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In honor of Latino Heritage Month I'm sharing a series of poems I wrote back in 2019 thinking about my family, my heritage, and identity. I've been writing and rewriting these over the past 5-10 years now and I like to revisit them to see what has changed, what has stayed the same, and what phrases or lines are still echoing in my head all this time later:
I Imagine this Arms stretched Legs too Holding on To homes I've never met The strain As these islands drift ever further Pulling muscle from bone from soul II The first poem I ever wrote about home Was about my grandma I wrote: "CAFE! Grandma screamed so that we all knew it was ready" Something about the smell Something about grown-ups laughing While I sat and observed I read it out loud And the love drunk smiles of my titi's and tio's Told me it was magic I don't want to leave this memory III Ay vece que me siento tan sola Sin historia Sin cultura Sin significado Como hay un cuento que yo nunca sabré Como hay tan grande una historia qu me va a romper mi espalda IV I imagine you Blue suitcase in hand Standing at the bottom of the ramp Looking up at nineteen floors of bring and glass and steel Sometimes smiling Sometimes teeth clenched against the wind you didn't predict Sometimes crying silent tears And I wonder if you knew What was coming? V In the end All I have Are lazos de sangre And that's enough VI In the end All I have Are lazos de sangre And that's too much VII It will take a lifetime To find the intersections The carefully placed knots The twists The interlocking The weaving The unraveling Of hilo and veins and blood That make up Lazos de sangre VIII If we are measuring I am One quarter Dominican Three quarters Puerto Rican If we are measuring I am American (though this is a technicality an imposition) If we are measuring I am the third generation to be born In the United States If we are measuring I am Of Spain And Portugal And Taino And Cameroon And France And Ghana And Mali And Italy And Andean And Benin And Ireland And Senegal And Sweden And Northern Africa If we are measuring I am the daughter of Omar Almanzar and Maritza Santos Of Atabey and la Virgencitya Of Lugos' and Cruz's and Montilla's and Rivera's And names lost to the bottom of the ocean And names lost to the stars And names only love can unravel And I am one hundred percent Salina Mayloni Almanzar Meditations for Aurea I How much have lost Crossing el charco? And how much still Is lost Waiting at the bottom Of the ocean For one of us to go back And fetch it I am curious what the implications are I am curious if I can Handle it Has my body evolved so much so that my fingers Can't recognize The feeling of a familiar Tongue Stone Home II What does it mean to read myself into you? What does it mean that I only know you through the words past|passed down to me Through the cloth of my mother of my father of my father's mother of my father's father I remember most clearly your voice The way you would seem to sing When you saw us Like music was the only way That you could make me understand Love Cariño III I want to feel the way your voice sounded when you saw me I want to feel the gentle brush of your fingertips on my face again The way you held me like nothing else mattered I wonder if you predicted this? If the hours of planning to trade One island for another To cross el charco To settle in where everything is cold and gray and hard If you knew all along That someday Someone would pull on an hilo And reveal the lace that is our Lazos de Sangre IV I made this so that It was worth it So that the things that were shed To hide a little bit better Were lost for a reason I always imagined that behind your closet door The one you would disappear behind To fetch treasures to Tuck in my hand as mom and dad guided us out one last itme I imagined that all of your secrets hid there That maybe you're still there Waiting for me to come back That the last treasure you will tuck in my hand Will make it all make sense V When we look back will we be satisfied With how we honored you? In the end everyday was Christmas for you Everyday was an excuse to listen to music To dance To sing along Even if you didn't know the words Or maybe you did I worry we discounted your beautiful mind To make it easier To see you transform To see your cocoon harden before you burst free from this life VI In the end all I have are Lazos de Sangre Y nada mas For five years I have said these words over and over It has transformed from a lamentation To a hymn Y nada mas VII La lengua de mi mami senti Como Marbles In my mouth Smooth Round And so ready to choke me I want so badly to replay every memory where you sang to me and Understand Translate Something VIII What happens, then When layers Of mistranslation Misunderstanding Missed opportunities Missing you Distort who we are Who I am Who I have built myself to be What happens, then When a diaspora Re-places Meaning Reimagines where we are from Meaning Comes back together Meaning Rematriates What happens, though If we can't IX There is a story I remember Of Tainos drowning A colonizer To prove that he wasn't a god I constantly wonder if I am drowning myself In the same way?
