Class via Twitter

Class Friday is going to be different than usual. We’re meeting via Twitter. Over the course of the day, you’ll spend an hour tweeting and commenting on the blog.

First, read through your blog posts and choose the one you think you’d like to submit to Aztlan Reads. Next, put up a tweet with both the #CHST404 hashtag and the URL link for your post.

Read through the links others in the class have shared and take some time to read the blog posts they’ve selected. Make comments either on the blog or on Twitter that you think will help them improve that blog entry.

And that’s it. I’ll see you Monday.

New Social media life

You probably wouldn’t know it by looking at me because I appear to be your average American that is up to date with the coolest trends, but I have avoided social media. I actually refused to get a myspace, Facebook, twitter, and even linkedIn, because I didn’t think that it fit who I was. It seemed weird to me that random people who I didn’t know could look at my personal information and never actually meet me. I also was rarely on the computer to keep all these social media outlets updated, so everything added up for me that social media wasn’t for me.

When I had my first Chicana Feminism class and Proffessor Perez told us that we HAD to blog and get a twitter account to tweet, I was kind of blown away because I was being forced to break my silent protest against social media. Another huge problem that I had with social media, especially tweeting, is that as soon as you send out a tweet, it is permanently out their in the twitter verse for everyone to see. My worst fear was that I was very worried that I would tweet something that would be taken as offensive to someone, and I wouldn’t be able to take it back! Once you tweet something offensive, it is worse than saying something offensive to someone because if you say something offensive to someone, you can at least say you misspoke and apologize instantly. If you tweet something offensive, so many people can be offended, and seems their is an automatic assumption that you tweeted with malicious intent. Since so many athletes, even in college basketball, have gotten in great trouble because of something offensive they tweeted that they probably didn’t give much thought to, I didn’t want to even put myself at risk of joining such a club since I was a collegiate athlete.

Once I started tweeting and blogging, it turned out to not be bad at all, I was able to get over most of my concerns I had before. I also really liked how the Chicana Feminism class had our own small community when we followed and commented on each others tweets. It was a great way to stay connected with your classmates, especially if you don’t have their numbers. Since you get a chance to see the opinions of your fellow classmates on twitter and on the blog post, you feel more of a familiarity towards them, than you would if you just seen them in class. However, you still have to be extremely cautious as to how you present your information when you blog especially, because it is taken more serious than a tweet, since our blogs for the class is representing basically the views of the class, as well as LMU. I was still also very cautious with my tweets because I don’t know who is looking at my tweets, so it was very important for me to be “politically correct” when I tweeted, so i wouldn’t offend anybody. Overall I thought my tweeting and blogging in the class helped me get introduced to the social media world, and I can see myself using it in the future. Thank you Professor Perez!

Mixtec Singer : Lila Downs

Lila DownsA few weeks ago I posted a music video on twitter, after reading about the Nahuatl language. It reminded me of Lila Downs, a Mexican singer who has written and recorded music not only in Nahuatl and Spanish, but also in Maya, Zapotec, and other indigenous languages (a.k.a. a Mixtec singer). A native of Oaxaca, Mexico, she is the daughter of Anita Sánchez, also a Mixtec singer. Her father, Allen Downs, is a Scottish-American filmmaker and art professor. Her culture and her life’s work are easily reflected in her music. Her studies of voice and anthropology from the University of Minnesota influence her work aesthetically and in sound.
I first heard of her when shopping around at a yard sale with my mom and finding some of her music. After listening to her album, “Tree of Life” (2000), both of us fell in love with her voice and her sound. I had never encountered a Mixtec singer before thus I thought of this as a once in a lifetime find. It was later that I found out that Lila Downs is actually quite the acclaimed singer throughout the American continent and has released several albums overseas. This was one of those music experiences that definitely opened my eyes due to the narrow genre that apparently is widely admired and sought after in other mediums for example, in film.
One of the giveaways of Downs’s diverse contributions was her soundtrack and acting performance for the film Frida directed by Julie Taylor, and starring Salma Hayek. During the final scenes of the film, just before Frida’s death, she attends her solo exhibition where a musical number is then set up. Frida, having arrived in her bed, spins around the room with Lila Downs singing to her one of her most popular songs, La Llorona.
It was in fact her album, “Tree of Life”, which placed her more solidly as an international artist, but it was her album, “One Blood” (2004) which brought out her activist side. Much of the lyrics of the songs were on the subject of the case of Digna Ochoa, the human rights defender who was found murdered during the time of her defense of peasant ecologists from Guerrero. The controversial way in which the investigation of her death was executed, was what inspired Downs’s album.
Today, Lila Downs continues to work on her musical mixture of jazz, blues, mixtec, etc. Her most current project includes a musical theater presentation of Laura Esquivel’s novel, Like Water for Chocolate. I encourage anyone to give her music a listen that has transcended through generations by making fans out of my grandfather, my mother, and I. As described on her site, her music is like “a heat fueled road trip from Oaxaca to New Orleans.”
Additional Sources:

