Guadalupe Rosales Turns a Decade of Instagram Into a Memoir of East LA

Since 2015, Los Angeles artist Guadalupe Rosales has collected the stories of the city's Chicanx and Latinx youth — above all, women and girls — through two Instagram pages, @veteranas_and_rucas and @map_pointz. This fall, that project becomes a book. East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood assembles the photos, flyers, news clips and testimonials followers have sent her for more than a decade, alongside her own photographs and memories of growing up on the Eastside.

The account Rosales corrects is a narrow one. Anyone describing Los Angeles youth culture in the late 1990s, as the source notes, might have reached for towheaded surfers, Sunset Strip hair bands, Beverly Hills teens, and the graffiti-soaked clubs that harbored New Wave and punk. Rosales's archive widens the frame.

The material is concrete and unglamorous in the best sense: big hair, lined lips, body-hugging tanks and baggy jeans. Party flyers carry titles like "Bad Influence" and "Titty Juice," with irreverent promises of liberation. The two Instagram pages have become a collective archive of pre-internet adolescent life in the 1980s and 1990s.

Rosales has displayed this ephemera in imaginative ways before, often in architectonic environments that pulse with the energy of nocturnal gatherings. Her installation for In Minor Keys, the international exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale, set infinity mirrors edged with neon, embedded with artifacts, on a steel structure evoking the form of a SoCal bungalow.

What does the book add that the feed cannot?

Intimacy, and a named grief. Rosales sets the parties against a backdrop of civic turmoil: the 1992 uprising, growing anti-immigrant sentiment after California's politics turned harsh, and gang violence. That violence claimed the life of her cousin, Ever Sánchez, killed at a party in 1996.

"It took me years to forgive those who took his life," she writes in the memoir, "but eventually I was able to turn the grief into altars and memorials and storytelling."

The revelry the archive documents was not escapism for its own sake. As the source frames it, time with friends offered a respite from troubles both at home and in the larger city. The book makes that context explicit in a way a scrollable feed rarely does.

The claims here deserve scrutiny, though. The pages are called "wildly popular," but no follower count, print run or sales figure appears anywhere in the material. The memoir's reception — reviews, appearances, whether the archive will enter any museum collection — goes unmentioned. What the source establishes firmly is the trajectory: a volunteer-run-looking Instagram project, sustained for over a decade, has produced a Venice Biennale installation and now a published memoir.

For readers who followed the pages since 2015, the payoff is a curated, personal version of material they helped supply. For everyone else, East of the River offers the rare thing: a crowd-sourced archive with a named author, a family grief at its center, and a city's suppressed self-portrait restored to the record.