Veins: Mining Family History Through Copper (2017/2023)

Through photography, video, and text, Veins expands upon my work excavating my family lineage through copper. 

In 2017, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I acquired a sheet of copper from the Buenavista del Cobre mine in Cananea, México. My father’s family is from Cananea and I grew up hearing stories about my distant uncle who, allegedly, pitched rocks into this mine and later played for the Detroit Tigers. As an MFA student at the University of Michigan, I used my position, and university letterhead, to request copper from Rene, a manager at the mine. This many-months correspondence was a way to explore my Mexican-American identity, my connection with family, and institutional power.

I embarked on an ambitious country-wide pilgrimage with my sheet of copper. Specifically I traveled to: Santa Barbara, the Imperial Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area (all in California); and Detroit, Michigan. Each of these locations are sites of importance, being that I, and other family members, have called them home at one time or another. I was interested in discovering what it meant to simply exist with my copper. How could our pilgrimage both transform it and me? By developing a relationship with my copper in this way, I realized that the copper was not just a slab of metal excavated from the depths of Mexican earth but a vessel to hold all of my concentrated questions, thoughts, and insecurities about my identity as a Mexican-American.

Veins expands on and adds to a rich history of contemporary artists using globally traded commodities (such as Minerva Cuevas’ Feast and Famine and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety) as visual metaphors for the ways that personal identity inhabits and is shaped by socio-political contexts. Veins has been shown at the Santa Barbara Architectural Foundation and Cypress College. ​