Week 10: Reflection

             Being a Chicana/o Studies major, I was pretty excited about the class because I figured I would finally learn about two integral components of Chicana/o history: Chicana women and their creative artistic expression. However, I thought this class was going to be very textual based, just like the majority of the courses at UCLA and even though we did have weekly readings, they were succinct and actually very interesting. In fact, my favorite part was also the artists presentations because we had to find our own sources of information while analyzing the womens' artwork. The assignment obliged us to do research on our artist so we learned a lot about the women’s backgrounds and inspirations and how those transplanted onto their art. The assignment made us both teachers and students by exchanging our knowledge about our artists.    

Reflecting on the first day, where as a class, we named very few Chicana artists, to now naming over 50, gave me the goosebumps (in a good way). I have always been a person who likes to see progress, so it was very satisfying to see that the class, including myself, learned a significant amount of Chicana artists, are now able to recognize their work, and can even have conversations about them with others.

If there’s one thing I could take away from this class, it would be the fact that Chicana art falls short of being conventional. From Garza, to Lopez, Alvarez, Baca, Carrasco and all the others, these women are innovative and courageous individuals who rely on different mediums of art to speak (in a non-verbal way) about the every-day life of being Chicana. In doing so, they have provided countermemories, that without a doubt, contribute to Chicana feminist theory.