After beginning a journey to retrace my history as a first-generation Mexican-American Chicana, this project started. I am documenting all this family history because all of our histories are orally passed down from generation to generation after they were erased from the history books. I’ve been photographing intimate moments between different family members, along with self-portraits of each of them. I plan to grow this project outside of my family and photograph the Latinx community in my hometown of Bryan, Texas, more commonly known as College Station. According to a study done in 2019 (Data USA), we make up 39.8% (33.5k people) of the Latinx population in my hometown. The study used the word Hispanic when describing us in this data. Hispanic emphasizes the Spanish experience of people of Latin American descent, focusing on the European component of mestizaje while diminishing or disregarding our indigenous roots. As an artist, I intentionally use the word Latinx to be inclusive of all races, ethnicities, and identities that exist within Latino America. With this work, I want to convey the story of my people, of their strength and resiliency, of a people who have survived beautifully even after facing oppression, racism, and erasure. I would like future generations of the Latinx community to understand how much our people sacrificed, how hard they worked, and for their families to have a better future.
