Woman with a Sad Iron Inside a Wooden House

CSAST - 2008 (453)

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín > Colección Samuel Santiago > Carpeta 9 (Vivienda a bajo costo)

Municipio desconocido | Unknown Municipality

[19--]

Title assigned by the cataloging team.

A barefoot, pregnant woman with a sad iron stands over a makeshift ironing board, as her child watches. The viewer occupies the vision of the child with his back turned to the camera, as we bear witness to the burdens of domestic labor borne by women in rural Puerto Rico in the twentieth century. The humble wooden structure is starkly decorated aside from a calendar advertising sliced white “Merita” brand bread with an image of an Anglo-Saxon cowboy “The Lone Ranger” and his Indigenous sidekick “Tonto” (literally translating in Spanish as “idiot”). The ad articulates paragons of white settler colonialism and consumerism in the United States. The exportation of the US dream clashes with day-to-day struggles for survival in Puerto Rico. The juxtaposition of domestic scenes and commercial branding unveils the complexities of impoverished lives, where daily struggles intersect with the influence of consumer culture in a challenging socio-economic landscape. Through the window we see that a new concrete structure is being built as an element of the family's progress that contrasts with the image of the humble wooden residence.

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Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín

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