CARA: Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Article)

Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba explains the gender politics imbedded in the CARA exhibit.  The official title, “CARA,” stands for, “Chicano Art, Resistance and Affirmation.”  Throughout this article, the author points out the various ways in which CARA overall failed to convey that it was constructed from a feminist viewpoint.  I feel the words in the title, “Resistance,” and “Affirmation,” are words I would personally associate with a feminist lens (especially in the context of an art exhibit).

The author qualitatively evaluates the exhibit, only to find that far less female artists were included in CARA, than male.  She poses the example of the Chicana artist collective, las Mujeres Muralistas, as a kind of group that could have been included in an exhibit like CARA, since it was indeed the first major national Chicano/a art exhibit.  It seems like CARA is a space that exemplifies the sexual politics of the overall Chicano art movement.  The pieces in the exhibit are vessels that distinguish what identity politics are and how they exist.  The author explains that identity politics formulate the identity of a group or community.  Therefore, I agree with the author in the sense that CARA is very much participating in the identity politics of many various participants (whether they are artists, viewers, academics, activists, etc.) in the Chicano/a art movement.  I thought it was important when the author emphasized the importance and influence in the history of the formation of Chicano/a identity within the context of the community’s art movement.  While reading, I felt like Chicana artists have always been pushed out of the movement in some way because of their unique positionality.  In the history of this movement, ”some of the Chicanas were also resisting another form of oppression, internal to the Movement, and for this resistance they were labeled by the patriarchs and their female allies traitors to the Chicano Movement” (125).  The author points out the work featured in CARA, that perpetuates stereotypical archetypes of Mexican women.  Because of situations like this, I believe in the necessity for the visibility of Chicana art that forces viewers to no longer perpetuate the oppressive history of these identity politics.