Arzeta, Edwin

     I Edwin Arzeta am a new third-year transfer pursuing a BA in Fine Art. I’m down with all kinds of art, but right now I work with sculpture, painting, drawing, ceramic art, and am new to photography.

   

  In Out of the House Judith Baca’s book Woman’s Manual: How to Assemble Scaffolding was mentioned; by the title alone, it sounds like Baca is making a statement about women being just as capable of performing “men’s work”. It seems that in that era male muralists were keen to neglect Hispanic female artists so much so that this statement-book had to be written. When Baca’s book was published was there some sort of backlash from the male muralist community? I ask because to me, it appears that traditional gender roles in Mexico were transmitted to the Chicana/o community in the United States where not even “white” art circles were spared. Was the power struggle fostered more by the already ongoing tradition in art that men were more prolific artists than women as evidenced by the unbalanced celebration of male art, or was it influenced more by the tradition of Mexican family tropes, or was it a blend?

     What I took away from No Place like Aztlan is that a sense of personal identity comes from the internal mechanisms (memory and emotion) that we associate with locations; that home is not the physical, but a psychological reaction to stimuli. Is that the main difference between the terms ‘house’ and ‘home’—that we don’t feel “at home” in a house (or a country) until we fill it with familiar and comforting relics and stimuli that reminds us of belonging somewhere? Is this why the kinds of artists you described create the things they do—to activate his or her memory and emotions whether it’s conscious or subconscious in its activity?