Artivismo for Resistance
My interdisciplinary artivismo (artivism) and social practice are rooted in exploring my Mexican American and fronteriza (transborder) background. I use photography, social practice, digital graphics and drawing, pottery, and installations in my interdisciplinary artivismo. These mediums allow me to communicate the issues impacting underprivileged communities daily. Every art piece I create encourages the audience to understand that change begins within us.
Visual art is my way of communicating with the public, and I have been actively engaged in the art world from a very young age. As a creative person with a deep passion for artivismo, I often look for new and unexpected ways to create art from my perspective and tackle the issues I have faced as a woman and artivista (artivist) of color. Since I was young, I have lived a binational life, where I have learned to co-shift and navigate between two governments, currencies, languages, and types of policies. Listening to conversations about how people migrate and cross the border to look for opportunities to have a better life, crossing the border every day, and being okay with often being offended by the customs agents, with their discriminatory questions, are part of my identity. These experiences significantly impact my artivismo, since it deals with identity and social issues. For this reason, my artwork represents new ways of doing artivismo and the importance of creativity, which allows me to think about different ways to act against injustice, oppression, and violence. I believe raising awareness alone is not enough to uproot any problem.
As an artivista who practices social activism, I am compelled to promote social justice. Therefore, I have developed my formula to determine when to research and focus my artivismo on a theme I believe we need to address as a community. The various elements of this formula depend on one another: research, visual communication, and first-hand experience.
The origin of this formula is based exclusively on what I have learned in photography; I share it with viewers to show that the root of my artivismo is to communicate inequalities effectively through visual language. Instilled with hope, I encourage my audience to break the norms and explore and obtain a broader knowledge of various subjects. As a result, viewers can better understand the urgency of problems that affect humanity in multiple ways. I want them to realize that the solutions to these problems are in collective action. My intent is for the viewers to see the beauty of the artivismo and understand the urgency for change on a deeper level.
Over the past five years, my artwork has taken a critical view of food sustainability, insecurity, and chronic disease. I am especially interested in how these issues impact low-income communities and what people do about it. My interest in these topics began when I was diagnosed with diabetes. When living with a chronic condition, self-care becomes even more vital, and I had to think deeply about the factors that had led to my state. I did not particularly appreciate taking medicines to manage my sugar levels or the treatment costs. This inspired me to pursue traditional medicines and explore the fight for food security, sustainability, and distribution in underserved communities whose residents also grapple with diabetes. Thanks to this, I learned to explore these issues through social practices, which involve social interaction conversations.
In essence, I create organic spaces alongside artworks, where people are invited to think creatively and break with habitual thought processes, even temporarily. My social practice moves conversations about social issues forward, developing ways of being and knowing centered on mutual respect and social justice. As an artivista, I may not change legislation or policies instantly, but my creations work as tools to foster new modes of artivismo to use them to end injustice permanently. This enables understanding alternative perspectives or opinions through shared objectives, which is the beauty of my social practice. The more I work collectively and understand different perspectives, the more opportunities I will have to work united against the corrupt and imbalanced system we live in. For this reason, I will continue to use my role as an artivista to give a voice to those who are often unheard and work to see this unjust world change forever.