Week 3: Goldman and Lopez

Shifra Goldman explains in her essay “Iconography of Chicano Self-Determination: Race, Ethnicity and Class” that many Chican@’s turn to self-identification was a form of resistance to oppression. The mestizo race was constantly being subjugated by Anglo-Americans especially in the 1840s when the United States was interested in seizing Mexican territory. Still discriminated against for over 100 yeas, Chican@s successfully responded in the first wave of the Chicano Movement through art that celebrated their mestizo race. They were able to become empowered by the idea that their race was inclusive of the fact that they were the “descendants of the elite rulers of the Aztec, Maya, or Tolpec states”. Also, they came to realize that ethnicity was not an individual construct, and thus it could not be imposed over them. Instead, ethnicity was “the set of activities, traits, customs, rituals, relationships, and other emblems of signification that are rooted in group histories and shared to differing degrees by the members of a given national/ ethnic group”. Therefore, the images that are recurring motifs in Chican@ art have been carefully selected to showcase a shared history and which continues to have significance in the present day. In regards to class, it also has been deeply imbedded in the historical fact that class divisions in the southwest have existed since 1598. These class divisions were reinforced by people like Juan de Oñate, millionaire silver mine owner, who subjugated native americans and mestizos into the “working class”. Chican@s contest these division by bringing up an awareness of how these divisions were constructed based on historical moments. 

Yolanda Lopez is one Chicana artist who contests this imposed oppression. Her mixed-media installation “The Nanny” from Women’s Work is Never Done reflects the working class reality amongst the constructs of what it means to be Mexican-American when there is a clear separation between “Mexican” and “American”. In this image, the nanny dress is the signifier of the working class experience of Chicanas. Furthermore, it’s a subservient position where the Chicana would be most likely working for an anglo-American family. The dress is located in the middle of the installation in between two large posters that showcase two commercial advertisements. The poster on the left is an advertisement for the wool industry that was printed in Vogue. It displays a white woman in fashionable clothes taking a watermelon from a colored woman who is a vendor and carries the watermelon on her head in a sombrero. The poster to the right is an advertisement for Eastern Airlines to travel to Mexico. In this poster, there is another white woman receiving flowers from a dark skinned Mexican vendor. The white women are smiling and the non-white women are not. The white women are also significantly taller than the non-white women. They practically stand over them and it reaffirms the white women’s positionality both literally, socially, racially, and class wise over the non-women. It reaffirms the hierarchy that exist in between these social, wealth, and racial classes.