Mexican?American? Series

Mexican? American? Series no.2 What I Imagined

I used to daydream about what my family and culture were like. Basing my vision on what I saw on tv and heard on the radio I expected my family in Texas & Mexico to be hanging around a small village, dressed in festive, traditional attire without a care in the world singing and dancing. I longed to know the language, to move to warmer climates and marry a rancher who would sing to me all the time. Meeting those relatives was anticlimactic. They wore the same clothes we did, worked the same jobs. The daily hustle and worries were the same. Mexico wasn’t a sleepy, little country stuck in the past.

Discarded items used: guitar, dried rose petals, paper, broken jewelry, pieces of a solar yard light, tiny rubber frogs, a bingo card, wire, a doll shoe, fabric from a jewelry gift box.

THE MADONNA #1 in the series Mexican?American?

I lived around my Mexican American family until the age of 5 or 6, then We moved to a small, mostly Caucasian town. I had fond memories of dances and big family dinners and always having cousins to play with. I began to miss the culture immensely. My mom wanted us to assimilate with those around us, but eventually she started exposing us to the food and music again. We didn’t visit relatives often, we rarely had a functioning car. I remember when we started to reconnect with family and friends in Lansing, one of the first visits was to my Godmother’s house. My mom kept talking about how much she loved “The Madonna”, how she worshiped and prayed to the “The Virgin” and had alters and pictures of her around her home. I thought “Cool!”. I also love her. I mean, I loved Madonna as much as the next preteen. I had posters, but no alter and I did not call her THE Madonna. I was to spend the weekend alone with this stranger and her family, someone my mother had decided would look out for me as a parent. Yet I can’t recall, aside from this awkward and disappointing (oh, we are fans of different Madonnas) visit we had almost no contact with them or the Catholic Church. That’s the first time I remember feeling that I was neither part of the white community and clearly not truly part of the Mexican community either.

Discarded items used: parts of a wooden recipe box, IPhone package, paint, glitter & sequins-because Madonna-fake tea light candle .