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I've been calling this year my year of no. Meaning, I have said no or been forced to say no to opportunities due to health issues, prioritizing mental health or just simply finally feeling comfortable to opt out and reclaim my time. Since I graduated college, I've held multiple jobs and gigs and once was very proud of myself for always being busy. I come from a family of overachievers and hard workers so it is more familiar to me to be busy and work all the time than it is to have leisure. In my year of no, I've rediscovered play in a way that I haven't in a very long time. My day-job/bread-and-butter is being the Assistant Director of the Center for Creative Exploration at PCA&D and I am happy that a good portion of my job is encouraging people to tap into their creative side. Often this means there is space for play and modeling play for creatives and the creatively curious! Just this past Friday, I spent my day working from It's Modern Art as part of the Peep Show with Executive Director of Center for Creative Exploration and long-time creative collaborator Natalie Lascek. We co-created a space that encouraged play as a vehicle to talk about the importance of funding the arts and advocating for the arts.
Natalie crafted a giant mouth that was our creativity creature and I created a zine about arts advocacy. We spent the day wearing satin red gloves and rewarding participants with knowledge (our zine) and a little alien friend. The whimsy of the project was both in the performance and in witnessing people stop and agree to be part of our weird experiment. Like most things I find myself doing in the play-o-sphere, adults said they would come back when they had time whereas kids could stop and jump right in. In my year of no, I am trying to be like the kids and jump right in.
In that spirit, I wanted to share some un-precious water color sketches I made. I say un-precious because often I overthink my work, wanting every bit to be meaningful and precise. Instead, most of these watercolor sketches were more visceral in the sense that I had a thought or sometimes half a thought and went for it. Many of these were made as I was recovering from my miscarriage and just needed to do something with my hands.
This year of no has also been part of a larger cycle of me reclaiming my childhood self. I've been doing more things that young me would want to do including embracing angst, obsessing over owls, and bringing bright and bold colors back into my work. My murals are generally colorful and bright, but my personal work wasn't for a while.
What I've learned in my journey through play is the following:
Take this as your sign to get a little weird! Start drawing even if you don't know what you're going to make! Find a felting kit and get stabbing! Play with paint just because it feels good gliding on paper! Learn a dance on YouTube! Schedule a play date with a friend! Go out and play!
I've been posting about a series that is more personal in nature on my social media.. It doesn't have a name yet but for now I'm playing with the idea of Transmutation. I will be telling a personal story and interspersing progress images of this series below. Trigger Warning: Early Pregnancy Loss, Grief, Loss On May 6th of 2024 I had a miscarriage. I was 6 weeks pregnant and my husband and I had been trying since October of 2023. I have anxiety and this entire process has really touched on all of my anxiety triggers-control (or feeling like I have no control), my health, time, and probably a bunch of others that I'm not even aware of). I was tracking everything so I knew exactly when I was pregnant and started tracking the pregnancy. With my health anxiety, I also was really hesitant to let myself get excited until the last week when I decided to let myself be happy. I started bleeding while at work and quickly through the course of the weekend I knew I was miscarrying. Being taken into the emergency unit and calling nurses was like a dream. I couldn't believe it was happening to me and I couldn't feel connected to my body. By Monday I went in for a follow up to see if everything was okay and learned that what little tiny nugget was hanging out in my womb on Saturday was gone.  Throughout the whole experience I took photos of things. My bruised arms from bloodwork. My hand with bandages when my arm veins failed. My face mostly to reconcile the disconnect between my mind and my body. The cardinals I saw in my backyard during my darkest days. The medical bracelet I cut off.  It felt important to document every little thing I could. Partially for my sanity and partially because I needed something to prove that I was pregnant. That what little life I had existed and was with me for a time and had to go. The past four months have been challenging. I've dealt with depression, increased anxiety, hormonal changes, and dealing with the trauma of the experience as my husband and I decide to try again. Today I feel hopeful and excited and want my work to honor the experience.  