Spring 2012
Conference Appointments
Office 4418 University Hall
3/26 Monday
10:15 – Beatriz Alfaro
3/28 Wednesday
8:45 – Kelsey Chine
9:00 – Richard Alcaraz
9:15 – Richard Alcaraz
9:45 – Carmen Castañeda
10:00 – Stephanie Troncoso
10:15 – Sarah Rosales
10:30 – Erika Meza
10:45 – Michelle Badillo
11:00 – Michelle Badillo
3/30 Friday
9:00 – Vanessa Gonzalez
9:15 – Michael Marmolejo
9:30 – Yara Hidalgo
Tweets based on the reading of Emma Pérez, “Irigaray’s Female Symbolic in the Making of Chicana Lesbian Sitios y Lenguas (Sites and Discourses)” and Mónica Palacios “Tomboy” (both from Living Chicana Theory).
Is strategic essentialism the creation of a space (i.e. caucus) where regulations (like a constitution) — #CHST404
— Yara C. Hidalgo (@Cipatlic12) March 25, 2012
— are established to resist powers of dominance? #CHST404
— Yara C. Hidalgo (@Cipatlic12) March 25, 2012
I was a tomboy when younger and still consider myself one, I remember crying when my mom gave me a doll too…oh the memories #chst404
— Vanessa Gonzalez (@vc_gonzalez) March 25, 2012
I always loved cooking and helping out with my grandma and mom when I was younger and still do. Didn’t think much about it. #CHST404
— Michael Marmolejo (@mmarmol1) March 26, 2012
In Palacios poem you can see how intrusive and domineering is the institution of heteronormativity #chst404
— Beatriz Alfaro (@MissBeatriz25) March 26, 2012
Its interesting to hear in thepoem “Tomboy” that the power struggle begins so early, and that women are taught to accept it #CHST404
— Richard Alcaraz (@RichardAlcaraz) March 26, 2012
Pretty ironic to adopt European feminism, to understand how third world women are located by colonialists. #chst404
— Carmen Castaneda (@ccastan5) March 26, 2012
@carmen That was a very strong quote in her poem, but I think this poem shows that she has been granted this power #chst404
— Erika Meza (@erikaem9) March 26, 2012
What I would give to have been at those group meetings. Just to be a fly in the wall and hear them talk about all the topics listed #CHST404
— Stephanie Troncoso (@steftroncoso) March 26, 2012
One of the strongest women that I know is my grandmother Deodata Plasencia. This summer we celebrated her 90th birthday with the entire family. She is one of the people that I will always admire and look up to. She is always taking care of her family and protecting them. Some of the best memories are of us building and playing with Lego sets. I still play with Legos, but now she is teaching me to cook. Throughout her life she has gone through many experiences that make her the person that she is today.
My grandfather died a few years after serving in the army during WWII. Leaving her to raise three children by her self. Although she didn’t speak a word of English, she was amazing with numbers. Combing through the papers of her late husband’s and countless times going to the Veteran’s Administration and the Social Security Office to fight for the rights of her children. Little by little, she was able to pay off the bank, the architect, and construction company that my grandfather had hire to build an apartment building. She had help with translating the English documents from her 10 and 13-year-old children. She continued to fight for her rights. She fought against the Barrington Plaza, the first high rise apartment complex in West Los Angeles, in court with the help of her 12 year old daughter and lawyers.
One of the stories that stuck with me the most is when she finally came to the United States. My grandfather went down to Mexico to marry her and then they came back to live in the United States. One day in Santa Monica they were walking down the street when a white lady asked her what she was doing with some Mexican. She replied with “¿qué?” and they walked away. She is never ashamed of who she is or of her culture. Unfortunately when my grandfather died he didn’t leave any money behind. Being broke she wanted her children to have better lives than the ones that they had right now. She saw that her other in-laws members were making money as owning their own gardening company and beauticians, and she wanted her to children to follow their footsteps. However, her children wanted to pursue other careers and wanted to attend college. Even though she knew that the path they were choosing was going to be hard she supported their decisions no matter what. My uncle and my mother went on to attend UCLA and became a cardiologist and teacher respectively. While my Aunt went on to attend CSUN and also became a teacher. They were the first in our family to graduate from college.
Feminist have reinterpreted Our Lady of Guadalupe to better relate to her. Sandra Cisneros describes this reinterpretation in her essay, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” Cisneros speaks from her own experience of her alienation toward her own body. During her early years up until she went to college she was taught that anything having to do with her private body parts were to remain private. She stresses that her religion and culture “helped to create that blur, a vagueness about what went on ‘down there” (Cisneros, 46). Traditionally Catholicism and the Mexican culture have always pushed women to cover up their bodies. Similarly in a note in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” from the collection of short stories in Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros creates Chicana character named Chayito who comes to express her developing relationship with Our Lady of Guadalupe.
