LA Times Spotlights Alum Guadalupe Rosales’ Debut Memoir

The Los Angeles Times recently featured SAIC alum Guadalupe Rosales (MFA 2016) in its "Image Makers" series, spotlighting the artist's decade-long project of preserving Chicano and Latinx youth culture in Los Angeles as she releases her debut memoir, East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood, out this month from One World.
 

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Rosales is best known for founding two widely followed community archives on Instagram: Veteranas and Rucas, which collects photographs and memories from Latina women who came of age in Southern California, and Map Pointz, which documents the 1990s Chicano backyard-party and rave scene. Together, the accounts have grown into a living record of a subculture largely absent from official histories, built from thousands of photos, flyers, and stories submitted by the public.

East of the River turns her archival instinct inward, pairing personal essays with photographs, party flyers, and social media ephemera to trace Rosales's own adolescence—and the friendships, danger, and eventual queer self-discovery that shaped it. The book arrives as Rosales prepares for her most prominent international showing yet: a place in the main exhibition of the 2026 Venice Biennale. The Los Angeles Times coverage adds to a long list of national attention for Rosales's work, which has also been featured by The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Artforum.