"Do Or Die"(1)

When I work, I try to clear my head and just let my hands do their work. When the thing it's finished, I look at it to "decode" its meaning and to capture its title. When I finished this one, I knew it was about my immigration and the related hardships.Then the title came to me: "Do or Die", but I still kept looking at the face, not exactly knowing who she reminded me of. Finally I realized the figure is the spitting image of my maternal grand mamma.

I was totally shocked and eerily aware of family ties, especially because my grandmother died when I was six years old and I have no idea how I accessed her memory. It's that much more strange because she appeared as the visual for a work about emigration/immigration: uprooting, heartaches, essentially fear and loneliness and cellular memories of all those feelings. I know this piece is real, because when I showed it to my Mexican friend who helps me with handiwork, his eyes welled up and he just said "así es".