Jotería Art Project Examines Latino Sexuality With Humor

Imagine La Malinche as a feminist — or El Valiente as a woman who’s coming out — or better yet, imagine La Rosa as a girl with pink hair. These images, and several others, form part of an art project created by Audrey Silvestre, Erika Flores and Cesar Cabrera for the La Raza Student Association Art Show at California State University at Long Beach in March.

Making a play on the traditional Lotería game, the trio created the Jotería series as a Facebook Page and have plans to revisit the project in the future.

We spoke to Silvestre, who told us that she and her friends only had three weeks to get the project together. The project started off as a kind of joke, something that could help the trio fundraise for an upcoming conference, but the idea quickly evolved into a full-blown series. Thus far, there are 48 of the images and Silvestre says it’s important to take them as a whole, not just individually.

“We wanted to make them funny, but also add political awareness. Some have more political implications, for instance with La Muerte we had the crosses to show the women of Juárez,” Silvestre told us, pointing to other examples.

La Malinche in this case is a feminist, someone who’s questioning things that make others uncomfortable. The idea, she tells us, is to mess with ideas of gender and sexuality.

“Lotería cards are a big staple of Latino/Chicano culture, we just kinda wanted to disrupt it and mess with it and have different interpretations of what these things can be,” Silvestre said.

The project, which you can see here on Facebook, was very much a community effort. The artists enlisted their friends, who brought their own props, and they hope to work on the project more this summer. The end goal is perhaps to create a set of cards to be used to help fundraise for queer issues. Because as Silvestre says, she and her co-creators are not artists after all, they just had a great idea and made it happen.

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD