Blake: Counter Memory

The women of discord for Mexica people were important aspects of indigenous origin stories, and explanations of political elite male dominance. “However, the Chicana, and U.S. Mexicana oral, written, and artistic refigurings of the four cultural symbols can be read as late-twentieth-and-early-twenty-first-century disruptions of national, patriarchal, and colonial rule”(Blake 14). These four prolific female cultural symbols exhibit the devaluation of femininity as they are made out to be either bloodthirsty(Mexica Goddesses), disloyal(La Malinche), insane(La Llorona), or ideally silent(La Virgen de Guadalupe). Meanwhile, there is no shortage in cultural memory of male heroes to idolize. By recasting these important women, Chicana and U.S Mexicana artists are redesigning how women are socialized to behave. When artists expand the constrictive ideologies associated with femininity, they are creating space for themselves where there was none before.