By Elizabeth Ferrer
May 21, 2026
Excerpt:
On February 7, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture in Riverside, California, inaugurated a show I curated: Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966 to 2026. The largest exhibition ever mounted by The Cheech, it includes some 150 works by 45 photographers based across the United States. The exhibition and accompanying publication also represent the first comprehensive survey of this history, one that spans six decades, beginning with a pioneering generation of photographers who chronicled the Chicano civil rights movement in the Southwest. These artists — including more recent figures like Laura Aguilar, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Christina Fernandez — have played significant roles in the evolution of the medium.
When I undertake a project like this, presenting what might be the first or among the first exhibitions or publications on a topic, I am deeply conscious of my responsibility to varied stakeholders — the artists, the institution, my cultural community, students, and so on — simply to get it right. The decisions I make during the curatorial process, and the ways I contextualize artists and their works, impact how Chicano photography will be understood, taught, and, hopefully, integrated into broader histories of art. Nearly every living photographer included in the show, active from the 1960s to the present day, attended the exhibition opening. Witnessing them together in one space to celebrate the event profoundly underscored for me the urgency of writing and presenting histories that have been dismissed, overlooked, or erased.
That is why the decision to remove a single work from the show was one I did not take lightly.
On March 17, news emerged that United Farm Workers of America (UFW) leader Cesar Chavez had assaulted multiple women and girls associated with the movement. He had become increasingly controversial later in his life, seen less as a charismatic leader than as an authoritarian figure. Chavez was also known for his hostility toward undocumented migrant workers. But for me, this news required a complete reassessment of the man who had been upheld as the great hero of the entire Chicano civil rights movement.
That day, The Cheech’s interim director, Valerie Found, called me to discuss an image in the exhibition: a 1969 portrait of Chavez by George Rodriguez. That photograph was meant not only to represent Chavez and his foundational role in unionizing California farmworkers, but also to manifest the underrecognized role Chicano photographers played in documenting the movement. The images of Chicano civil rights leaders that circulated widely in the 1960s and ’70s were, by and large, taken by non-Chicano photojournalists, many of whom worked for major newspapers or photo agencies. But when Chicanos took up the camera in the late ’60s, for the first time, they were representing other Chicanos in the movement, whether leaders or everyday people.
This photograph, in other words, illustrated Rodriguez’s crucial role in preserving this history, even if unsung at the time. And now, Found was asking me whether or not I wanted to remove it from the exhibition. The next morning, the New York Times published a report detailing accusations that Chavez had abused girls as young as age 12 and raped UFW Co-founder Dolores Huerta. My decision was immediate. This photograph no longer had a place in the exhibition and was removed later that day by museum staff.
In my 35 years of curation, I’ve never faced the need to remove a work from an exhibition. In the case of Chicano Camera Culture, I deliberated over the inclusion of each image, knowing that they would, in a way, become canonized as emblematic of a history that has never before been presented in its entirety. But in removing the photograph, I did not want to diminish Rodriguez’s presence in the exhibition. He is a highly respected documentarian, now nearing 90 years of age, and is responsible for photographs that memorialize key moments of the movement’s history.
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