Looking through Carmen Garaza’s paintings I happened upon the painting called Cleaning Nopalitos. I feel like a lot of her paintings can connect to the Mexican community, and many of them create an intimate space between the audience and the work. In this specific work, I feel that I can really connect it to my own experiences growing up. I lived in Mexico for a few years during my elementary school years and feel that this was a familiar scene to me. Whenever we would visit my grandmother she would make us beans and nopales that she would take from the neighbors property. Although the person in the painting is a man, for me it was my grandmother sitting in the chair cleaning the nopales. At the same time, I would remember being a younger girl and sitting and staring at my grandmother doing the most mundane tasks in awe. I especially loved the way that one would clean nopales, I felt that the way that the skin and the slime came off of the surface was so satisfying. Now living in the US, it is a change of scenery as the brick houses are replaced with dry wall. But still, every time my grandma sits down to clean the nopales for us, I always like to stare at the way the needles fall off so gracefully.
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