Ni De Aqui Carpetas
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Fotos y Recuerdos emerges from a family photo album archive. These original photographs were scanned and reprinted in sepia tones on transparent photo paper, referencing their analog origins while reclaiming brown as a site of cultural identity and representation. Equally significant are the handwritten messages on the backs, intimate exchanges between my parents while separated by migration, my mother in Atotonilco and my father working in the farm fields of the San Joaquin Valley. I preserved the texts by scanning and printing them on semi-matte paper, maintaining the blue ink of the original pen. The images are physically constructed through layering, with transparencies mounted onto polycarbonate and backed by the handwritten texts, adhered with fragments of double-sided tape. This process collapses time and perspective, allowing front and back, image and language, memory and material to coexist simultaneously. Light passes through the work, casting shadows that extend the photographs into space, giving them weight and dimensionality while echoing digital layering processes in a tactile, embodied form.

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FOTOS Y RECUERDOS

ARTWORKS FROM THIS INSTALLATION

REFLEJOS

THEY TRIED TO BURY US, BUT THE DID NOT KNOW WE WERE SEEDS 

NI DE AQUÍ, NI DE ALLÁ

TODO LO QUE BRILLA 

FOTOS Y RECUERDOS

SPEAK ENGLISH! 

NO TE OLVIDES...

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No Te Olvides De Tu Cultura is an immersive installation that constists of seven artworks created from family photo archives, inherited objects, and sculptures modeled after my childhood home, a space built to hold memory, to be seen, and to be recognized as a site of healing and safety. Created during a period of deep isolation in San Francisco, this work became a way to return home when I could not physically be there, grounding me in the only thing that sustained me: my family, my culture, and the act of making. The installation parallels my mother’s life and my own, her journey from being born and raised in Mexico to coming to the United States as a wife, a mother, a farmworker, and a cannery worker, and the disorientation she feels when returning to a Mexico that has changed, mirroring my own sense of displacement moving between the Central Valley, Mexico, and San Francisco. We exist in a constant in-between, where belonging is never fixed, and this work lives in that tension. At its core is the quiet, persistent act of creation as survival: my mother’s intricate doilies and my photographs, sculptures, and installations become parallel languages of endurance, care, and expression. By bringing hay and dirt from the Central Valley into the space, filling it with the scent of home and the sounds of Mexican music, I invite the body to remember what the mind tries to hold onto. This work bridges past and present, honoring the labor, sacrifice, and resilience embedded in my family’s history while confronting the generational trauma shaped by discrimination, racism, and sexism. It is an offering, a reclamation, and a declaration that our stories, our labor, and our culture are not only worthy of being preserved, but of taking up space fully, unapologetically, and with love.

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NO TE OLVIDES DE TU CULTURA 

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