Grutas y Revelaciones

This work examines my "cursed" maternal lineage through staged photographic still lifes, cut family archives, cave-like structures, and religious and domestic rituals.

When I first moved to Iowa, I didn’t leave my house for a week. When I finally did, I drove four hours to the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. Grottos have always felt like places of sanctuary for me. Grottos are shrines carved into rock formations, often bearing the face of the Virgin Mary. Growing up, visiting the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes always felt like a spiritual pilgrimage. We went to the grotto more often than we went to Catholic mass.

In 2018,  a five-dollar palm reader told me that all the women in my family are cursed in love…and that it would cost eighty-five dollars to remove it.

While migrating to the U.S., my mother managed to preserve a tamale recipe her grandmother perfected in Honduras. My mother followed this recipe faithfully, sharing tamales with friends, family, and anyone in the neighborhood. When we were sick, Sana sana colita de rana was sung, Vicks VapoRub was rubbed all over our bodies, and garlic and onions were put into our socks to detox. “Never put your purse on the floor!” “Don’t touch hands when passing the salt!” She used domesticity and ritual as tools to develop a new family unit in a foreign place. This was her method of showing love as talking was too thickened in loss and trauma. 

Last year, my grandmother’s health rapidly declined. As her faculties waned, she revealed more and more fractured memories and “truths”. The women in my family had always concealed their full narratives, passing down only fragments, glances, and gestures. This glimpse into her life offered reason to her survival rituals and practices. After moving to Iowa, I sat with the truth of this curse in cave-like structures scattered throughout the Midwest, often resembling the grottoes I grew up attending.

I stage complex still lifes of my maternal lineage using family archives, cut photographs, and religious and domestic rituals to examine this “cursed” lineage. This still life inhabits what writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras calls border grace—spaces between knowing and not knowing, suffering and understanding. The visual abundance in my work does not come from comfort or affection, but from the emotional residue of ritual, sacrifice, and generational endurance. To photograph is to pause within these accumulated narratives. A kind of bardo. A space between waking and remembering, between a strained phone call with a mother who struggles with her vulnerability, between my grandmother’s truth and her memory.

“To think one is cursed is to think oneself above suffering. No one is above suffering.” This contradiction sits at the center of my work. I use photographic language not to break the curse or resolve it. To do so would be to place myself above my ancestors. But to ask: What does it mean to name the curse? To carry it differently? To exist within its truth?