Installation for Echoes in the Echo

The Pocho Research Society

How is “History” memorialized in your city? What events and people are remembered? What events and people are forgotten? Through what lens are those “histories” viewed/ These questions are starting points in the work of the Pocho Research Society, a collaborative project that seeks to investigate and challenge official representations of history.

Los Angeles is a city that does little to remember its past. The city does not have a museum dedicated to its own history and the few public monument, that do exist, tend to glorify conquest and war. Simultaneously, through the relentless pace of production under global capitalism, the city’s landscape undergoes a perpetual process of building and tearing down. It’s proximity to Hollywood, “the image factory”, makes it fertile territory for the fabrication of dehumanizing images disseminated through mass culture that often bulldoze, commodify, or mythologize the multitude of hidden and forgotten histories of the working population who fabricate it.

Youth cultural histories are particularly erased. In Echoes in the Echo, PRS installed “unofficial” plaques in public spaces to commemorate formerly queer Latina/o bars that have changed ownership as forces of gentrification have pushed many working class communities out of the city “core”.

The Pocho Research Society believes that “History” and memory can be powerful sites, to help one not only critically reflect on the present, but also to inspire the imagining of other possibilities.

Exhibited:
Resurgent Histories, Insurgent Futures, curated by Jennifer Ponce de Leon, Slought Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2017)

Stay Bite: Modes of Operation, curated by Karla Diaz and Evelyn Serrano, Mains

Art Gallery, University of Texas, Dallas, TX (2009)