Chicano Identity & Movement

This is a fuck ton of random notes
from my past three semester packets
that hold potential to become content
for the GARDEN ALTAR, and
the final version of the Imago DEIsign book.

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Making History In Real Time

The arts don’t just reflect reality but have the opportunity to create it.

What then is the responsibility of the artist to the self and to the community to create healthy and equitable realities? Gaslighting is also a form of shaping reality that lands under the category of relationship abuse. How do we teach artists to create and shape reality in responsible ways? How do we avoid creating “martyrs” and “saviors?”

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Telling Our Own Stories

Vulnerable spaces, and brave conversations require a facilitator/ leader who can mediate and help ove the group through moments when people either do not understand, or disagree.

Why is it important to incorporate narrative into the Graphic Deisng Education Curriculum?

Alongside fundamental concepts concerning desing elements and principles such as grid, hierarchy, semiotics, color, line, plane, pattern etc. What are students learning in this space? How does this additional learning factor into career and culture making?

What do students want/ need

I don’t know that design pedagogy
gave us tools to process this.

How to listen/ witness/ ask permission to provide feedback

“De-capitalizing my design practice” is a fancy way of saying “I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my shit.”

Capitalism is an approximation of freedom that exists one step outside of a slavery economy.

-Jenna Worhtheim, Still Processing

mexicanism =
doing the most with the least (the material qualities of the altars)

The true measure of success is a calm nervous system.

WE ARE NOT OBJECTIVE
Our Identity and Our Motivations

To talk about identity is to talk about the self and the concept of the self; the knowledge, beliefs memories, expectations, tendencies, and understandings each person has, that define them as unique individuals and also as members of families and other social groups. Identity defines people and deeply informs and gives meaning to every aspect of their lives. It informs what people think they deserve and provides the measure of their worth, both to themselves and frequently to others. It shapes what people think they are capable of accomplishing, and thus helps to shape what they end up choosing to do and not do.

Because your identity is at base, in large part a set of beliefs, it can be examined and altered using cognitive techniques such as cognitive restructuring as described above. Indeed, the use of cognitive restructuring techniques to challenge beliefs about the necessity of depression or anxiety in your life can lead to an alteration of your identity. As you use the cognitive technique to challenge and re-challenge your beliefs successfully, those beliefs start to change. As your beliefs change, so too does your identity.

Before you can have any hope of making changes to your identity with cognitive or other techniques, however, you must first decide that exploring your identity is a worthwhile thing to do. Some people resist identity exploration. They may (mistakenly) assume that they are already perfect; that their current perspective on things is the sole and only correct one to have and that any problems they might be experiencing are caused by other people (a mistake known as "externalization", described below). Alternatively, they may lack the necessary insight or intelligence required to realize that their experiences are filtered through the lens of their identity and perspective. Such people fundamentally don't get the idea of identity, naively assume that everyone else must see themselves and the world as they do, and never realize that it is important to pay attention to individual perspectives.

Source

We incapable of non-objectivity.

I read a quote in high school that said “Every work of art is a self-portrait” and I suddenly had an intimate entry point to artists work. Instead of asking “What is this about” I had a juicier question “What are you hiding in there?” I found that the more I learned about an artist, through reading memoirs and biographies, the more I was able to decode the secrets hidden in plain sight. Pablo Picasso used abstraction to paint portraits of his mistresses—he’s not a genius, he’s a liar! I find the more I understand the human psyche, the more I am able to decode the work even without a biography, and the more I am willing to look at the subconscious parts of myself through my own work. Self portraits give us the distance we need to look at the messy parts, or our shadow-self with compassion and curiosity, this is why I love making them. The revelation that exists in that practice, the fearless and open dialogue with my subconscious self is a practice of self-love as opposed to self-rejection disguised as self-protection. In that realm I also find beautiful surprises, stories, and passions passed down from relatives and ancestors.

