Asco and the Resignification of the Chicano Moratorium

Abstract: This essay examines the Los Angeles–based art group, Asco, in relation to the Chicano Moratorium, a series of antiwar demonstrations organized in the early 1970s. Positioning Asco and the Moratorium in dialogue with each other provides an alternative account of how the events' significance translates to local communities and to social movements interrogating state-sanctioned violence. Through performance, visual art, and photography, Asco articulates a form of Chicanx sociality based in alienation that produces what I characterize as a queer sense of time and space, one that simultaneously rejects heteropatriarchy while resignifying the political horizons of the Moratorium's history within and beyond LA in the 1970s.