Vir Andres Hera

In the Premonition of a Global Chicanismo is a cinematic project developed in Los Angeles through film, sound, performance, writing, and encounter.

Chicanismo was born in the streets. It is a history, a community, a political movement with its own territory and fight. What interests me is everything it has become since: the way it appears in gestures, faces, songs, cars, tattoos, murals, clothes, family stories, and ways of carrying yourself through a room. Travels and mutating.

I come to this land with a complicated genealogy. I am from Tlaxcala. Centuries ago, Tlaxcaltecas were sent north as allies and foot soldiers of the Spanish, colonizing territories that reach into what is now California. So my arrival is not simply foreign. It might be a much older return, indigenous and colonial at once, to a ground my ancestors may already have walked. And I return as something else again: a Chicano rascuacho made in France, acculturated far from any origin, coming to look for the fountain of Chicanismo at its source.

I will be in the film too, not only behind the camera. The work is not about Chicanx people observed from a distance. It is about what happens in the encounter itself, when bodies carrying different histories meet and something passes between them that has no name yet.

A premonition is not a prediction. It is a way of listening to something before it arrives. This project listens for the dreams of freedom already moving through Los Angeles, in gestures that have not yet found their official form.

The material gathered will become a future multichannel installation, developed with Bétonsalon (Paris), IAC Villeurbanne, and the Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles).

This is my first time in California, though not in the USA.

East Los Angeles is one obvious center of gravity for my residency. The Vincent Price Art Museum, at East Los Angeles College, holds one of the oldest and most significant collections of Chicanx and Latinx art in the country, and is one of the partners accompanying this project. Naturally, I am particularly interested in meeting Chicanx scholars.

But I do not want to fence the project inside a single neighborhood. Chicanismo does not stay where you put it, and neither should the research. I want to follow it across the city: archives, independent spaces, music and nightlife scenes, family interiors, places where Mexican, Chicanx, Black-Mexican, and queer histories press against each other.

I am especially drawn to a younger generation of Chicanx and queer folk inventing their Mexicanness on their own terms: non-binary aesthetics, rancho codes worn differently, the revival of lowriders and cholo/chola style, a closeness to Black American vernacular and to Afromexican histories. I want to meet the people remaking inheritance into something that was not handed to them.

This matters from where I stand. In Mexico, Chicano culture was long treated as pocho, not quite Mexican, a culture that had left and lost its claim. In France it barely registers, arriving secondhand as US pop imagery, almost absent but recycled through France’s Brown and Black communities appropriating Chicana Aesthetics. I move between those two blind spots, taking Chicanismo seriously as one of the major aesthetic forces of our time.