Dreaming of the Multiverse: From Morelia to Jurupa Valley

Investigating the Impacts of Immigration on a Family History.

In 2017, my parent's sold their (deteriorating) home in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico. That house was their original retirement dream. That same year, they bought and renovated their "final" home in Jurupa Valley, California. This brought up questions of what life would've been like had my family never left Mexico to begin with; or if we had multigenerational roots in America.

Would my sister have survived if we had stayed in Morelia? Would my parents not had me since I came after her death? Would Catholicism have a tighter grip on my life? Would I have suppressed my queerness and opted to live a heterosexual lifestyle in order to survive? Considering the social climate in Mexico, would we have been bound to cartels and their violence? In America, would my grandparents and our family have fared better or worse? Would several of my relatives ever existed? Would I have succumbed to the blind patriotism I see in many multi- generational Americans? Placed white supremacy/racism on a pedestal like said Americans? Would we have the generational wealth my colleagues enjoy? Would I be more embracing and solid in my queer identity? Or would I and everyone else have "glitched out" and become unforeseeable iterations that not even my wildest dreams or nightmares could imagine?

This series plays with these questions and examines the American Dream. This photographic series makes use my family's photo archive (ranging from the 1960s to the early 2000s), as well as images of my parent's home(s) I shot during 2017. Inspired by the work of Daniel Gordon, the house images were turned into dioramas, where I added tapestry's native to Mexico/the US, and the archive images were collaged in layers onto said dioramas. The final arrangements were then photographed using long exposures and resulted in 24 x 36" prints.

In the end this project may not offer any answers to these common lived immigrant experiences/questions, but instead serves as a release. It's a release from dreamed possibilities that never came and never will be. The visual chaos represents the processing of emotions alongside these realities and realizations.