Mother Tongue

My mother was raised in Mexico in Catholic boarding schools. When her stepfather moved her and my grandmother to the US he shamed her for her Mexican heritage. She told kids at school she was Italian, or Spanish, anything but Mexican. I didn’t even know that I was half-Mexican until I was 12.

These diptychs attempt to explore the contrasts of my very white identity with the roots of my family, the lost culture of my mother and her mother, the feeling of not having a past to root into.