The University of Texas at Austin

Graduate Student, Art and Art History

Doctoral Candidate (ABD)

Fine Arts

Thesis Title: Bridging Zapata. Transnational Images across Mexico and the U.S.

About

Luis Vargas-Santiago is an Art Historian and curator born in Mexico City in 1982 with a focus on Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and Visual Culture.

He holds a BA in Art History from the Universidad Cristóbal Colón (Veracruz, Mexico), and a master's degree in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Since 2009 he is a doctoral student at UT Austin (see dissertation description below). For his doctoral studies, he's been recipient of different scholarships such as the Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship (2009-2012) and the PBEE-FONCA/CONACyT (2010-2012). Conversely, he also serves at UT as Graduate Coordinator for CLAVIS-Center for Latin American Visual Studies http://blogs.utexas.edu/psla/ Within his tasks at CLAVIS, he co-coordinates the Permanent Seminar in Latin American and contribute to the planning of the International Forum for Emergent Scholars. He also assists Prof. Andrea Giunta in different academic projects.

In 2007, Vargas-Santiago was a research fellow at the Department of Art History and Theory of the University of Essex, UK.

Back in Mexico, he taught seminars on "Mexican art" and "Historiography of art" at institutions such as UNAM and Universidad Iberoamericana. He was also researcher and assistant curator for the Photographic Collection of Fundación Televisa, and Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL, Mexico), respectively.

Vargas-Santiago has curated and co-curated exhibitions such as “Mirar desde el aire. Aerofotografía en la ciudad de México 1932-1969” (GDF, Mexico, 2007); “Materia y sentido: el arte mexicano en la mirada de Octavio Paz” (MUNAL Mexico, 2009); “Images of the Mexican” (Centre for Fine Arts-BOZAR, Belgium, 2010); “El éxodo mexicano: los heroes en la mira del arte” (MUNAL Mexico, 2010).

He has published articles and entries on Mexican art for books, catalogs, magazines, and dictionaries in Latin America, U.S., and Europe, and participated in a number of international academic events.

Dissertation: "Bridging Zapata. Transnational Images across Mexico and the U.S."
The image of the Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata has been an essential symbol to represent and define Mexico, as well as a recipient of ideas, fetishes, fears, desires, misconceptions and anxieties about the country south of the border. Starting in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, the heroic image of Zapata has traveled throughout time and space embodying divergent constructions pertaining to identity, ethnicity, race, gender, migration, nation, and citizenship in both Mexico and the U.S. From the thirties to the present, the image of Zapata, the epitomized charro, appears repeatedly in different American contexts championing the most disparate commercial, social and political agendas.
Case studies and works of art analyzed in my doctoral dissertation range from political to popular art; from Mexican Muralism, bracero graphics and Chicano art to cartoons (Speedy Gonzalez) and Hollywood movies (Viva Zapata!); and from Mexican guerrillas paraphernalia (60s' and 70s') to more contemporary productions such as the Zapatista murals in Chiapas, and graffiti in East L.A.

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