Why Would Anyone Need to Be a Different Person? (2021)
Published in MODA Critical Review Issue: Ellipses.
A lot of the time, after seeing my work, people will say that I am “in one of the best positions to talk about this.” What they mean: “Wow! You do a good job weaving together white references with your ancient history” and “There’s something just queer and just brown enough for you and ‘your people’ to be legible.” And perhaps: “I’d get in trouble if I talked about this in my art.”
What bothers me is how real this statement is. I do try to paint and tell stories I am related to and use my own experience to communicate ancient narratives poised between fiction and reality. I always find myself coming back to the loose thread that connects me to my family’s history in El Salvador, and I try to represent this displacement and boundary that connects me to my unknown past. I do this because what I look like allows me to be heard and because I have something to say. The statement is a reminder that when I enter my own studio I am not just an artist, I am a Queer Latine Artist. I am a placeholder for a painful history and I feel personally responsible for preventing further alienation. Art can feel like a job. Sometimes, I want to strip myself from these identity markers, sometimes I want to choose political independence over cultural innovation and I wish I could just enter my studio with the freedom of a “painter,” or a “multi-media artist,” or with no tags at all. Sometimes, I feel as though the only way to escape the politics of visibility is to leave my body.
I have come to an agreement with my identity. It will always change, and sometimes I will not be perceived as what I identify. I am not interested, however, in accepting this distance (an ocean) between self-identification and outside perception. There is my own history, the direct experiences that shape me and it is the kernel of truth I carry with me. Then there is the mythological reality (perception) of my history, who people think I am by looking at me and it’s usually part of a narrative that preserves and perpetuates the same old stereotypes. Sometimes, I feel betrayed by my own coca-cola-bottle-shaped-body, like I can never escape the sexualized fate of my LatinA curves and just be a man for a day. Don’t get me wrong, being non-binary and Latine are potentially my favorite things about myself. But more and more, I am interested in finding new ways to inhabit these identities in the same body with the hope to transcend their meanings. I want to be strong enough to carry my multiple identities with me at all times.
GRISELDA
Out of this desire emerged my alter-ego, Griselda. I thought that if I animated this intersection of my self-image and how I am perceived to an extreme, if I embodied the expectations I felt as Queer Latine Artist, I could threaten my prescribed roles to the point of absurdity. I felt that I had to eat dirt, bleed for you, cry for you; if I show you hurt, it shows you that the world hurts while you’re sleeping. Griselda was born from a desperation to understand the everyday performances that underpin the quotidian, from the mundane to the extreme automatic.
Griselda oscillates performing exactly as others want to see me and embodying the persona that I wish to occupy. On the one hand, Griselda functions to perform, or rather re-perform, identity and thus destabilize it. She is intentionally too sexy, too loud, and too bold. Suddenly, a person can’t be all of the things you expected them to be. At the same time, Griselda’s animosity denies potential typecasts, and her performances as the Virgin Mary and as the “Latina Performance Artist,” intentionally mock the inherent symbols of my art historical lineage. She calls upon the work of Tania Bruguera, Ana Mendieta, and Regina Jose Galindo. Griselda is a shapeshifter: she can be emotionally aware, playful, charming, unafraid, and at the same time, disarming, challenging, and indignant. Her goal is to lay bare what is already in the room.
Of course, on the surface Griselda can say what I wish I did, she can wear what I wish I had, and embody the fluid and disarming character as which I always want to be perceived. Not only do I get to be two different people, I get to be in two different places at the same time. It feels like I’m creating a transgressive reality, where I exceed even my own expectations of who I can be or how many lives I’ve lived. It’s my pocket of freedom, my secret in this dark world. No one knows I’m also someone else sometimes.
I imagine a loose invisible thread exists between me and Griselda. When I focus on that space in between, I am more comfortable looking back and exploring all of the mechanisms my memories have created. I exit the space of my body, and look back at all the memories that I’ve created and that have created me. For this reason, all of her performances have autobiographical elements. She is a tool, a medium that gets me closer to myself. I become the referent for truth, my experiences gain validity, and I become autonomous over the re-presentation of my own story. At least that’s what I tell myself on a good day. Sometimes Griselda represents a desperation to belong, to desperately try to hang onto the past, to re-perform what already existed, to change what it means. On some days, Griselda does eat dirt.