The other feelings I've grappled with are the disappointment with how we as a society treat women and especially women who are trying to conceive. There are so many misconceptions about how easy it is to conceive and how likely it is for conception to result in a viable and healthy pregnancy that results in a healthy baby. It's something I always knew growing up in a large family, but feel so much differently now as a person trying to conceive. We treat women like they are silly if they want to have children. We treat mothers badly if they seem anxious. We judge women for not wanting to have children. It's a lose-lose situation and I've felt so angry about it especially when it's clear that we don't want to acknowledge things like early pregnancy loss.  This shit is hard and worth talking about. No woman should have to feel like they need to hide their experience or grieve alone because they're an inconvenience. I'll climb off my soapbox now and get back to the art. This series felt ready on the four month mark of my loss. I wanted to transform my grief into something that marked it as real beyond the mementos I saved. The cardinal painting came to me first as I remember seeing so many cardinals in my yard and thinking the red of the feathers reminded me of the medical bracelet I had.  The eyeball as womb image was something I started to think about as I started to think of my own womb so differently. Constantly monitoring it made me wish I could see inside my self and make sure everything was okay. I am trying to be better about remembering to be in my body so this painting felt even more poignant as I thought of it in the context of my loss. I know I will do something with the photos I have of my hands and bruises from bloodwork. I'm not sure if that is all I have in me. Each painting leaves me tender but more healed and a bit lighter. 
Hello!
I'm hoping to start utilizing this space to do more in depth writing about current projects and musings again. I've had some folks ask how to start thinking about making murals and that's a big question but I thought I'd share a bit about how I translate finished designs to walls for community paint days. The method I use when the wall is 6ft tall and smaller is a grid method. Many of us have used the grid method for projects in elementary or middle school and probably have never touched it again. I like the grid as a place to start especially when I'm working with youth. Below is an example of my design for Lincoln Middle School. I measured the wall and rendered the drawing in Photoshop to match the size. If I'm not projecting, I don't usually worry too much about resolution and set my dpi to 150 and translate each foot of the wall to inches. It's important to start with a precise measurement of the wall. In Photoshop there is an option under Extras to show a grid. You can adjust the size of the grid by either double clicking your ruler OR accessing preferences and going to the units and measurements or grids and slices area. I set the grid to be 1inch by 1 inch. I prefer to use 1:1 square grids while other like to use different ratios. I usually then label the rows with the alphabet and the columns with numbers. Below I have one portion of the wall represented in the sketch. 
To translate the drawing you move square by square and examine the points where your drawing lines intersect with the the grid. In this case. In the photo above you can see the grid in pencil. This grid was 12inx12in. So effectively, I scaled the 1x1inch squares to 1ftx1ft. Here is a helpful video that goes into more detail about grid drawing:
This mural was verrrrrry long so I printed out sections and taped up the reference sketch along each segment. I also sketched out the drawing myself for the students since we didn't have much time and I wanted them to focus on painting. I usually sketch a drawing out with watered down yellow ochre or quin red. In this case I knew most of my flowers would be yellow and red so that helped reinforce where students were ate in the reference photo .
Here is a wider view of the fully sketched out mural:
Once the drawing is translated, I find that labeling colors is the next most important step to making sure your community paint day goes smoothly. The first step is identifying your colors and mixing them and carefully labeling your containers. Rather than writing out the full name of the color, I usually use a combination of letters and numbers. If I have more than one yellow, they become Y1, Y2, Y3 etc. We had too many blues to keep track of so we ended up using shapes to identify those. I use takeout containers to store all my paints and I prefer to mix my own colors. I always use NovaColor paints UNLESS there is a reason to have to use something else. I'll go into this in another post.
