Chicano Art and the Mass Media

This essay explores three paintings by Mel Casas dating to 1967. I argue that these paintings communicate the artist’s critical consciousness about the social disadvantages of Mexican Americans, both historically and at the crucial period of change that led to the formation of Chicano groups in San Antonio, Texas. Casas incorporates skin tones in his painted characters, which prompts a racialized interpretation. The analysis is grounded in the dualistic picture space represented in Casas’s remarkable series, the Humanscapes, where the artist both critiqued and incorporated mass media and advertising images. To construct an interpretative context for these works, I explore sources extracted from San Antonio newspapers, tracing debates about the changing racialization of Mexican Americans and about the formation of combative political groups in this city where Casas lived and worked. The three paintings, then, engage with a politicized context and with the artist’s personal experiences, establishing a continuous narrative with his best-known Chicano-period works, such as Brownies of the Southwest.