Importance of cry-smile mask

The cry smile mask is described by Jid Lee as a smile on your exterior face, while inside you are really lamenting,  crying, or sad. Jid Lee descibres the Cry-Smile mask as, ” effective, but its use came with collective as well as personal harm; it condoned my audiences’ self-righteousness(398)”. When Lee hears people say racial comments against other people, or when she talks about racial struggle to her class, she must use the cry-smile mask. When Lee is at a function with a white coworker, they have a conversation about race that starts as, ” I wish they were all like him”, Susan whispered looking at the back of the black man who had just turned around after asking her for a dance. ” He’s so nice. No bitterness or anger. If all black people were like him, we’d be living in heaven”. Lee thought, ” Susan stung me with her rudeness; I had to bite my tongue, struggling to smile… Facing this forty-year-old lady so mature and loving yet filled with hackneyed racist cliches(397)”. In this situation, Lee wanted to address Susan’s ignorant and rude remark, but the perceived stereotype that was plastered all over the Korean-American Lee, is that Asian-Americans shouldn’t complain about racial struggle.The oppression on Asian during  World War II, specifically with the Japanese concentration camps in America, is forgotten by most of society. It is forgotten by Susan in this instance that Asians  had to suffer in America like Blacks, and had negative stereotypes attached to them as well. Since Lee is able to not be viewed with negative stereotypes like the Black man by Susan, instead of tell her she is wrong for her views, she puts on the cry-smile mask.

 

The reason it was hard for Lee to speak up and tell Susan that she was wrong for her comment is because she is supposed to be on the same page as Whites. Susan shows how Whites view Asian American when she writes, ” Frankly, it’s a little hard for me to believe what you say about Asians being discriminated against. They’re white.” ” Those concentration days are over. We don’t want to bring them up again.” ” Immigrants like you work so hard. They rise up so fast. (401)” Such complements and great expectation of the White race is very hard to disregard since Asians have been coined the “model minority” over Blacks, Chicanos, Indian, etc. , in America. If Lee were to speak up to tell Susan that she was incorrect to stereotype all Black people as bad in a serious tone, Susan most likely would not take her correction seriously, since she doesn’t expect her to know anything about other races struggles. Lee might be taken more serious by Susan if she corrected her racial stereotype if she said it with a cry smile-mask. The method of the cry-smile mask Lee used when teaching about racial issues in her class was ” This new layer,…, would be more concealing and suggestive, softer in appearance but harder in reality.” Lee found out while testing her new cry-smile mask technique, that the less serious she appeared when talking about racial issues to her students, the more receptive they were to listening to her and contributing to the discussion. The more serious Lee was in talking about racial issues to her students, the less free they felt to discuss racial problems with a Korean -American that seemed to know nothing about experiencing racial issues. If you are the “model minority” like Asian Americans, in some aspects of your life,  the cry-smile mask can have some importance.

 

Sources:

 

Jid Lee “The Cry-Smile Mask: A Korean American Woman’s System of Resistance” (From this bridge we call home 397-402).

Xicana Codex Tweets

Coatlicue: Mother Goddess

While I was reading Cherrie Moraga’s, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, I came across this quote: “It cost me a great deal to find their stories, but without my gods – Coatlicue, the mother of creation and destruction; Coyolxauhqui, her dismembered daughter…without these icons of collective MeXicana sedition, my criminal acts as a Xicana dyke writer would have no precedent, no history, and ultimately no consequence.” Since I do not know much about Aztec gods/ goddesses, these names drew my attention. I wanted to find out what these female deities represented to the Aztecs.

