ABSTRACT
This study investigates the impact of art-based interventions on heart rate variability (HRV) and emotional regulation among undocumented immigrant populations. Utilizing a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, objective and non-objective artworks were presented in a public gallery setting. Wearable sensors are utilized for HRV analysis. Results showed a statistically significant improvement in HRV among participants exposed to immigrant subject matter-based artwork that they connected with. Suggesting the positive potential of identity-connected art-based therapies for emotional regulation. These findings contribute to the literature on art therapy and HRV applications. Future research should focus on expanding sample sizes, refining interventions, and exploring additional demographic factors. Collaboration with health institutions and arts programs is vital for successfully implementing art-based interventions in supporting the emotional well-being of marginalized communities through public programming.
Conquest of Teotihuacan
24" by 36"
Oil on wood panel.
Statement: Conquest of Teotihuacan explores the themes of identity, indigeneity, and cultural transformation. From my personal experience as an undocumented immigrant, I wanted to voice the inner conflicts of coming to terms with connecting with my Mexican heritage while integrating and assuming the identity of the American culture I've been raised in. I've struggled to reconcile what it means to be of one place and live in another that seems to be hostile to what I hope to understand and incorporate into myself. This piece expands on the myth of La Malinche and her story of cultural loss and birth of Mexica blood. Surrounded by raining liquid gold, she finds her face split between three identities preservation, survival, and grief. I felt this painting connected to the experience of undocumented immigrants who similarly have to redefine their culture to integrate successfully into a new world through a system of personal erasure. Carrying the themes of past historical works that realize la Malinche as a survivor in the face of cultural genocide and the mother of modern Mexican identities. I wanted to share my personal feelings of having so much yearning to connect with a culture that has been erased and a culture that is still alive but built around the wholes left behind from colonization and immigration.
Migration without Integration
40" by 48"
Acrylic, oil, mixed embroidery on stretched canvas.
Statement: With this piece, I wanted to funnel the conversations of immigration as an undocumented immigrant. I wanted to explore the experience of my father and mother that is shared among many other immigrating parents. The hope of migrating in the sight of the children they love, placing a faith within a land unfamiliar to them away from the earth they called home. Untying the fibers of themselves in the hopes that their children find better threads to create and grow. It is an uncertainty, and yet an undeniable yearning worth so much sacrifice. My father left Mexico five years before the rest of my family emigrated, sacrificing seeing his mother passed away and my birth so that our family would have the money to safely cross the border. I wanted to recreate that unimaginable sacrifice with a piece that integrated love and understanding of his world. Being isolated and faded into the colors of the background, I see that his experiences are often ignored as an undocumented immigrant. A parent's love for their child is represented through the careful act of embroidery suspended and surrounded by a frantic need to hold the world together. I know my parents have done so much for me to see the world as beautiful, and I only hope to relieve the tension in the strings they have held for so long. This painting is tied to a wooden backing through sewn slipknots, it is not perfect, but it holds this world together.
Daily Rituals
9" by 12"
Oil on stretched canvas.
This painting is representational of an immigrant's expressions of their cultures and thoughts through the mundane. I grew up shrouded in many aspects of my parent's culture. Often learning about holidays and traditions from class or North American media. But the pride and love of their culture poured out whenever they would cook. It would take years of seeing my father bring in groceries and I would see the innate joy the prospects of cooking would bring him. Through this ritual, he can connect me to him, his mother, his father, and his past life without shame or fear. I think of this often, that immigrants are not loud or outspoken about their heritage if they live in fear but through their mundane daily rituals find solace and connections to what adds such rich complexity and color to their past.
Emergencies without Language
18" by 24"
Oil on wood panel.
Statement: This piece explores the experience of fear that many undocumented immigrants face when met with emergencies. The choice of whether they can call upon the protection of law enforcement or deal with matters themselves. Whether physical, mental, or dire it seems it is always a weighted matter of what one can sacrifice, suffer, or bear. When my mother was diagnosed with lymphoma for a second time, many things rushed through my mind. Would we be so lucky that she would not be deported this time around? Would her minimum wag work be understanding of her plight and not fire her again? Would our family have enough wages to heal with her? As awful as it seemed, our last thoughts were on if she was strong enough to face cancer again. It is the plight of undocumented immigrants to suffer in fear. Scared of losing their hope in a delusional dream of being accepted into a new world they've spent more than half their life living. These are the emergencies without language, for it does not need communication. It is a shared innate fear of those either born and loved into sacrificing. I feared losing my mother to government deportation more than losing her to cancer. Often this thought doesn't face such a dire opponent, often it is faced during simple traffic stops, domestic abuse house calls, and any moments where we find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Often it is emergencies that call on the humanity of those around us to aid and serve. To pull to the side and aid one who has just crashed their car, but in the minds of undocumented immigrants, they hope that they continue to be ignored and allowed to live in this country to suffer and love another day. And in the scope of the Mexican identity, there is life in death and death in life. Salvation in crisis, and crisis in salvation.
Sin Tarjeta, Sin Exito, Sin Retrato
9" by 12"
Multi Block Relief Print
This relief print explores the social conditions that undocumented immigrants face living within the US. They are often faced with berries without their legal papers. They often find limitations within job, school, and family opportunities. Social stigmas leave these individuals feeling that they must hide their opinions and contributions. Being defaced culturally, socially, and politically these individuals struggle to fully incorporate into our communities without outside help. But they continue to live strong and find their own mechanisms of strength and cooperation to improve and benefit their surrounding communities.
