Latin American Critical Studies Working Group Discussion

Tatiana Reinoza
Notre Dame du Lac Assistant Professor, Art History
Institute for Latino Studies, Faculty Fellow
The Initiative on Race & Resilience, Faculty Fellow

Discussant:
Karen Graubart
Notre Dame Professor of History

Family Matters: Women, Photography, and the Genealogies of Race in Central America

In this talk, Dr. Reinoza examines autoethnography as a method that shifts how we understand family photography. The ethnographic eye has certainly produced problematic and uneven encounters with "ethnic others" in the history of photography, but what happens when the subject is the photographer's own mother and the site is the artist's ancestral homeland. How does this blur the boundaries between the maker and subject? What are the ways in which it engages the tropes of ethnography and also undoes the field's claims to objectivity? The focus of her analysis is the series Casa de Mujeres (2009-2013) by the New York-based artist Rachel le Mozman Solano. In the series, Mozman Solano places women at the center of reproducing genealogies of race, and shows how the pigmentocracies, which we remain beholden to, are in fact a family matter.