Alicia Gaspar de Alba: CARA Exhibition

Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s “Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore’s Mask: The Mirror of Malinchismo” is a chapter in one of her works that underlines the way the domain of art is permeated by the roots of patriarchy and the exclusion that exists within the Chicano community. Through her reading and her guest lecture, I learned about the Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) and its initiatives. Despite the fact that the exhibit was monumental because of the fact that it conveyed themes representative of the Chicano movement, its history, and politics, CARA was also a testament to the inequality within the Chicano community. CARA highlighted the minimal inclusion of Chicana artists within the exhibit, ultimately demonstrating the deep presence of Chicano work that was displayed within the vicinity. As seen through Gaspar de Alba’s brief quantitative analysis of the CARA exhibition by gender, it is evident that a hundred more Chicano male artists were represented in comparison to Chicanas.

Within the reading, Alicia Gaspar de Alba states, “To ignore gender, however, in the struggle for civil and human rights is to perpetuate the objectification and abuse of women” (122). The latter was something that definitely touched chords due to the fact that civil and human rights are not meant to be unilateral. The male-to-female ratio illustrated that even within resistance to forms of oppression embedded within art, Chicanos’ art was given more validation just based off of the fact that it was curated through the vantage point of a male. As a male, I stand firm on the idea that our sisters within the community need more representation all across the artistic spectrum; a representation of women that can be amplified with the help of men.