Natalia Anciso (born March 25, 1985) is an American Chicana-Tejana contemporary artist and educator. Her artwork focuses primarily on issues involving Identity, especially as it pertains to her experiences growing up along the U.S.-Mexico Border, via visual art and installation art. Her more recent work covers topics related to education, human rights, and social justice, which is informed by her experience as an urban educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a native of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and currently lives and works in Oakland, California.
Biography
Natalia Anciso was born in Weslaco, Texas in 1985, the eldest of three children to Armando and Idalia Anciso. A fifth-generation Tejana, her family has resided along the Texas Borderlands since the Texas Revolution. Her family lineage has been traced to San Nicolás de los Garza near Monterrey, in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, as well as to Tejones y Sacatiles Indians indigenous to the areas surrounding the Zacatal Ranch between Relampago and Santa Maria, along the Rio Grande.
Shortly after her birth, Anciso's family moved to Austin, where they would reside until she was the age of 10. She would eventually move back to the Rio Grande Valley to her parents' hometown of Mercedes, Texas, graduating from Mercedes High School in 2003. Coming from a long line of migrant farmworkers and laborers, Anciso is the first in her family to graduate from college. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art at The University of Texas at Austin in 2008, before moving to the Fruitvale District of Oakland, California, earning her Master of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2011. A Berkeley Distinguished Graduate Fellow, Anciso earned her M.A. in Education at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Education in 2015.
Work
Art
Anciso creates art predicated on realities and legends of her upbringing. Her works are visual records of family, community, and border culture along her native Rio Grande. Her work has historically covered issues surrounding the Borderlands, which have long been subject to poverty, human trafficking, and the drug war. She depicts Chicano history and struggles on both sides of the border in her work, especially as it pertains to the notion of Identity.
Anciso researches vernacular arts like pano arte, handkerchief art believed to have emerged from Chicano prisoners in the 1940s, and the huipil, embroidered Mayan textiles worn by indigenous women in Southern and Central America. These art forms are reconfigured to tell contemporary stories of life along the Texas/Mexico border. Using pen, pencil, and paint on domestic textiles such as handkerchiefs, pillowcases, and bed sheets, Anciso's work examines psycho-political struggles of life along La Frontera. Specific subjects include the lynchings of Mexicans and Tejanos in Texas from the Texas Rangers, as evident in her Pinches Rinches series, which draws from both historical references and stories of her family in the Rio Grande Valley.
Much of Anciso's research and work surrounding her native Borderlands and her personal identity as a Mexican-American, informed a deeper self-critique and understanding of the complexities of being a Tejana in the Rio Grande Valley. On bridging her dual identities as both a Texan and as an American-born Mexican, Anciso came to a new realization of herself and identity.
Her most recent work covers issues around education, human rights, class and race, as evident in her piece, Don't Shoot (2014), which is featured as the cover of the globally-released human rights education book, Bringing Human Rights Education to US Classrooms: Exemplary Models from Elementary Grades to University, published by London-based Palgrave Macmillan and edited by University of San Francisco professors, Dr. Susan Roberta Katz and Dr. Andrea McEvoy Spero. In the book's final chapter titled, "Afterword: Will Human Rights Education Be Decolonizing?," Dr. K. Wayne Yang, associate professor of ethnic studies at University of California, San Diego, makes a reference to Anciso and connects her work on her native La Frontera in the Texas Borderlands with that of the plight of "urban frontiers" in Detroit, Ferguson, Oakland, New Orleans and Watts, Los Angeles.