Born in 1973 in El Paso, Celia Alvarez Muñoz had to grow up between borders. This caused her to always be between the two binaries of language and culture, but also value systems of both countries. With this said, the art piece I was more intrigued about was Enlightenment #4: Which Came First?. This series, made out of five 12 x 20-inche pages photographs, illustrated an alignment of eggs on a yolk colored surface. What I loved about this series is that, not only did it depict Muñoz's childhood memory, about her confusion of the chicken reproductive system, but it also reflected a linguistic clash. On one of the photographs, Muñoz "...clarifies the appropriate use of the irregular verbs ‘to lay’ and ‘to lie’ in the tenses of ‘today’" (Tejada 47). It's evident that Muñoz wanted to demonstrate that linguistic clash of when two different languages meet. Perhaps, her teaching profession influenced her to create this well-representation of the linguistic challenge that Chicanx folks struggle when their first language is not English.
On a personal note, I truly loved this image a lot because it invoked me a childhood memory in which I was able to resonate with Muñoz on the linguistic level. I was born in Mexico City, but I was brought to the United States when I was about 4 years old. However, having Spanish as my first spoken language, I struggled to pick up the English language fast. Even now, having to learn and speak in English here at UCLA; and then having to go home and speak Spanish there, makes things much more difficult. Although I'm fluent in both Spanish and English, I believe it's hard because it has forced me to always fight that language assimilation, while having to adapt within an English dominant community.
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