Self Portrait: My Hometown
In May of 2015, I took my uncle's old Leica M6 to Aurora, IL, the place of my birth, in an attempt to create some cursory representation of the town's significant Hispanic population: not necessarily the people, but the things (businesses, language, spaces) they create. What began as an attempt to look at other people quickly became a self portrait. Is it possible, I wondered, that an image of a place can represent a person's internal questions of identity? In capturing storefronts and businesses in Aurora, the reflection of myself in windows soon began to resemble what Olafur Eliasson called "seeing yourself seeing": noticing one's place outside of something, looking in.
As a part-Mexican woman, I have always felt that Hispanic culture played an important part in my life. Yet the nostalgia I feel around taquerias, quinceanera dresses, panaderias, Hispanic religious iconography, the Spanish language itself -- I realize that these are misplaced. The reality is that these archetypes with which I feel such a close connection actually had little to no influence on my life, yet I regard them as a part of me.
Jaya Saxena described the bi-racial experience as being "an intruder in two spaces": not belonging to any culture, yet feeling some ownership of many, whatever form that may take. These images, then, are as much a documentation of a place as they are a record of experiencing that place: revisiting. Looking in from the outside. Attempting to understand, reconcile, or claim through observation.
featured in
Unidos (More than One) Side Street Studio Arts
MAY 2015
