Transgressive Delight: A Digital Archive of Mexican Street Art
Mexican street art, including murals and graffiti, plus prints and other alternative, urban, and clandestine artistic production, are the focus of the digital archive created by Mexican photographer, Itandehui Franco Ortiz. Itandehui has catalogued this type of artistic material since June of 2006, compiling her photos in”El deleite de la transgresión: Graffiti, esténcil, y arte urbano en Oaxaca.” In mid-2006 Oaxacan teachers experienced massive state and federal repression after they occupied the city’s plaza to demand better working and educational conditions. An outpouring of local aesthetic expression in solidarity with the teachers arose and flourished in that year, and many artists continue their work to the present day, still addressing civil rights and education, but also political prisoners, police brutality, migration, indigenous cultural survival, femicide, food sovereignty, land tenure, and many other social justice issues of contemporary Mexican history.
Especially active in 2006 was the collective ASARO, the Asamblea de Artistas Revolucionarios de Oaxaca, who rapidly rose to international fame. A University of Oregon faculty group landed in Oaxaca right when ASARO was taking off, and work of the collective saw its way into a documentary about the teacher’s movement made by filmmaker Gabriela Martínez, Media, Women, and Rebellion in Oaxaca (2008). A graduate student of art history at UCLA, Megan Lorraine Debin, also caught the fever and developed working papers about ASARO as early as 2007 and 2009. Evidence of additional student enthusiasm for the topic can be seen in the doctoral thesis that concluded that ASARO was exemplary of postmodern art of Mexico, completed by Neill Pyatt at Loughborough University (UK) in 2013, and the M.A. theses about ASARO finished at the University of New Mexico in 2014 and Georgia State University in 2015. Various repositories, including the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon and the library at the University of New Mexico, now count ASARO prints as a part of their teaching collections.
A talented photographer, Itandehui was closely associated with one of the members of ASARO, and seeing the explosion of artistic expression and how quickly it could be erased, she rapidly embraced the role of archivist, photographing everything she could as a way of documenting this unique movement. As a result of the trust the artists’ had in her discretion, she came to know many other collectives, such as Arte Jaguar (a group that published on physical walls and on the virtual walls in MySpace), the cleverly named Lapiztola (combining lapiz, the word for pencil, with pistola, pistol), and the Tlakolulokos (drawing from the Valley of Oaxaca town name, Tlacolula, and adding lokos, or locos, crazy ones). Ita’s vast digital photo collection, which includes the art of these and other groups and individuals, is offered with a Creative Commons copying designation (asking only that the authors and the photographer be cited).
The archive provides a solid foundation for high school classes and university seminars on art history and any number of other subject areas. Teachers participating in summer institutes supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, formerly held in Oaxaca (e.g. 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2015), created multiple open-access lessons about Oaxacan street art for their students. They were fortunate on a couple of occasions to receive person street-art tours and explanations by Itandehui of some of the murals in the center of Oaxaca.
The user-friendly WordPress web publishing platform serves Itandehui’s digital archive, whose name translates into the “Delight of the Transgression.” The investigation page includes a long, scrolling alphabetical list of chosen autores, or the author-artists of the political graphics. By choosing an artist or collective’s name, the user arrives at a selection of decently-sized thumbnail examples of their work. A cursor hovering over a thumbnail will bring up place names and dates. Clicking on a thumb leads to an enlargement with options for more “Info” and “Comments,” but these are often forthcoming. A small, elementary search window can be found in the upper right corner of the page, and while it functions, searches will be more effective when images have been given more annotations. For instance, a search of the word “mujer” (woman) turns up nothing, and yet, of course, many images of women—and some works of art made by women—can be found in this archive. Nevertheless, this vast archive holds immense value for documenting what is typically an ephemeral and often under-valued body of aesthetic work and popular expression.
Significant investigative research by the artist-photographer herself accompanies the digital archive. Both her WordPress site, and mirror sites hosted by ISSUU, a digital publishing platform that works well for magazines, catalogs, newspapers, and books, offer free downloads of Ita’s thesis, “El deleite de la transgresión: Graffiti y gráfica política callejera en la ciudad de Oaxaca,” (2011),and her 2014 publication, “El sur nunca muere: desplazamientos del graffiti en la ciudad de Oaxaca.” In the Licentiate’s thesis, Ita explores the genesis of this type of art in Mexico, its “new aesthetic language,” and the history of graffiti and stencil in Oaxaca, highlighting a few of the collectives. In the 2014 publication, she explores more deeply the aesthetics, politics, and subjectivity, looks at the effects of commerce and tourism on the urban art movement, and revisits the importance of the production of symbolic capital and archiving it.
Those who wish to follow the archivist and photographer will find that “Itandehui Xiaj Nikté” has a presence on Facebook and other social media venues, such as SubVersiones, where she publishes as “OaxIta.” A four-minute interview with her, where she speaks in Spanish, can be found on dailymotion. There, she explains her purpose and her estimation of the need to record art for memory and history. She also speaks of her desire to document indigenous cultures.
Itandehui has Zapotec heritage; her family comes from the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca. Her name is an indigenous-language term for a beautiful flower. Ita currently works in the museum at the ex-monastery in Yanhuitlan, and is exploring and documenting art and Native cultures across the Mixteca Alta. Her archive will long serve as rich fodder for teaching and research into art and social justice in recent Mexican history.
Stephanie Wood
(Stephanie Wood edits the Digital Resources section of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Latin American History. She took the photo that appears on this post, shot in the Espacio Zapata studio of ASARO in 2009. The bumper sticker says, in effect: “Announcing: Revolution. Coming Soon!” Stephanie also shot the banner image for this website in the same location and year.)