Lotería: What Do We Leave to Chance?

Playing games is a powerful way to tackle complex personal, social, political, environmental, and economic issues. For students at ArTES Magnet, a small public high school in Los Angeles, Lotería is a popular game that brings family traditions to school through play, stories of occasional cheating, and an almost superstitious attachment to a particular tabla.

Lotería is sometimes compared to American Bingo because players place a marker on each card that is called. Callers can identify the card by the title, for example, “El Valiente,” or give clues without directly naming the card, such as “a brave man.” Players have a tabla with sixteen images and listen carefully to mark the cards.

Contemporary Versions
The 1963 Don Clemente Gallo illustrated version of the game is popular and familiar to students, and itʼs available in our local markets, making it a great starting place for a discussion of culture, symbols, and the role of contemporary artists and designers in adapting images to changing times.

Reintroducing students to the traditional symbolism of the game through play and comparing it to contemporary artists Mike Alfaro, creator of the new game of Millennial Lotería, and Luis Pinto and Cecelia Cruz, who redesigned the deck as an interactive Google Doodle and online game provided a framework for analyzing the juxtaposition of text and image in telling stories through playing games.

Collaborative Play
Students brought in their own family Lotería games and classes played all the versions that were shared, including the traditional, Millennial, and Google versions. The speed of the game allowed for brisk discussions on pronunciation and clues, helping to clarify the cards’ meaning and why they matter. Students noticed which cards were updated for the 2021 versions of the game and why they were important cultural updates. Cards such as Don Clemente Gallo’s “#16, La Sirena” (the mermaid) was updated by Mike Alfaro to “#1, La Selfie.” Students discussed the labor, economic, social, and political issues represented in the cards and what was missing to represent their world.

Students analyzed visual elements such as font, composition, and color scheme while recognizing the changes in theme and tone of the cards in each game. As artists and designers, it was important for students to evaluate symbols and images in a familiar game and question how they tell stories. Play raises questions about whether certain symbols are representative of a specific time period and how they become parts of popular culture and family life.

Connecting History and Art
Through arts integration and teacher collaboration, eleventh- and twelfth-graders designed a card in their U.S. history class that addressed a labor issue. They began with researching a current labor issue local to Los Angeles, including the causes and effects of their topic. Second, students traced the current issue to the Gilded Age using the symbolism of their first Lotería card reinterpretation to question if they are living in a Second Gilded Age. Through play, students further discussed the labor, economic, social, and political impact represented in their first card and what needed to be reinterpreted in the symbol of one of the cards to represent their labor issue from the past to the present.

Recent training by Dr. Tyrone Howard at the International Center for Leadership in Education encouraged ArTES teachers to create a curriculum that includes mirrors to reflect lived experiences and windows to see opportunities beyond the classroom. These current issues reflect students’ lives, and reimagining these issues through contemporary art provides agency to reframe and shape the narrative.

Contemporary Game Cards
In visual arts classes, students in grades nine through twelve investigated how games represent the values of a culture or time. Students reinvented a card to be relevant to 2021 or created an entirely new card that addresses a contemporary issue. The artistic process for all students was to research the symbolism of the cards in the deck and interpret those symbols through the contemporary lenses of the artists who inspired the project. Students created four sketches, explaining their card choice and what it represented.

Students held a peer and teacher critique to choose the strongest image and created an artwork following the format of white border, number in the top left corner, and card title in the bottom center. Using a TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) approach, students had a menu of choices for medium and tutorials and materials available depending on their interests. History students who also had art worked on their project with both classes, elevating the complexity of thought regarding the issues they chose to illustrate.

Students requested that all the cards be compiled into a new version of the game that can be played virtually online or in person at our annual event ArtRiot, opening the door for future generations to continue playing a Lotería game that mirrors the realities of their lives.