Robles, Gissel (Week 9: Chicana Futurism)

For this week's reading, I will discuss "Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez" by Catherine S. Ramírez. In this piece, she introduces an exhibition called Cyber Arte that consisted of four artists and the works represented “elements traditionally deĀned as ‘folk’ with state of the art computer technology” (Ramírez, 146). Amongst those artists was Marion C. Martinez, an Indio-Hispanic artist from New Mexico. Martinez’s art exemplifies Ramírez’s concept of Chicanafuturism very closely as most of her work uses technology from the present while simultaneously reproducing traditional folk art. One example is Oratorio a la Virgencita (2000) where Martinez creates a new vision of religious icon by using circuit boards to recreate it. Furthermore, Ramírez adds, “In short, Hispanos have been excluded from the world of science, technology, and reason…” (150) which in result leaves them in these stereotypes people believe in. Chicanafuturism on the other hand challenges these racist, classist, and sexist stereotypes that block Hipanas from reaching their fullest potential in fields of science, technology, and reason. Chicanafuturism is “Chicano cultural production that attends to cultural transformations resulting from new and everyday technologies (including their detritus); that excavates, creates, and alters narratives of identity, technology, and the future; that interrogates the promises of science and technology; and that redefines humanism and the human” (Ramírez, 157-158). In conclusion, Martinez’s art work embodies Chicanafuturism; she goes against the New Mexico narrative, she challenges nostalgic and romantic visions of the “Land of Enchantment” along with the residents, but she also “expresses, and transforms Indo-Hispanic traditions and Hispana-Chicana spirituality, and finally, underscores the malleability, dynamism, width and beauty of Hispana and Chicana cultural identity in the twenty-first century” (Ramírez, 159).