Barrera, Yvette

 Hello everyone.

My name is Yvette Aida Barrera and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I preferred to be called Yvette, but friends have called me by my middle name as well. I'll respond to either! I'm currently a fourth-year (second-year transfer from Orange Coast College) attending UCLA. I'm from Orange County and currently live here due to remote learning. I'm an English major and just declared my minor in the CCAS department this past quarter. I'm really excited to begin taking upper-division Chicanx classes and learn more about my people's histories and culture. I haven't considered research in any field of study, but I am open to exploring more within the realm of Chicanx literature, artists, and authors. I enjoy writing myself and published a short Chicanx story in the Orange Coast Review literary journal. 

My other hobbies include baking, music, and playing videogames. I'm not an artist myself and I think the most I can draw is stick figures, but I have a great appreciation for the different ways art can manifest itself. Whether it be through line-art, graphic design, print, photography, or paint, I can't help but be intrigued. I'm really fascinated by media as a whole itself and how representation should be in all mediums--not only in television or film. Ramos essay's touches on this topic of Chicanx graphic art's lack of acknowledgment in art museums. As a Chicanx person, it's been hard to not know my people's history or see representations of myself in establishments like museums and schools. I can name a few famous artists, but none are artists of color or Chicanx. Therefore I am grateful for being to take classes like this one to contextualize the culture that I used to feel stranger to by being in a country where the white narrative is the predominant one. I look forward to getting to learn more about this class and my peers within it. Here's to a great quarter!