For second generation immigrants in the US, religion and culture are often passed down hand in hand. Religious communities double as ethnic enclaves; the religious becomes the cultural, the strongest tether to one’s personal history. What emerges from this mix is a new syncretism, blending diasporic cultural influences and the ritualism and tradition of religion. I employ this syncretism as a framework to complicate abstract structures of colonialism, religion, and diaspora.
Born from colonial violence, mestizaje arises from the oppressed and the oppressor, and is further complicated by US immigrant identity. My own mestizaje is filtered through the lens of Catholicism; growing up in Southern Illinois, the Spanish mass with my mother on Sundays was a connection to a largely inaccessible culture. In coming to terms with the violent history that birthed mestizaje, and its origins in Catholicism, my personal feelings have become necessarily complex. By recontextualizing found objects and religious scenes, and the tender depiction of gesture and touch, my work pays homage to the cognitive dissonance of my experience. The hands often present in them, references to the brutal Spanish colonial practice of severing prisoners’ hands, become stand-ins for rituals, sacrifices, and cultural scaffolding. These hands serve as loci of desire, violence, gentleness, and support.