¿Qué hay del otro lado? / What's on the Other Side?

2025

This body of work explores repair, resilience, and uncertainty within the migratory experience, the way identity, memory, and belonging are carried across borders and reimagined on the other side. Trayecto I, a scroll of cochineal-dyed Japanese paper joined by hand stitching, maps a journey through fragmentation. The breaks in the line and the repetition of landscape mirror how memory transforms each time it is revisited. Alongside it, cochineal-dyed papers hang freely, the way clothes once hung in my home in Mexico. Their abstract forms, suggesting path, movement, and change, hold something familiar yet transformed, caught between two places. Magnolia Map works through absence and presence: a flower embossed into paper, familiar in Mexico, yet here a symbol of the American South, the same form carrying two geographies. The linocut What's on the Other Side? represents the journey from Guadalajara to Memphis through two contrasting lines — one warm, one cool. The work explores how names and categories such as "Mexican" take on new meaning and consciousness when living between contexts, across a geographic contrast. Together, these works sit with the instability of belonging and the ongoing labor of holding something together across distance.