Post week 3

In the essay “The Iconography of Self Determination” by author Shifra Goldman, the author states historical events from as far back as the Mexican American war till the Chicano movement in the 1970’s. Anglos, as explained in the essay, used race, as a way to oppress the indigenous and black people in order to reap certain beneficial opportunities. Goldman states that “in the 1930s one American schoolteacher claimed that the ‘inferiority of the Mexicans is both biological and class.’" The racial attitudes that this 1930s schoolteacher states bothered me because his statement is scientifically incorrect. Race is socially constructed. Biologically there is only one human race. The ignorance of the statement bothered me even more knowing that a schoolteacher had said it. The author then describes the difference between nationality and ethnicity. Nationality is defined in the essay as the “virtue of birth in a certain place and time.” Ethnicity is defined as the “needs to be mentioned/an embattled posture/to separate by years or generations” and as a mixture of many other things that construct an identity.

In Yolanda Lopez’s installation named “Things I Never Told my Son about Being a Mexican” the artist expresses her Chicana ethnicity and identity by showing the viewer that the images upon the installment are actually not Mexican. What I got out of the installment is that the artist is encompassing these stereotypes and throwing it right back at the audience and cleverly stating that theses are incorrect images to associate being a Mexican.