Cleaning Nopalitos

     I wanted to write about Carmen Lomas Garza and her painting called Cleaning Nopalitos. I love all the wonderful lines and curves that Garza uses for her art, along with all the different colors she fills her entire frame with. I wanted to write about this painting for it displays to me Garza’s character and her style. This painting also reminds me of my ancestry and the Mesoamerican culture. I identify with the Mayans, Olmecs, and Aztecs due to fact that they inhabited America for thousands of years before Columbus or any sort of European influences. I know that eating nopales is a Native American cuisine. I also identify with Garza’s painting because in my family we eat nopales and they are really healthy and eatable good too. My mother still has some nopales in her back yard and when they are ready to harvest she or I harvests them and we take all the prickles off and we prepare them fresh to eat, it is in our culture and an honor to grow our own food. I also liked this painting because it displays an adult man and a young girl, and the man is showing her how to clean the nopales so they can be cooked, and the young child is observing curiously. This painting goes against the gender roles and it represents the Latino family, contradicting the stereo type of machismo. It is vital for us to represent our culture and show the community that we do have values and that we do have a long ancestral past to this land also.