The Collective Desire to Live - Guadalupe Rosales’ Legends Never Die
By Jason Conrad Llaguno, 11/15/2018
ith the 1980s and 1990s came a population shift so diverse and grand, it would define California’s culture for generations. As an influx of black, Asian, Latinx, and various other ethnicities came into the once predominantly white suburbs of Southern California, so did one of the most tumultuous times for the city of Los Angeles. It saw the vehemence of the Rodney King riots, the rapid growth of inner-city gangs and its influence on youth, as well as a general racial divide that plagued the diverse communities of the vast county. Specifically, what persisted was a general fear and discrimination toward brown youth due to their perceived involvement in violence and criminal/gang activity.
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Now, more than a quarter of a century since the shift, Angeleno artist Guadalupe Rosales attempts to redefine history’s perspective on brown youth and lend a familiar portrait of (her) adolescences in order to sew understanding amongst an even more diverse world community. Rosales constructs an installation primarily comprised of photographs and memorabilia that echo altruistic experiences of 90s Latinx youth. She builds a counternarrative through the collective support of others similar to herself who remember their adolescence as an intimate community of misunderstood youth rather than an experience
marked by violence and gang culture. She brings in physical objects and remnants of her involvement in the 1990s as well crowdsourced material over social media that subsequently reflect on the normalcy of growing up Hispanic. Rosales utilizes Instagram as a platform for a digital archive in order to make her message accessible to all and ultimately normalize perceptions of brown youth for a contemporary audience. Within her installation, she includes photos of family and friends that seem straight out of a photo album. The tableau poses, accommodating faces, and familiar photo studio setting draws on the collective human desire to document loved ones and an era in one’s life that define who they are. Almost everyone in the modern world can relate with the nostalgia that an old portrait of friends and family can evoke. Rosales exposes these faces in these colloquial environments so that one can see it and align it with their own upbringing and find that, in the end, we all have photos and ephemera that hold sentimental value.
These photos go on to illustrate the fact that each person, no matter their skin color, place of origin, or age, has loved ones they care for and memories they wish to hold onto. Rosales offers herself to the viewer and unapologetically reveals the life she led growing up in Los Angeles. She recognizes the difference of her upbringing and youth, but Rosales insists that within those difference one can find themselves and understand that their experience is but a small portion of the collective human condition.
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