Artist Statement:
As a Mexican immigrant, I experience a place called the Borderlands first hand. Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldua describes it as the following:
“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.“
Excerpt from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua, originally published in 1987.
This liminal experience manifests from the ambiguity and uncertainty of living in the United States as someone with a hybridized identity: Mexican, American, Texan, brown, other. My body of work is a representation of this liminal space in which the uncertainty and fear become a spatial representation of the Borderlands. The works were inspired by the current political climate surrounding the proposed border wall, anti-immigrant rhetoric, a boom in immigration detention centers, bigotry, and racism.
