Drawn from the Scraps
“Drawn from the Scraps: The Finding AIDS of Mundo Meza.” Radical History Review, Special Issue: Queering Archives: Intimate Traces, 122 (May 2015), 70-88
In “Drawn from the Scraps: The Finding AIDS of Mundo Meza,” Hernandez challenges an empirical archive methodology predicated on document wholeness. By exercising what he terms, “queer detrital analysis,” he empowers archival failure as a way to reconsider archival formations in queer terms. In the essay, he ruminates on the ways in which AIDS has effectively devastated the visual archive of Chicanx art history reshaping its materiality through degradation, confiscation, and ruin. Examining the scraps left in wake of artist Mundo Meza’s AIDS related death, he unfastens destruction as the sole determinant in the study of his remains. Rather, near absence presents new opportunities to expand the utility of debris for a queer vision of the Chicanx avant-garde past.