This online search tool provides visual access to Mexican American art and primary documentation through online unification of geographically disperse records held at different institutions.

Working with a team of software developers, scholars, curators, librarians and archivists, Constance Cortez (UTRGV) and I are addressing the invisibility and lack of access to Mexican American art through the creation of a post-custodial portal, Mexican American Art Since 1848. Artistic invisibility, moreover, directly and indirectly feeds the racial biases against Mexican Americans, who are stereotyped as criminals, uneducated workers, welfare-cheats, hypersexual, and foreigners. Art attributed to Mexican-heritage creatives prior to 1960 is rarely studied and often forced into contemporary paradigms of representation, resistance, and affirmation rather than explored as a facet of its own social context. Unfortunately, conventions in art history and Chicana/o/x studies obscure the wide range of stylistic, thematic, and conceptual practices within bi-cultural and multilingual contexts. This pervasive lack of knowledge supports not only the conflation of all US Latinx populations-everyone is undocumented, Spanish-speaking, and on and on-it also flattens the artistic diversity across and within US Latinx communities, particularly the nation’s second largest ethnic group, Mexican Americans. As Arlene Dávila observes, structural and social hierarchies “sanction ignorance” about Latinx art, which has resulted in neglect and erasure in the nation’s museums and galleries but also within libraries and archives ( Latinx Art, 52).

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