midwexican

[midwexican]

Pilsen's murals are something else. Check out the details on the wings. I never realized they had all those swirls on the inside. There's so much detail going into the shade of orange. How do artists decide just how the shapes are going to look? Photo cred NIU Foundation.

#midwexican #murals #pilsen #chicago #art

[midwexican]

July 29, 2019 I definitely had midwexican thoughts on the brain. Here's another from the archives.

Growing up, I always felt like something blotted out my cultural memory. A hole existed inside me, and I had no idea what was supposed to exist within it. I tried to figure it out by surveying the edges, to see if I could recognize the shape with research and questions. I'd get closer, but what I needed was for someone to give me the missing piece, the memory, the family story that would connect me back.

What I wanted was to feel rooted into my family. What I wanted was to look at myself and see my reflection extended. I wanted to know how I fit in my family. I wanted to know where my eyes came from. In absence of my family, I tried on different people's faces to see if they matched. Sometimes, it got close. Sometimes there was a resonance. A hey, we raise our eyebrows the same way when we meet eyes. A hey, we both carry a same grief for the history lost with our elder loved ones. I wanted to see my face in others, in art, but that wasn't true. I wanted to see my face in myself. I wanted to see my reflection unfragmented. I wanted the void to be healed.

Alain Fleischer - Dans le cadre du miroir, 1984

#midwexican archives

[midwexican]

I didn't realize I'd made this blog even earlier because this post is from July 23, 2019, and there's so many things I wrote about the boy there that are so different now.

One of the things that I think is not unique in kind but unique in flavor is the way living in an isolated world makes you latch on to anyone else like you. You're both rare and therefore precious (instead of being precious while being rare) so you get terrified of losing the other person.

I thought I'd never meet another person like this boy, who could understand the pocha struggles I was going through, who could understand the ways my mixed family impacted my life. Turns out, the people didn't need to be Mexican to get that, and it turns out that even so, there are a lot of Mexican people who do. We were precious not because we were rare but because we were each creations of God.

I deeply love a Chicano hillbilly boy and it’s okay for me to post that here because he’s never going to see this and the reason this sucks is I’m leaving in a week and he’s leaving in a month and like. I’m probably never going to see him again. I feel very sad about that. I wish I had looked at him more when we sat next to each other in class.

#midwexican archive

[midwexican]

Hey! If you're reading this, it's probably because one of my old posts redirected you here. I changed my URL recently to mariposavuela because I want to use this for a different project. I originally created the blog in August 2019 because I wanted it to be a place to store my original work. I did a lot of cool original essays there! But then around the election time, I think the blog got a little too reblog-heavy. So on March 6, 2021, I transferred the URL here to give it a little refresh. A fresh start for a new spring.

#midwexican #update