Carmen Lomas Garza is an artist who portrays a lot of the "folk" lifestyle of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans/Chicanos. She was very influenced by her life growing up surrounded by her family and her community and it is really beautiful to me to see how much success she reached by just painting meaningful experiences of hers. In the painting, Para la Cena (For Dinner) you can see Garza's grandparents about to start preparing dinner by killing some of the chickens they are farming. This painting has humorous effects by showing the young brother being so shocked by witnessing where his dinner comes from that he's dropping his slushie. I think what is equally evident in this painting is the division of labor is equal here. In many of her paintings, Carmen portrays the women doing much of the house and kitchen work, as has been traditionally seen in Mexican homes, but in this image that is not the case. Her grandmother is doing more than her part in cooking the meal and even killing and beheading her soon to be meal. This is normal to her and is not something that needs to be hidden from her grandchildren, although it is a little shocking to them. This is the way my parents tried to raise my brothers and I. We never had our own chickens but at one point we did farm and eat rabbits and it is very endearing to see it portrayed so normally by Lomas-Garza. The connection I feel when seeing her artwork is one I imagine most Chicanos and Mexicans equally feel in seeing this kind of representation.
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