My grandmother’s family didn’t talk about the past, so I learned it from records: church books, census sheets, DNA matches. What the paper couldn’t tell me, I started looking for in other places: in corn ground by hand, in maps traced from a garage in Arizona, in the sound of a canyon at night.
I think of my work as alchemy: making something out of what looks like nothing. The six months between my Abuela’s death and her burial left me with nine hours of voice memos; I turned them into THE DESCENT, a composition that never plays the same way twice. Wax became an altar for the women in my line. In the kitchen, heat, cold, salt, and time do the same work: cream becomes ice cream, piñon nuts become milk, and fermentation keeps a food changing long after I’ve let it go. I’m drawn to any process where a material transforms into something new.
Food is my most direct medium because it asks the body to remember. Sound is the one that reaches what words can’t.
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