Week 10 Reflection Post

 Coming into this quarter, I was fatigued by online school and had very little motivation or excitement for the classes I was enrolled in, except for this one. Though I grew up learning about and seeing the work of Mexican visual artists, I knew little to nothing about Chicanx artists and their work, besides the occasional trip to Chicano park and its murals. The perspective that comes with being a racialized and oppressed group, often alienated from the country of origin, really interested me, and after ten weeks of this class it has surpassed all expectations. Through this class I have discovered many artists and works that I will follow and admire for years to come, but the section that left the biggest impression on me was the one on La Virgen de Guadalupe. As I have said in previous posts, La Virgen was ever-present in my rural mexican upbringing, and I had already formed many personal meanings and associations with the image and what it represents. Seeing the interpretations and allusions made by Chicana artists has given this icon a depth of meaning it didn’t previously have for me. The work that stood out the most to me was that of Ester Hernandez, La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos (1975), which shows La Virgen in martial arts attire kicking from her altar atop the moon. Seeing her as a mobile figure was fascinating, but seeing her kicking and posing as a strong figure in active defense of something has stuck with me since the image was shown in lecture. This work along with the work of Professor Lopez and Yolanda Lopez, who also have strong and culturally radical reinterpretations of the Virgen figure, have changed my perspective on the possibilities of La Guadalupana as a radical icon for feminist and indigenous movements, despite the colonial and misogynistic values that tend to be attached to her image. This class has introduced me to many talented and transcendental artists whose work has deeply influenced my view of chicanismo and the icons I grew up seeing.

Week 9: Chicana futurism

 In the article “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez”, Catherin S. Ramirez defines “Chicanafututrism” as “Chicanx cultural production that attends to cultural transformations resulting from new and everyday technologies.” The article specifically focuses on the art of Marion C. Martinez, a chicana artist from New Mexico whose art often employs chicano and pre-colombian iconography as a foreground to technological visuals like circuit boards and other tech salvaged from the waste industry. The use of these materials is in reaction to the large presence of technological waste sites in New Mexico, specifically near latinx communities, something that has lasting effects on the social and ecological environment of these areas. The seemingly conflicting visuals are skillfully blended together by the artist, and the ensuing image creates an important discussion regarding the seemingly archaic perception of indigenous aspects of chicanx culture. These elements are typically presented and discussed as obsolete or belonging to a time long past, which in turn denies the richness of the culture and the thousands of people who continue to keep it alive. Additionally, the use of waste material to create the art brings awareness to the very real phenomenon of climate change and other negative side effects of industrialization disproportionately affecting low income communities of color. One of the biggest latino neighborhoods in my home city of San Diego is Barrio Logan, which incidentally is also home to a notorious Chicanx cultural site, Chicano Park. This park is located under multiple freeway overpasses, which are covered with beautiful murals depicting brown leaders and other sources of Chicano pride. However, the community’s proximity to the freeway, as well as the industrial production in the nearby docks has led to some of the highest rates of respiratory illness in San Diego. Seeing how a member of a New Mexico community dealing with similar issues was able to turn these disadvantages into beautiful pieces of art reminded of this example from my home town, and is an inspiring showing of Chicano creativity and perseverance in spite of centuries of systemic abuse.

