Curating for Care in Mexican Chicago: How a Museum Gave Voice to a Migrant Community

• Main Author: Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Bologna 2020-12-01
• Series: European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes
• Subjects: urban curating; mexico; chicago; migrant; art; care; curatorial
• Online Access: https://cpcl.unibo.it/article/view/10172

This article looks at the practice of urban curating within diasporic communities through the lens of care. Urban curating provides a decolonial understanding of voice, responsibility and care within diasporic urban environments and across their expanded geographies. The Mexican neighbourhood of Pilsen in Chicago provides valuable learnings about how urban curating, enacted through the lens of care, has enabled a historically disenfranchised group to contest and confront prejudice, displacement, and injustice, by reinventing a classic institution of modernity, the museum. Through a close reading of the National Museum of Mexican Art and its curatorial program, this paper articulates the way in which the curatorial as a socio-cultural practice, has played a critical role in enabling migrants everyday engagement in the reconfiguration of the city. The curatorial practices of the Museum have provided forms of direct-aid to the community of Pilsen, cut across time and space for this multisited group and ultimately showed how art and culture can redefine the conditions under which urban transformation is contested and reframed, producing a new territory of and for Mexican Americans.