Naghshvar, Mahyar

My name is Mahyar Naghshvar. I was born and raised in Iran. I immigrated to the United States three years ago. I went to San Diego Mesa College; this is my first quarter at UCLA as a junior transfer student, and I am majoring in architecture.

Where is Aztlán? How is it related to Chicana/o artists?

In the essay, “There’s No Place Like Aztlán,” Alicia Gaspar De Alba describes in the very first paragraph that when we say “there is no place like home,” it means that home is not a place, and because there is nothing like it, home is being in a state of utopia. Hence, Aztlan does not exist, yet it is a dream home for displaced Chicana /o artists. Aztlan has the root in racial memory of Chicanas and Chicanos. The concept of homeland is more powerful than the land itself. For Chicana/o artists, Aztlan may have two important aspects; firstly, acknowledging that their past originated from American Southwest. Secondly, Aztlan evokes spirits of Chicana/o artists. I am interested in this question because I can relate myself to it in a sense that I am an immigrant student, and I feel the challenges of displacement.

I believe that the underlying theme of the essay, “Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore’s Mask: The Mirror of Malinchismo,” is that Chicanos are more equal than Chicanas. Gasper de Alba gave her insight about the CARA exhibit, however, the important question - as she mentioned at the end of the essay- is that “how have others read or decoded the exhibit?” I have to say that I have not totally understood the words Chicana and Chicano; I am not sure whether both are labels that any women and men of Mexican descent in the United States can identify themselves with or these women and men are required to have consciousness to identify social injustice in their community. It is a strong possibility that just a few individuals realized what Gasper de Alba did about under representation of Chicana artists’ works in the CARA exhibition.