For Mixing Cultures

            Because my father is a first generation immigrant from the Philippines and my mother is the product of a genealogy of pioneers from Europe, as I child I struggled to understand under what race I would be categorized.  When my little friends would meet my mom for the first time, they would see her blonde hair and blue eyes, and would be unable to make the connection of mother and daughter between us.  With my dad, I felt more comfortable with introductions; our connections were more obvious.  Now I’ve realized that I don’t specifically identify my appearance to either one entirely.  I believe I’m a complete mix.  Though the brown of my eyes are easily seen as a reflection of my father’s, the lids that house them are in the form of my mother’s.

            It is in my genealogical roots that I wished to find the answers of who I was.  I would daydream of what life was like in the Philippines, with only idealistic photos from travel books and my own imagination to guide me.  In this piece, I wished to represent what that sort of looked like in my mind.  When looking through a bunch of paintings, I found the work of Vicente Manansala, who is a cubist from the mid 1900s.  The bright colors and basic forms he uses to create a pieced together world are similar to the visions I often try to form in my head.  I specifically chose the piece “Prayer before Meal”, because there are only a few details that my father would share with me, including the fact that his mother was very strict about prayers as a family and the Sabbath day observance. 

            For me this piece became the physical representation of the imaginations I’ve had since I was a child.  Like Jenkins says in his article “How Texts Become Real,” I formed an immediate fondness to Manansala’s type of painting, because it replicates the feelings I have created for myself in my own mind.  To me, because of this connection, the original intent of the painter may be lost on me now that I have my own purpose of viewing his work.

            To combine this idea with my feelings about my mother’s heritage, I found a more realistic painting of farmland landscape on which she grew up on and that her ancestors had been accustomed to.  This image is more realistic to me, because I’ve visited the birthplace of my mother and seen the landscapes she had seen when she grew up.  Overlaying this image with the painting by Manansala, emulates the feeling that I am not defined by one culture or the other, but rather an exploration of what the two become blended together.