In 2019 I begin to return sporadically to Lake Tahoe. Having spent much of the previous five years producing in Mexico City, I wanted to return to the place where I had begun my work with a much sharper perspective on the living conditions of Latino migrant communities. I finally settled here, and in 2023 I begin a series about undocumented migrant women working informally around the lake, one of California’s most exclusive vacation enclaves.

Tahoe is a national park nestled in the Sierra Nevada Mountains between California and Nevada. A protected reserve that offers visitors a place to enjoy nature, a wide variety of recreational offerings and year-round recreational activities. Tahoe promotes a touristic lifestyle, built around slogans about an unwavering commitment to the environment and to each other. Of course, these discourses exclude lower-income workers. Generally migrants.

In Mexico, I built a practice around yoga exercises, dance classes, or learning pottery. For this new project I propose to my co-workers (since I myself work in a restaurant in the area), to attend ski touring classes, because none of them knew how to ski. Although Lake Tahoe attracts tourists and workers looking to enjoy the enormous offer of snow sports, irregular migrants live another reality. Whether for fear of going abroad because of their immigration status or because of their exhausting workdays, they barely enjoy this ‘natural paradise’ that they themselves have built with their work.

The proposal is simple: we meet on free days, like any other visitor to the area, to go skiing. The photo shoots, however, have a strongly theatrical component: they are both a ski lesson and a comedy performance that we do together for the camera. Since they all work irregularly in the United States, I made extravagant animal masks to cover their faces. I also made the clothes that each of the participants wear during the skiing sessions. The costumes reinterpret an ancient highland tradition from southern Mexico. In the carnival of the Sierra de Putla, Oaxaca, the inhabitants dance dressed in tiliches, colorful garments made from rags or scraps of scraps that were left over or received as alms. The origin of this costume goes back to the isolation of the inhabitants of this small community, located in a mountainous area of Oaxaca, and their need to become self-sufficient and make their own attire.

From this work I have made several series: We are missing a burrito guys (2023), whose images correspond to the ski touring lessons I conducted during the winter of 2023 with migrant workers. The sound collects testimonies in a somewhat variegated way, like the tiliches. Several personal stories are told there; border crossings that overlap with the sound recordings of the classes themselves, the sound of the kitchen of the restaurant where we work together, breathing and the soft sound of skis gliding across the snow.

The series I present is entitled I love America, America loves me. The title takes up the title used by Josef Beuys in his first and famous American performance. In 1974, Beuys traveled to the United States to perform this action at the René Block Gallery in New York. As soon as he got off the plane, Beuys wrapped himself in a large felt cloak and, without setting foot on American soil, was taken by ambulance to the gallery. There he remained locked in a room with a coyote, a native animal and the protagonist of several native myths and legends, for three full days. Beuys performed strange daily rituals that included the use of various objects and constant conversations with the animal. His action was intended as a critical commentary on the history of the persecution of Native Americans and the relationship between the United States and Europe, but also on the relationship between culture and nature and the treatment of animals.

I thought of all the contradictions that run through our lives in this remote, privileged region of California. My work thus appeared as a kind of generational dialogue with Beuys’ practice: in technicolor, repeated perhaps as comedy, but at the same time much more committed to a social reality of which Beuys only spoke from the pedestal of the artist. 

In this series, my companions and myself are at once coyotes and humans, subjects forcibly invited to occupy a position of social subalternity and artists in outlandish garb. The gray felt of the cold war explodes in a saturated and certainly excessive, almost unreal, chromatic palette that contrasts with the grayness of Tahoe’s snowy landscapes. The animals learn to ski, but also resurface as embroidery or rugs to decorate our homes. They talk to each other, wondering how far human beings are capable of going. I seek to explore feelings of incoordination and loss without losing sight of the capacity of humor to keep us together. A skein of threads keeps us there, sewn to the landscape, like traces of life in a beautiful and violent territory that is about to disappear. 

I love America, America loves me.