My mother immigrated to the US from Mexico shortly before I was born. She was still so young, still discovering herself as she became separated from her home and family. Growing up, I watched her grapple with this physical, psychological, and cultural distance. I saw her longing for both assimilation into her new country and retained closeness to her place of origin. She developed a necessarily malleable sense of self and transient sense of home, which she has expressed through her ever revolving wardrobe and affinity for fast fashion. I’m interested in this relationship between cultural longing and commodities, including the commodity of land.

Tropes in European art history which coincide with eras of colonial expansion in Mexico serve as starting points for analyzing relationships between the seductive aesthetics of Western colonialism and cultural desire and identity formation.

I photograph textiles belonging to women in my family, composed similarly to the 16th century Spanish still lives popularized during the empire’s Golden Age of colonial wealth. I photograph my mother in her many hair pieces, which she uses to shift between her nuanced identities of Latina, Mexicana and Tehuana. These images take aesthetic cues from Dutch portraits in the 17th century, the peak era of cochineal red dye trade by the Dutch East India Company. Finally, lush landscapes and ruins of the North American West reference the 19th century romantic notions of Westward expansion leading up to the Mexican-American War and subsequent surveys for the Tehuantepec Railroad.

Working from the perspective of my family’s Zapotec heritage, and the tension between my own whiteness and Latinidad, this project examines cultural longing, geographical transience, systems of commerce, and notions of beauty.