A little girl, seated within an open cardboard box wrapped in barbed wire, looks out past the camera. Above her, a schematized curtain of rosaries dangles, filling the empty space between the outline of the United States and the contours of Central America. This image, a detail from Sandra C. Fernández’s The Northern Triangle (2018), serves as the cover of art historian Tatiana Reinoza’s Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory. As the Trump administration continues its assault on immigrant communities, Reclaiming the Americas looks at Latinx artists’ responses to the rise of racist xenophobia in the United States from the 1990s to the present. How and why have Latinx artists operationalized printmaking to stage an avant-garde that delinks from the racial logics of space? Through four case studies, Reinoza argues that Latinx artists used printmaking because it is a medium that legitimized the settler colonial epistemologies since the Spanish invasion of the Americas. These artists turned to print to unsettle cartography, geography, and mapmaking in the Americas. By subverting printmaking’s historical use in the representation of territory, Reinoza argues, artists have imagined and envisioned alternative forms of territoriality by reclaiming space and the idea of belonging in “America,” both in its United Statesian and its hemispheric sense.

As Reinoza asserts, from the moment of the European invasion, printmaking was used as a technology to visualize empire and legitimize its claims. Latinx artists activated the medium to subvert cartography and territorial representations’ claims to “universal” knowledge, which was always a stand-in for Europeanness, and to demonstrate its pervasive legacies in the present as made manifest in racist and “xenophobic nationalism in the United States” (8). By using a pan-national approach, Reinoza proposes a “new cognitive map for Latinx art” (2) that recognizes how the shared experience as the perpetual other—homogenized as a single mass for their or their family’s country of origin, spoken language, or racialization—has led to a united aesthetic effort. She charts a landscape of Latinx print studios and publishers across the US that have built “cross-racial” relationships that turned workshops into sites of experimentation, and printmaking into one of the primary mediums for Latinx artists. The prints Reinoza analyzes present four approaches to picturing territoriality, each the focus of its own chapter, to delink from Western conceptions of territory: native, embodied, mestiza, and aqueous territorialities. Reinoza uses decolonial theory, feminist of color critique, borderlands studies, and Critical Latinx Indigeneities as lenses through which to consider the complexity of Latinx identity addressed throughout the four chapters. The conclusion considers the impact of these strategies in the exhibition ¡Printing the Revolution! (2020 and 2021).

In the book’s first chapter, “Native Territorialities,” Reinoza analyzes The New Order (1996), a NAFTA-era serigraph by Ricardo Duffy. Duffy reorients the viewer’s gaze towards Indigenous claims to land, deploying the strategy of “native territorialities.” The print was made during a residency at Self-Help Graphics, the East LA printshop born of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. The residency encouraged artists to experiment with silkscreen as a medium and to make politically relevant prints that spoke to Latinx pride. Reinoza terms this print’s aesthetic “border pop,” an approach Reinoza views as a way to use humor and pop culture to broach the life-or-death stakes of border crossings and xenophobia. Despite Duffy’s decolonial aims, Reinoza notes that the print is trapped under the settler-colonial logic embedded in Aztlán, the ancestral homeland for Chicanos, staging a reconquista (reconquest) that creates ghosts of living Native Americans, and forces the Indigenous mother to stand in as the symbol of a conquered land. Her critique points to the ongoing debates between who is included and excluded in the project of “latinidad,” explored throughout the book.

Reinoza introduces “embodied territorialities” in the second chapter: a strategy used by Latinx artists to “unscript” the truth-claims of geometric projection, cartography, and geography inherited from the European Enlightenment. With references to celestial Chinese cartography, Russian Suprematism, and Mesoamerican codices, the visuals of You Are Here (2000), a collaborative work between the Mexican-born artist Enrique Chagoya and the Chicano poet Alberto Ríos, engage in an “embodied territoriality” that asks its viewers to “perform the ignoble savages” (89), to disobey “vision as the privileged source of knowledge” (81). In so doing, the viewer questions the purported truth and objectivity of maps. Reinoza links the portfolio’s strategies to those of embodied performance, like in the collective La Pocha Nostra’s Mapa Corpo (2003–9), or Pedro Lasch’s collaborative, conceptual Route Guide (2003–6). By focusing on the phenomenological experience of place, “embodied territorialities” unscript the link to the disembodied cartographic gaze and promote multiple ways of envisioning territory.

