Website Purpose

Greetings, and welcome to my website. This functions as both a repository of my artwork and a learning ground for website design and development. I hope you find something interesting

Short Essay on Authors view of Self and Identity

I go by Lou or Tezuma, whichever you'd like. I'm an American born Chicano who hates America, who hates the fact I was born, and who hates the racialized creation of identities like Chicano. The word Chicano is a long storied and historical word with a lot of meanings and fluidity within it. I'm using it to describe an individual of Mexican American descent/experience who feels they aren't wholly included within the (made up) catagories of a Mexican or an American. This is not an identity I grasp with pride, but with heavy reluctance. To me race isn't anything but taxonomy invented to allow us to do horrors on those unlike us.

Any attempt to define a human (especially the classic academic views) leaves out many essential and importance aspects of an indiidvual, parts of a person lost in the translation from a human to a human language. For myself, it's very rare that I am not painfully aware of my skin color in rooms of white people. Furthermore it's very rare that I am not painfully aware of my lack of Spanish proficency or culture when surrounded by Mexicans and other Latnix persons. Hence the idea of being Mexican doesn't sit right with me and neither simply an American

As with any human this negativity I have towards America and Identity is only one half of me. The other part of me loves America and loves my cosmopolitian mutt nature. It makes me look racially ambigous which I've since learned makes me mysterious and desirable as an exoticy. That does suck sometimes but I won't pretend I don't enjoy the benefits as they come along. In this sense and way of thinking I can look at America and see a lot to admire. The millions of immigrants (including my grandparents) who fought and struggled to the very unfair land of oppurtunity and endured. I think of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Ceaser Chavez and Larry Itliong and so many other countless people who fought for their rights to exist with respect and dignity.

So again if I had to describe myself I'd say American Born Chicano, but depending on the time of day, my mood and who knows what else, I can be very anti identity and pro indivualistic understandings of others, which in a sense is very American itself. This paradox of utilizing American values to reject the status and identity of American is more so what I want to get across in this about page more than any biographical info. I hope that this website is a place where I can ramble and create work about my different ideas and the ways in which they conflict, fufill and deny eachother.