Blog Post Week 3

In the short essay Shifra Goldman discusses the Chicano art movement. She focuses on how the social movement was a quest for self identity focusing on the characteristics of the culture's race, ethnicity, and the societal class. Not only was this short essay based on Goldman's perspective, but she also focuses on other artists. The Chicano art movement was not just a social movement that solely involved Chicano artists but it was a movement of people fighting against oppression but was being stated in art pieces. The artists that Goldman articulates on are artist who took a stance by emphasizing race, ethnicity and class to their final product.

            The emphasizes on race was depicted in the short essay by Goldman addressing some history in regards to where racism began. In the short essay she gives a description of the "untitled mural (pg. 168, fig. 1)" that she describes that the Spaniards are not as exaggerated unlike the "dark-skinned indigenous (pg. 168)" people were. This is an important description because it gives the reader a straight forward description of the type of racism that occurred in the mural. Goldman describes ethnicity as the development within generations that evolves an ethnic group. This could be as seen as a families hard work and/ or societal accomplishments that determine the ethnicity of a group. The paintings that are involved with showcasing ethnicity are the ones that represent cultural foods, Spanish language in text and might also include celebrations of the dead (pg. 170). Class is described as the division of the Southwest in the United States that became an area of the "working class (pg. 171)." The type of artwork that showcased "class" was of artwork that was in settings of businesses and of land focusing on the idea that when the division occurred in the Southwest, people lost their land and their type of work.

            On page 46, figure 25 of the text Yolanda M. Lopez written by Karen Mary Davalos describes how Yolanda did not define "motherhood" as something that only identified with women but she depicted women as leaders and activists. In this image the Virgen of Guadalupe is breastfeeding a child which to me means that this artwork is something that is normal and that it is not how women should be identified by. Seeing how the Virgen of Guadalupe is a very important figure, this would capture the attention of a lot of people that would find that motherhood should be a women identity and there is more to women.