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I crave to make a mark; it is in the making of the mark
that I carve my existence bone against bone.

I am an Artist. My art is birthed through the body, through the written symbol; language I am involved in art as a tool for empowerment, social change and transformation. I use art as a critical tool of both expression and inquiry to rupture and create alternative spaces for political, social, and artistic expression. As a Chicana/Mexicana in the United States, our voices are often silenced and our histories unwritten. For me the act of creation is born out of my philosophy that our histories are lodged deep in the tissues of our body, tattooed on skin surface. My body bears witness and my voice gives testimony. My work speaks to this contested space of body and of place. Through art I keep my oral history alive and speak to the experience of the border; internal and external.

I believe all that I have experienced, all that I have witnessed lies within my body, lodged deep in the tissues, in the bone, in marrow. My cells swell with the memory of my people and it is here that I find my story. As an artist I journey to discover my core, the essence and it is here that my work begins and moves out. I work to discover the text within the body, the image that awakens and the place where voice originates. I weave these into a tapestry of sound, body, spoken word, voice, movement, silence, stillness, image and text. At times elements of salt, earth, rock, bone, blood define the space. I work in the mediums of painting, performance, installation, video. No matter what form I use to express my artistic vision, at the core is body and language. The written symbol emerges first followed by the image.

My family is from the mountains of Michoacan Mexico. My recent work explores how my identity has been shifted/forced/changed by migration and displacement. I am interested in exploring the space (geographic, historical, bodied) between Mexicana and Chicana, the construction of identity and the "third space". I am re-embodying my relationship to place and migration. The past four summers I returned to Mexico to immerse myself in artistic research. Much of my exploration centered around the temples, churches, and Indigenous spiritual practices of my pueblo, and their effect on my life and world view. I live these things, soak them deep into my being, constantly aware of the borderlands. What has emerged from this artistic quest is rich, fertile, thick and difficult. Through art I am exploring this profound space. I dig deep into the places of history ignored. I find this place to be ecstatic, many times turbulent, often bloody and at times I am afraid. Through my art I am reclaiming a sense of place, re-embodying traditional practice and representing the performance of migration. I claim the position of "woman warrior" in my culture as I struggle to speak a history unwritten.

In these turbulent times we live in, I crave to emerge raw as an artist who dares.