Xicana Printmakers

For this week's reading, Where are the Chicana Printmakers?, art historian Holly Barnet-Sanchez explains how Xicana artists used art as a medium of expressing their commonalities. These commonalities included "their struggles against racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and ethnocentrism" (118). Through their printmaking, these artists exhibited their agency as subjugated women which consequently granted them a space for other women of color to relate and see themselves as the women in the prints. In our class presentations, we saw examples of the issues that Barnet-Sanchez brought to light. One of the notable prints that was presented in class and in the reading was by Barbara Carrasco with Pregnant Woman in a Ball of Yarn from 1978. Barnet-Sanchez comments how this print shows the "restrictive roles of sexuality" (130) by having the woman's hair wrap around her mouth and eyes. I personally felt very drawn to the calendar art of Patricia Rodriguez for the very reasons that Barnet-Sanchez mentions. We are immediately told that the women in Rodriguez's calendar art are not portrayed in the typical seductive "pin-up" manner that most people are used to seeing. Rodriguez's Josefa-Juanita series illustrates the life of a physically and emotionally abused woman. She is described as "looking down, lost in thought, oblivious to her surroundings" (128) with very obvious bruising on her face. Although, these are very difficult subjects to talk about, we must critically engage in dialogue about it instead of simply observing at the artwork and feeling sad for the woman in the art. The women in the art suffer from double subjugation for being women and  women of color. This double subjugation is the reason for their silence in the home and their invisibility in society. The article is significant because it allows us to have a dialogue when there was no dialogue before.