Now that my colors are mixed, I label the elements of the mural accordingly with the corresponding color.
Once the wall is labeled, I find it's very easy for anyone to join in on the fun of painting!
That Grant Street Mural is coming to life! We finished 3 of 20 5x5 panels working from right to left and top to bottom. This allowed us to jump in with big areas of paint to get our feet wet. We've left the white borders that I can take care of in studio along with the map lines and some gradients that I'll add in glazes. We'll continue alternating Saturdays and Sundays into January, take a break and assess, and get back to it. Here is the sign up form if you're interested in painting with us! Note: We do require all participants practice safe Covid-19 procedures including vaccination if possible and mandatory masking. I'm excited to share the final render for the CMCL Grant Street Mural project! After sifting through all of the feedback from the late summer community engagements, I found a few common threads that I wanted to uplift in the final drawing. Folks were really interested in the parrot and wanted to see it bigger. We talked about the parrot's significance to the CMCL congregation as well as the connections it has to many communities often not represented in public artworks. Parrots are found in South and Central Americas as well as Africa and the Carribbean geographically. They're loud and colorful and hard to miss. I felt that it was important to have a colorful representation that is at once specific to CMCL and broadly recognizable/unifying. I also included a vintage map of the block. The map is a 1912 Sanborn Fire Insurance map that lists the names of companies that once populated the Concord and Grant intersection. Visible just below the halo on the right side you can see "Conn & Slote" printing company. Just one of the iterations of the building. Below the map is a simplified rendering of an aerial shot of the intersection taken during our last community engagement! Pictured are folks walking their dogs, riding bikes, twirling, and scootering about! The reference image shows the original image and the render in the drawing below is my interpretation. I chose to eliminate some power lines and poles to clean up the image and focus more on the people in the space. On the left side is a simplified render of a pawpaw tree! Pawpaws are a fascinate native fruit that remind me of Quenepas from Puerto Rico. Many folks find them to be similar to bananas and mangos. They're like a taste of home for many and yet they're native to this region. I included them as a nod to the land we're on and the persistence/resilience of indigenous heritage. Some folks shared that the feathers swirling felt like the parrot was molting but they liked the movement. In the final render I used the paw paw leaves as a way to capture the upward movement of the parrot. The segments of the pawpaw have images of a period printing press, community members riding bikes and playing in the lot, Susquehannock pottery, and more! I wanted the viewer to be rewarded for getting close to the image. Lastly, the overall aesthetic I chose to work with is inspired by stained glass. I like the way it simplifies shapes and allows space for broad areas of color. I hope this final render resonates with the community! I'll be announcing paint days throughout the late fall and winter at CMCL and additional details as we solidify plans with cold weather and the holidays coming up.  
 Here is Sketch A for the Grant Street Mural  And here is Sketch B  I'm rounding up comments from the last two community engagements and Art Office Hours! Tonight we will look at two sketches I created based on all of the feed back. Here is a summary of the feedback (starred comments reflect multiple comments in the mind maps, conversations, and worksheets): Images:
Ideas:
Other stuff:
 I am excited to announce that I will begin working with Community Mennonite Church of Lancaster and Grant Street neighbors on a brand new mural! The mural will be located here once the building renovations complete:  Our plan is to meet with community members and the CMCL congregation to discuss potential themes, ideas, and designs that would inform the final design of the mural. When I do community based projects, I like to have at least five sessions of input and exchange to get to the know the community, find points of convergence or shared values amongst stakeholders. This Saturday will kick-off our first round of community engagements with an Ice Cream Social! On Saturday the 24th from 6:30-8pm we will meet in the parking lot with ice cream, frozen treats, coloring pages, a mind map and visioning activity as an ice breaker and kick-off to this exciting project! I will continue to update on progress and insights here as we go.
-Sigue Pa'lante! |
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