Along the Diagonal - by Roberto Tejada

Book Synopsis

The first book to offer an expansive view of both major figures and emerging voices in Latin American and U.S. Latinx art

With a poet's eye and a critic's insight, Guggenheim Fellow and celebrated scholar Roberto Tejada brings together a dynamic collection drawn from decades of lectures, articles, cultural criticism, and catalog essays that reframe our understanding of Latin American and U.S. Latinx art throughout the diaspora.

A landmark work from one of today's most vital minds in art criticism and cultural thought, Along the Diagonal moves fluidly between close readings of memoir, visual analysis, and political history to offer an expansive and deeply personal journey. Rather than defining Latinx or Latin American art as fixed categories, Tejada explores them as overlapping and diverging trajectories shaped by migration, colonization, media culture, and institutional visibility. He pushes against narrow conceptions of Latinx identity as well as isolated histories of Civil Rights movements to situate artists, works of art, and images in sociopolitical contexts and within a web of identity, memory, and often-contested meanings.

Opening with Celia Álvarez Muñoz's participatory installation, A Brand New Ball Game, Tejada sets the tone for his diagonal approach: one that favors slantwise perception, speculative connection, and aesthetic risk. From there, the book spans the street-level murals of Chicano Los Angeles, the photobooks of contemporary Brazil, and the multimedia installations of Puerto Rican duo Allora & Calzadilla. Tejada draws on his personal experiences in Mexico City in the 1990s, the theory of Roger Caillois and Vilém Flusser, and the activism of queer and Latinx artists to stage a rich and restless conversation about art as both a record and agent of historical change. Tejada offers sharp insights into the work of influential precursors such as Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, and contemporary artists Miguel Angel Ríos, Francis Alÿs, and Allora & Calzadilla, while also amplifying emerging and lesser-known voices, including Jenni(f)fer Tamayo and Jesús Macarena-Ávila.

A vital contribution to the evolving conversation about Latinx and Latin American art, Along the Diagonal opens new paths for thinking about how art lives in, and helps shape, the social and political worlds we inhabit.

Review Quotes

You do not know American art history until you have read Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América. Roberto Tejada traces a diagonal across the hemisphere, bringing Latino and Latin American artists into view--not as an addendum to U.S. art history, but as a site of open-ended contemplation on the larger, often silenced histories and asymmetrical entanglements that shape the region. Bridging disciplines, this book is indispensable for art history, cultural theory, hemispheric studies, and gender, sexuality, ethnic, and Indigenous studies.---Chon Noriega, Distinguished Professor, UCLA

About the Author

Roberto Tejada (Author)
Roberto Tejada is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Carbonate of Copper (Fordham), Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham), and Exhibition Park. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, he is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.