Creation is spiritual communion. It’s where I see and hear the voice of GOD, the voices of my ancestors, and the voice of every version of myself that I have been. I want to continue my narrative writing practice and make more self-portraits from those stories.

Integrity

Glennon Doyle’s ONE thing.

In describing the key to her sobriety, Glennon Doyle references
that her ONE THING is what keeps her sober,
going on to explain that this ONE THING is integrity.
Glennon explains her understanding of integrity
and it’s root tapping into the concept of integration.
Being whole.

Integrity is being all of oneself in every place, all the time.
Integrity means not hiding.

Untamed, Glennon Doyle

assignment idea
Redemption Narrative VS Contamination Narrative

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

Hidden Brain podcast

We all tell stories about ourselves, often without realizing we’re doing so. How we frame those stories can profoundly shape our lives. In the kickoff episode to our monthlong series on healing, psychologist Jonathan Adler shares how to tell our stories in ways that enhance our wellbeing.

Jonathan Adler spent much of his young adulthood, feeling unsatisfied and yearning for more. He says he was gay, but didn’t feel comfortable coming out. He spent a semester in Australia to break free of the constraints of his college life in Maine, but found that he was just as lonely on another continent. Sometime after he returned to the United States, however, Jonathan came by the work of a pioneering scientist in a field known as narrative psychology. Dan McAdams at Northwestern University argued that the stories we tell about our lives have profound effects on our webby. Jon moved to Northwestern, became Dan PhD student, and later, his scientific collaborator in time Jonathan came to see his own life through the lens of his research. He realized that he had been telling the story of his life in a way that was self-defeating, and he came to see that by telling that story differently, it could make a profound difference.

Jonathan to explain to me the basic idea behind narrative psychology.

You can’t totally control the things that happen to you in your life, you have some more say about how you make sense of it and it’s important to remember we’re talking about stories here so we know from research on memory that we’re not very good at recording the objective facts of our experience for a long time that frustrated cognitive scientist, but in more recent years is become clear that our memory works like this for a good reason. If you think about why we have memory in the first place, it’s not so we can hold onto every single thing that’s happened to us in some vertical way, we have memories so that we can make sense of what’s happening to us right now, and anticipate what might happen next. So if you walk by a cave and a bear jumps out you don’t necessarily need to remember that cave and that bear, you need to remember that dangerous things might hide in dark places so the slippery reconstructive nature of memory is a feature of the system, not a bug and stories are an amazing tool for holding onto the meaning of our past experiences. The objective facts of our lives are what they are, but the stories are about where we draw connections between things where we park the chapter breaks of our lives. Those are narrative acts, not historical acts, and the way we do that can have big implications for our well-being, and McCadams found one of the most crucial choices we make is how we tell our stories.

It’s important to underscore that most of us make these choices unconsciously. What we find in the research is that where we draw connections between the negative and the positive matters a lot so stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good we call that a redemption sequence and stories that start good and end bad we call that a contamination sequence. The redemption sequence is “something bad happened to you but you rise from the ashes.” A contamination sequence is “things are “going pretty well but then something bad happens to you and then everything is downhill from there.” One story has an upward trajectory, the other one has a downward trajectory. This is how we narrate the experience.

use the Moon is up project as inspiration

Embodiment

Neuroscience now recognizes that the brain and the body are so intertwined that they cannot be thought of separately. Cognitive science, which as recently as 30 years ago was a field intent on understanding cognition as a closed system, has begun—based on a broad swath of interdisciplinary research—to embrace the theory that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (the 4E cognition model). These ideas are no longer a fringe movement. Even psychotherapy is embracing more embodied techniques to treat trauma and to supplement talk therapy.

What would it mean to live in a world in which we understand that the body has knowledge and subjectivity? Or rather that part of our “thinking” process happens in the body.  Embodiment is not an idea. It is not a theory. It is a state of being in which you feel connected and attuned to your body and senses. It is a state in which the mind listens to the body. Ultimately, it is a state of being in which the division between mind and body dissolves.