First it’s important to know that Our Lady of Guadalupe is the patroness of Mexico and who symbolizes virginity. She appeared to Juan Diego at the hill of Tepeyac and asked him to deliver the message to the bishop that she wanted the construction of a chapel there. She appeared on his cloak as proof of her miracles when he was delivering the message to the bishop for the third time. Our Lady of Guadalupe continues to be a significant force of devotion among women from Mexican descent and other parts of what is known as Latin America. She is traditionally superficially depicted as mild and submissive in relation to her virginity; the embodiment of what a woman should be like. Chicana feminists like Sandra Cisneros have re-imagined Our Lady of Guadalupe to describe their evolving relationship with her.
In “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” Cisneros describes her experience of silence and says, “[i]f I was a graduate student, was shy about talking to anyone about my body and sex, imagine how difficult it must be for a young girl in middle school or high school living […] [with] no information other than misinformation from the girlfriends and the boyfriend” (48). This experience is replicated among many other Latinas who grow up in a traditional household and whose bodies are kept in silence. The culture keeps demanding young women to not get pregnant but nobody ever sits down to talk about how to keep from getting pregnant, the only choice young women have is to listen to the misinformation that is out there. Cisneros continues to state, “[t]his is why I was angry, for some nay years every time I saw la Virgen de Guadalupe, my culture’s role model for brown women like me […] [d]id boys have to aspire to be Jesus? I never saw any evidence of it” (Cisneros, 48). She is relating the culture oppression against young women as sexual beings as a result of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s submissiveness.
In “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” Chayito begins her short story (or note) speaking to Our Lady of Guadalupe as she is pinning the part of her hair she cut off. She describes the ways in which the patriarchal structure continues to humiliate her for not abiding by the social standards of how a girl is suppose to act. She states, “Virgencita de Guadalupe. For a long time I wouldn’t let you in my house. I couldn’t see you without seeing my ma each time my father came home drunk and yelling, blaming everything that ever went wrong in his life on her” (Cisneros, 127). In her eyes Our Lady of Guadalupe only symbolized a sufferer, someone who would take everything in and not fight back just like her mother took her father’s verbal abuse. Chayito could not stand to see the pain her mother and grandmother underwent as women. She wanted to see Our Lady of Guadalupe “bare-breasted, [with] snakes in [her] hands […] leaping and somersaulting the backs of bulls” (Cisneros, 127). Chayito wanted to see Our Lady of Guadalupe as a woman who had breasts, who felt confident with her body; a woman who could take anything even a bull and who showed no fear. Just like Chayito wanted to see Our Lady of Guadalupe bare-breasted, in “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” Cisneros states, “I want to lift her dress as I did my doll’s and look to see if she comes with chones [underwear], and does her panocha [vagina] look like mine, and does she have dark nipples too?” (Cisneros, 51).
Placing both readings side by side, we see that Cisneros used Chayito’s voice to demonstrate her grappling’s of relationship with Our Lady of Guadalupe, especially when she says, “When I look at la Virgen de Guadalupe, she is not the Lupe of my childhood […] She is Guadalupe the sex goddess” (Cisneros, 49). In “little Miracles, Kept Promises” Chayito comes to realize that Our Lady of Guadalupe is “[n]o longer Mary the mild […] That you could have the power to rally a people when a country was born […] made me think maybe there is power in my mother’s patience” (Cisneros, 128). Both demonstrate the relationship to Our Lady of Guadalupe as empowering, one being able to embrace her sexual being and the other the strength that women possess within.
Reinterpreting Our Lady of Guadalupe as Sandra Cisneros has in “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” has caused controversy especially among people who are religious in the traditional ways. In order for Chicanas to be able to connect with her and see her as an empowering figure they have had to re-imagine her as someone who is just like any ordinary woman. This is specifically important to Chicanas because of the history of colonization and conquest that the indigenous population endured as the Spanish conquerors took over Mexico, central and south America.
Additional Resources:
Reading assignment for Monday, March 26, 2012. Emma Pérez, “Irigaray’s Female Symbolic in the Making of Chicana Lesbian Sitios y Lenguas (Sites and Discourses)” and Mónica Palacios “Tomboy” (both from Living Chicana Theory)
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.
Reading assignment for Friday, March 23, 2012. Gloria Anzaldúa, “To(o) Queer the Writer– Loca, escritora y chicana (from Living Chicana Theory) Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. Remember, you don’t need to answer all or even any of the questions, but your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts. Note: Be sure to read the endnotes for this text!
How does Anzaldúa trouble the identifier / label “lesbian” as it might be applied to herself? What does she want to be identified as instead? How does she problematize queerness?
What do you think it means to “police the queer person of color with theory”? How would that fit in with the other readings you have done this semester? How does it connect with her later passage on the idea of policing with fear?
Translate a passage of Spanish used in the text and discuss why she may have used Spanish for that sentence.
Discuss Anzaldúa’s writing about reading as a male versus. female. How does it relate to issues of identity formation?
How does this text make you feel? Is Anzaldúa creating an open atmosphere or an anxious one? Or something else? How would you compare it to Borderlands or This Bridge Called My Back? Would it fit in with either? Both?
