Guadalupe Rosales’ Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo

05/29/2025

[NoHo Arts District, CA] – This month’s LA Art blog features Guadalupe Rosales’ Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Guadalupe Rosales’ Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo isn’t just another art exhibition, but it’s a true museum piece. Deeply rooted in lived experience, the show acts as both an archive and a mirror, documenting a generation’s relationship with memory, identity, and survival through the lens of late 20th-century Los Angeles party culture.

More than anything, Tzahualli marks a pivotal generational split. There are those who walk through the exhibition and recognize the flyers, the DIY glamor, the snapshots of lowrider girls and backyard parties as fragments of their own lives. Mementos of nights that shaped them. Then there are those who see the exhibition as a preservation of artifacts, standing slightly outside the experience, reverent but distanced, encountering these images and objects as part of a formally recognized history.

At the center of Guadalupe Rosales’ Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo Tzahualli is the elevation of “party girl” culture. Young women whose education came not through formal institutions, but through lived experience on the fringes of mainstream society.

Rosales highlights a culture often dismissed: a scene built by young women who crafted their own aesthetics, navigated racialized spaces, and bore witness to the economic and social upheaval happening just beyond the walls of the clubs and backyards where they gathered. These women weren’t passive observers. They were active participants, bearing silent witness to a city’s transformations even as they carved out spaces of joy, rebellion, and survival for themselves.

Rosales’ work here also calls back to the spirit of the flaneur, the 19th-century figure who wandered city streets, capturing the poetry of everyday life. In Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo, the flâneur is recast: not a solitary man in a topcoat, but the girls in oversized jeans and crop tops, the teens in eyeliner-thick faces wandering swap meets, cruising Whittier Boulevard, posting up at backyard parties. Their everyday moments (once fleeting, unrecorded, and devalued) are now documented with the same critical reverence typically reserved for grander, more “official” histories.

Importantly, Tzahualli refuses nostalgia’s easy comfort. It captures the tension between ecstatic escapism and the persistent grind of social strife: poverty, policing, gendered violence, and marginalization. Rosales does not sanitize these realities. Instead, she threads them carefully into the backdrop of the celebration, reminding viewers that even in joy, survival was a daily negotiation.

Whether approached as a vivid memory or as an anthropological study, Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo demands recognition of histories too often left out of mainstream narratives. Guadalupe Rosales doesn’t just preserve these moments; she asserts their power, their beauty, and their rightful place within the museum walls.