My art #1: The smile

In a beautiful town that we usually visit, while enjoying of delicious "empanadas",something happened that little we imagined could happen. It happened that just the nephew of the lady with more pronounced features of Afro-descendence, was a victim, within her own environment, of endoracism. It turns out that what we now call "people", understanding this word as a place away from the city, noise, traffic ... full of customs rooted over time, has become a name quite far from reality. In this place there is no house, no matter how humble it may be that it does not have a satellite connection, and this already says a lot, since all the standards of life, of beauty, of thought, are gathered in a range of TV channels that poison your mind even the smallest child in the family.

And that day, a boy with a weak smile and African roots, could hardly be seen. He was a child embarrassed to have darker skin than his cousins, and it was quite risorio since in terms of degradation the tone of his skin was only a darker shade than that of his relatives..

These children, in the middle of the game and the mockery, were unconsciously forging the most accepted standard by western society, if you are "black", you can not escape an insult because you have been for more than five centuries one of the most beaten by humanity. Sometimes it is unthinkable that we still live these situations today, especially if you are in a society where it is difficult to find a person who does not have afro features. This happens here and in any part of the world, more and more, we are hiding our roots, ignoring our ancestors. We straighten our hair, we operate our noses, we whiten our skin, we perfume our natural smell. Even today in the twenty-first century we want to be who we will never be. The search for men and women is based on resembling the other, and in order to become part of the ideal of "beauty", we destroy ourselves, we poison ourselves, we make up and we flagellate ourselves, thus nullifying diversity of thought, diversity of races, in short cultural diversity. With this drawing I wanted to capture the separation that exists between what we would like to be and what we really should be, which is the same separation between what we were and what we are. The dividing line of the drawing is the strip that moves us, human beings, away from freedom. This work entitled The Smile of an Afro-descendant, is the portrait of a child, who despite living racism from such an early age, and unaware of the strength of their roots, maintains the naive smile of childhood.