Week 10: Reflection

 

    As I approached my senior year, I finally had the opportunity to take courses that interested me instead of simply fulfilling degree requirements. As a Mexican-American first-generation college student raised in Los Angeles, I wanted to explore the development of the Chicanx identity because my family had never discussed it. This quarter, I took this course, Chicanx Art and Artists, and an English course called Chicanx Literature since el Movimiento and it was interesting to see the themes of representation, mestizaje, and empowerment manifested in both, visual artworks and written stories.

    The artist that stood out to me the most throughout the course was Yolanda M. López because she used her art education to create reflections about her identification as a Chicanx women. It was inspiring to learn about a Chicanx artist that uses every piece of artwork as tools for social and political change. My mother immigrated to the United States thirty years ago so it’s meaningful to me that artists like Yolanda M. López and Judithe Hernanadez created spaces to combat the invisibility of Chicana voices and experiences in and outside of the Chicano movement. In her series, Tres Mujeres, López’s objective is to transform the stereotypical sexualized representations of Chicana women into images of them as ordinary beings. In this image, her grandmother appears with a plain expression on her face and a calm pose to draw attention to the her intellectual qualities rather than her feminine features. Through her painting Runner: On My Own, she demonstrates the dimensionality and complexity of Chicana women that is a product of their lack of privilege and agency. Pushing back on the patriarchal structures of Chicano communities is a bold and difficult task, but López remains committed to the dismantling of these structures and the empowerment of Mexican American women.