community. She may be able to relate to them as a woman but the intersectionality of being Latina and a woman is something that Delphine, as an Anglo Saxon identifying artist cannot relate to. With that said, Marivel T. Danielson in Homecoming Queers talks about using art as a weapon to speak out against the patriarchy and being heard as a minority. One could argue that Blast uses her work to punch the patriarchy and to remain politically and socially conscious. She also uses her work to spread awareness about the struggles of the Latinax community and therefor is being politically and socially informative to the general community. It is important for her, as a French artist, to bring her work back to her community in order to raise awareness about the socioeconomical state of young girls in Bogotá in 2014.5 In order to sympathize with the Latino community, it’s important for one to understand how they view and understand the world. A lot of the Latino family culture and upbringing
revolves around traditional Catholic morals, and spirituality, the idea that the elderly will be taken care of by their children rather than being placed in an elderly home. A Latino child must be “bien educados” meaning well mannered. It is a a highly pressured cultural system that uses emotional manipulation in order to achieve a well rounded child. Within this “highly pressured cultural system” also referred to as La Familia there are a lot of hierarchies, roles, and scripts to follow. Keeping expectations about “respeto” for elders is imperative. Each member of the family has their intricate role. There are multiple faceted roles that go into it, making it an entirely convoluted social system. Certain factors like, being an only child, birth order, independence, immigration, stereotypes of the “machismo” father and how that affects the gender roles in the entire family. Marianismo in particular a social behavior associated with Catholicism and the Virgin Mary that is sets the expectations and mindsets for young girls that sets gender
roles such as expecting a woman to “know her place”, not forsake tradition, be dependent, not discuss personal problems, depend on a men and become a housewife. The dangerous part is that it is learned by both men and women, so not only are women expected to behave this way but men are, in fact, reinforcing this ideology.6 The social pressures from the complex Latino cultural influences is definitive in the Blast’s photographs. The captions discuss what the girls aspire to be, and how hard the parents worked to put the production on. Some of them costing millions of pesos. This again reinforces the gender and social pressures delegated to an adolescent latina.
Remezcla Rosie Molinary, Hijas Americanas (17-22) 5 Marivel T. Danielson, Homecoming Queers (168-170) 6 Patricia Arredondo, Maritza Gallardo-Cooper, Edward A. Delgado-Romero, Angela L. Zapata, Culturally Responsive Counseling with Latina/os (15-23) 1 3
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