Week 8 Blog Post

 !Printing the Revolution! Virtual Conversation Series: From Black and Brown Solidarity to Afro-Latinidad was a very enriching discussion by three Latinx artists regarding printmaking, public art, and the way their identities and practices were shaped. A lot of the discussion was centered around the power of community, and the effect it can have on young artists and their ability to create and promote their work, especially in social movements. Favianna Rodriguez, an interdisciplinary artist from Oakland, spoke about the importance of seeing yourself and your identity reflected in popular media. I was struck by the story she told of being a child and wondering why her father and grandma, who were both Afro-Latino, were not represented in the telenovelas they would watch. As a child, I would often wonder this while looking at billboards in Mexico city. I would look at the smiling white faces and families in movie posters and giant billboards and wonder why they did not look anything like myself and the people walking by them. Rodriguez spoke of the importance of representation, particularly during the period of the War on Drugs, when people of color were being disproportionately prosecuted and portrayed as junkies and public threats. On a similar note, artist Malaquias Montoya spoke about the exhibition New Symbols for la Nueva Raza, and the decision made him and fellow latinx artists to use one of the Brown Berets present as the face of the exhibition. He described his indigenous facial features as beautiful, and said that the act of painting them made him reframe his opinion of his own looks. Favianna Rodriguez spoke of the use of indigenous iconography in her work, and how important it was to her to present these visuals with value. The erasure of indigenous influences in our visual culture is a constant from North to South America, and I agree with the artist’s purposeful use of these visuals, particularly in public art, as a way of reclaiming and reframing them as beautiful and valuable. Additionally, the presence and importance of Black heritage in the Latinx community has historically been ignored or outright ostracized. It is imperative for latinos to recognize our Black brothers, as well as the huge role they played during the Chicano movement and other pivotal moments of our history. As the artists discussed, collaborating, learning and sharing, is mutually beneficial, both in the context of art and social liberation.

Week 7: Graffiti

 “Graffiti is Art” by Charles “Chaz” Bojorquez seeks to explore the intricacies and artistic components of graffiti and the roles it plays in the different environments it is practiced. Bojorquez explores the history of the form and the groups that have practiced it, from 1960’s Los Angeles Cholo culture to the hip hop style of 1970’s New York. As someone who has lived in cities for most of my life, graffiti has always been a part of the scenery, but the stigma from older people in my life affected the way I perceived it up until recently. In the small town that I lived in in rural Mexico, most graffiti was tagging, typically very crude lines meant to mark territory of local criminals. However, I would visit Mexico City very often, and every bus ride and walk around that city led to new discoveries of beautiful graffiti, intricate, colorful, and often reflective of the culture of the city. My exposure to these works and the rise in popularity of Banksy during this time changed my perspective on the form, eventually leading me to make my own stencils with my older brother and cousin. The first stencil I made was by ripping a piece of cardboard from the back of a school notebook, and it was an image of the head of the President of Mexico at the time, Enrique Pena Nieto, on the body of a rat. Even before tagging it on a wall I already felt a rush from taking a political stance and rebelling against “the system”, like my punk heroes of the time. The tag itself was very small and I placed it in one of the walls with the least transit and visibility of the town, but it felt like the whole world could see it, and consequently, see me. I really enjoyed reading this essay. I had learned about Chicano graffiti and muralism under freeway overpasses as a sociological phenomenon, but the form is entirely deserving of an artistic reading. The “Old English” typography of L.A. cholo culture and its history is fascinating. It is really interesting how it went from gang culture to the typography of the L.A. clippers uniform.

Rasquachismo

 Rasquache is a term that originally held a negative connotation, referring to that which is low class and of bad taste. It is similar to kitsch, but holds connotations of poverty and low access to resources. It is not something that one would like their work, clothes, house, or decorations to be called in most contexts, however, much like with the term Chicano, rasquachismo has been recontextualized and appropriated by many in the Mexican-American community. Rasquachismo aesthetics are made with limited resources, and oftentimes lead to crude results, but the inventiveness and resiliency involved in their creation is one that artists who purposefully employ these aesthetic and techniques embrace. Similarly to the reappropriation of the word “Chicano”, rasquachismo stems from the embracing of the limitations and “othering” experienced by the artist, producing through the limited or “low class” materials, not in spite of them. Rasquachismo is also an attitude, vibe, energy, or approach. It is an empowered and self-aware griminess, one which embraces the realities of the situation and shows the beauty that can come from it, difficult as it may be. It is tragicomic, reflecting the grueling reality of poverty without having self-pity, portraying its realities proudly.

Personally, I have employed rasquachismo in school assignments of the past. I created a zine for one of my chicano classes, however, I did not have access to a printer that could print color images, so I used colored poster paper to add details to my black and white printouts. I also chose to illustrate some of the pages by hand with a cheap ball point pen, which led to some smearing and very sketchy illustrations, which did not look too out of place in a shoddily stapled little zine. Instead of trying to make a refined product with my limited materials, I put them together in a way that reflected the limitations and used them to emphasize the themes of my zine.

