Perez 1

Antonio Perez

Mr. Khan

English 10 Period 1

September 30th, 2021

Cultures True Vision

Someone from America and hasn’t traveled much probably can’t even begin to visualize how
other cultures see American culture. When someone lived somewhere and grew up around
people who experience and teach the same culture, it can be a complete shock to understand how
people in other areas of the world live very different lives in very different areas. Culture is
taught through the families that have lived here, and their parents before, and is forever growing,
so expanding horizons past what we might know is quite a spectacle. I’d like to argue it takes
someone truly brilliant to document and understand the way another culture works in a small
time, and that’s exactly what Frida Kahlo has done in her painting, “Self-Portrait on the
Borderline Between Mexico and the United States.”

To begin, lots of cultures in families stem from background or local area, which can come from
family heritage. Knowing this, we can relate how culture is seen in Frida Kahlo’s painting. In
this painting, we see how she paints historical buildings or structures in Mexico. Many of these
buildings have very significant history, and are more than likely super important and understood
by Frida Kahlo. She uses other imagery too, representing the history of her well understood
culture in her area which we can compare to the other half of the painting. It’s also a great
example of how cultures can look at other countries or places and still be confused, and is not
only relatively American culture.

Next up, like I stated previously, experiencing or learning something new about a culture can be
scary. There are major differences from place to place, and seeing a new culture is to learn
something new. For example in Frida Kahlo’s painting we see how she relates the deep and rich
agriculture of Mexico to the industrial and capitalistic life of America. On the side that represents
her culture, there’s bountiful flowers and totems representing how heritage is expressed in places
like Mexico. Whereas in America there’s incredibly large skyscraper cities, and industrialized
buildings like Ford representing the lives Americans are understood to live by people in other
parts of the world. There's also the almost futuristic looking pipelines on the America side,
showing just how extremely different and scary these new world experiences can be. Yet
somehow Frida Kahlo manages to capture these understandings brilliantly.

From these depthy dives into the brilliance of Frida Kahlo’s work, we can start to think like her.
We can understand that, while understanding a whole millennium of culture is almost impossible,
it takes brilliant people to express themselves and show they are capable of illustrating the
culture divide into a piece of art.
 Perez 2

Work Cited:
Kahlo, Frida. Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States.
Springboard. New York, Collegeboard. 2017, 37.