Ofrendas/
Altars
2024
Staged assemblage, photographed with text/typography overlaid using design software. Connecting a visual dialogue between materiality, memory, and transformation.
Objects—both found and fabricated—are carefully arranged, each carrying its own weight of history, function, or cultural significance.
Every installation begins with a writing process, where themes woven through narrative essays take shape as elements of the altar. Sample essays are provided here, with the ultimate goal of publishing this collective work as a unified project.
In traditional practice, the Ofrenda—or altar—is a living entity, tended like a garden with care and intention. It acts as a portal: a sacred threshold for welcoming ancestral spirits, forging covenants, offering gratitude, and paying tribute to our Creator.
My Ofrendas are layered, lyrical constructions—poetic constellations of image and memory—that trace my journey from girlhood to liberated womanhood, and into the tangled terrain of marriage, where the struggle for spiritual sovereignty demands a return to origin.
Each altar marks a chapter in an ongoing feminist, spiritual, and decolonial pilgrimage toward self-love, healing, and freedom. These resonant, jewel-toned assemblages—composed of symbolic elements like flowers, makeup, confections, and candles—reimagine devotion through the lens of lived experience. Their titles arc above them like crowns or cathedral arches, naming and framing each offering in tender defiance.
Ella Habla Mucho
She Talks Too Much
Ella Habla Mucho/She Talks Too Much captures my experience growing up in the 80s and 90s as a mixed-race Chicana while living in one of Los Angeles’s most conservative suburbs. Documenting my childhood and my family’s histories is a pilgrimage interwoven with excavating the origins of internalized racism and generational trauma. In this journey, I find a thread that connects Barbie to Malinché to Guadalupe, unraveling a story that eventually reaches all the way back to the Pre-Columbian Tonantzin (holy mothers) of the Mexica people.
No Tienes Vergüenza
She Has No Shame
No Tienes Vergüenza/She Has No Shame documents acts of liberatory pleasure while de-capitalizing, de-Catholicizing, and decolonizing my mind, body, and spirit—an endeavor filled with humor, frustration, failure, and triumph. Along the way, I discard the misplaced shame imposed by institutions, expectations, and inherited narratives, trading it for radical self-love and autonomy. I learn that perfection is a myth, that as long as there is breath in our lungs, we remain a work in progress—and that the only true finish line is death.
Don’t Try This At Home
Cuidate Mi Amor
Don’t Try This At Home/Cuidate Mi Amor
is a marriage memoir that reveals the brutal collision between marital expectations and reality. Traditional marriage remains an institution full of misogyny, outdated gender roles, selective memory, and sometimes uninvited guests. In this work I discovered that the path to a liberated marriage can only be forged through mutual effort, deep collaboration, and generous applications of grace.