Celia Alvarez Munoz

Celia Alvarez Munoz’s exhibition Fibra (1996) connected the symbolic violence the fashion and advertising industries inflict upon women with physical violence against women, illustrated by serial rapes and murders of Mexican women along the Texas-Mexico border, to demonstrate that societal devaluation and control of women leads to brutality against them. She installed long, hanging bolts of cloth attached to parodies of women’s clothing that “parodied “gender expectations in clothing”” (Tejada, 68). The pieces highlight the strict roles that women are expected to conform to, either sexually desirable or professional, and the imposition of sexuality on women from a young age, as symbolized by “a pair of sexualized diapers and a toddler outfit branded “Naughty Li’l Girl”” (Tejada, 69). She also illustrated the ongoing crisis of maquiladoras being raped and murdered en masse along the Texas-Mexico border by arranging dozens of pairs of womens shoes around a sandbox to represent the women who have gone missing and mark the violence as distinctly gendered. 

Alvarez Munoz’s Postales y Sin Remedio (1988) explores the dynamic between Chicano and Anglo culture in El Paso by visually representing the city’s two main languages. Alvarez Munoz installed sets of street signs emblazoned with exaggerated English and Spanish pronunciations of the streets’ names; for example, “Marteenes St” vs. “Martinez St”. This juxtaposition conveys how two cultures share the same spaces, but the passages written from the perspective of Chicano children on the walls of the exhibition space reveal that the two do not have an equal share; one has more power and resources than the other.