Week 8 Border Arte

 The writer of this article Border Arte is a Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory American Scholar. Her name is Gloria E. Anzaldua who focuses on the anger and isolation of occupying the margins of culture identities. In this article, she entails on her experience of the Denver Museum of Natural History that exhibits the Aztec capital city called The World of Moctezuma. Attending these museums, she acknowledges that we have been stripped of our history, our culture and language. We will always find ourselves in a never-ending loop of trying to find what we lost by going through findings and piecing it all together. Yet again we find ourselves learning through the white man. In k-12 school we learn our history through the history of the western. They have access and bought artifacts to display in a museum which they get to direct what we see and do not see. These museums try to label themselves as a bridge between two people, in this case the bridge between the U.S and Mexico. These museums forget to acknowledge the ten- thousand Aztec survivors still living in Mexico, so we learn as if this culture is dead. Anzaldua continues her article to talk about an artist named Santa Barraza who focuses on the reclamation of cultural and historical identity of the mestiza/o. This artist mixes historical figures into modern work of resistance to oppression. In the artwork Nepantla by Santa Barraza we see the iconic depiction of la Virgen de Guadalupe on the back of a brown skinned lady’s shirt with a modern twist of patterns. The lady’s clothing is filled with symbolic patterns from her skirts, to even her hair piece. The background is filled with cactus plants and vast land that seems to be a place for agriculture.