At the height of El Movimiento—the Chicano/Latino labor and civil rights movement led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez—a group of mostly Mexican American U-M social work students founded Trabajadores de la Raza, intended to support underrepresented students and promote justice at the university. This group would evolve into the La Raza Arts and Media Collective, part of a vast network of grassroots organizations throughout the country. In UMMA’s glass-walled Stenn gallery, La Raza: Arts and Media Collective, 1975–Today celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.
Bold and colorful, the exhibit commemorates La Raza’s work at the intersection of art and identity activism, using DIY media to challenge and reframe narratives surrounding the Latino experience in the U.S. The pieces on display include drawings, documentary photography, and the group’s academic publication, the Raza Art & Media Collective Journal. (One piece of digital art, apparently meant to be presented on an old-fashioned tube television, was not operating at the time of our visit.) Fans of zines and their history will have a lot to appreciate; that artform, which emerged in the 1970s with the rise of photocopier technology, was embraced by La Raza wholeheartedly.
At times, the historical exhibit assumes more familiarity with its subject matter than is perhaps warranted. A sign lists the names of the founding members, but simple biographies for each would have been helpful. And while all sections have informational plaques in both English and Spanish, we occasionally felt confronted with a thicket of critical theory jargon (“recuperate public memory,” for example) that obfuscated more than it clarified. Newspaper clippings and plaques documenting La Raza’s interactions with a dizzying spectrum of organizations and activists could be difficult to follow. Something as basic as a timeline would have helped to ground things.
Connecting La Raza’s 1970s roots with contemporary activism, the exhibit also features three commissioned works by Latino artists which address themes of cultural identity in dialogue with the present day. Taking center stage is Aztlán del Norte, by La Raza founding member George Vargas (with Stamps professor Nicole Marroquin and Mina Marroquin-Crow). This striking, 15-foot-tall acrylic wall painting mingles Aztec cosmology with imagery of migrant workers from modern-day Mexico, presenting the U.S. as Aztlán, the Edenic ancestral homeland of the Aztec people. Several gorgeous original silkscreen posters, designed by Marroquin, commemorate the collective in a style that evokes the visual language of protests. (Marroquin also designed a black-and-white wallpaper that covers one wall of the exhibit, made up of other La Raza prints.) The largest piece, 2023 Stamps grad Michelle Inez Hinojosa’s The Ribbons, The Future, adorns the floor-to-ceiling windows that enclose the exhibit. This immense tapestry of semi-transparent PVA film evokes interwoven narratives stretching across time.
Small but substantial, La Raza is worth a trip to UMMA for anyone interested in the interaction between art, politics, and social movements. Not just a collection of pretty pictures and bumper sticker–ready slogans, it demands thoughtful focus from its audience. It is a challenging, fascinating, and worthwhile window into an underrepresented chapter of American history that deserves appreciation, celebration, and further work.
La Raza: Arts and Media Collective, 1975–Today is at the U-M Museum of Art through July 20, 2025.
