Storytelling can take on many forms. My Mexican Grandmother, or Nana, passed down stories to her American grandchildren through craft and folk art. As I weave together colors and figures on a canvas in my newly adopted Mexican home, I reflect on her visual storytelling, and the impact it has on my art. My curent collection is called Re-Generation.

Quilting played a very important role in my early childhood. Nana would create beautiful, abstract quilts for our family out of household fabrics, reused and repurposed. A prom dress became skirts, pants, or blankets. A laundry bag became a stuffed animal or even oven mitts, with beautiful latin flare - something mundane transformed into something memorable. As I’ve grown older, I realize I learned a lot about the use of objects and ephemera as artistic mediums, as well as abstraction and color blocking, from her creations. I love how she took her art and handed it down to her grandchildren as a way of passing down our traditions and cultures. These items weren’t simply oven mitts or blankets, they told a story of our family as they moved from Mexico to the United States and adapted to a new way of life in California. This intergenerational storytelling through stitchwork was very formative to my practice, even after Nana’s passing all those years ago. Now I’m telling my own immigration story -- moving back to Mexico from San Francisco -- through this series. As I stitch together color and form to tell my own story, I continue the history of my family and use what I learned from my Nana.

While many queer people have started to raise families, many more embraced their roles as Aunts and Uncles, investing in their extended families and in their community. Indeed, the majority -- like me -- will never have children, and will miss out on this seemingly effortless practice of intergenerational storytelling. This series, Re-Generation, is my attempt to pass down my stories in ways that echo previous generations. Just as my Nana chose quilting material that evoked memories, each color on the canvas represents one facet of queer culture that I relished or endured. That light pink is the color of the shirt I was wearing when I first got called a faggot in 4th grade. That mint green is the color of the walls of the English class that I hid in during lunch so I wouldn’t get beat up in junior high. That blue is the color of the first tab of molly I took at Long Beach Gay Pride in the Summer of 1995. That orange is the color that my husband and I painted our first home together. The significance of these colors, combined with the figures throughout, represent the love of my new life in Mexico.

My journey -- an extension of my family history -- informs the patterns of my paintings much the same way that my Nana pieced together quilts from pieces of her family's journey. The stories of my life as a queer person and as an American moving to Mexico will live on in this collection, contributing to the larger narrative of queer traditions and cultures in my communities.