Los Guadalupanos

 My relation with the image and symbol of La Virgen de Guadalupe has been shaped by my family and the context in which I grew up. As a child living in Estado de Mexico, La Virgen was a constant presence since my earliest memories, every childhood home I can remember had a portrait of her hung somewhere. But more importantly than the image, the immense devotion and respect for the figure was felt in the rural municipalities where my family lived and in every little alley and market of Mexico City. I think the manifestation of this devotion that amazed me the most was the yearly pilgrimage to the Basilica de Guadalupe on Monte Tepeyac in Mexico City. Every year hundreds of people would walk from their communities to this church, carrying little to no gear and oftentimes sleeping in the streets of the communities they passed on the way there. My maternal grandmother would open her doors to them every year, feeding them and letting them sleep in her yard. The image of these devout people, mending their blistered feet and sleeping on the grass only to get up in the morning and continue walking left me confused and in awe. The church itself is located on a hill and is built on top of the ruins of the former temple for Tonantzin, a motherly goddess whose name means “our venerated mother” in Nahuatl. Knowing that the Spaniards destroyed and appropriated the indigenous people’s sacred site still angers me, and her image is a constant reminder of the rampant cultural erasure perpetrated by the colonizers. However, many still refer to her as Tonantzin Guadalupe, and the hybridity of both the myth and the sacred site is a beautiful representation of the mixed, though violent, cultural heritage of Mexico. I am not a devout catholic, despite going to Sunday school growing up and having two very devout grandmas, but out of the myriad of representations of the Virgin Mary, most of which are pale and European looking, La Virgen de Guadalupe is the one I feel the most attachment to.

Denver Art Museum

 The Denver Art Museum panel on Mexican modernism was very interesting and gave me a lot of insight on the movement as a whole and on the various social and cultural phenomena that influence artist’s perspectives, and correspondingly, their artistic work. I found Damian Ortega’s work as a political cartoonist fascinating, especially since his recent work has been with sculptures and installations. His installation Movimiento en falso (estabilidad y crecimiento económico) was particularly striking. The position of the barrels and their constant instability is almost cartoonish, the constant threat of collapse and overall fragility conveys the theme and commentary very effectively, presenting the Mexican economy and its counterintuitive reliance on the oil industry as the unstable and unreliable folly it is, all we can do is watch and wait for its inevitable collapse. 

Additionally, Pablo Helguera’s background and reasoning for his themes of identity and self image was something I could relate to strongly. I also grew up in Mexico and later moved to the United States, the feeling of having to present myself as a certain identity or constantly having to explain who I am to people was something I have experienced all my life on both sides of the border. I really appreciated his project “Escuela Panamericana del Desasosiego”, which seeked to create connections between communities throughout all of the American continent. Growing up in Mexico and the United States with friends from Chile, Peru, and Central America, I have always lamented the lack of fraternity or feeling of community between Latin American countries, especially between Mexico and its Central and South American neighbors. Most of what I have learned about South American culture has been from Chilean and Brazilian meme pages I follow. Seeing their humor and cultural references, as well as the way they interact with political figures and cope with their country’s violent history has shown me that we have a lot in common, and would benefit greatly if we turned inward instead of towards the American hegemony.

Week #3 Post: Artist

 

Sarai Ojeda is a Mexican born photographer and sculptor from Veracruz. She graduated from the Contemporary Photography Seminar of the Image Center in 2014, and received a Master Degree of Art from the Autonomous University of Morelos. Her projects explore the many manifestations and consequences of the violence that plagues Veracruz and many other regions of Mexico. Her 2018 photobook, Donde No Puedas Verme, was presented at the Paris Photo, Policopies, and Unseen festivals. This project uses altered family photos and photographs of the interior of her mother’s house and her childhood home to create an eerie visual story about childhood memories, femininity and its roles in Mexican culture, the construction of identity, and family relationships. Images of porcelain babies and angelic figures, common decorations in Mexico, are framed in somber images, as the space inside the home is shown as dark and foreboding.

Family portraits are also altered, covering the identity of some children and all male figures, touching themes of identity and the effects of our environments on it. Other projects like Fragil (2010) explore similar themes of identity and femininity through the use of nude self portraits that create a dialogue around femininity and its perception through the use of daguerreotypes and constant nature motifs. Ojeda’s exploration of violence in Mexico and the way it affects the day to day and identity of its citizens are not unique, in fact, Enrique Metinides, one of the most known and prolific Mexican photographers and photojournalists began his career as a young child photographing violent car crashes in Mexico City. But Ojeda’s subtle approach and her focus on the psychological and intrafamilial effects of this violence distinguish her from her contemporaries and other Mexican photographers.

References

“La Artista como modelo” by Leticia Mora Perdomo https://cdigital.uv.mx/bitstream/handle/123456789/33205/132010-pag-48-51.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Artist’s website 

https://www.saraiojeda.com/imagenes

Foto feminas article

https://foto-feminas.com/portfolio/sarai-ojeda/

Blog Post 2

Q: What benefits does the internet provide as an “alternate gallery space” for Chicanx socially conscious artists?

The benefits of printmaking and posters as artistic mediums used by socially conscious Chicanx artists have been apparent since the early 80’s, when the United Farm Workers union gained public support and solidarity through the use of strikes, boycotts, and very coherent and effective graphics that created an unified identity and easily identifiable symbols. In addition, the prints and posters made by Chicanx artists in support of this cause and other social movements were effective and iconic due to how informative, accessible, and easily distributed they were. However, these physical formats had their limitations, and were not easily distributed nationally or internationally, and far from the speed necessary to effectively support urgent movements. With increased access to the internet came a change in the production, as well as distribution, of art by chicanx artist involved in social movements. Rupert Garcia is an example used in “Printing Revolution” by Claudia Zapata, who notes that Garcia’s switch to digital mediums

Homoland, Julio Salgado

“reflects artistic adaptation and curiosity in new techniques that a ford a newfound speed, but most importantly it highlights Garcia’s ongoing efforts to address themes of social justice he has touched upon since the 1960’s.” (Zapata, 133) Garcia has long been an icon in the medium due to his striking and compelling prints, my personal favorite being ¡Fuera de Indochina! (1970), which was made in protest of the Vietnam War, which led to the disproportionate deaths of thousands of brown and Black Americans drafted to fight. Garcia’s adaptation to the digital medium has provided new tools for his artistic production, but for other Chicanx artists like Julio Salgado, the internet has served as an alternative space whose potential for anonymity and ease of sharing has made it possible to create intimate pieces and spaces for community members who are often persecuted in their physical communities, such as undocumented
and queer folk. The intersectional nature of this identity and the experiences of repression and discrimination faced by these individuals is more easily, and safely, discussed in online spaces than in physical ones, something Salgado has utilized very effectively.

Sanchez, Emilio

     I am Emilio Sanchez (he/him/his), and I am a third year student majoring in Political Science and Chicanx Studies with a minor in Spanish. I became a Chicanx major because I have struggled with understanding my own Mexican American identity for most of my life. I was born in the U.S. but have dual Mexican citizenship and lived in central Mexico until I was 10 years old, when I moved to San Diego, California. For many years I felt like a Mexican living in the U.S., but after years of going to school, consuming American media, and living in the country, I was undeniably American. It wasn’t until my first Chicano class and meeting other Mexican American students at UCLA that I realized the possibility of Chicanidad as an identity, seeing the cultural hybridity as a whole instead of two halves of different, and often conflicting, identities. Most Chicanx classes I have taken at UCLA mention or include works by Chicanx artists in the course materials, and their portrayals and reinterpretations of American iconography along with Indigenous and Mexican cultures has fascinated me. For example, the constant use of historical figures like Emiliano Zapata and Che Guevara as symbols for social reform mentioned by Carmen Ramos, has turned them into visual icons. Also, the use of indigenous iconography in Yolanda Lopez’ Who’s the illegal alien, pilgrim? (1978), and in Ester Hernandez’ Libertad (1975) transform iconic American visuals and subvert established western ideas of American identity. I had learned about Rupert Garcia briefly in another class, and I am a big fan of his works protesting the Vietnam War. Learning more about the use of posters and colorful visuals and the social and mobilizing reasoning behind them was very interesting, I look forward to learning more about Chicanx Social Practice Art.