blog #3

This week's reading about the mestizo painters' response to colonial art was fascinating to me. I have always thought it is amazing how much power is held in religious symbolism, not only in the art world, but also in literature, and even in the daily life of the common person (religious or not). The Virgin Mary in particular holds great significance for a wide range of people, especially in the Latino culture. I wanted to share the beginning of this poem, "The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica," by Ortiz Cofer:
"Presiding over a formica counter,
plastic Mother and Child magnetized
to the top of an ancient register,
the heady mix of smells from the open bins
of dried codfish, the green plantains
hanging in stalks like votive offerings,
she is the Patroness of Exiles,
a woman of no-age who was never pretty,
who spends her days selling canned memories
while listening to the Puerto Ricans complain..."

Though I am not Latina, or religious, I can see the importance of this strong and comforting symbol to a struggling, displaced culture. In fact, I am constantly surrounded by the effects of this symbol as I walk through my home that is filled with images of Christ and the Virgin Mary. After reading the section about the mestizo twist on the Madonna, I went downstairs to get a bowl of cereal and had to stop and take a closer look at the forty-some statuettes of Mary displayed in my living room, the precious collection of my step mother. A woman of Latin decent, my step mother and grew up in a time and atmosphere much different from my own, and though I can never fully understand where she came from, I can appreciate the symbols that are important to her world-view, and try to see the beauty in what those relatively foreign objects mean to the culture that raised her.

It is widely thought that many religious symbols have survived in different forms through very different religions... I won't get into that in detail here, but I think it is an intriguing concept and it makes the enduring attributes of art even that much more important in the flow of ideas from past to present...