Coatlicue is the Aztec mother goddess of creation. She is also known as Teteoinan, “the Mother of Gods”, Toci, “our grandmother”, and Cihuacoatl, “the Lady of the serpent”, the patron of women who die in childbirth. The goddess’s name comes from the Nahuatl language, which means “the one with the skirt of serpents.” Therefore, the image of Coatlicue is represented as a woman wearing a skirt of snakes, and her face is also that of a snake. The snakes symbolize fertility. Her breasts hang flat (from the nursing of her children), her necklace is made of hands, hearts, and skulls (from all the corpses she has fed on), and her hands and feet are claws (used for digging graves) (Britannica).

According to the myth, Coatlicue was magically impregnated while still a virgin by an obsidian knife and gave birth to Coyolxauhqui and 400 other children. After some time, while she was sweeping a temple, she became pregnant again by a ball of feather that fell from the sky. Her children were enraged by her pregnancy because a goddess could only give birth to one group of divinity. Coyolxauhqui then convince all her siblings to kill their mother. Amidst all the commotion, Coatlicue gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, the God of War, and he came out fully-grown and armored for battle. To protect his mother, he murdered his brothers and dismembered Coyolxauhqui. Huitzilopochtli threw Coyolxauhqui’s head into the sky and it became the moon, she was then known as the goddess of the moon (Aztec creation).

Referring back to Moraga’s quote, I believe she admires these goddesses because they are strong female identities found in Chicana ancient history. It is evident that issues of sex, fertility, and power in women date back to ancient times. Coatlicue is a maternal figure that struggled and resisted against external forces. It is similar to the struggles the Chicanas experienced during the movement and still continue to experience.

References:

“Aztec Creation Myths.” Crystalinks. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. <http://www.crystalinks.com/azteccreation.html>.

“Coatlicue.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/123205/Coatlicue>.

Moraga, Cherrie L. “Indigena as Scribe/ 2005.” A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. 95. Print.

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coatlicue

Xicana Codex (3)

Reading assignment for Wednesday, April 18, 2012. Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. Your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.

Cherríe Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (163 – 199)

What is your response to Moraga’s positions on President Obama’s election, marriage equality and transgendered people? What do you see her as arguing for or against?

Do you agree that there’s a lack of political and social movement in the present day? If you see social movement, where do you see them? Who are the leaders? Has Moraga missed “something” in her discussion of “back in the day.” What do you think her vision of Aztlán is and how does your generation of people of color fit into it?

Do you see universities the same way Moraga does? What role do you see universities as having in your life? In the lives of your communities? As sites of social change? What do you imagine the difference between Stanford (where Cherríe Moraga teaches), UC Berkeley (whose Ethnic Studies department she discusses) and Loyola Marymount are?

What vision, if any, of Chicana / women of color feminism does Moraga’s work offer?

More on Xicana Codex.

Xicana Tweets & Thoughts (2)

[tweet https://twitter.com/ccastan5/status/191860060798988290]

Kelsey’s response:

When Moraga was accussed by Anzaldua of plagarism, she wrote “I do know she spoke of “plagarism”.I was stunned (117).” Moraga probably thought she was just adding to the ideas that she got from Anzalduas piece, not plagarising. However, such confusion of rules and understanding that people have I think relate to the confusion of what each woman stands for in the womans movement. Even though we see the like thinking of Moraga and Anzaldua, they still held different opinions for “The Bridge called my back”. Moraga endorsed what ” The Bridge called my back” stood for with the diversity of the Feminism movement when Anzaldua didn’t support the diversity of what the book stood for. I think the Feminist movement is seperated into women who want the movement to represent all the different aspects of the movement(like Moraga), and other women who want the movement to represent seperate issues of women.

Women In the Lowriding Culture

Usually when one thinks of lowriders they imagine the cars that are associated with that word.  Along with that image that comes to mind are the various images of girl models posing on or around a car.  Yet this is not the only role that women take up in the lowriding culture.

Lady Bug Car Club
Regina Lopez in her 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix

Well the culture is still majority dominated by men; there are also women that take part in the culture.  While women weren’t allowed to join most lowriding clubs in its early hay days, times have changed.  But even back then women were part of the lowriding culture.

In the early beginnings of the lowrider culture, men dominated the various car clubs.  Women were either seen in the background cooking or taking care of the children or arm candy.  Many of these car clubs didn’t accept women members to join or be part of their clubs.

