Still Playing with Fire

"Still Playing With Fire" a long term photographic project about my own family and our individual and communal history within Southern New Mexico. Through a pseudo-documentary approach to photographing my family and the land around Las Cruces, Doña Ana and Mesilla, NM, (all part of the same metro area) I interrogate the generational trauma of my family, and the cycles of violence and suffering that have followed us in context of dominant narratives of white supremacy in Colonial Spain, Imperial Mexico all the way through the current occupation of the land by the United States of America.

Through photography I navigate the loss of family and culture, through the examination of ongoing hardships within my family. Beginning with the death of my paternal grandfather, an enrolled Agua Caliente Cahuilla man, in the 70s after he was shot by Las Cruces Police officers while in custody, to the murder of my uncle in 2019, and through the recent death of my little cousin to overdose. I make this work as a means of tracking, documenting, interpreting and working through the enormous pain that has lived in my people and family for generations and is passed down with every new birth.