Author: Kale Serrato Doyen
St. Paul's Cathedral, London, image by author
I traveled to Europe for the first time this summer with the support of a predoctoral fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts. This was my second time ever leaving the United States, the first being a 10-day trip to Mexico City last summer accompanied by my advisor, Dr. Jennifer Josten, and my fellow Americanistas in the History of Art and Architecture (HAA) Ph.D. program. I spent one month in Europe visiting London and Paris for two weeks each. In these extended stays, I intimately experienced these cities—learning the texture of their urban fabric and spending time with their extensive institutional collections.
I flew to London from Detroit and stayed in Battersea Park, a neighborhood named for the riverside Battersea Power Station, London’s first electricity plant that now operates as a high-end shopping and residential center. From there, I followed the River Thames from west to east on foot to see the Palace of Westminster, Buckingham Palace, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Tower Bridge. Given London’s size and sprawl, I also used the London Underground, famous double-decker buses, and commuter trains to branch out into the city and countryside.
My time in London gave me a new understanding of Latinidad. I learned about the circuits and cultural exchange between twentieth-century Latin American artists and Europe in the HAA graduate seminar “Image and Text in Avant-Gardes of the Americas,” but my visit introduced me to the embodied Latin American experience of the city. When people asked me where I was from, my answer often prompted the response, “Oh, I thought you were Latin.” It was interesting to me that in the U.S. my Latinx identity is always presumed and foregrounded, whereas as a foreigner in England my Latinidad was almost erased, falling short of the demographic of the average U.S. traveler. I got to see one of my favorite cumbia bands, the London-based group Malphino, play an EP release show in King’s Cross, where I made new friends of Latin American descent. When sharing my research interests with them, some told me that they had never heard of the term “Latinx.” In turn, I learned from them about the invisibility they experience as Latin Americans in the United Kingdom. This resonated with my own experiences being Latinx in the Midwest, a geography wherein we are demographically minoritized and often overlooked in Latino Studies.
I took the Eurostar high-speed train from London to Paris on June 26 and stayed in the 2nd Arrondissement. Emerging from the Gare du Nord, my first impression of the city was how beautiful it was. Throughout the entire city, I loved how all over you could find ornate details, like decorative staircase railings and floor tiles. Paris was much more walkable than London, but I nonetheless used public transit and a bit of Spanish to get by.
I quickly understood that the beauty of Paris’s built environment is reflective of an aestheticization of class hierarchies. On June 27, the death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk spurred protests against police brutality. This tragic event and justified response reminded me of protests in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd. From my bedroom window, I watched protestors march through the Porte San-Denis down Rue du Fauborg San-Denis, and I watched my neighbors watching them across the way. This felt uncannily similar to my standing-room-only view inside the Palais Garnier, wherein I, and spectators across the way, peered over the five floors of loges de côtés to see the stage. The Chicago-based artist Tonika Johnson, widely recognized for her Folded Map Project, was in Paris at the same time. She shared maps of the city on social media to demonstrate how, contrary to U.S. segregation, the Parisian suburbs where Merzouk lived are the locus of the city’s racial and wealth inequality.
Both Paris and London put on display their politics of representation, which effectively marginalize issues of class, race, and gender. The first gallery in the British Museum, for example, is an entire corridor dedicated to the Enlightenment (a European intellectual movement from the 17th and 18th centuries characterized by its shift toward "logic" and "reason"); meanwhile, Africa is the only geographic region to be exhibited in the museum’s basement galleries. Indeed, Black Londoners, namely the “Windrush” generation of migrants from the Caribbean, have faced discrimination in pursuit of education and citizenship, a history I learned through the primary source documents in the exhibition Over a Barrel: Windrush Children, Tragedy and Triumph at the Black Cultural Archives. Some institutions used their past negligence as a site of repair, like the Museum of the Home, which is currently exhibiting and acquiring new objects that fill its gaps in the collection of Black and Vietnamese diasporic histories in London.
In Paris, ideals of the Enlightenment are embodied figuratively in the built environment and literally through explicit monuments and tributes. In both cities, this identity is predicated on highly reproduced depictions of wealthy, clothed white men and, conversely, naked and docile white women. I used the Wi-Fi at the Musée d'Orsay and searched, to no avail, for what percentage of artists in their collection were male after I grew increasingly disturbed by the quantity of nude females I saw in paintings and sculptures. This query might make a good Guerrilla Girls poster.
While on “the other side of the pond,” I found that sites I thought to be quintessentially “American” derive from European precedents, and vice versa insofar as the U.S. leaves its own cultural and imperial footprint abroad. Buckingham Palace and the Tour Eiffel, both icons of British and French nationalism, respectively, have lawned malls leading up to them just like the Washington Monument. In both England and France I frequently entered shops and cars playing music from the U.S. I also noticed that U.S. artists occupied a lot of exhibition space, and in two instances this pleasantly surprised me. At the Camden Arts Center, I learned about the life and work of Martin Wong in a solo retrospective exhibition, a feat of visibility few Asian-Americans enjoy in the States. I had certainly not expected to see photographs of my Midwest hometown of Saginaw, MI, while in Paris, specifically in the Centre Pompidou’s special exhibition Lynne Cohen/Marina Gadonneix: Laboratories/Observatories. Observing Europe’s orbit of U.S. culture, I couldn’t help but internalize the critical words of James Baldwin from 1970: “My country runs the world, owns the world."
Returning home to my own steel tower in Pittsburgh, I feel a sense of gratitude and humility similar to how I felt returning from Mexico. I’ve reflected on the migration from Mexico to the U.S. that my family undertook three generations ago, consequently securing my citizenship and prospects. Not only am I the first in my family to attend college, but also the first to return to our ancestral homeland and to leave the hemisphere. The international travel opportunities I have been afforded in my graduate career are reminders of the privilege we carry as academics when we exercise mobility and bear witness to circulation.