November 1, 2021: Chicana Futurism - Avril Rincon

One of Xandra Ibarra’s work that really stood out to me was a photography series called Lo Norteño, 2008. The series consisted of three photographs. The first one depicted a man inside an empty pool seeming to be resealing or flooring the bottom of the pool.The second picture was something that looked like a construction site within a very urbanized city. These orange metal bars that looked like ladders, were spread out in the opening of the site. The last picture was a woman on her front yard, behind her fence that guarded her home. However, the woman’s face didn’t really seem like she was happy, rather the way that she was grabbing the fence bar made it seem almost as she felt trapped. Throughout all these pictures, a common theme that I picked from all of them was the struggle of being Chicano on this side of the border. Since the title of this piece is called Lo Norteño, I automatically thought of it as the North of Mexico, meaning the US. In all the pictures, it is demonstrated that life can be hard and often feel as we are trapped despite living in the land of the free. In the second picture, this can be the depiction of someone’s neighborhood, where they are surrounded by polluting companies and other industrialized features. It is in these conditions that many of the working-class live in. Besides the poor built-in-environment, the man in the first picture is seen working under the hot sun, doing some work on the floor pool. While this does demonstrate the resilience and hard work ethic that many Chicanos have upon coming to this country, it also shows that sometimes the working conditions of many can be unfair. Life is hard though, and sometimes by being immigrants to a country, one has to suffer more sacrifices to allow for the next generation to succeed. Sometimes even within our homes, one can feel out of place, prisoners to a capitalist society - putting it in symbolic terms to the women behind her home’s fence. A question I have of her work is, what inspired her to pick up on sculpture work, specifically the pieces where she shows workers’ clothes in vacuum air-tight bags?