The theme is inherently loaded. Latin American art has had shamefully little museum attention in a county that is, statistically, nearly 40 percent Spanish-speaking. So “LA/LA” is definitely a catch-up gesture. And when research began on the project several years ago, few participants could have anticipated the anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Mexican sentiment of the next administration, summed up by the recent suspension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program by President Trump and in the persistently circulated “Build the Wall” meme of the election campaign.

Image A 1988 poster by David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco whose message, “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation,” addresses the subject of a fraught boundary. It appeared on the back of 100 San Diego Transit buses in 1988. Credit... Elizabeth Sisco

One “LA/LA” exhibition, “The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility,” at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, directly addresses the subject of a fraught boundary. Some of the work in the show is too soft and cute, but a few pieces obviously mean business. In a 1978 print by Rupert Garcia (reprinted in 2011), three thick strands of barbed wire silhouetted against a red ground frame the words “Cesen Deportación.” A 1988 poster by David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco combines a triptych of images of brown-skinned hands cleaning a dinner plate, and others handcuffed, with the words: “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.”

And no work falls more clearly into the art-as-evidence category than a sculpture by Camilo Ontiveros in the exhibition called “Home — So Different, So Appealing: Art from the Americas Since 1957” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Placed at the beginning of the show, it’s an assemblage made from the personal effects — bedding, clothing, books and a television set precariously piled on sawhorses — of Juan Manuel Montes, a 23-year-old Mexican man who had lived in the United States since he was 9 and who was deported in February, well in advance of President Trump’s move to end DACA. What’s new in the news is really old history.