Taboada, Lilia

My name is Lilia Taboada, I'm a third-year World Arts and Cultures major. I am also planning a minor in Chicana/o Studies and Art History.

In the essay, "Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore's Mask: the Mirror of Malinchismo," I found that the exhibition at CARA was a particularly interesting example of the prolonged influence of the gender division during the Chicana/o Movement. I enjoyed the way Alicia Gaspar de Alba presented the amount of male to female artists in each room, initially through a qualitative perspective, and then went into detail about specific works that supported her plea that Chicanas were not represented equivalently through the metonymy of the exhibition. I especially enjoyed the discussion of Frida Kahlo within the Cultural Icon section. Gaspar de Alba explained how despite Kahlo appearing in Chicana artwork, and being an emblem of feminine struggle in a male-centric society, only one work within the section was produced by a Chicana artist. I found myself thinking how Kahlo is still extremely present in Chicana/o artistic production, but has the gender inequality changed? Perhaps Gaspar de Alba may know if recent exhibitions have become more equal? Do exhibitions on Chicano art in encyclopedic museums typically focus on equal gender representation now more so than during the era of the CARA exhibition?

In the essay, "There's No Place Like Aztlan: Embodied Aesthetics in Chicana Art", Gaspar de Alba separates an essay focused on the power of place within artistic production into art. I particularly enjoyed how she contrasted the power of Aztlan in the Chicana/o aesthetic with the Euro-American vision of the West as a wild frontier. While the image of the wild west preceded the major time of production of Chicana/o art, it seems like Chicana/o artists would have had to combat a nationwide image of the West and Southwest as an area for colonizing and controlling. Conquest and control contrast the sacred and familiar space it is portrayed as in Chicana/o art. Although we focus on Chicana/o artists in the course, I found myself wondering how the image of landscape differs in other immigrant minority groups. Does Gaspar de Alba's use of landscape as a "cultural currency" function in Asian-American artwork, or immigrants from the middle-east? How would she explain Chicana/o artistic production within a larger genre of artwork focused on landscapes of migrants?