Submission

“I come to Colorado often because my soul is here. Your blood is here also.” Just one of the many breadcrumbs leading me to seek the father I barely knew when he was living. His legacy and my feelings toward him are complicated by the ever-present polarity of a loving parent and occasionally-violent patriarch. I recall only three instances of real vulnerability over thirty years. This project follows my father’s trail through important historical sites in Colorado and New Mexico, along the rivers, mountains, arroyos and valleys and to towns and pueblos where our family has lived for over 400 years. Photographs empower me to explore the emotional experience of knowing this complex man. Simultaneously I photograph the contemporary markers of Spanish colonialism in my own home, the San Francisco Bay Area. I visit missions, the Camino Real and mud-brick adobes in order to feel bits of the past that shaped my ancestors and now shape me. Perpetrators and victims, our identity is a confluence of conquest and erasure. My father’s legacy parallels that of Spanish colonialism by demonstrating violence to subdue innate desires for self-determination. How have upholding violent subjugation, systemic coercion and the erasure of native contributions ricocheted through our generations? My sense is that it poisons us. My father’s love depended on my obedience to his unpredictable emotional whims. I never knew when my loving nature would be turned against me. My sensitivity became a weakness and so I withdrew myself from the love of the world, my father, and my own self-love. I’m seeking apologies my father never gave and I need to experience him as a nuanced person, not just the object of my resentment. Legacies of violence and erasure persist across generations masked as tradition and order. These marked my father and now shape me. I want to forgive my father so that I can forgive myself. Photographs create a space to reflect on my mistakes instead of repeat them. This project will require the sharing of intergenerational knowledge and the collection of archival family photographs and paraphernalia alongside my own to create new visual connections. This presentation of the project includes archival AAA road maps sourced from areas of Spanish colonialism in California. The original black and white photographs are of family members or of historical family and colonial sites in CO, NM, and CA. A red sharpie line traces the route of the Camino Real, one piece in a system of pervasive propaganda that erases native and latinx stories from the landscape of the Southwest.