In Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America, Kency Cornejo surveys contemporary political art in Central American countries. The book includes analyses of forty artists and more than eighty works, underscoring the abundance and diversity of artistic experimentation in the region. The author reads these pieces through her concept of “visual disobedience,” a decolonial mode of resistance that posits art as a direct intervention in a specific sociopolitical reality. For Cornejo, these works embody a sensorial practice where the tactile, auditory, and visual coexist and are fundamentally motivated by love for the “damnés,”—the condemned, as put by Franz Fanon. The chapters of the book are structured around four main interconnected themes: Indigenous art, gender and sexuality, migration, and the carceral system. Such categories allow the author to deal with pressing issues such as femicide, the separation of migrant children from their families, anti-Blackness, the violation of human rights under prison captivity, and violence against queer people, among many others. Cornejo approaches these topics and their entanglement with artistic practices through a methodology that highlights the history of violence and power in the region, particularly its ties to colonialism and US imperialism. For Cornejo, the practices included in her different chapters embody “a critical understanding of how colonial legacies and US empire fuel the mass exodus of refugees and asylum seekers arriving at the US-Mexico border” (5).

The book’s conceptual scaffolding begins in the introduction, where Cornejo states how visual disobedience “is a defiance of both state repression and visual coloniality” (10). She defines visual coloniality as a result of historical processes of visual erasure, visual thingnification, and visual extractivism that remain ongoing today. Visual erasure refers to the rejection of Indigenous systems of knowledge and artistic practices by European colonizers; the “colonial deletion of Indigenous artistic history and significance to impose colonial standards as superior and unreachable” (28). Visual thingification is the commodification of the colonized and its transformation through symbolic and physical procedures that justify the perpetuation of violence. Last, Cornejo’s notion of visual extractivism is connected to how Indigenous communities have historically faced “looting of resources, pollution of water and land, privatization and food scarcity, diseases, and decreased life expectancy” (25). For the author, visual extractivism refers to the appropriation of Indigenous visual design: from the looting of Indigenous objects by European explorers to the presence of Indigenous designs in contemporary fashion, or the touristification of Indigenous elements. In return, Indigenous peoples are targeted and discriminated against when they use their traditional garments and clothing. The artists surveyed in the book defy such processes by aesthetic means, and it is this understanding of art as political praxis that for the author, constitutes a decolonial mode of aesthetics.

The first chapter of the book analyzes the work of contemporary Mayan artists. During the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96) thousands of Indigenous people were killed, and Mayan children were explicitly targeted by the military, led by the dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, because they were deemed a future threat. Cornejo shows how the artists included in this chapter, who were children during the conflict, respond to the aftermath of the genocide and approach the numerous forms of violence that Indigenous communities face in the present. Cornejo analyzes the work of Benvenuto Chavajay, Sandra Monterroso, and Ángel Poyón, artists who use performance to demand justice and heal the historical trauma caused by the war, but also “across centuries of settler colonial violence and coloniality” (43). She also studies practices that engage with Indigenous worldviews in myriad ways. In the works of Chavajay and Ángel Poyón, objects are resignified to challenge Western conceptions of linear time and to insist on natural elements as sacred. Artist Fernando Poyón critiques the imposition of Christianity on Indigenous communities, and Antonio Pichillá enacts the inaccessibility of Mayan spirituality as a form of visual resistance. In addition, Cornejo shows how artists like Monterroso, Marilyn Elany Boror Bor, and Edgar Calel problematize identity through pieces that address the forced assimilation of Indigenous subjects and the effects of cultural uprooting, displacement, and migration.

The second chapter deals with postwar feminist and queer art in the region. Cornejo identifies a turn to the body in Central American postwar artistic practices characterized by performative interventions in public spaces, where the body becomes “a site of protest, dissidence, testimony, healing, intervention, remembering, and memory making” (82). She surveys the work of artists Regina José Galindo, Isabel Ruiz, Alexia Miranda, Natalia Domínguez, Jorge Oquelí, and Priscilla Monge, who use their bodies to condemn state violence, feminicide, sexual violence, and violence against queer people. In particular, the work of Galindo and Monge aims to dismantle the divide between the private and public dimensions of feminicide and domestic violence. Moreover, in this chapter, the author engages with the intersection between gender and labor. The pieces by Colectivo Artería and by Dalia Chévez show women’s exploitation in maquiladoras—factory workspaces on the rise after the implementation of Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)—an expansion of The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that includes Central American countries. On a similar note, Lucy Argueta, Monterroso, and Galindo problematize the connection between the exploitation of women’s bodies and that of natural resources. Cornejo’s intersectional feminism also insists on how race impacts the configuration of gender. The work of Katie Numi Usher exposes anti-Blackness in the region and critiques the body shaming that results from Western beauty standards, a concern that takes place in pieces by María Raquel Cochez too. Lastly, the chapter closes with analyses of artists Martin Wannam and Elyla (Fredman Barahona). Cornejo focuses on their claim to erotic autonomy and on the exclusion of queer subjects from revolutionary narratives.

