My Mother Told Me I Was Chinese. The Painting Lesson
Campos-Pons brings up identity politics by discussing her Chinese heritage in terms of her blackness. Children of the diaspora, are not estranged from the intersectionality of life. However, Maria Magdalena expresses the effects of the limits that identity politics place on her experiences of her complex existence.
This exhibition is composed of two pieces that work to paint her experiences with identity politics together. I will be focusing on the paintings. In the center of a collection of disconnected images, Maria paints herself in traditional Chinese garb. However, her black skin and features are heavily prevalent under the white that has been painted over her skin. The figure is masked to look the part of her heritage, yet she doesn’t fit the conventional look because of the presence of her blackness. Maria Magdalena paints her Chinese heritage through the lense of her black skin because the coexistence of both identities inform her definition of each. In addition, this image can be seen through a different lense: she cannot define her blackness without her Chinese heritage. Maria tells us that the Chinese part of her family also lived in Cuba and worked on sugar cane plantations along side her African ancestors as indentured servants (Unknown2). Either way, she is trying to reconnect with her roots. The geometrical portraits surrounding her resemble shattered glass. Further illustrating the disconnect that diasporic communities experience with their past.
Maria Magdalena acknowledges the complexity of identity by illustrating how the intersections of her own identities are crucial to her definition of any singular one. She is a Cuban woman of Black and Chinese ancestry. And once she moves to the United States she becomes a Afro-Latinx Cuban artist with Chinese ancestry. American identity politics make her identity become more communal, threatening to exclude her Chinese ancestry from being acknowledged. Yet, her art works against this limiting system that threatens to generalize and simplify people’s experience. This causes a lack of representation and misrepresentation when it is present. She paints her blackness as being inseparable from her Chinese ancestry, which at the same time illustrates how her Cuban identity is composed by this perception of her multi-ethnic background.