The figure looks unflinchingly out across the picture plane. She pulls her tank top away from her heart to show off two chest tattoos. One is a rose with a banner and text that reads Margarita, and the other is a stylized portrait of a woman surrounded by filagree with a similar banner adorned with the name Guadalupe. Each tattoo is an homage to one of the subject's ancestors. This image is one of the three photographs that comprise the piece 100% (Triptych), part of Chingona Por Vida.Chingona Por Vida explores personal and family histories of migration, survival, and the negotiation of identity in a culture where emphasis is placed on who we are and how others perceive us. In Chingona Por Vida, the subjects re-perform the Chola versions of themselves in rural and suburban landscapes, drawing connections between the complex articulation of intersectional Latinx identity and the colonialism and racism bound up in the landscape of California. 100% (Triptych) derives its name from the common feeling of never being enough, experienced by many people with hybrid and mixed identities.
Chingona Por Vida is a multi-media project investigating queer, femme, Chicanx identity and how the colonization of Mexico in the mid-1800s has led to the ongoing oppression of Latinx people in what is currently thought of as the United States. The project raises questions about the impossibility of visual encounters and representations to ever-present the truth or the entirety of a person. There is always something illegible in the process of looking, and this act is always entangled with cultural ideologies. The work underscores identity as intersectional, contingent, and continually malleable.
Excerpt from the written component of the map piece Untitled (an nofficial history of Mexifornia).
