Rodríguez, Kaelyn

My name is Kaelyn Rodríguez and I am a first year Ph.D candidate in Chicana/o Studies. My background is in art history, but some of my politics and interests are in street art, public art, murals, critical race theory, urban planning and social justice. 

I have a few questions about the essay, Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore’s Mask: The Mirror of Malinchismo. The essay discusses the ways that Chicanas were discriminated against and underrepresented in the CARA exhibition. The author of the essay, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, makes the point that Chicanas, especially Chicana lesbians and queer women, were not only under represented in an exhibition that was interested in, “an awareness of gender issues in all aspects of the exhibition…” but somehow, heteropatriarchy was the tone of several of the respective exhibition rooms. For this, my question is: how does this contradiction occur and exist so pervasively in an exhibition that is specifically interested in resistance and affirmation for Chicanas and Chicanos? Who was the curator? I wonder who was on the Advisory Committee and how involved they were with the processes of gather art and displaying it. My next question is more interested in how “some members of the Movement were more equal than others”. I appreciate the parallel to Orwell’s Animal Farm, but I wonder why there wasn’t more advocacy for actual Chicana feminism (that was not steeped in heteropatriarchy and machismo), especially lesbian Chicanas in the exhibition. And finally, why did Eva Sperling Cockcroft think that this was a successful exhibition for Chicanas? Is that an indication that we are not united on what equality means? Are some of us still operating in patriarchal logics? Are we still trying to wear “The Halo”?

In the essay, There’s No Place Like Aztlán: Homeland Myths and Embodied Aesthetics, Alicia Gaspar de Alba refers to Homi Bhabha who talks about identity as what goes beyond the present where the “subject negotiates her/his differences”. In her essay, Chicana Feminism: In the tracks of “the” native woman, Norma Alarcón talks about Chicana identity as “…ideological conflict of having  ‘no names’ having ‘many names’ not ‘know[ing] her names’ and being someone else’s ‘dreamwork.’” Both Bhabha and Alarcón are presenting what I see as two similar ideas about existing and not existing. I understand Chicana feminism and Aztlán as place-based identities or experiences that may be mythical and not necessarily wholly based in a present space that is perfect. My question for Professor Gaspar de Alba is about Aztlán as a sort of placeholder for the intangible aesthetics of Chicana and Chicano identity and the politics behind the geographies we do and do not see (or geographies that may or may not exist). If we think about Aztlán as a metaphor for belonging and having, can we think of Chicinadad as a parallel that is both in our minds and in the future (as in “the future perfect”)? Or can we think of Chicanidad as a more permanent or localized experience?