Lincoln Middle School

The year of 2011 will be unforgettable for me.  I joked around with the fact that I was a rabbit in the Chinese calendar and the rabbit year of 2011 positioned me at an advantage to win the lottery.
I never bought a lottery ticket.
I was busy looking for a teaching job where I could learn more about the Rio Grande Valley.
 
Fresh out of college, I applied in 2010 to a top ranked painting school in the United States and got accepted for its Post-Bac program which I did not accept.
At my interview with them in Chicago, I realized they misunderstood my border culture.  I had to correct them more than once about things I felt the world already knew about the border.  I talked and talked to get my point across.  After talking too much, I came to a pause and I wondered there for the first time: Do I really know my culture?
  
I began to criticize myself like I did to Octavio Paz's "Laberinto de la Soledad."  How could he talk about the Mexican identity and get some things wrong?  How could he get the borderland identity wrong?

I am in debt with Lincoln Middle School for the knowledge I gained in one year.

I would have not wanted another student population than the one I got this year.  I made it a purpose to talk about college every single day and lost track of how often I mentioned it until one of my students made a remark:  Why do you always talk about college?  We are in M-i-dd-le School.  I can still see some students taking a deep breath and others getting mad at this one student that was going to make me give a speech about, again, E-d-u-c-a-t-i-o-n.

I hope I made a difference.  A good difference.

I still remember my teachers and professors that acted ( and I am glad they did) like my mother or father guiding me in what I was to become.  My choice at the end but they gave me their valuable opinion about what steps provided more opportunities in the long run.  I love their on going selfishness of still supporting me in my life and career.

After finishing this school year, I am more humane.  I know I needed this for my writing and art to grow.

Now, it is the summer of 2012.  I am transforming what I create and with full knowledge of different perspectives of the Rio Grande Valley.  I give thanks to my students and my co-workers that gave me a good heart.

I did not win the lottery but I sure gained the good and the bad to create a good work of art.

Gloria Anzaldua Conference

In 2009, I remember being angry and a heated discussion with an individual that thought everything about Chicanos and Mexican-American culture was not important.  Oddly enough, he had chosen to take a Mexican-American class at UTPA and attended El Retorno Conference honoring the life and works of Gloria Anzaldua.  

My professor had given me the microphone to talk about my artwork and how Gloria Anzaldua had influenced me.  I tried forgetting his words but I could not.  I do not remember everything I said that day because my mind spoke without first stopping to think about it.  It came out of me.  I knew if I kept it inside my muscles would start to tremble and I would go to sleep that night angry and wake up angry for a couple of weeks.

I talked about my experience of waiting in line to get my permanent residence card and how it took more than ten years to get it.  I heard and saw people clap but I do not know if it was for approval or pity.  My anger did not go away. 

Aida Hurtado talked in this year El Retorno conference about leaving your body and how Anzaldua talked about this concept.  Hurtado mentioned that she could have written thirty book if she had controlled her anger.  She found that making someone angry leaves the person being only a body without its mind.  

I never want to be again only a body.  How about if someone cries?  Are they only a body too?

Along with Rodney Gomez and Isaac Chavarria, I participated to create a chapbook for El Retorno: Our Serpent's Tongue. I curated the exhibition at the event and even talked without breaking up about the chapbook.  My professor  Emmy Perez again encouraging me to talk.

This time the message was different.  I talked about one of my students who told me, "Miss, Why are you here?"  The student had at the time a tone of disgust.  This student, in fact, had been disgusted all week long about peers and making awful comments about the Mexican culture to the point that I lectured them every single day on the subject of valuing their culture.  When I was picking out artwork for the chapbook and going to meetings about this conference, I thought about my students.  I had taught my students everyday to write and draw their own history because I did not want them to wake up one day and dislike what someone else wrote about them.  More so, to be looked upon for something they disapproved.

I made two drawings that were given to be given to Lauren Espinoza, a poet leaving the Rio Grande Valley to study her Master's in Arizona this fall and Norma Cantu, a Chicano writer.  

I cried when I explained to Norma the meaning of my drawing.  I don't know if I should have hold it in and talked more about my artwork.  But, the moment I could not speak any more and I started to cry, my whole life flashed by in an instant.  It was the sensation people say you get when you are about to die.  I realized then why I had made it.