The Brown Berets is a nationalist group that was established during the 1960’s with Chicano and Chicana members, with their main focus being to help the Chicano community. The goal of the Brown Berets was to help the Chicano and Chicana community specifically with police harassment, inadequate public schools , poor health care, as well as low level jobs.
The Brown Berets were successful with being able to help the community by setting up free clinics and breakfast programs for their community.To protest against the public schools in the community, in 1968, the Brown Berets planned the East L.A. Walkouts, where thousands of L.A students protested education standards. The walkout was the largest school walkout in the history of California.The Brown Berets were also known for acting against police brutality against Chicanos.They protested killings and abuses that were committed by the L.A. Sheriff Department. The Brown Berets were actually modeled after the Black Panther party, which was a black activist group that aimed towards helping the issues of the inner city.By September 1968, the Brown Berets had grown Nationwide and opened chapters in California, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, and Indiana.
There were however women struggles among the Brown Berets. The women were limited to secretarial jobs in the Brown Beret like writing and distributing the newspaper of the movement called “La Causa”. Women like Grace Reyes who was in charge of writing for ” La Causa”, would write articles about women within the Brown Berets and the Chicano Movement, as well as the sexist attitudes towards them, but they were not published and ignored. In 1972, the original L.A. Brown Berets chapter dissolved because of speculated CIA involvement in the group.
In 1994 the Watsonvile Brown Berets chapterlocated in which is located in Watsonville,California, was formed as a revival of the Brown Berets of the 1960’s. Just like when the Brown Berets just started the organization in the 1960’s, the objective of the Watsonvile Brown Berets is to stop gang violence and to try to solve problems that are in the Chicano community. The Brown Berets today are equally adressing the problems of the men as well as the women. They have a group called Youth Brigade which provides alternative activities for high school students, and is located at the Brown Berets headquarters. They also have a group called Girlz Space for high school girls at the YMCA, where they talk about issues affecting young women. We see the growth of the new Brown Berets since they goals are not just to uplift the Chicanos in the community, but also the Chicanas. They now acklowlegde that both men and women in the Chicano community have problems that must be addressed.
Sources:
Within the scope of Chicano and Chicana art exists the idea of dissimilation: the breaking down of this particular genre of art by including art that contrasts or creates exceptions. The artist and film maker, Poli Marichal fits perfectly into this subject. Primarily a print-maker, her work has been included in several Chicana/o art collectives with pieces that express social, and environmental concerns, as well as visions of the human condition. One of the things that makes her exceptional is the fact that she is neither Mexican nor of Mexican descent but is still included in the genre of Chican/o art.
Poli Marichal was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where she earned a B.A. in printmaking at Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico, and later an MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art. Marichal often delves into the ideas of immigration and family roots. In the painted piece, “Intruder” (2009), the cactus represents the southern immigrant who breaks through the groundwork of it’s new environment as it grows and makes it’s new home. Many of her pieces are known for including trees as symbols. She states that they represent the need for individuals to feel rooted and “safe” while at the same time transcending these needs with others and attempting to branch out “into the cosmos.”
Her most recent projects include animated shorts, both personal and public, and a permanent mural found in LA. The mural, installed on a wall at Avenue 50 studio gallery is comprised of carved wooden panels. Made in 2007, Marichal directed the high school and college students that created the piece for the non-profit organization, LA Commons.
As Gloria Anzaldúa mentions in her book, Borderlands, feminism is a subject that reaches multiple races, cultures, and geographies. That third-world feminism is a specific type of feminism is true and can result in a type of sisterhood, as exemplified by Marichal’s work and contributions to both the Puerto Rican community and the Chicano community.
Additional Sources:
http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/4155-poli-marichal
Reading assignment for Monday, March. Chéla Sandoval’s “Mestizaje as Method: Feminists-of-Color Challenge the Canon” (from Living Chicana Theory) Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. Remember, you don’t need to answer all or even any of the questions, but your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.
What is Sandoval’s “mestizaje method”? Be specific. How does it adapt and evolve from Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory? How does it give additional insight as to where Anzaldúa’s theory comes from?
Do you agree with Sandoval’s history of feminists of color? How does it connect with her method and Anzaldúa’s borderland theory? How does she interrelate her method with the publication history of Borderlands / La Frontera and This Bridge Called My Back?
What positives and drawbacks of Sandoval’s method can you see? How do the endnotes add to your understanding of Sandoval’s work?
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands
Reading assignment for Wednesday, March 14. Chapters 1 – 3. Your reply (under Comments) is due before class. Remember, you don’t need to answer all or even any of the questions, but your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.
Are Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands Aztlán? What connections are there between them? How are they different? Where do you see borderland spaces as located?
How does Anzaldúa see home? How does she define leaving it? How does she discuss transformation of self with regard to sexuality and otherness? How does her sexuality affect her position in the borderlands? How is Malinche image used in Borderlands?
Why does Anzaldúa identify as a snake? How is that connected to her consciousness? To the Virgin of Guadalupe? How does she connect la facultad to her feminist self?
