Latinos in the United States are currently recognised as an emergent and decisive force in electoral politics, while at the same time, in Mexico pro-democracy and social justice activists have been knocked back on their heels by what some have called the ‘Colombianisation’ of Mexico – the proliferation of armed actors linked to the transnational drug trade and the consequent militarisation of the country's politics. What is generally rendered invisible in this split-screen and superficial view of two national realities are the discourses and demands of grassroots movements, as well as the underlying connections, the relationships and the dialogue, between social formations in the United States and their counterparts south of the border. Edward McCaughan's Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán is a useful reminder of the complex cultural vitality of three such movements – the US Chicano movement, Mexico City's youth movement of 1968 and its legacies, and the Zapotec project for self-rule in the Oaxacan city of Juchitán – and offers a visual registry of their sometimes contradictory efforts at reshaping US and Mexican society. Based on extensive research and informed by the perspective of a witness to and participant in the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, Art and Social Movements carefully attends to the cultural and artistic dimensions of recent social movement history and experience.

McCaughan's book is important for at least three related reasons. Firstly, it presents an inventory of the visual arts produced from within three transformative political projects that coalesced at roughly the same historical moment: the US Chicano civil rights movement, Mexico City's 1968 student-led protests against corporatist political rule, and the popular front-like Coalición Obrero-Campesino-Estudiantial del Istmo (Worker–Peasant–Student Coalition of the Isthmus, COCEI), which represented both a regional electoral challenge to one-party corporatist rule in Mexico and the leading edge of a Zapotec cultural revival. These activist projects have generally been treated separately, but by taking a comparative approach to a range of visual works by artists associated with them, McCaughan successively demonstrates not only various points of contact between the movements (artistic influences, personal contacts and the like) but also numerous pressure points among and between the discourses, and the aesthetic and symbolic registers, deployed by artists in relation to their social movement contexts.

McCaughan's comparative and critical evaluation of the social movements' artistic ‘catalogs’ is the second important contribution of the book. McCaughan's discussion of the artwork attends carefully to multiple concrete examples in order to show how particular discourses of national identity, citizenship, gender, indigenism, sexuality and class were articulated or challenged by artist activists. McCaughan uses the evident differences in the visual art produced in the three different social and political contexts to underscore and reveal some of the ideological blind spots and contradictions of the social movements. In this way, for example, the graphic production of the 1968 student movement projects a tenuous relationship to Mexico's working class, a lack highlighted by contrast with graphic work related to COCEI in Oaxaca. Similarly, the reader is able to recognise the frequent acritical symbolic identifications of the Chicano movement with the same officialised Mexican nationalist symbology that the 1968 Mexican movement sought to demystify. Perhaps most significantly, the hyper-masculine visual language of protest in both the US and Mexican contexts can be seen to mirror the marginalisation of women and the homophobia that were a weakness of these movements. In his exploration of aesthetic and symbolic features of movement-related art, McCaughan makes visible the internal margins of the discourses and projected identities of the activist projects.

Thirdly, McCaughan's book engages an important theoretical and practical question: specifically, the activist agency of art. Amid the extensive social movement literature, there is relatively little attention paid to the activist role of art within social movements as a medium for public discourse, a strategic means for communicative framing or a space of cultural resignification. McCaughan's analysis of artistic production under specific historical and political circumstances goes beyond the simple scholarly recognition of politically motivated art to explore the special value of art within the logic of the so-called new social movements, which have emphasised collective identity. In the context of public struggle over shared meanings and activist challenges to cultural and symbolic hegemony that excludes and devalues different social groups, McCaughan argues that art is especially strategic, and that ‘artists are often better able to fully appreciate the cultural processes by which people attribute meaning to social reality through representation’ (p. 166). Although the book could benefit from a more detailed examination of the existing literature on this question, McCaughan positions his argument carefully within the back-and-forth between structure and agency, and material versus cultural grounds for transformative action.

Art and Social Movements is a valuable contribution to several fields that intersect with McCaughan's concerns, including art history, the sociology of art, and cultural studies. But McCaughan's argument and the inventory of movement art he assembles in the book are of particular value for understanding the transnational struggle for LGBT equality, a struggle undertaken (and ongoing) not only as a project of societal transformation but also within social movements otherwise centred on demands of social justice and equality. Not surprisingly, Chicana activist and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa is quoted throughout the book with reference to the production of ‘subversive knowledges’ (pp. 6, 155) and the need to ‘claim space’ (pp. 83, 100). If Anzaldúa's 1987 manifesto Borderlands/La frontera represented the coming to awareness of a movement within the US Chicano movement, McCaughan's book fills in some of the cultural history for that project, not as a theoretical position or an abstract identity politics but as a historical reworking of received cultural materials – symbols, styles, languages, discourses – that ultimately makes Anzaldúa's work possible.