  

Memories of Dresses: Part 2

Memories of Dresses

Dresses are important because they remind me of places and the moments created in these places.  I often go to stores and go around just feeling the material in every garment.  As I concentrate in painting on cloth, in specific a floral one, I remember my mother and my grandmother in Reynosa.  

Powdered streets full of air,

sunlight enough to kill a

hairy dog and women

leaving flowers from

their dresses in the streets.

Going for more

I went for more and pushed myself to fill in the emptiness I felt in this artwork.  Now, how to finish it up and the most difficult question of all: how to present it?

And here is my Changito...that helps me out not to lose my needles.  I used to put them in my bed since I can remember.  Not a good idea since I have not learned to pick them all up.

Floral Border

I started sewing even before I entered kinder.  The memory of siting down on a cool gray tile floor next to a black trash bag filled with retazos from leftover material of dresses my mom had sewn is my dearest memory.  She always refused to teach me how to sew arguing that I needed to learn by seeing her at work.
I often thought she was harsh but I am glad she did.  When I moved to the United States and did not know how to speak English, I had to learn by only seeing.  It was hard but I knew how.
Every time we crossed the border, we bought fabric.  It was a must even though we did not need it for anything.  I got so used to touching fabric to feel the quality and texture which gave me a sense of what to create with it.
La tienda Dos Rios was a paradise for me.  You see, the border is not all sadness and death.  The  noise of the scissors cutting the fabric along a hard edge table and the infinite roles of fabric along the old catalogs made me create at high speed, in my mind, designs of dresses I wished to wear.
Today I mentioned to a young crowd: As you grow older, you will associate things with color and you will carry that association with you for your entire life.  A light blue will remind you of the first car you drove or your first dress.
Fabric for me reminds me of my grandmother, my mother and the border.  All three come to my mind when I see a strong floral cotton fabric that can be turned into anything.  A fabric of that quality is and will always be hard to find.  I have had this floral printed fabric for more than ten years and it suddenly made sense to me, this past December, to cut a piece of it and create art with it.

Chronicles of a Painting: Part 2

I had been with the obsession of buying canvas cloth for a long time even though I loved to paint on masonite panels.  I think it started out of knowing I could get a large amount of cloth at a cheap prize in Reynosa.  Honestly, anything that has to do with buying something at Reynosa makes me happy and much more if I pass/stop at el centro.

El centro is a place that brings me many memories that seem so distant now.  I remember entering into el mercadito and smelling leather all over the place.  I wanted everything all the time.  I wanted a zarape, a leather purse, with leather boots, a sombrero, leather coin purses, all the candy and all the dresses I could fit in.

Last year, my dad and I went to Reynosa without being scared of the violence going on at the border.  I am not a brave one but I am often reminded that I am like my dad who often says, "de algo nos vamos a morir."  It is a joke of course and a harsh one that I also love to say.  My favorite joke coming from my dad has been, up to this point, when I have told him that I was hungry and he replied with, " que bueno, es senal que estas viva."  

I often think of Federico Garcia Lorca and how he went back to his homeland even though he knew he would get killed.  I can say my thought when I crossed the border has been one of happiness.  I can never wait to smell Reynosa.  I love all its ugliness and complexity.  I take it all in.

I had been in Reynosa that Saturday less than three hours when I suddenly found myself at a supermarket restroom trying to calm myself.  I remember wanting to fix my hair in front of the mirror and noticed my hand shaking.  I was scared.  We had been at el centro to buy the cloth and upon coming out we noticed blocked streets we thought were car accidents but in reality was a preparation for a shooting.  

The military helicopter could not had been louder flying over the big traffic congestion we were in.  I saw women running inside stores and covering their heads.  The agony in everyone had vanished all my memories.

When I was in high school, I asked my mom if the amount of violence had increased with time.  If maybe, when I was little it had been calmer.  Her answer was no.  There had been no change.

I think if my grandmother and grandfather were alive I would ask them the same question about the violence that is going on right now.  It will comfort me if they said it was just the same as in the Mexican Revolution.  Yet, what an immense sadness it will generate.