Latorre: Cultivated from a cultural group that initially wrote off gender and sexuality issues as specific to Anglo Americans, the innovative Chicana movement does not have nearly enough scholarly visibility as it should.
Lopez: Lopez evokes the experiences of latina women through modernizing the Virgen de Guadalupe in her digital print entitled Our Lady.
After reading both pieces by Latorre and Lopez along with doing some more outside research of my own, I found the initial ambivalence of Chicana artists to identify with the feminist movement interesting. A particular passage in Latorre’s piece comes to mind when thinking about this quandary: “Concerns over gender and sexuality were either relegated to the margins or completely silenced. Many activists at the time, both male and female, held the perception that these were Anglo-American issues that would divide el movimiento and dilute its political effectivemness.” Latorre p.12
However, in the first few pages of Lopez’s piece Silencing Our Lady, we see that this belief is proven to be wrong. In fact, it seems as though the activists use the excuse of political dilution to mask their real concern of bringing the issues of gender and sexuality within the community to light. Unsurprisingly, we see this represented in the violent attitudes of men toward young women in reaction to the digital mural that portrayed female residents of the Estrada Courts Housing Projects entitled Las Four (below).
Source: http://www.rowan.edu/artbytes/abnhtm/art/alma.htm
Lopez’s digital piece Our Lady, which features a more contemporary, sexualized version of the Virgen de Guadalupe also sparked an intense debate spear headed mostly by male religious leaders. Because this piece accentuates female strength and freedom through such an iconic religious figure, we see (as we did in the reaction to her Las Four piece) patriarchy’s attempt to censor and stifle anything that is not dominated by, or pleasing to men.