One of the first women car club was called “Lady Bugs Car Club” that was founded in the early 1970s by Stella Perez (Bueno) in California.   Like any other club there were governing rules that all members had to follow. The rules were simple like making sure their cars were always kept clean and presentable, respect each other, and of course either own or ride shotgun in a VW Bug.  The members could never leaver their plaque alone or unattended.  For any car club member earning the right to have and display a club’s plaque was one of the highest accomplishments that one could earn. One of the most important rules was to have fun.  The name of club comes from the fact that VW were easy and relatively inexpensive to customize, which was a welcome thought as the various women in the club “…had jobs, and some were going to college full time, working towards earning their secondary degrees. There were also single mothers and other members were engaged to members of the male car clubs” (Bueno).  While the cars and name was the VW Bug, the logo that represented them was the vice president’s vehicle, which happened to be a Ford Pinto.

While the Lady Bug Car Club was the first Women lowrider club, it wouldn’t be the last one to form.  Some clubs like “…the Dukes and Low ‘n’ Slow, did let women join…” their clubs.  The women that did were able to join the men car clubs even took offices such as being the record recorders, historians, and organizers of the clubs’ social events. (Sandoval)  These cars that these women built were just magnificent and eye catching as any of the men counterparts.  While being in a club allowed one to have access to people that were brilliant with modifying, it also cut the cost of customization. So the women that weren’t able to join these men dominated clubs were cutoff to these advantages (Penland).

This didn’t stop them from building magnificent cars though.  These cars won various categories at shows such as “Best Chrome, Best Hydraulics, Best ’70s Custom and, almost always, Best Paint” (Penland).  While more and more men and car clubs have welcomed and become accepting of women into their clubs there are still those that wish to see that the only participation that women should have are being dressed scantily and model in front of the cars.  When these women win and accept awards they may still encounter opposition in the form of rude remarks.  In one such case Patricia Gonzalez, who works on plating of moldings and wheels and works on her own car, had a man come up to her after accepting an award and say “It must’ve been because you slept with the judge” (Griffin).  Perhaps one of the greatest achievements that one can receive is featuring one’s car on the cover of Lowrider Magazine.  So it’s no wonder that the effort and time that women put in their cars that would earn the right to be featured on the cover.  Two examples are by Nena Aguilar and Lee Gonzalez whose “ ‘La Nena,’ the ’47 Chevy Stylemaster” and “Every Girls Dream, a ’69 Camaro” were featured on the cover.

For further reading on the Lowrider culture check out my other article:

Cruisin’ Down the Street

References:

Bueno, Jae. “Lady Bugs Car Club.” Lowrider. Lowrider Magazine, Nov. 2010. Web. 16

Apr. 2012.

http://www.lowridermagazine.com/features/1011_lrmp_lady_bugs_car_club/vie

wall.html.

Griffin, Gil. “Taking the Wheel.” UTSanDiego.com. 23 Aug. 2004. Web. 16 Apr. 2012.

http://legacy.utsandiego.com/news/features/20040823-9999-mz1c23low.html.

Penland, Paige R. “Women of Lowriding.” Lowrider: History, Pride, Culture. St. Paul,

MN: Motor International, 2003. Print. https://www.msu.edu/~torresm2/ch12.html

Sandoval, Denise.  “Lowriders”

Lady Bug Car Club

http://ladybugscarclub.homestead.com/index.html

Images:

Lady Bug Car Club from http://ladybugscarclub.homestead.com/Home.html .

Regina Lopez in her 1985 Pontiac Grand Prix taken by  Howard Lipin / Union-Tribune from the article “Taking the wheel”.

 

 

 

Xicana Codex (2)

Reading assignment for Monday April 16, 2012. Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. Your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about both of the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.

Cherríe Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (79-162)

Based on your readings this semester on textual communities and print culture, what does Moraga’s writing reveal about the construction of communal texts, anthologies and performances? How much ownership do we have of our writing? How much debt to others? What do you think of Moraga’s decision not to contribute to This Bridge We Call Home?

On a more personal level, do you think Moraga is right about how she and Anzaldúa could have resolved their differences? Do you agree with her reading of Anzaldúa’s writing as having more to do with vision of the ideal than the more concrete politics of process?