Conocimiento

Using self portraiture, archival photographs, and constructed environments, I examine how migration, ritual, and maternal myth can exist beyond our living realities.

In 2020, Alzheimer’s and dementia began to alter my grandmother’s relationship with memory, language, and recognition. She had always been a private person, rarely sharing details about her life before becoming a grandmother. Instead, she told the same three or four stories in rotation, each retelling revealing a sliver of something new. Over time, I lost the ability to distinguish between the stories told about her and the truths she had shared about herself.

As her mental and physical health declined, our conversations became nonlinear. Time collapsed, folded, and blurred as fragments of the past surfaced in the present. Stories suppressed for decades began to emerge beyond the narratives she had rehearsed throughout her life. In these moments, my grandmother moved between ancestral Honduras, our life in Maryland, and a future she would not inhabit. We tried to arrange her fragmented stories into a timeline we could understand, but her memories resisted the linear structures through which we make sense of our lives.

Through Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the nepantlera, an individual who navigates the thresholds between conflicting worlds, I began to understand my grandmother’s shifting relationship with time and memory. She inhabited these fractured spaces psychologically, spiritually, and ancestrally, challenging my understanding of how we access and inherit knowledge. Rather than viewing her revelations solely as a consequence of her illness, I came to see them as an unexpected opportunity for her to confront her past, reclaim suppressed histories, and move toward a final sense of redemption.

Through staged still lifes, family archives, cut photographs, and religious and domestic rituals, I reconstruct the fragments of my maternal lineage. These images examine how maternal myths, constructed realities, and generational trauma shape the stories we inherit, the truths we suppress, and the histories that resurface across generations.