Guadalupe Rosales’s Portable Archive of East LA

Guadalupe Rosales, an LA-based artist, has amassed a vast collection of ephemera from the city's Chicano and Latinx youth culture, particularly women and girls, from the 1980s and 1990s. She did this through her Instagram pages, @veteranas_and_rucas and @map_pointz, which have become an invaluable archive of pre-internet adolescent life in that era.

Her collection features bold hairstyles, lined lips, body-hugging clothing, and party flyers with titles like "Bad Influence" and "Titty Juice," all exuding a sense of liberation.

Rosales has showcased this collection in various ways, often in architectonic environments that embody the energy of nocturnal gatherings. For instance, in her installation for the In Minor Keys exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale, she used infinity mirrors lined with neon, artifacts embedded in them, and suspended them on a steel structure resembling a SoCal bungalow.

In a more recent endeavor, Rosales has shifted her approach to present her archive in more intimate ways. Her new project, East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood, published this fall, compiles many of the photos, flyers, news clippings, and testimonials she has received from followers over the past decade. In addition to these materials, she incorporates her own photographs and experiences, sharing her own Eastside upbringing and the ways in which socializing with friends provided a respite from hardships, both at home and in the broader city.

She references the 1992 uprising, increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, and gang violence, the latter of which claimed the life of her cousin, Ever Sánchez, in a party in 1996. Rosales writes, "It took me years to forgive those who took his life, but eventually, I was able to turn the grief into altars, memorials, and storytelling."