Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art

Patssi Valdez’s “A Room of One’s Own”

130 Q As traffic sped by on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles in 1974, Gronk, a member of the Chicano art collective Asco, taped fellow member Patssi Valdez to the exterior of a liquor store.1 On Valdez’s left, and not shown in the most popular photo-documentation of this performance piece, Instant Mural, is Asco affiliate Humberto Sandoval, whose body was also bound to the wall by Gronk (fig. 8). Their taped bodies were part of Asco’s commentary on the many Chicano movement murals of East Los Angeles in the 1970s. Asco felt that the Aztec symbols and Mexican nationalist iconography of these murals did not represent their experiences as young urban Chicana/os growing up in East L.A. Instead of drawing upon nationalist emblems, Valdez, Gronk, and the other original members of Asco—Willie Herrón and Harry Gamboa Jr.—fashioned their political statements using a pastiche of visual subcultures, including mod, glamour, and later punk.2 Valdez’s look and demeanor in Instant Mural evokes East L.A. glamour , which itself derives from pachuca fashion, a female version of pachuco or zoot-suiter style from the 1940s. In the pachuca tradition, she wears short shorts, black platform shoes, coiffed hair, and dramatic eye makeup, elements of dress that counter cultural and gendered ideologies that have cast Chicanas as demure and submissive (Fregoso 2003; Ramírez 2009).3 With fishnet stockings and eyecatching jewelry, Valdez combines East L.A. glamour with a punk aesthetic that anticipates the Chicana punk look that would emerge in East L.A. later in the decade. Valdez’s image in the photo-documentation demonstrates Chicana punks’ investment in disrupting accepted notions of femininity. It also embodies punk’s playful disregard for the serious and sacred.4 Valdez’s use of fashion and performance to comment on gender and sexual norms pervades her paintings and set designs of domestic interiors for theater and film today. Valdez is now a well-known painter and set designer whose solo c h a p t e r 5 Patssi Valdez’s “A Room of One’s Own” self-fashioning, glamour, and domesticity in the museum and hollywood Patssi Valdez’s “A Room of One’s Own” 131 art extends her earlier focus on glamour and beauty in Asco to the sites of the domestic, costume, dress, and masquerade. This work can be viewed in major museum exhibitions and collections, including at the Smithsonian, and her set designs of domestic interiors can be seen in the few big-budget Chicana/o-directed motion pictures of Hollywood, such as Gregory Nava’s Mi Familia (1995) and Jose Luis Valenzuela’s Luminarias (1999). Several academic and mainstream publications in the last ten years have also included Valdez’s paintings on their covers.5 Valdez’s art work has also been featured at the National Council of La Raza Alma Awards, which honor outstanding Latina/o artistic achievement in television, film, and music, as well as at the Latin Grammies. The popularity of Valdez’s visual art in these spaces has created a recognizable Chicana artistic representation of domesticity in the mainstream. While these new artistic mediums and spaces, in addition to focusing on the domestic, might appear to depart from her multimedia and urban site-specific work with Asco, her paintings and set designs share similarities with her earlier work. They each use the sites of fashion and dress to comment on the role of glamour and domesticity in the construction of Chicana subjectivity. They also interrogate glamour and gender identity through a focus on the domestic. In Asco,Valdez focused on fashion and glamour to make her statements on domesticity , and as a solo artist, Valdez turns to interrogating the space of the domestic itself, while still concentrating on the tropes of dressing and performance that were central to her work with Asco. Valdez’s Asco performances commented on Figure 8. Asco, Instant Mural, 1974. Pictured are Gronk and Patssi Valdez. Photograph by Harry Gamboa Jr., courtesy of the artist. 132 Domesticana the multiple layers of urban life, and her art today is centered on the everyday textures of domestic life. Her paintings “stage a highly personal theatre.”6 Taken together, Valdez’s body of work can be considered an artistic interrogation of space and domesticity. In this chapter, I argue that Valdez’s performances with Asco and her solo art demonstrates a...