Week 9 - Judithe Hernandez's L.A. Sonata (2013)

L.A. Sonata (2013) by Judithe Hernandez resonated with me, since my recent research about Chicana and Chicano music makers, singers, songwriters, and performers have a long history of making hybridized Chicana/o American music. My current work is conducting a literature review, and Michelle Habell-Pallán’s book, Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture, explored the shifting identities of Chicanas and Latinas from the northern and southern hemispheres of the Americas during the late 20^th century, as they endured neoliberalism that negatively harmed many Chicana/o communities. Habell-Pallán found that trans-local and transnational imaginaries were evident in Chicana and Latina performances in poetry, to music, theater, and film; where the performers exhibited hybridized productions or used hybridized tools, such as pop-music, as a pop-culture tool, to reclaim and redefine Chicanas to their likeness as opposed to the dominant narrative in the United States that historically made and continues to make poor stereotypes of Chicanas and Latinas. In Habell-Pallán’s words, Chicanas used, “… the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house” (4).

With respect to L.A. Sonata, it was the trans-local elements within the artwork that paralleled the genres observed by Habell-Pallán. In this case, Hernandez’s artwork featured, a Japanese geisha girl, a Chinese symbol, coy fish, and nopales, the fruit that was the “food of last resort” according to the indigenous, understood by the visual art and in the book, Carmen Lomas Garza. Therefore, the symbolic nopales grounded the art in the Americas.

Public works such as Hernandez’s that celebrate diversity and hybridity or speak to the cosmopolitan and diverse city that Los Angeles is, also challenge the status quo of the dominant society that most likely believes in America’s “melting pot,” where every immigrant must shed their culture and become “American first.” What translates in Hernandez’s work is she ignores the “melting pot” dreams and celebrates diversity instead. But also, since Judithe Hernandez is Chicana, and by virtue of being in Los Angeles, she may have become local to Asian communities by virtue of proximity, or maybe she has travelled often to Japan and China, which gave her inspiration to make her hybridized trans-local, or transnational inspired art. However, she may have come by her inspiration, her 21^st century art is a reflection of the globalized world we live in today, which is another aspect to how Chicanas and Latinas are producing more art with global influences these days.

L.A. Sonata (2013)