You feel embodiment when you drop down from your thinking mind into the feeling body.

What is ADHD?

from Reddit’s “Explain it to me like I’m five”

At the most fundamental level, the simplest way to think about ADHD is that the front part of your brain is supposed to control the rest of your brain but it has trouble doing that. So, people with ADHD can have trouble directing their thoughts, controlling their attention, remembering things (or recalling the memory when they want it, their memory is fine, it’s just their control over the memory center is wonky), emotional regulation, sitting still or fidgeting (poor control of the motor center), and so on. But the thing is different people can have some of these more affected than others. So, one person can have a terrible memory and another can have more trouble with emotional regulation but they aren’t that forgetful. Which can make adhd look very different person to person.

But that’s not really the full story. Imagine you have asthma, but you live in a world where running is the most important thing in life. You’re taught from the time you’re a little kid that to be a successful adult you need to be a good runner. As such, school is nothing but gym class all day. You come home and have exercise homework. All your chores are exercise chores (maybe you have to run on a treadmill to power the dishwasher or something, just go with it lol). But you have undiagnosed and untreated asthma.

How would you feel about yourself and your performance in this world? Would you feel accomplished and sure of yourself? Or would you feel like you’re never good enough, that you’re always failing at tasks you’re asked to do, and that everything kind of always seems to suck for you?

Probably the latter. And this is really at the heart of what it’s like living with ADHD. Because in our world we’re not asked to “run”, but we’re expected to use all of the executive function skills affected by ADHD at a high level, constantly day in and day out. We’re expected to sit still, not fidget, pay attention, remember large volumes of complicated information and details, remember basic information like the name of the new person you just met, to control and regulate our emotions and our actions, and so on. And because we have adhd, we struggle with these things so, invariably, regardless of which particular adhd things we struggle with, we all feel like we’re constantly failing or messing up at, well, life.

If I could only ask my patients one question to determine if they had ADHD or not, it’d be that one: do you feel like you mess up or fail a lot, and how long have you felt that way? In the end, the only question that truly matters. It doesn’t matter what specific things they mess up at. It only matters how doing these adhd things makes them feel, and the answer, invariably, is that it makes them feel terrible.

A lesson on procrastination

There is a sweet spot where procrastination serves as a vital component in the role of creativity. People who tend to procrastinate are more creative, and the trick to this—is they aren’t running with their first idea—they’re giving the problem some time to incubate until they reach their best idea. Procrastination allows the brain to subconsciously process the solution, and that subconscious processing is where deep creativity lives.

Be wary though dear dilly-dallyers! Procrastinating for too long can sabotage your creativity as you may not have enough time to execute your best idea.

Making procrastination work for you requires two things!

1. An awareness of the time you’re gonna need to pull off your best idea when you find it.

2. A deep interest in solving the problem at hand. Boredom and procrastination are a lethal combo!

courtesy of the Hidden Brain Podcast Series You 2.0

“Isn’t this the purpose of education?
To learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?”

—Robin Wall Kimmerer

Privilege allows us to go back and pick up what our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and ancestors were forced to drop by colonial oppression. In America, this applies to every group of people, as 'The United States of AMERICA’ is an alien idea, a nefariously formed system of colonization and supremacy that has forcefully demanded that people—the indigenous population, and every immigrant/refugee who has come to this land since—assimilate toward its values and systems.

True assimilation would be that the immigrant populations drop their imperial colonial ways, and integrate learning/ways of being from native populations into their culture. Maybe I’m being overly idealistic here, but real assimilation would have preserved language, culture, ecosystems, and health, while also avoiding tremendous amounts of death and violence.

Everyday White Supremacy - the view from being of “American Born” Mexican, and white pedigree. AKA “Sh*t my white family says when there are no “pocs” around (this is also an illustration of the erasure I experienced as they NEVER considered what they were saying in front of me.) In my Latiné culture, Colorism and Gatekeeping are ONCE AGAIN white supremacy outsourcing its labor onto us.