Seeing and Being Seen

Personally I have never felt tokenized because as a Latina woman I know how easy it is to be such in a situation where you feel like your worth is only in what you represent and not what you can bring to the table. While I understand that in certain situations people want to hear or need the perspective of a certain group of people and that is always welcomed being a token of a community is completely different I have seen this used plenty of times in my life and have tried my hardest to avoid it. When people first meet me I assume that I have faced many challenges in my life because of the place I came from and because of my ethnicity. I never grew up wealthy but my parents always made sure that I had everything I needed. Another assumption of the typical Latina girl is that we live under the reign of this “machista” household where the man of the house is controlling but that was not my case.

While my father was strict on me it had more to do with my studies he made sure that I knew what his expectations were of me and that was to go to college and get a career; not to be a good housewife or mother. Many of the women in my life have resented me because of this my mom did not teach me how to cook from a young age and I have always been pretty messy. My aunts and uncles always thought that my parents were too easy on me and that they were not raising me to be a good Latina girl, this was hard on me as a grew up because i was not this token Latina women and I still do not strive to be the idea that my family members have of the token Latina women because I know that it is not my path in life. I feel that in a lot of ways my family has come to the conclusion that I am neglecting my Mexican  roots and look down on them which makes it hard for me to relate to many of my older family members.

Free Writing on Essay One

I want to explore my idea of identity through my family. I want to talk and write about how my identity was effected because the majority of my family are immigrates. Through the lens of my childhood eyes and then further on how i see it now. My family from the very beginning was very open to me about our situation and i always knew that my parents and brother faced a certain danger in this country and I even got to see this play out first hand when my father was deported 16 years ago but i know that not everyone’s family was so open because hearing the stories of others as i moved out to San Francisco i see that many people lived with the secret their whole lives. I heard a story of a person who’s younger cousins is not even aware shes an immigrant. I think especially today i am effected because of my brother’s situation and because of his line of work, my brother is an immigrant but he is also an aspiring lawyer and works for a low cost immigration law firm in the city and also has been a person who has been very outspoken about current issues. I’ve attended speeches he’s done on the steps of city hall I’ve read all the articles he’s been featured in, and witnessed some of the many news interviews he’s done as well as been a part of a short documentary which featured my brother and two other young immigrants in a similar situation as his. My brother has always been such an inspiration to me and through his work i have been able to see how your words could make a change.

Outline Essay One

• My idea of identity through my family
• How literacy can make a change
• The examples in my life that I’ve seen it make a change
• How I’ve implemented these things in my life/ how I plan to implement them more in my life in the future

Audio Essay Discussion

For me the hardest part of the essay will definitely be the the technical part of the audio essay. I am not the best when it comes to technology, this assignment will push me to try new forms of websites and files to make my audio essay better. After taking Music of the Americas and doing musical audio biographies i have a better understanding of soundscapes and the ways music can be used to interpret identity so i look forward to using what I learned in that class in this assignment. I was excited to seethe option to use a family or friend because I already have some ideas on who and what I want to write about.

The Graffiti Community and Bikes

Its interesting to see how graffiti is used to show the of different bike communities and how each piece targets a specific audience depending on where it is located.

Hello Class I’m Vanessa Gomez I’m a Marketing Major and my presentation today is going to be on Bicycles in art. Because my time is so limited I wanted to focus in specifically sculptures involving bicycles. I wanna start off with Pablo Picassos famous Bull Head. Picasso is a known innovator who always. Here Picasso uses old pieces of a bicycle to create a bulls head. Picasso always wanted to find beauty and art in everything . He wanted to show people how thing he found discarded s tried to not only push himself but also people’s ways of thinking could be art. I wanna transition now into modern uses of bicycles. Artist are using bicycles as a way to change the way people view conventional sculptures. most artist now move away from the fact that using a bike is unconventional on its own but try and touch on the meaning behind what they use. Essentially without the chains the bike wouldn’t function. Now here the artist names his pieces things like, Mediation, Anguish, and Nirvana, all things which could be considered pivotal to human life. The artist Young-Deok Seo is amazing what he is able to create by welding chains together is absolutely incredible and out of every sculpture I saw his truly captivated me. Jason de Caires is a huge advocate for environmental issues and uses his art to not only bring attention to the issues of marine life conservation but also includes his art as part of the solution. Jason’s sculptures are located to enhance the reef, making natural use of its varied topography of marine life. This piece is part of the Grenada underwater sculpture park which is the world’s first underwater sculpture gallery. The use o the bike here can be used as a double meaning promotion the idea of environmental consciousness of riding bikes while also using it in his piece for marine life conservation. Mark Grieve and Llana Spector reclaimed bikes from recycling centers to form this 30 foot high archway for burning man held in the Nevada desert. Bike shop owner Christian Peterson came up with the clever concept to mount the shop’s entire inventory of 120 bicycles on the exterior wall of the store. Not only does it bring them free advertising but it also doubles as a cool sculpture.