Cardenas, Cristina (2020)

Hello Classmates, for my presentation I am choosing to do Cristina Cardenas because I find her work to be very inspiring and something I would love to learn more about. I do not know a lot about artists but I found her work to be something to reflect on my own experiences. 

In this week’s reading the reading that stood out the most to me was Out of the House, the Halo, and the Whore's Mask by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. I found this paper to really explain well to me how The Chicano Movement, as empowering as it was, to be very machismo. For instance, women’s main role was to “support and comfort” men more than actually fighting in the cause. I was upset reading this because women can do so much more than this but they are stuck being dehumanized and seen as the “wife” or “mother” than a “fighter” in the cause. This made me admire Chicanx art more because women are expressing the feelings of being trapped in the gender roles through their art. Their art, such as Pregnant Women in a Ball of Yarn by Barbra Carrasco, expressed a woman literally being trapped in the tasks of “the mother” being unable to escape. It is a powerful piece because it demonstrates to us the side of domestic life of women and how their purpose of reproductive being their sole and main purpose in their lives. We see how this side of domestic life traps women because they essentially lose their “wings” and are told they are unable to attain more than a domestic life.