The third chapter opens with an analysis of a piece by artist Mauricio Esquivel where a tattoo of the line of an autopsy incision covers his body. Cornejo reads this work through the connection between borders and violence, which she also examines in the foundational painting El Sumpul (1984) by Carlos Cañas, and in embroidery art made by Salvadoran women. In this chapter, the author explores how Central American artists are producing counternarratives of mass migration in the region. These works “shift the border”: they portray borders as mobile and expansive, as regimes that surpass specific national frontiers. They also move beyond the US-Mexico border. The work of Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas shows the violent consequences of antiimmigrant sentiments in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, fueled by citizen passivity, failed revolutionary promises, and anti-Blackness. Here Cornejo explains how Mexico can be understood as a "vertical border” (148), due to the anti-immigration policies implemented throughout the country to deter mobility. The work of Regina José Galindo addresses migrant experiences in Mexico, and for the author, her performative pieces place the body as the main target of the externalization of border practices developed by the US. In her words, “Galindo’s actions are a reminder of both the physical harm of such policies and the ongoing physical resistance to the violent spatial logics of mobility control” (152). The author also engages with representations of migration that overcome victimization and focus on creativity and collectivity, as seen in the work of Ronald Morán and Guadalupe Maravilla. Artists like Walterio Iraheta and Catalina del Cid highlight the emotional toil of migration. At the same time, Myra Barraza, Simón Vega, and Adán Vallecillo use different media to explore the effect of remittances in Central America and their connection to international businesses. For Cornejo, these artists offer a complex portrayal of migration in its personal, geographical, and financial dimensions and portray “cartographic disobedience,” or the production of maps based on embodied engagements with space.

The last chapter of the book deals with criminalization, prisons, and social cleansing in the region. The author states that the artists surveyed depict a carceral logic “that perpetuates the criminalization of Central Americans across borders and that is inseparable from the colonial agenda of social cleansing of poor, racialized, and marginalized people” (183). The work of the collective Los Siempre Sospechosos de Todo (“The Ever Suspected Ones”), created after the unfounded arrest of a twenty-one-year-old man, critiques the judicial system in Central America through performance and participation. Artists Danny Zavaleta, Simón Vega, Jorge de León, and Alma Leiva engage with urban and domestic spaces and explore how these are shaped by criminality and fear, for instance, in the expansion of security systems or the self-confinement provoked by street violence. In addition, Cornejo explains how the work of Alicia María Siu and Marton Robinson insists on the criminalization of Indigenous and Black subjects, highlighting the historical intersection between race, class, and visual thingnification. The pieces by Zavaleta and Jhafis Quintero also reflect on the experience of inmates in Central American prisons through personal letters, objects, and survival manuals. For Cornejo, in Central America the prison is a site of social cleansing, something explored in the work of Galindo, Jorge Oquelí, and Gabriel Galeano. These artists respond to multiple cases of prison fires that were not properly investigated by the law. Finally, the chapter deals with the portrayal of migrant children detention in the works of Ernesto Bautista, Maravilla, and Galindo. The author explains how these artists highlight the harm that migrant children endure, but also register their testimonies in ways that counteract portrayals of helplessness and victimhood, and move towards creation and survival.

In Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America the reader will find a substantial survey of contemporary Central American art that deals with a wide variety of political issues. Cornejo approaches these through detailed historical and geographical contextualization. She produces an innovative cartography of dissident practices in the region that complicate both aesthetic and political assumptions about migration, violence, and oppression. The author’s analyses are direct, concise, and guided by thematic correspondences. Most importantly, they focus on what the works can politically do in their context of production. Cornejo understands the examined pieces as direct interventions in the public sphere that question patriarchal, colonial, and neoliberal forms of visuality. The book is an important contribution to Latin American art histories because of its careful conceptual framework, extensive research, and exploration of pressing sociopolitical questions in Central America. It establishes the relevance of aesthetics for the disentanglement of power structures.