CARA Politics of Representation

Alicia Gaspar de Alba explores the marginalization of Chicanas and Chicana artists within the Chicano movement in her essay on the CARA exhibition, which meant to showcase the Chicana/o art movement, but included one hundred more Chicano than Chicana artists and typically represented women in a typically Chicano fashion by relying on the archetypes of the mother, the virgin, and the whore. This approach reflects the norms of the Chicano movement, which disenfranchised women in the movement and, in the early days, defined them as sexually available Adelitas or Malinches, or loyal or disloyal women, respectively. Any woman who had an agenda for liberation beyond race and class was a Malinche and disloyal to the movement. Feminists were considered as threats to the essential bonds of the patriarchal Chicano family and traitors because they aspired to an ideology associated with middle-class white women. Chicana artists were particularly marginalized; for example, Chicano artists believed women were not fit to be muralists because they were physically unable to set up the necessary scaffolding and shouldn't paint in the public eye. CARA reinforces these ideas because every artist include in the “Feminist Visions” room of the exhibition is female, which conveys that only women should be concerned with women’s liberation, and by including other works by Chicano artists that depict women as either mothers, virgins, or whores, or only as part of patriarchal units.

However, the Chicana artists included in the CARA exhibition did resist this history of marginalization. The “Feminist Visions” room includes many works by Chicana artists that decolonize the body by using it as an active, expressive subject, rather than as a passive subject for gratification. The triptych Les Tres Marias satirizes the mother/virgin/whore construction, and portrayals of Guadalupe alter the passive femininity of the original image to give her physical agency. Frida Kahlo is used as a symbol of resistance and affirmation, and the Chicana’s relationships with Anglo racism and Chicano patriarchy. Overall, though, CARA lacked a revisionist view of sexuality and gender that challenged how those roles are typically performed and portrayed in Chicano culture.