Week 3 Blog

In Shifra Goldman's essay The Iconography of Self Determination it talks about the various struggles Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and Chicanos have had to endure throughout history. It talks about how racism is institutionalized and was done for the benefit of Anglo-Saxon settlers. Goldman goes on to explain that these discriminations were done on the basis of race, ethnicity, and class. The attack on race was not isolated to just the Indian part of being Mexican but also the Spanish Mestizo bloodline as one American school teacher put it, "the inferiority of Mexicans is biological and class." Anglo colonialism also had a severe impact on ethnicity. Frantz Fanon put it best when he poke of colonialism, "is not satisfied merely with holding a people in it's grip...By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it." As far as class goes Goldman explains that the lower "working" class was formed by Anglos stripping land from the Mexicans and that they have basically stayed in the working class since.  The most interesting part of the essay to me was about the Zoot Suit riots, i was not really familiar with this event and it astonished me that it was said that "...all he knows and feels is the desire to use a knife...to kill, or at least let blood" and that "Americanism" was used as an excuse by servicemen to beat zoot-suiters. It is yet another reminder of the very ugly history of the United States that tends to be swept under the rug.

The Yolanda image that i feel best represents self determination is Nuestra Madre. I think that showing aspects of Tonantzin and Coatlicue within the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe draws back on the roots of who we are as a people and showcases our ethnicity. The aspects of these godesses also show strength and virtue and empower us as a people, showing that we are not the lower class and have more to offer than what the Anglos put out to believe. In this image Yolanda draws on the beauty of race, ethnicity, class, and feminism.