When you are poor, you lose options. Survival does not bring choices, only windows of opportunity you have to break open yourself. In this case, I’m breaking a window. 

I am a visual artist and writer from the Chicago region, where I raised by my immigrant mother - the very woman whose resilience and endurance informs my work. Middle child of six and a first-generation college student. My work examines the cost of silence and the violence of illegibility. Growing up in the United States, where you are constantly told that you are not the default; not the right language, not the right kind of documented status, not the right class. Where your very existence is branded ineligible and your life an open secret. Silence becomes a survival strategy, for those of us who must make ourselves smaller, quieter and invisible to power.

For so long silence meant survival, now my pen became the voice silence could not be. Art is my weapon of choice, my pen, the catalyst that speaks.