Guadalupe Rosales is on a mission to share ’90s Chicano culture through social media. Part of telling that story comes in the form of two Instagram pages: @veteranas_and_rucas and @map_pointz, which are filled with photos of Chicanos through the decades. The photos she posts are time capsules that Rosales says “dismantle the stereotypes people have about Chicano culture.” Rosales tells mitú about her journey documenting Chicano culture, her connection to Chicano culture and her exciting new position.
Guadalupe Rosales is Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) first-ever Instagram artist-in-residence.
“It was scary. It was also really great. I felt like maybe I could have these conversations through art or an artistic platform,” Rosales says about her six-week takeover of LACMA’s Instagram page, which started July 5. “I also want to use my skills as an artist and dismantle the way people talk about art.”
Rosales has been bringing Chicano culture to the internet since 2014. She wants to buck the stereotypes people have about Chicano culture .
Through the @veteranas_and_rucas page, Rosales works to give a well-rounded snapshot of Chicanos.
“When people think of Chicanos, they only think of L.A. Even the world tends to criminalize us or profile us, or call us ‘cholos/cholas,'” she says. “What I’m trying to do is dismantle this idea that people have. It’s all through mainstream media, which is all the view that most people have. So, for me it was important to show everything and not censor it.”
In fact, documenting Chicano culture on Instagram is what landed her the opportunity at LACMA.
Rosales was featured in the Tastemakers & Earthshakers exhibit at Vincent Price Museum, which was all about Los Angeles youth culture from 1943 to 2016. Her piece was a looped slideshow of screenshots and comments of posts on her Instagram pages. When Rita Gonzalez, the curator and acting head of Contemporary Art at LACMA, saw her work she approached Rosales and set up a meeting.
Rosales wants all Chicano culture to get attention with modern media. However the ’90s are a special time to her.
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“I really loved spending time with friends, driving around the city. It was about being in physical spaces with other people,” Rosales says. “I feel like that has changed a lot. People are constantly on their phones or the internet. I think back then people were engaging in physical spaces a lot more. That’s what I miss the most, or find really special from that time, including the parties, in backyards or warehouses.”
As for the party scene, Rosales name drops some of her favorite music from her youth.
“The party cruise song was ‘Follow Me’ by Aly Us,” Rosales says. “We were also listening to rap, Zapp & Roger, Snoop Dogg. Then at house parties I would say it was techno or house music.”
Rosales’ Instagram pages started because she was homesick living in New York City and started calling home to reminisce.
“I pretty much lost touch with everyone I grew up with, including my family. Then about halfway into living in New York, I actually started missing my home,” says Rosales.
That lead her to start researching Chicano culture, but she had a hard time finding things she could personally relate to.
“I was sort of over this whole stereotypical cliché of the way we are portrayed or described.” She also dealt with people thinking she should leave the past behind.
“I remember people being all like, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, that’s the past,'” Rosales says. “Like it’s not that important, you know? And to me, I felt that I just couldn’t relate to not caring.”
But Rosales knew it was a project she had to do. It was on the recommendation of a friend that she started to play with the idea of using social media to tell the story of Chicano culture through the decades. Three years later, her Instagram pages have each become a pretty big deal.
Now with her residency at LACMA, Rosales gets to bring her eye and knowledge of Chicano art to their 610k followers and up the visibility of Chicano/Latino art.
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“I want to treat this residency and platform as an exhibition where I get to showcase my work and showcase the work that I’m interested in, outside museums and inside museums,” says Rosales. That means posting artwork, talking about artists she loves and even throwbacks. “What I’m trying to do is mix it all up,” she adds. “I want conversations to be the crossover.”
Rosales wants young Latino or Chicano artists to capture their art and life without feeling a need to sterilize it for others.
“A young photographer once said to me that for his final project he photographed his family and when he brought the pictures to class the teacher said they were not acceptable because they were too violent,” Rosales recalls. “The teacher is pretty much saying that the way he lives is not acceptable in this world. The photos were not violent. It was maybe a picture of a cousin shirtless that had tattoos. But yet, there are a bunch of photographers that get to do that.”
Rosales wants to encourage young artists to keep doing their work and “do what feels right.”
Don’t let other people dictate what you do. That’s been the problem in our world: people being told they don’t fit in or their work isn’t good enough,” Rosales says. “No one is in a place to say what art is.”
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