Week 9: Chicana Futurism

The reading “Deus ex Machina: traditions, technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marison C. Martinez” written by Catherine S. Ramirez, truly explores a different form of art that combines and locates Hispanas in narratives of science and technology while also inserting science and technology into narratives of and about Hispanas. Catherine also goes in-depth with Martinez’s artwork that challenges racist, classist, and sexist stereotypes that primitivize Hispanas and excludes them from the core of science and technology. Catherine personal definitions of “Chicanafuturism” is the “Chicano cultural production that attends to cultural transformation resulting from new and everyday technologies…that excavates, creates, and alters narratives of identity, technology, and the future; that interrogates the promises of science and technology; and the refines humanism and the human.” (157-158). Since Martinez’s artwork is primarily focused, some believe that their work offers nothing new and others see her work as original and argue that it “breaks from and challenges...[traditions]” (158). Thought Catharine believes that it “preserves, breaks from, and challenges the Santo tradition precisely because it is legible part o it.” (158). More about Martinez’s work is that it expresses the value, price, and necessity of change. Its inspiration from traditional forms and practices truly allows the direction of the sight to turn back and look at the past. While doing all this it also dares to imagine the ways of the future, by looking directly and confronting the problem of e-waste.

An interesting detail added was how in recent years, African American intellectuals and artists have focused the relationships of African Americans to science and technology using principles of what is known as “Afrofuturism”. In this concept, instead of limiting their focus to both computer software and hardware, they try to focus on the myriad ways “people of color produce, transform, appropriate, and consume technologies in their everyday lives” (157). A lot of the technologies that are included are cellular phones, pagers, karaoke home systems, bikes, and much more.  On the other hand, while Afrofuturism reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories.