interactive image

Here is our extremely truncated analysis of the image we looked at in class.

This print is entitled “Plumas Para Paloma and it is by the Chicana artist Glenna Avila. It was done at Self Help Graphics in Los Angeles in 1989.

We can see a naked baby lying on two rugs with photos around her. There are many ways to interpret the images and symbols. Firstly, The baby appears to have the same position as Jesus which could highlight the religion of the Chicanos. The baby represents a new generation and insures a continuity of tradition and culture within a family. It represents the link between generations. We can also see two rugs. The top one has many feathers on it and the bottom one has hot colors and is the traditional sarape. This represents the Mestizo people, or the mixing of the two cultures...

Please analyse the image below. Explain how this painting reflects the Chicano identity. Remember, art is a vision of the past, the present and the future ! You will record your analysis and send it by email. Recording due 18/5.

Chicano Park

Here is the image from Chicano Park that you need to analyze for May 11th. Speak about the mural in the foreground as well as those you see (the first two) behind it.

"I Am Joaquin" by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales

Read the following epic poem by Rodolpho Gonzales in preparation for an in-depth class discussion. I have included references at the end to help with specific references. I will be distributing the poem printed during our next class.

I Am Joaquin

by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales
 

1Yo soy Joaquín,
perdido en un mundo de confusión:
I am Joaquín, lost in a world of confusion,
caught up in the whirl of a gringo society,
5 confused by the rules, scorned by attitudes,
suppressed by manipulation, and destroyed by modern society.
My fathers have lost the economic battle
and won the struggle of cultural survival.
And now! I must choose between the paradox of
10 victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger,
or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul and a full stomach.
Yes, I have come a long way to nowhere,
unwillingly dragged by that monstrous, technical,
15 industrial giant called Progress and Anglo success....
I look at myself.
I watch my brothers.
I shed tears of sorrow. I sow seeds of hate.
I withdraw to the safety within the circle of life --
20 MY OWN PEOPLE
I am Cuauhtémoc, proud and noble,
leader of men, king of an empire civilized
beyond the dreams of the gachupín Cortés,
who also is the blood, the image of myself.
25 I am the Maya prince.
I am Nezahualcóyotl, great leader of the Chichimecas.
I am the sword and flame of Cortes the despot
And I am the eagle and serpent of the Aztec civilization.
I owned the land as far as the eye
30 could see under the Crown of Spain,
and I toiled on my Earth and gave my Indian sweat and blood
for the Spanish master who ruled with tyranny over man and
beast and all that he could trample
But...THE GROUND WAS MINE.
35 I was both tyrant and slave.
As the Christian church took its place in God's name,
to take and use my virgin strength and trusting faith,
the priests, both good and bad, took--
but gave a lasting truth that Spaniard Indian Mestizo
40 were all God's children.
And from these words grew men who prayed and fought
for their own worth as human beings, for that
GOLDEN MOMENT of FREEDOM.
I was part in blood and spirit of that courageous village priest
45 Hidalgo who in the year eighteen hundred and ten
rang the bell of independence and gave out that lasting cry--
El Grito de Dolores
"Que mueran los gachupines y que viva la Virgen de Guadalupe...."
I sentenced him who was me I excommunicated him, my blood.
50 I drove him from the pulpit to lead a bloody revolution for him and me....
I killed him.
His head, which is mine and of all those
who have come this way,
I placed on that fortress wall
55 to wait for independence. Morelos! Matamoros! Guerrero!
all companeros in the act, STOOD AGAINST THAT WALL OF INFAMY
to feel the hot gouge of lead which my hands made.
I died with them ... I lived with them .... I lived to see our country free.
Free from Spanish rule in eighteen-hundred-twenty-one.
60 Mexico was free??
The crown was gone but all its parasites remained,
and ruled, and taught, with gun and flame and mystic power.
I worked, I sweated, I bled, I prayed,
and waited silently for life to begin again.
65 I fought and died for Don Benito Juarez, guardian of the Constitution.
I was he on dusty roads on barren land as he protected his archives
as Moses did his sacraments.
He held his Mexico in his hand on
the most desolate and remote ground which was his country.
70 And this giant little Zapotec gave not one palm's breadth
of his country's land to kings or monarchs or presidents of foreign powers.
I am Joaquin.
I rode with Pancho Villa,
crude and warm, a tornado at full strength,
75 nourished and inspired by the passion and the fire of all his earthy people.
I am Emiliano Zapata.
"This land, this earth is OURS."
The villages, the mountains, the streams
belong to Zapatistas.
80 Our life or yours is the only trade for soft brown earth and maize.
All of which is our reward,
a creed that formed a constitution
for all who dare live free!
"This land is ours . . .
85 Father, I give it back to you.
Mexico must be free. . . ."
I ride with revolutionists
against myself.
I am the Rurales,
90 coarse and brutal,
I am the mountian Indian,
superior over all.
The thundering hoof beats are my horses. The chattering machine guns
are death to all of me:
95 Yaqui
Tarahumara
Chamala
Zapotec
Mestizo
100 Español.
I have been the bloody revolution,
The victor,
The vanquished.
I have killed
105 And been killed.
I am the despots Díaz
And Huerta
And the apostle of democracy,
Francisco Madero.
110 I am
The black-shawled
Faithfulwomen
Who die with me
Or live
115 Depending on the time and place.
I am faithful, humble Juan Diego,
The Virgin of Guadalupe,
Tonantzín, Aztec goddess, too.
I rode the mountains of San Joaquín.
120 I rode east and north
As far as the Rocky Mountains,
And
All men feared the guns of
Joaquín Murrieta.
125 I killed those men who dared
To steal my mine,
Who raped and killed my love
My wife.
Then I killed to stay alive.
130 I was Elfego Baca,
living my nine lives fully.
I was the Espinoza brothers
of the Valle de San Luis.
All were added to the number of heads that in the name of civilization
135 were placed on the wall of independence, heads of brave men
who died for cause or principle, good or bad.
Hidalgo! Zapata!
Murrieta! Espinozas!
Are but a few.
140 They dared to face
The force of tyranny
Of men who rule by deception and hypocrisy.
I stand here looking back,
And now I see the present,
145 And still I am a campesino,
I am the fat political coyote–
I,
Of the same name,
Joaquín,
150 In a country that has wiped out
All my history,
Stifled all my pride,
In a country that has placed a
Different weight of indignity upon my age-old burdened back.
155 Inferiority is the new load . . . .
The Indian has endured and still
Emerged the winner,
The Mestizo must yet overcome,
And the gachupín will just ignore.
160 I look at myself
And see part of me
Who rejects my father and my mother
And dissolves into the melting pot
To disappear in shame.
165 I sometimes
Sell my brother out
And reclaim him
For my own when society gives me
Token leadership
170 In society's own name.
I am Joaquín,
Who bleeds in many ways.
The altars of Moctezuma
I stained a bloody red.
175 My back of Indian slavery
Was stripped crimson
From the whips of masters
Who would lose their blood so pure
When revolution made them pay,
180 Standing against the walls of retribution.
Blood has flowed from me on every battlefield between
campesino, hacendado,
slave and master and revolution.
I jumped from the tower of Chapultepec
185 into the sea of fame–
my country's flag
my burial shroud–
with Los Niños,
whose pride and courage
190 could not surrender
with indignity
their country's flag
to strangers . . . in their land.
Now I bleed in some smelly cell from club or gun or tyranny.
195 I bleed as the vicious gloves of hunger
Cut my face and eyes,
As I fight my way from stinking barrios
To the glamour of the ring
And lights of fame
200 Or mutilated sorrow.
My blood runs pure on the ice-caked
Hills of the Alaskan isles,
On the corpse-strewn beach of Normandy,
The foreign land of Korea
205 And now Vietnam.
Here I stand
Before the court of justice,
Guilty
For all the glory of my Raza
210 To be sentenced to despair.
Here I stand,
Poor in money,
Arrogant with pride,
Bold with machismo,
215 Rich in courage
And
Wealthy in spirit and faith.
My knees are caked with mud.
My hands calloused from the hoe. I have made the Anglo rich,
220 Yet
Equality is but a word–
The Treaty of Hidalgo has been broken
And is but another treacherous promise.
My land is lost
225 And stolen,
My culture has been raped.
I lengthen the line at the welfare door
And fill the jails with crime.
These then are the rewards
230 This society has
For sons of chiefs
And kings
And bloody revolutionists,
Who gave a foreign people
235 All their skills and ingenuity
To pave the way with brains and blood
For those hordes of gold-starved strangers,
Who
Changed our language
240 And plagiarized our deeds
As feats of valor
Of their own.
They frowned upon our way of life
and took what they could use.
245 Our art, our literature, our music, they ignored–
so they left the real things of value
and grabbed at their own destruction
by their greed and avarice.
They overlooked that cleansing fountain of
250 nature and brotherhood
which is Joaquín.
The art of our great señores,
Diego Rivera,
Siqueiros,
255 Orozco, is but another act of revolution for
the salvation of mankind.
Mariachi music, the heart and soul
of the people of the earth,
the life of the child,
260 and the happiness of love.
The corridos tell the tales
of life and death,
of tradition,
legends old and new, of joy
265 of passion and sorrow
of the people–who I am.
I am in the eyes of woman,
sheltered beneath
her shawl of black,
270 deep and sorrowful eyes
that bear the pain of sons long buried or dying,
dead on the battlefield or on the barbed wire of social strife.
Her rosary she prays and fingers endlessly
like the family working down a row of beets
275 to turn around and work and work.
There is no end.
Her eyes a mirror of all the warmth
and all the love for me,
and I am her
280 and she is me.
We face life together in sorrow,
anger, joy, faith and wishful
thoughts.
I shed the tears of anguish
285 as I see my children disappear
behind the shroud of mediocrity,
never to look back to remember me.
I am Joaquín.
I must fight
290 and win this struggle
for my sons, and they
must know from me
who I am.
Part of the blood that runs deep in me
295 could not be vanquished by the Moors.
I defeated them after five hundred years,
and I have endured.
Part of the blood that is mine
has labored endlessly four hundred
300 years under the heel of lustful
Europeans.
I am still here!

I have endured in the rugged mountains
Of our country
305 I have survived the toils and slavery of the fields.
I have existed
In the barrios of the city
In the suburbs of bigotry
In the mines of social snobbery
310 In the prisons of dejection
In the muck of exploitation
And
In the fierce heat of racial hatred.
And now the trumpet sounds,
315 The music of the people stirs the
Revolution.
Like a sleeping giant it slowly
Rears its head
To the sound of
320 Tramping feet
Clamoring voices
Mariachi strains
Fiery tequila explosions
The smell of chile verde and
325 Soft brown eyes of expectation for a
Better life.
And in all the fertile farmlands,
the barren plains,
the mountain villages,
330 smoke-smeared cities,
we start to MOVE.
La raza!
Méjicano!
Español!
335 Latino!
Chicano!
Or whatever I call myself,
I look the same
I feel the same
340 I cry
And
Sing the same.
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.
345 I am Joaquín.
The odds are great
But my spirit is strong,
My faith unbreakable,
My blood is pure.
350 I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.
I SHALL ENDURE!
I WILL ENDURE!

NOTES:

Cuauhtémoc - Cuauhtémoc was the Mexica ruler of Tenochtitlan from 1520 to 1521, making him the last Aztec Emperor
Nezahualcóyotl - philosopher, warrior, architect, poet and ruler of the city-state of Texcoco in pre-Columbian Mexico.
Aztec civilization - people of certain ethnic groups of central Mexico who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica from the 14^th -16^th century

Hidalgo - Mexican Catholic priest and a leader of the Mexican War of Independence

El Grito de Dolores - battle cry of the Mexican War of Independence from Spain, first uttered by Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo

Morelos – Mexican Roman Catholic priest and revolutionary rebel leader who led the Mexican War of Independance movement, assuming its leadership after the execution of Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo in 1811

Matamoros - Mexican Roman Catholic priest and revolutionary rebel soldier of the Mexican War of Independence

Guerrero – A leading revolutionary general of the Mexican War of Independence.

Don Benito Juarez - was a Mexican lawyer and politician of Zapotec origin from Oaxaca who served as the president of Mexico for five terms: 1858–1861 as interim, then 1861–1865, 1865–1867, 1867–1871 and 1871–1872 as constitutional president. He resisted the French occupation of Mexico, overthrew the Second Mexican Empire, restored the Republic, and used liberal measures to modernize the country.

Zapotec – an indegenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished in the Valley of Oaxaca in MesoAmerica.

Emiliano Zapata - a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution, the main leader of the peasant revolution in the state of Morelos, and the inspiration of the agrarian movement called Zapatismo

Yaqui – Native Americans who inhabit the valley of the Río Yaqui in the Mexican state of Sonora and the Southwestern United States.
Tarahumara - Native American people of northwestern Mexico who are renowned for their long-distance running ability
Chamala -

Díaz - Díaz is a controversial figure in Mexican history, with the status of villain among the revolutionaries who overthrew him, and something of a hero of capitalism in the business community
Huerta - After a military career under President Porfirio Díaz, Huerta became a high-ranking officer under pro-democracy President Fransisco Madero during the first phase of the Mexican Revolution. In 1913, Huerta led a counter-revolutionary coup, the Ten Tragic Days, in which Madero was deposed and then assassinated. The Huerta regime was immediately opposed by revolutionary forces, and Huerta was forced to resign and flee the country in 1914, after 17 months as president
Francisco Madero - a Mexican statesman, writer, and revolutionary who served as the 33^rd president of Mexico from 1911 until his assassination in 1913. He was an advocate for social justice and democracy.

Juan Diego - a native of Mexico, he is the first Roman Catholic indigenous saint from the Americas.
Tonantzín - the name of an Aztec mother goddess, possibly Mother Earth

Joaquín Murrieta - a famous figure in California during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. Depending on the point of view, he was considered as either an infamous bandit or a Mexican patriot

Elfego Baca - a gunman, lawman, lawyer, and politician in the closing days of the American wild west.
Espinoza brothers - led a gang made up of their cousins in the 1860s who murdered travelers in the Colorado Territory. the Espinosas were not only embittered by the earlier killing of their family members, but also because they claimed their land grant in Conejos County wasn't being honored and numerous white settlers were squatting upon their property.

Moctezuma - the ninth or ruler of Tenochtitlan, reigning from 1502 to 1520. The first contact between indigenous civilizations of MesoAmerica and Europeans took place during his reign, and he was killed during the initial stages of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Chapultepec - one of the largest city parks in the Western Hemisphere, measuring in total just over 686 hectares. The park area has been inhabited and held as special since the Pre-Columbian era, when it became a retreat for Aztec rulers

Diego Rivera - a prominent Mexican painter
Siqueiros - a Mexican social realist painter, better known for his large murals in fresco
Orozco - a Mexican painter, who specialized in bold murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera and Sisqueiros.

Chicano Art: The progress of a people through art

Watch the video and answer the questions below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ7xYvcEpuM

0:00 – 1:26

What are some of the negative things that are said in the beginning of the video?

Why do you think this is cited?

Ester Hernandez talks about the role of art in the Chicano movement. What was this role?

1:27-end

Where did the art grow from?

What does the art capture and convey?

Lowriders and Chicano art

To complement the sequence Mexamerica: the Chicano Identity and Artwork, I am posting some images of lowriders. As you will be seeing in the sequence, art has an integral place in the Chicano identity. Lowrider cars and bikes are the Chicano everyman's artform. That is to say that not only "artists" make art, but everybody can be an artist. The history of lowriders is complex, but two things coincided in the 1920s starting it off; the geography of Los Angeles which is a horizontal city where a person needs a car to get anywhere and car ownership which was already at 1 car for every 2.25 people in Los Angeles (as compared with 1 for 7 people in the rest of the country) meaning that cheap second hand cars were available. Customizing cars began with Anglos making them lighter for racing and Mexican-Americans lowering down the back end for cruising more slowly. Customizing has evolved greatly, and now bicycles are customized as well. Here are a few examples.

                                  Frank Romero. The Closing of Whittier Blvd. Giclée print, 1999

We will be talking briefly about lowriders in class, and to a much greater extent Chicano poetry, murals and prints.

Here is a link to an interesting blog about Chicano art:
http://chicanoartmovement.tumblr.com/page/13

Enjoy!

Instinct for privacy vs media demands for information

She is always in opposition with the prime minister who suggests to speak to the media. Maybe she thinks that Diana doesn't make honor to the family because she always exposes herself to the media. She refuses public funerals and wants a privat berial. Publics want the queen to speak about the death and to support them.

        

        Traditions Vs Modernity

       All along the movie, we can see a real conflict between the traditional face of the U.K. and its modern side. There is an effective confrontation that opposes the Queen, conservative and attached to the customs, and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, described as the modernizer of the country. A few examples illustrate this conflict: 

     The Prime Minister advices to let the flag fly at half mast above Buckingham Palace, whereas the Queen wants to respect the tradition which is that the flag should only be flying in presence of the monarch in the Palace. 

Also, the Royal Family wants private funeral, in a more traditional and discreet way, when the Prime Minister assures the requirement of a public funeral to help the population to be in mourning.

The activities of the Royal Family are also very different of the Prime Minister ones:  when the royal family goes fishing, hunting and other ancient conserved activities of the British monarchy, the Prime Minister likes to go golfing.

       Finally, the traditional/modern conflict is reflected by the cloth and behaviors on both sides.

 The Queen has a very strict dress code to respect. We could quote the length of her dresses: never above the knees. The tradition demands as well to never show your back to the Queen. 

We can obviously feel the tension in the insolent and provocative attitude of the Prime Minister’s wife during the first meeting at Buckingham Palace, which shows her disagreement about this tradition and the traditional style of the monarchy in general.

Reflections regarding elected power / inherited power in the British monarchy)

Throughout the film, the two powers frequently collide, showing two different views on the British society. First is the traditional view, represented by the Queen, her inherited power's legitimity being constantly challenged by her people who seem to believe more in the modernity embodied by Prime Minister Tony Blair. Indeed, the monarchy refuses to listen to the will of people concerning the burial of "Princess" Diana in Buckingham Palace which would go against the royal traditions. Moreover, the apparent impassibility of the Queen is confronted to the deep sorrow of her people. In the end, the elected power wins since the will of the people is granted by Diana's national funeral and tribute.
We can conclude that even though British people are profoundly attached to their monarchy and traditions, their defiance towards the Queen and her refusal to listen to the people's requests show the limit of inherited power whose role doesn't make he royals care for the people's will. Conversely, an elected power must be regardful when taking decisions as its position is always at stake.

Use the posts of your classmates to reflect on the "collisions" in British culture we spoke about in class; tradition vs. modernity, inherited power vs. elected power and the instinct for privacy vs. media demands for information.
Come prepared to discuss:
Are these are distinctly British problems?
Do these things keep the British insular and "unto themselves" or unwilling/unable to be a part of the EU?