The 1926 image Pulqueria by Edward Weston, exhibits the dynamic between two men, a tavern front and its mural (fig. 1). This photograph of an everyday scene in the streets of Mexico City contains a substantial revelation of social injustices happening during Weston’s second stay in Mexico from the years 1925 – 1926. Weston’s composition subtly voices social injustices through the framework and subject to effectively unveil how the Mexican government disregarded its indigenous people because of the false stereotyping that surrounded these “lower class” citizens. Discussed, is the symbolism behind the pulqueria establishment and its mural as well as the production of the image Pulqueria, whose political undertones are further highlighted by the collaboration …show more content…
The tall doors leave enough space above for the placement of the name of the bar: “Charrito.” This ground floor takes up roughly one-third of the image leaving a small space for the sidewalk and the second floor of the establishment. The upper floor contains three small windows skewed toward the left of the image. The camera appears to have captured half of the window farthest to the left, followed by the smallest of the windows in the center, and another window surrounded by four bird cages at the far right. The bird cages are scattered at the top right, left, and beneath the window, as with one located further to the right. The upper floor also contains a phrase that states “exquisite pulques from the best haciendas of the plains of Apam.” In the image, a tree casts a natural shadow set by the light that filters from the upper left corner. This shadow falls on the right side of the image and partially in the bottom left corner. The print also captures two men on opposite corners; one at the top right and another at the bottom left of the image. Both of these men’s identity obscured by the flickering shadows of the
The tone of Whitewashed Adobe delivers an ethnic and cultural history of Los Angeles. The author, William Deverell, indicates “Los Angeles has been the city of the future for a long time.” The book takes a revealing and harsh look at prejudice, political power and control in the early vision of 19th century Los Angeles and its surrounding communities. Deverell’s main interest is the economically, culturally and politically powerful Anglos and their view of ethnicity and race that enabled them to distance themselves from the Mexican people. Whitewashed Adobe’s six chapters illuminate how these men “appropriated, absorbed, and occasionally obliterated” Mexican sites and history in going forth with their vision for Los Angeles.
In the eighteenth Century, Colonial European and Mexican artists were fascinated with the emergence of racial blending within the Spaniard bloodline. Works of art began displaying pieces that portrayed three major groups that inhabited the colony— Indians, Spaniards, Africans and other ethnicities. This new genre of painting was known as Casta painting and portrayed colonial representations of racial intermarriage and their offspring. Traditionally Casta paintings were a pictorial genre that was often commissioned by Spaniards as souvenirs upon their arrival from New Spain (Mexico). And yet, why would such works have so much fascination despite its suggestive theme? It is clear that Casta paintings display interracial groups and couples, but they seem to have a deeper function when it comes to analyzing these works. These paintings demonstrate that casta paintings were created to display racial hierarchies within the era. They depict the domestic life of interracial marriages and systematically categorized through a complete series of individual paintings. It is clear that the fascination of these works reflected the categorizing of new bloodline that have been emerging and displays these characters in a manner that demonstrates the social stereotypes of these people by linking them with their domestic activities and the items that surround them as well. Despite the numerous racial stereotypes that are illustrated in these works, casta paintings construct racial identities through visual representations.
Norma Elia Cantu’s novel “Canícula: Imágenes de una Niñez Fronteriza” (“Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera”), which chronicles of the forthcoming of age of a chicana on the U.S.- Mexico border in the town of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in the 1940s-60s. Norma Elia Cantú brings together narrative and the images from the family album to tell the story of her family. It blends authentic snapshots with recreated memoirs from 1880 to 1950 in the town between Monterrey, Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas. Narratives present ethnographic information concerning the nationally distributed mass media in the border region. Also they study controversial discourse that challenges the manner in which the border and its populations have been portrayed in the U.S. and Mexico. The canícula in the title symbolizes “The dog days of 1993,” an intense part of summer when the cotton is harvested in South Texas. The canícula also represents summer and fall; also important seasons and concepts of that bridge between child and adulthood. She describes imaginative autobioethnography life growing up on ...
The author of Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman, grapples with the United States’ economic relationship with their neighbors to the south, Mexico. It also considers, through many interviews, the affairs of one nation. It is a work held to high esteem by many critics, who view this work as an essential part in truly understanding and capturing Mexico’s history. In Mexican Lives, Hellman presents us with a cast from all walks of life. This enables a reader to get more than one perspective, which tends to be bias. It also gives a more inclusive view of the nation of Mexico as a whole. Dealing with rebel activity, free trade, assassinations and their transition into the modern age, it justly captures a Mexico in its true light.
Hernandez, Tanya Katerí, “The Buena Vista Social Club: The Racial Politics of Nostalgia.” Latino/A Popular Culture. Ed. Michelle Habell-Pallán, Mary Romero. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 61-72. Print.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, what words are being told in the Codex Mensoza 1964, Lám (Brumfiel 1991: 224) and more importantly what influential role did the Spanish heritage have in the artifacts? These credentials were offered as form of resolute of Aztec women’s productive activities in Mexico. Nevertheless, Bromfiel paint a different picture of the Aztec women. In these sketches, Brumfiel draws our attention to the background in which the women are performing their “productive activities.” (Brumfiel 1991: 224) At first glance, these images are portraying Aztec women. However, after careful scrutiny of the photos, I noticed several an uncanny discoveries. In the first two portraits, both of the weaving instruments appear to be bound to Roman and/or Spanish columns (to my untrained eye). In the last two illustrations, I observed “productive activities” (Brumfiel 1991: 224) of cooking being performed, in what appears to be in a non-traditional work environment that does not correspond with the “productive activities” (Brumfiel 1991: 224) of the women in that era. One appears to be working in luxury room while the other seems to be overlooking the mountains from a balcony. Although these duties were performed in a residential setting, the pictures fail to emphasi...
