ARTIST STATEMENT: As an artist, my work utilizes my biography not only to explore personal experience, but also to provide a lens for the persistent effects of social institutions and cultural practices on the individual. Addressing everything from immigration to sex and sexuality, I aim to reclaim my personal narrative and creatively reconstruct history. Reassembling imagery (indigenous codices, colonial propaganda, consumer print media), I create new iconography presenting alternative understandings of colonialism, culture, sex, etc. As a Mexican, I belong to a population absent from U.S. cultural and historical production and often referred to as "undocumented." Within this context, printmaking becomes a response to the exclusionary history, media and texts populating my upbringing. The print and its ability to be reproduced subversively re-assumes the tools of the system to insert condemned and excluded peoples with which I identify into larger conversations--to provide the missing pages.