This dissertation examines transborder interaction between post-1960s Mexicana and Chicana/o art movements, specifically the interrelation between feminist and queer artists. The first part of the title refers to this project's objective of expanding the disciplinary paradigms that restrict knowledge of Mexican and Chicana/o art to the epistemological and geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state. A second objective is to assert the importance of queer and feminist activist art as an affecting and effective social movement practice. This study also investigates the artistic influence that Chicana feminist art has exerted in Mexico in order to chart the course of transborder cultural exchanges that flow in multiple directions across the border thus challenging the idea that decolonial cultural practices can be understood as geographically bounded and separate cultural, political and economic entities.

This investigation applies methods from art history, cultural studies, and sociology, including visual and textual analysis, participant observation, archival research, and interviews with artists, to produce a multi-sited study that traces how discourses articulated in opposition to hetero-normative and patriarchal systems of power shift across racial, gendered, cultural, class, and national borders. Chapter One, "Atravesando Fronteras: Remapping the Borders of Queer Chicana Feminist and Mexican Lesbian Feminist Art and Activist Scholarship," interrogates the U.S.-Mexican border, not only as a political and cultural demarcation, but also as an epistemic border that separates Mexicanas and Latinoamericanas from U.S. Chicanas and Latinas, and the feminist knowledges they each produce.

Chapter Two, "Queering the Family Portrait in Mexican and Chicana Art," examines the political investments of queer and feminist Chicana and Mexican artists who choose to re-member and recreate familia as part of decolonial practices of queer love, survival, and resistance. As these artists rethink the meaning of familia by queering the conventional family portrait, they expose the normative conventions and ideologies that legitimize exclusion and hierarchy, as well as violence, within heteronormative familial forms. At the same time, artists envision non-heteropatriarchal possibilities for imagining queer love, kinship, and desire.

Chapter Three, "Locating a Transborder Archive of Queer Politicized Virgen de Guadalupe Art," argues that the aesthetic and political commonalities that unite queer Chicana feminist and Mexican lesbian feminist artists and activists are visible in the visual and cultural texts that comprise what I conceptualize as a transborder archive. Furthermore, Chapter Four, "Art as an Activist Methodology in Transborder Lesbian Feminist Encuentros," asserts that this transborder archive is the basis of a mutually understood transcultural visual language that facilitates understandings between queer Chicana feminists and Mexican lesbian feminists involved in transborder encuentros that use art as a dialogic activist methodology. In this context, art serves as an activist methodology, which facilitates transcultural dialogues among a transborder public that spans the continent.