GUADALUPE ROSALES + SANKOFA
Subcultures [have] endured in the Mexican American community since the Second World War. One is born Mexican American but one chooses to be a Chicano. Politically charged, the Chicano life style has been passed from one generation to another. It has survived wars, prisons and strife
- Gaspar Enriquez
Guadalupe Rosales is California born Mexican American. During the early 90′s, when many of her friends and relatives were in gangs, she was a part of the Latino party crew scene. These informal gatherings took place in the backyards and industrial spaces of Los Angeles. It was a youth subculture that allowed disempowered young people, who were often criminalized by the public school system & mainstream media, to gather as a form of resistant cultural practice. Party crews were made up of 30 people or more with names such as Aztek Nation, Operation X, East LA’s Madness, Latin Tribe, Rebel Familia among others. The party crews and raves allowed these youth to organize for the sake of unity and alternative lifestyle.
After living in New York for over a decade, Guadalupe began to think back on the community she left in Los Angeles and fear that gentrification was erasing her history. In 2014, she started an investigation into her history in Los Angeles and that there might be others who had similar stories that had to be heard and acknowledged. She writes:
I began to understand the body as archives, bodies that document memories, history and trauma. I focused my research on the Los Angeles youth cultures in hopes of finding a deeper identity. I wanted to read and look at images the brown youth on the dance floor and backyard parties, cruising the boulevard or anything that had documented the (sub)culture that existed in the midst of violence. I started an Instagram feed, titled Veteranas and Rucas and posted photos from my own personal collection as reference. Within a week of my initial posting, people began to submit their own photos through email and messaging them through Instagram, perhaps because they felt an intimate connection to mine even though we had never met before and yet our lives were now exposed as parallel. This digital archive was proof that my desire and need to find material about this particular part of my life was also important to others- I describe the Instagram feed as a digital archive of previously inaccessible images of an unrepresented, unstudied group of people.
In 2015 she proposed a project to UCLA Chicano Studies- to start an archive collection on the 90s Latino Party scene in Southern California. Through an organized panel discussion she used this archive to reframe and establish this shared history.
Guadalupe’s collaborative photo archives, Map Pointz and Veteranas & Rucas celebrate the identity of young latinos. Creating a space for people who shared a similar history to “go back and fetch it” (Sankofa), to retrieve and position their history in a celebratory way, provided them with a space to declare their identity and to uncover a history which may have been permanently lost.
This project gave one our Fashion Participants, Nelva Mendoza, a more complete language to talk about the stereotypes she experiences. Reading Guadalupe’s story and seeing her instagram feed, offered a bigger space and platform for her to subvert those stereotypes and lift up her own history as a Mexican American. The images she used for our final video were inspired by the images in Guadalupe Rosales’ photo archive.