Yolanda M Lopez - The Nanny

In Karen Davalos's Yolanda M Lopez, the author explores a Chicana artist that grew up on the border and gained international recognition for her controversial use of popular icons in her artwork. As she grew as an artist, Lopez had an awareness of racial stereotyping and specific coexisting erasure of Mexican culture in the national narrative. The Nanny was an installation made in 1994, from Lopez’s Women's Work Is Never Done Series. On the left and right are advertisements portraying cultural appropriation and in the middle is a white folding screen hanging a nanny’s gray uniform. On the right side there is a brown woman bowing to a light skin brunette and on the left side, a dark-skinned woman holding a sombrero-like-hat with watermelon is in the shadow of a light skin woman. Through the deconstructionist approach, Lopez questions domestic labor, gender, cultural differences, and ethnicity. Davalos expands on the work and how this installation “depicts how White women in the ads appropriated and degraded Mexican culture and Mexican women." (79) Through the use of materials, Lopez identifies that Chicana women are seen only as laborers and creates stereotypes of Mexican culture and history for the dominant culture to use. Lopez understood the various social codes, such as gender, ethnicity, skin color, language, and nationality that work in conjunction with capitalism. Looking at this installation, I am reminded of two things, one being the stereotypical reality that most of the working Chicana women I have met in my life have been a nanny or maid at one point in their lives. The other thing I am reminded is that the dominant culture uses our oppression in their favor to promote their brand and superiority. It is up to us to speak our as a collective and say “that is not our Mexican culture.”