Lamentations across Guachimontones
24" by 36"
Oil and UV reactive pigment.
Lamentations across Guachimontones aim to express the experience of immigrants and Latin Americans who’ve felt absent from their cultural heritage. These experiences are often found in populations of those feeling a need to assimilate with a culture to avoid being marked as other. With the significance of a personal connection between the figure ripping from within themselves and a sense of pride that has been passed down from generation to generation. This painting explores modernity and its intersections with the loss of ties to innate senses of culture, either through forced or self-inflicted sacrifice. With symbolisms of past and present, death and rebirth, hidden and seen, the complexities of the Latin American identity are personified and layered for deep conversation between viewers.
Intersections of Land and Regret
45" by 48"
Acrylic and mixed dry media on stretched canvas.
This painting aims to explore the land relationships within Utah and indigenous identities. Utilizing motifs from Utah’s kennecott copper mine. This is a multi media piece that explores the relationship of mining companies and native connections to lands across the Americas. As an immigrant from Mexico, I aim to create conversations over what it means to be connected with the land you live on and how that comes to terms with the intersections of resources, culture, and land. The figure in the distance is a personification of the cultural identity overviewing the wounds left on its land.
Interstates Moving Past and Present
18" by 24"
Oil on wood panel.
This piece encapsulates the growing need for travel and the impact it has on the development of our lives. As a child of immigrant parents who could not afford child care. I found ways to enjoy the many car rides that two jobs carried my family to and from. Seeing the morning condensation on the car windows as the galiath mega structures of concrete highways create impossible shadows and new forms. These mesmerizing interactions would entertain me through the difficulties of growing up as undocumented.
Growth within Time and Death
12" round
Oil on stretched canvas.
I wanted to explore my connections within indigeneity. As an immigrant, I've felt tethered to a culture that I socially am separated from. And yet I do not fully accept the culture where I live. Neither from here or there. But learning about the traditions and customs of Mexico before it was colonized has given me an open-arm embrace. Where my mixed cultural presence can intermingle with a culture on the brink of complete loss. I connected with a circular concept of Teotle. A determinant and flow of life, where death can be celebrated without fear. Time and land are interconnected forces that interact in breathtaking forms. I wanted to contrast the crystallinity of our human bones, which we grow through our lifetimes spanning nearly a century. Lovingly intermingled with a gemstone that takes millennia to precipitate from supinate materials. Both are historical accounts of the environments in which they were formed. The same potential of carbon to create such different and beautiful forms is a circular artifact of the transformation of matter and life that we all abide by.
Lamppost Inquisition
15" round
Oil on Wood Panel.
I wanted to create a discussion of human encroachment on the natural landscape in southern Utah. Carving out a sky skylight light ablaze creates a physicality of the disruption of our land causality. A scene skewed by one lone post lamp. The land we live on is a breathing culmination of ecotones and transformation, and it is the monoliths of precious materials that we will leave behind.
Memories are Due
12" by 12"
Acrylic on stretched canvas.
I wanted to explore a sense of nostalgia and remembrance through the haze of memory. This painting depicts the gradual defilement of what our minds hold so precious. As time passes we must actively wipe away the frost that cloud our minds. Passively shifting the events of our past. Until our ultimate frames are no longer of memories that we can hold with sharpness, but only with a feeling.
Ofrenda Al La Tierra
18" by 24"
Multi Block Relief Print on cold press paper.
The following pieces explore the relationships between cultural identities and the lands we live on. We all have a sense of heritage whether we are first, second, or third-born Americans. We hold onto a pride of land and hope of connection. As an undocumented immigrant, I fear this has been initially stripped from my veins and I've had to spend the last decade of my life reclaiming what I felt I had to abandon to survive. Using the symbol of waterways to explore returning to a source.
Ofrenda Al La Tierra
40" by 45"
Acrylic and UV reactive Pigment on stretched canvas.
In this painting, I wanted to create a story of strength and perseverance beyond time. Hidden within the precious materials of our land, I've incorporated imagery only visible under UV light. Paper cutouts traditionally set out to celebrate our families that have passed on cover the red mountains. Culminating in an offering to the land created by an ancestorial culture to tend and care to what has moved on without us.
Tesoros de Mi Padre
18" by 24"
Acrylic on Canvas Panel
This artwork explores the experiences and sacrifices that often befall parents of undocumented children in the US. This painting depicts the hands of a father who’s only tangible memory of Mexico is the marbles he has treasured through his life. As often parents who have chosen to come to America leave behind family, connections, and memories in the hopes of a better future for their children. These symbols of adolescence in Latin America are then transformed into points of discussions for the amount that is sacrificed in the name of hope for the future. Faced with growing uncertainties for dreamers in the US, might these new generations be forced to only take their own childhood momentous of walking a thin line of American or undocumented.
Sin Tarjeta, Sin Exito, Sin Retrato
24" x 36"
Acrylic and oil pastel on stretched canvas.
This relief print explores the social conditions that undocumented immigrants face living within the US. They are often faced with berries without their legal papers. They often find limitations within job, school, and family opportunities. Social stigmas leave these individuals feeling that they must hide their opinions and contributions. Being defaced culturally, socially, and politically these individuals struggle to fully incorporate into our communities without outside help. But they continue to live strong and find their own mechanisms of strength and cooperation to improve and benefit their surrounding communities.
