Este Recuerdo

Este Recuerdo Statement
Looking at photos of my family, I decided to use the words etched on that long ago stone monument, este recuerdo, to reconstruct remembrances in paper: to place my family in a monument of my own making.
My father, Ambrose, dreamed of becoming a pro golfer, and he was excellent at the game. But in his youth, golf courses and country clubs were segregated in Texas. He could be a caddy, but he couldn’t play. So he took a job in sheet metal maintenance at one of the local military bases to provide for his family.
My mother Susie, Jesusita, was a secret poet. Independent and strong, she would have loved the life of a creative person. But women didn’t do that in her day. Instead fell in love and hid her talent, until finally, in the last years of her life, her lyrics, in Spanish, were set to music and performed.
My grandmother, Marina, grabbed her two children and ran for the U.S./Mexico border after her husband, father, and brother were killed during the Mexican Revolution. Her mother, two brothers, and a sister crossed with her. One sister stayed behind to marry and raise her family in Laredo, Mexico. (Her children are in the Innocent Age series in a piece called “Digale a Jesusita,” a portrait postcard since to my mother from her cousins in Mexico when they were all children.) One of my grandmother’s brothers kept going to Michigan, at first as a migrant worker then settling there. The family scattered, like many migrant families, though these days it may not be by choice when they are forcibly separated at the border. My great-grandmother is shown with two of her daughters.
As spacers between family images, I created the “Discontinuous” series, a notion I borrowed from Georges Bataille who wrote that we humans are meant to be eternal creatures, continuous with the infinite. It’s life that makes us discontinuous, separating us from the eternal. The Discontinuous pieces each have a rectangle cut into their center with an image of thorns and hearts, stand-ins for life and love, placed into that vacated center.