Linda Lucía Santana

The Chicana artist that I choose for my paper and presentation is Linda Lucía Santana. Although there’s a significant amount of amazing Chicana artist, I was particularly attracted to Santana because I could relate to her background and story. Santana was born and raised in the Central Valley, like me, and has used her community as well as her Mexican roots to inspire her career. Her focus is on storytelling and has been inspired by Mexican narrative ballads, called corridos to create art as a form of musical narrative. She considers herself to be an artist, archivist and a corridista working towards activating the lost histories of her culture.
What I admire the most from Santana is her ability and desire to recreate the memories that have been lost in our culture. I love that there are lyrics to famous Mexican corridos in her drawings and that each of
these is so real that one can think that it’s a picture from the eighteen hundred’s. Corridos are a huge component in Mexican history in that they tell a story of historical events or an individual. Her drawings are reviving this music that seems “outdated” to the current generation to demonstrate the value in our history.
Aside from creating her drawings, Santana is the co-founder of “The Bump It Mafia,” a printmaking group of women that celebrates womanhood and represents strong and intelligent women artist from all backgrounds. In 2013, she was honored as the Featured Artist by the Hispanic Women’s Network of Texas-Fort Worth Chapter. In 2014, she was categorized as one of the “13 Young Latina Artists Changing the Contemporary Art Landscape” by the Huffington Post. I am looking forward to my research and finding out more about this Chicana artist.