Bilingual visual culture in New York: Socially-engaged Latina artists and the discourse of hybridity

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the aesthetic visual discourse of hybridity manifested in the works of contemporary socially-engaged Latina artists of the New York diaspora. For Latin America and the Caribbean, regions where sociopolitical history has generally exhibited a tumultuous trajectory, the arts have provided a formidable venue for addressing the social concerns engendered by this turbulent history and for studying the creative ways in which artists interpret them. The symbiotic bond created between art and politics would become a cultural force and tradition in the history of struggle that characterizes the countries that are part of these regions. This bond has provided the basis for the visual discourse developed by sociallycommitted Latin American and Caribbean women artists residing in the United States. Since the 1960s, the struggle for gender, cultural and ethnic recognition in U.S. society became crucial both on the social and political fronts. The visual and performance women artists of the Latina/o diaspora who came of age in the mid-1980s, and other subaltern groups within the arts, have continued to be at the forefront of these struggles and have merged the aforementioned issues with their subaltern diasporic experiences to create a unique discourse of hybridity.;Through a detailed analysis of works produced by ten visual and performance New York Latina artists from different Latin American and Caribbean national cultures, and through personal interviews with each, this dissertation examines the genesis and trajectory of the Latina aesthetic discourse of hybridity. The study highlights the common discursive elements deployed by the artists to creatively address the social and political issues that affect them as women of color who are part a U.S. Latina/o diaspora. This analysis includes the perspectives provided by the most relevant theories on cultural materialism, border consciousness, Third World feminism, and hybridity that served as basis for the development of the discursive elements that have come to characterize these artists' distinct aesthetic visual language.