It’s my interpretation that the action curating a show like this comes very close to ghettoizing a broad scope of largely unrelated artists into the “Chicano” field. I think that the curators, in admitting that the “Chicano grouping” is a curatorial artifact are facing the reality that we have moved past the time when that term was really politically, and even ethnically coherent. What we’re dealing with isn’t a Chicano show – it’s a post-Chicano show, and therefore a non-Chicano show.

Considering Shizu’s work, I think the identity that she’s really dealing with is an Angeleno one, and not a Chicano one. As someone who could easily shoehorn himself into a “sort of Chicano” identity politics, I find Shizu’s work to be thoughtfully free of the kind of auto-stereotyping that has unfortunately come to define much of the work of the early “Chicano artists”. I wouldn’t consider Shizu to fall within the traditional definition of Chicano, any more than I myself do.

I don’t think that a Chicano identity has to resemble my conceptions, but I do have a personal perception and an experience of Chicano identity. I don’t see Chicano identity as particularly fluid, I see the idea of Chicano identity as somewhat exclusive, even defensively/offensively used to draw a line in the sand between Mexican-Americans and Americans with ancestors in Central and South America.