“Let Me Tell You About Border Love Stories” is a unique artist book of cyanotype portraits and composites featuring women from my matrilineage. The book is an offering of gratitude, dedicated especially to them for dreaming me into existence. It is an invocation of their love stories as a protective spell. It is a rejection of all colonial borders: geographic borders, body-mind-spirit borders, physical-liminal-spiritual borders, the borders between life and death, and any and all borders which may prevent us from coming home—to ourselves, to our relations, to the sacred water, to the land.

    The work of putting together this intimate archive of feeling, looked like gathering testimonios, writing autohistoria, performing family genealogical research, unearthing photographs and digitizing almost 500 items including: images, documents and letters. It also looked like ritualizing the cyanotype image-making process into an intuitive hydromancy practice. An imagined methodology to (re)member, to bear witness of how water is alive and carries memory, and as a healing path for ancestral reconnection.

This book goes out with a prayer:

May those who encounter it feel compelled to envision new ways of (re)enchanting the world.
May those imaginings feel like soft places to land.
May they feel the tender embrace of their ancestors.
May they remember that our love stories are ours—
to celebrate, to share, to hang on to,
from this world to the next.

June 2021