Tlacuila Visions: A Conversation with the Creators

Engage with the visionary artists Yreina D. Cervántez and Celia Herrera Rodríguez behind the new volume, Tlacuila Visions: Apparitions and Transformations. Joined by editor Laura E. Pérez and book artist/publisher Felicia Rice, these creators share how Cervántez and Herrera Rodríguez embody the ancient role of the tlacuiloque (scribe-painter) to discuss the inequities, histories, and spiritual connection of the Chicane community.

Tlacuila Visions: Apparations and Transformations  is the third and final book in the Califas Legacy Series, published by Moving Parts Press. The book is in the style of a Mesoamerican Codex as an accordion fold art book that positions Chicana artists Yreina D. Cervántez and Celia Herrera Rodríguez as Tlacuila storytellers in conversation with one another. Together they use imagery from their ancestral past to describe the existence of the Chicana today and always.

Cervántez and Herrera Rodríguez were part of the historic Xicana feminist generation that arose in the late 1960s. Their artwork seeks to honor ancestral Indigenous ways of looking at the world that center an understanding of all life forms as spiritually connected, interdependent, and of equal worth. 

The social role of the Mexica tlacuiloque, the learned painters of “the red and the black inks,” has shaped their artistic sensibilities, guiding viewers toward in ixtli in yollotl,  toward the good hearts and faces of persons of integrity.

Felicia Rice is an artist, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. A native Californian rarely found far from the coast, she founded Moving Parts Press in 1977. Rice has published hundreds of books, broadsides, and prints in close collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. Rice’s books and prints are held in library and museum collections worldwide, and have been included in exhibitions from Mexico City to New York and Japan. The complete Moving Parts Press archive is housed at UC Santa Barbara. She has worked closely with Museo Eduardo Carrillo on several projects, including Tlacuila Visions.

Laura Elisa Pérez is a leading figure in Chicanx and Latinx scholarship. With a PhD from Harvard and degrees from the University of Chicago, she is a distinguished Professor and Chair of Latinx Research at UC Berkeley. Dr. Pérez is a visionary author and curator whose work reshapes how we view art and identity. For example, her seminal 2007 book, Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities, fundamentally shifted the field by showing how Chicana creativity acts as a profound site for spiritual and political resistance. Through her prolific writing, Dr. Pérez illuminates the deep intellectual and aesthetic contributions of Chicanx and Latinx people, making her an essential voice in decolonial thought.

Celia Herrera Rodríguez is a Xicana queer visual artist/educator, whose practice reflects a multi-generational dialogue and engagement with Xicana[x] Indigenous Mexican and North American art, thought, spirituality, culture, and politics.  She is co-founder and co-director of Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Praxis and is a Teaching Professor of Xicana Art Praxis in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies at UCSB. In recent years her work has been exhibited nationally including The Oakland Museum of California Art; The Cheech Marin Center of Chicano Art and Culture, Riverside, CA; The Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; and The Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL

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As a child of the 50’s and 60’s growing up in southwest Kansas and rural Southern California I witnessed injustices and had experiences I did not have words for which became the impetus for a lifelong dedication to social justice. Eventually my path led me to study art, becoming the first university graduate in my family. My art reflects more than fifty years of exploration working in diverse media, and is informed by Native Mesoamerican spirituality/cosmology, Mexican art traditions, Chicanx/Latinx poetics, and a Xicana-Indigena feminist thought and perspective.

Expressed are issues of environmental justice, human rights, and themes of the Sacred; specifically in regards to Xicana/Latina agency and the decolonized feminine body as contested space and site of transformation. A complex layering of symbolism and text from many sources characterize the compositions in my artwork, creating a hybrid language of contemporary glyphs, and a rich visual narrative. Cervántez is Professor Emerita, Department of Chicana/o Studies, California State University Northridge.