“Deus ex Machina” by Catherine S. Ramirez explores the artistic productions of Marion Martinez whose art expresses how dynamic Chicana art is by using computer software and hardware to create beautiful artworks and unique visions of religious icons such as the Virgen de Guadalupe in Oratorio a la Virgencita (2000). By featuring wires, disks, circuit boards, and chips in her artwork Martinez transforms traditional Chicana and Hispana art forms, which is coined as Chicana futurism. The reading explains that Hispanos have often been seen as primitive beings directly associated with their physical location. They’ve been left out of technology, reason, and science-related discussions and environments because people believe that they are unsophisticated and unintelligible. This exclusion has perpetuated sexist, racist, and classist assumptions of Hispanos making it even harder for Hispanos to obtain economic, social, and environmental justice. Chicana futurism reproduces Chicanx history and identity in order to transform Chicana culture. Catherine S. Ramirez states that “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 refines humanism and the human” (157). Martinez utilizes her spiritual beliefs to enhance her artwork. For example, she uses a circuit board because it is like the Holy Eucharist. The circuit board is kept within the computer and keeps the computer functioning well, just like the Holy Eucharist which is held within the tabernacle helping the Catholic church function. Chicana futurism is inclusive of all gender roles because science, religion, and technology are all fields that have been gendered masculine. It helps challenge male-dominated traditions and the myth of technophobia in people of color and women by discovering the beauty and value within electronic waste.
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