This article examines how contemporary Cuban American artists have experimented with visual languages of trauma to construct an intergenerational memory about the losses of exile and migration. It considers the work of artist Alberto Rey, and his layering of individual loss onto other, traumatic episodes in the history of the Cuban diaspora. In the series Las Balsas (The Rafts, 1995–99), Rey explores the impact of the balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994 by transforming objects left behind by Cuban rafters on their sometimes ill-fated journeys to the United States into commemorative relics. By playing on a memory of absence and the misplacement of objects found along the migration route of the Florida Straits, Rey's visual language transmits the memory of grief across time, space and generational divides. Rey's visual strategies are part of an “extended memory” tied to the aesthetics of disappearance and remembrance in contemporary Cuban American art. His use of objects as powerful memory texts that serve to bring fragmented autobiographical, family and intergenerational testimonies of loss together suggests how visual artists can provide us with more collective, participatory and redemptive models of memory work.

In an age when politicians and the mainstream media continue to divide immigrants into deserving and undeserving subjects, making them both hypervisible and yet invisible, the essays by Lauret, Krause and Schreiber are timely and compelling. Together, they map the historical and contemporary processes of state violence, legal erasure and cultural coercion that have shaped immigrant lives and subjectivities. Models of cultural conformity and whiteness, hyphenation, and either/or binaries that enforce the strict separation of old and new, legal and illegal, have affected the immigrant psyche and induced forms of individual and collective trauma, including ethnic shame, madness, family fragmentation and the physical exploitation of human bodies. In their essays on Americanization and Dominican American fiction, Lauret and Krause reveal the less than celebratory narratives that get lost in stories of emancipatory assimilation, ethnic persistence and hyphenated and multiple subjectivities. Likewise, in her essay on contemporary Latino/a music video and undocumented immigration, Schreiber asks us to see what is obscured from view, but also to find room in these new narratives for patterns of immigrant visibility, agency and activism. These essays suggest that immigrant testimony, literature and visual and aural media can be powerfully combined with historical analyses of immigration policy to unravel the complex realities behind the walls of national nostalgia and racial stereotyping. They also suggest alternative ways of seeing that demand we recognize every immigrant's right to humanity and a sense of belonging.

This short introduction provides a brief overview of the special issue, by addressing the main historiographical and theoretical concerns that unite the individual contributions and by placing the essays in comparative, inter-American and interdisciplinary perspective. What do comparative analyses tell us about patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the visual arts? More specifically, what do these analyses tell us about the role of ethnic agency and audience, and the complex relationship between artistic practice and the “mainstream,” the local and the global?

During the early 1900s, Anglo-Americans in search of an indigenous modernism found inspiration in the Hispano and Native American arts of New Mexico. The elevation of Spanish colonial-style art through associations such as the Anglo-led Spanish Colonial Arts Society (SCAS, 1925) placed Hispano aesthetic production within the realm of tradition, as the product of geographic and cultural isolation rather than innovation. The revival of the SCAS in 1952 and Spanish Market in 1965 helped perpetuate the view of Hispanos either as “traditional” artists who replicate an “authentic” Spanish colonial style, or as “outsider” artists who defy categorization. Thus the Spanish colonial paradigm has endorsed a purist vision of Hispano art and identity that obscures the intercultural encounters shaping contemporary Hispano visual culture. This essay investigates a series of contemporary Hispano artists who challenge the Spanish colonial paradigm as it developed under Anglo patronage, principally through the realm of spiritually based artwork. I explore the satirical art of contemporary santero Luis Tapia; the colonial, baroque, indigenous and pop culture iconographies of painter Ray Martín Abeyta; and the “mixed-tech media” of Marion Martínez's circuit-board retablos. These artists blend Spanish colonial art with pre-Columbian mythology and pop culture, tradition with technology, and local with global imaginaries. In doing so, they present more empowering and expansive visions of Hispano art and identity – as declarations of cultural ownership and adaptation and as oppositional mestizo formations tied historically to wider Latino, Latin American and transnational worlds.

In early twentieth-century Los Angeles, Anglo-American women writers documented the emergence of a metropolis. Perceptions of race, ethnicity and culture became embedded in the struggle to depict and interpret a new urbanism. In capturing the changing cityscape, women writers constructed Sonoratown, the old Mexican Quarter of Los Angeles, as a place in the social imagination. This article examines representations of Sonoratown and its Mexican inhabitants in two anthologies. Women writers, many of whom moved in civic and reform-minded circles, rendered Sonoratown ambiguously: as a “picturesque” place to be preserved and yet a space earmarked for renewal, Sonoratown became entwined with the drive for social reform, assimilation and urban development.