“Mestiza territorialities” explore the mixed-race subject as a product of the border and the coloniality of power. This chapter analyzes three prints by Ecuadorian American artist Sandra Fernández: Coming of Age, CAUTION, and The Northern Triangle. Reinoza uses the Enlightenment-era Carta de la Provincia de Quito to draw a parallel between Fernández’s investigations and the legacies of the Enlightenment in Ecuador’s mestizaje, one that privileges Europeanness. For Reinoza, Fernández challenges the truth-claim of scientific modernity by exposing its underside: coloniality. By centering the lived experience of border dwellers, whose lives are defined by multiplicities, Fernández’s prints interrogate the racialized dimension of migration, xenophobia, and misogyny. One way Fernández shifts the dominant discourse from immigrant as laborer to immigrant as person is by attending to immigrant children, like the DREAMERS in CAUTION, or the girl in the box in The Northern Triangle, perhaps a future “Dreamer” herself. By drawing attention to the movable border from Central America to the US through these prints, Reinoza displaces the “Chicano hegemony” narrative of border art at a time when Central American migrants are particularly vulnerable to deportation.

The fourth chapter turns to the work of Dominican American artists who represent the experience of those who migrated over water rather than over land as “aqueous territorialities.” Reinoza demonstrates how artist Pepe Coronado and scholar Lorgia García-Peña have connected borderlands discourse to the Dominican migrant experience. For me, this section reveled in the joy of “Latinx art” as a coherent category. This chapter discusses Coronado’s belief in the collaborative printmaking process as a site for experimentation and exposure. After settling in New York, Coronado organized the Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA (DYPG), staking a claim for Dominican artists in the city. Reinoza analyzes some of the prints in the collective’s first portfolio, Manifestaciones (2010). Through her focus on Scherezade Garcia’s “Daydreaming/Soñando Despierta,” Reinoza weaves in the history of the Black Atlantic to explore the complexities of Blackness and Dominicanness in relationship to latinidad. The chapter is a useful introduction to the work of Dominican artists in New York City that welcomes further inquiry. By using a pan-ethnic Latinx approach, Reinoza conveys a fuller historical account that connects the Dominican American experience in New York to struggles in the Arizona borderlands, breaking silos that would render these (art) histories mutually exclusive.

Tatiana Reinoza’s book argues that a contemporary generation of Latinx artists has “reclaimed” the medium of printmaking, once the primary tool for the legitimization of settler colonialism in the Americas, in order to subvert the logics of modernity and coloniality. In the book’s conclusion, Reinoza presents an analysis of the traveling exhibition ¡Printing the Revolution! curated by E. Carmen Ramos and Claudia Zapata for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which featured prints from the beginning of the 1960s Chicano Movement to present-day digital graphics. Using the exhibition as a foil to Peter Berger’s claim that the absorption of an avant-garde by institutions constitutes a failure of that avant-garde, Reinoza argues that, for these Latinx artists, the museum served as a site of subversion, their prints donated to the museum by activist-collectors, infiltrating the museum over time. The exhibition “leaned into . . . the formal and technological innovation, social history . . . the networks and mentorship” (197) of Latinx printmaking. Furthermore, the exhibition demonstrated that Latinx art is a category discrete from Latin American art or American art. For Reinoza, the exhibition’s triumphs and shortcomings signal the mountain of work necessary to flesh out the history of Latinx Art.

Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory’s impact will be immediately felt across classrooms in the United States. Each chapter stands on its own, reinforcing the book’s central argument and applying a rigorous specificity to its case studies, and to the long entanglement between printmaking and territorial expansion. As Reinoza notes, the discipline of Latinx art history is still in its nascence, and its methods are contested, developing, and in negotiation. This addition to that bibliography displaces ethnonational divisions and centers the collective identity, its solidarities and alliances, all while formally attending to the art object as such. Today, this book feels more urgent than ever. Looking at the book’s cover, at that little girl pouting into the distance, I ask myself, did she represent herself in court? Was she separated from her kin? She is the target of the Trump administration’s assault on Black and brown people perceived to be foreign, regardless of their actual citizenship status. Reclaiming the Americas shows how Latinx artists have talked back to this wave of hate, unscripting the logics of the settler nation and envisioning a freer future for us all.