Anzaldua’s Mestiza Consciousness can be seen through “racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization,” she calls it “an “alien” consciousness…a new mestiza consciousness…a consciousness of the borderlands” (quoted in Bizzell and Herzberg 1597). This consciousness, according to Anzaldua, is born out of the areas (or ‘borders’) through which a person diverges from a perceived norm, and experiences adversity. The Mestiza Consciousness aims to embrace these aspects of our identities, which are shaped by the ‘twin skins’ of language and ethnicity, that are reflected in how we perceive and process the world; “she communicates…documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives.” (quoted in Bizzell and Herzberg 1600). However, this quote from Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera parallels, and most clearly displays, how the Sundance Film Associations luncheon is the Mestiza Consciousness in action, is “cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems…a struggle of borders, an inner war” (quoted in Bizzell and Herzberg
A monumental staircase is the centerpiece of entrance hall and creates a barrier to a direct view of the courtyard. The stairway, although grandiose, is modeled after oversized wooden stairs with a “wealth of spindles and paneling from his earlier Shingle style houses.” The oversized arched windows on the wall facing Exeter Street, bring sunlight into this space, and have a radiant effect on the walls covered with variegated Sienna marble (especially quarried for the library). At the intermediate landing, there are two hand carved couchant lions, which are the work of Louis Saint-Gaudens. Above this stairway a spherical chandelier of bronze and cut glass hangs from the richly coffered ceiling. As you climb up the stairs towards the main landing, the paintings of Puvis De Chavannes representing poetry, philosophy, and science adorn the wall. These murals are painted
With assertive shouts and short tempers, the prominent character, Ricardo, is characterized as a feisty townsman, doing nothing except trying to protect his town and its members from the judgments of the western world. For example, the characterization of the “‘…quaint’” man is exemplified through the simplicity of his life and the fact that he is “‘…employed’” and is full of knowledge, not a “‘cow in the forest’” (55, 29, 32). Ricardo desperately wants to establish the notion that he is not a heartless, feebleminded man, only an indigent, simple man striving to protect his friends and family from the criticisms of callous cultures. Incessantly Ricardo attempts to make it clear to the photographer the irritation elicited by his prese...
The photograph “Flor de Manita, 1925” shows great equity between figure and ground shapes. It is a plant that has large sweeping curves, but because of the darkness of the subject and the lightness of the background, if viewed from a distance, the nature of the subject is obscured and one sees only white and black shapes that harmoniously coexist with one another.
From the piece of artwork “Rain at the Auvers”. I can see roofs of houses that are tucked into a valley, trees hiding the town, black birds, clouds upon the horizon, hills, vegetation, a dark stormy sky and rain.
Set in a barren storefront the sales man, Senor Sancho introduces the audience to his "used Mexican lot". Within the store, roughly a dozen models are stationed, immortalized in their eras. These models are the embodiment of the stereotypes that American society has imposed on the Mexican-Americans for the last several centuries. As Ms. Jimenez peruses the store in search of an appropriate Mexican-American to take to the governor’s luncheon, she critiques and rejects each model pres...
The Chicano history is a history of transformation based on conquest and struggle under a racial hierarchy. The Anglo-Americans’ intentions of creation of this racial foundation and segregating culture was to justify their act of assigning socio-economic functions to Mexican-Americans, limiting them to a cycle of exploitation and poverty. The meaning behind the contradiction of double aims was identified in El Plan de Santa Barbara’s manifesto and Menchaca’s Recovering History, which emphasized the neglect and distortion of Mexican-American history as a political act by Anglo-Americans to generate a negative, inferior image of these minorities, in comparison to their progressive “American” culture. This ultimately kept the two cultures unreconciled,
Life in Mexico was, before the Revolution, defined by the figure of the patron that held all of power in a certain area. Juan Preciado, who was born in an urban city outside of Comala, “came to Comala because [he] had been told that [his] father, a man named Pedro Paramo lived there” (1). He initially was unaware of the general dislike that his father was subjected to in that area of Mexico. Pedro was regarded as “[l]iving bile” (1) by the people that still inhabited Comala, a classification that Juan did not expect. This reveals that it was not known by those outside of the patron’s dominion of the cruel abuse that they levied upon their people. Pedro Paramo held...
It takes a while to process everything that is going on, but once you see the whole picture, the smaller details come out and are noticeable, even within the visually assaulting Square. The tall buildings are the first things you recognize; just the sheer size of them makes you feel like a tiny, unremarkable speck of dust. Each has its own character and was created with a unique design. A uniting factor of the buildings is the windows. The glass surface reflects the afternoon sun’s light, making a giant mirror from the buildings’ sides. The mirrors create an enormous hall of other building’s distorted reflections. Hanging from the buildings are advertisements for everything under the sun. Many billboards are for the different musicals that are going to be shown at Broadway soon; the classics, like West Side Story, Phantom of the Opera, Annie, and Wicked, are always there. Others are announcing the release of a new HP laptop, or Samsung HDTV. Some unveil a high fashion store’s new fall line of sweaters and jeans. Of course, there is the obligatory Coke commercial, telling you to enjoy a refreshing bottle of ice cold Coke.