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Since it first opened in Los Angeles in September of 1991. The art exhibit known as CARA, the acronym for Chicano Art Resistance and Affirmation has traveled throughout the country to Denver, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Francisco, the Bronx, and Washington DC, bringing art inspired by the Chicano political and social movements of the 60s and 70s to audiences that had sometimes not even heard of the word Chicano. The CARA exhibits last stop was at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Museum patrons on this last afternoon of the CARA exhibit seemed to appear a little bit more intently than usual at this collection of 130 works by 90 Chicano artists from across the country. San Antonio artist David Zamora Casas was among those getting a last glimpse of the landmark art exhibit.

It has opened up the link that we have with our collective past. It has made it okay to and cool to be Chicano again.

Spanish teacher Barbara Merrill came from Devine, Texas. She says the works in the CARA show help her to better understand her mostly Mexican-American students.

There’s so much of the heritage and seeing it through the eyes of the Mexican American. The quote over there, the A Chicano is a Mexican American through non-Anglo eyes, speaks very much to me through this exhibit.

Combining art, politics and history. These diverse works, posters, murals, and multimedia together defined a distinct Chicano aesthetic.

What that meant some 15 years ago is that Chicano artists began to look inward at their own experience to look at their own traditions.

Art historian Dr. Jacinto Quirarte curated the exhibit in San Antonio.

Things that the Chicanos themselves had experienced rather than leapfrogging over to Mexico and looking at things indirectly. By the mid-70s Chicano artists began to really know who they were and by the 80s they were really well onto their own.

In three years of touring the Chicano Art, Resistance, and Affirmation exhibit has brought this distinctive artistic style to the attention of the mainstream art world, but perhaps its most lasting impact has been on audiences who had seldom before seen themselves reflected on museum walls.

We worked the fields in the summer and on weekends during the school year, whatever crop was seasoned. So uh-

30 year old beautician, Sally Ortiz came to see the exhibit twice in San Antonio before it closed. The familiar images she says like that of the Virgin of Guadalupe and of farm worker life and struggle touched a deep cord of memory.

The lettuce and the grapes and the pesticides. I remember my mother talking about the pesticides and of course I was very young and I never understood, but she used to always say, ‘que era muy venenoso.’ Just looking at everything. Just, it's like looking into my past all over again.

And for others too young or not around during the heyday of the Chicano movement, the CARA show proved an education.

Looking at the photos of all the rallies that they had, I found my mother in one of them and it just made me feel really proud that my parents had never really told me about it. But then they started telling me about all this stuff, makes me really proud that people were so alive back then and it just makes me want to be more alive now with the movement because it is still going on.

In San Antonio, as well as the other cities where CARA was exhibited, the show brought in more Latinos than had ever visited those institutions previously. The challenge now say many observers is to keep them coming.