Valles, Andres

Hi everyone, my name is Andres Valles and I’m studying political science with a concentration in international relation focusing on the Meddle East. I plan to seek employment with the FBI in the near future, possible after receiving my Ph.D in the subject. This is my last quarter at UCLA and I have the opportunity to take this chicano/a class. I gravitated to this particular class because I’ve always wanted to enroll in at least one chicano/a class before leaving UCLA and this was the perfect class for me because its dealing with art. I’ve been drawling and painting since I was a kid, but I haven’t painting anything recently. I hope this class will rejuvenate some preexisting drive in painting, a drive that I once held inside of me.

 Out of the house, the Halo, and the whore’s Mask: My first thoughts after reading the essay clearly demonstrate the constant struggle of chicana artist to receive recognition in the art community? Has this inequality and unjust alienation of chicana art work continue now? However, did Yolanda M. Lopez portrait of the artist as the virgin of Guadalupe come with some surrounding controversy, and if so, did that prevent her work from getting the attention she should have received?

There’s no place like Aztlan: Ebodied Aesthetics in Chicana: the legendary ancestral home of the Aztec people is depicted in the Aztlan as a paradise, but other scholars like Aubin Codex paint a more ominous place, a place governed by tyrannical rule, guided by their priest. Alicia Gaspar de Alba shows that chicano/a don’t feel at home in United States but they also don’t feel at home in Mexico. Like the contradictory image of Aztlan, could chicnao/a be searching for something that really doesn’t exist and could only reside in oneself?