Estefania Angeles

We Are The House We Live In

2021-22

I returned to the house of my childhood, a home beloved for its aesthetic beauty, its lived experiences, the effort that my maternal grandparents made to acquire it, and the effort that it has been to maintain it before and after Tina.

As in any good family home, surrounded by countless memories, I rediscovered a box that my dearest grandmother had treasured. I had packed this box twenty years ago, right after Tina’s funeral, but I didn't remember what it contained. Photos of my family, of all the children, of my grandfather. Legal documents such as birth certificates, wills or judicial sentences, deeds, architectural plans, correspondence between my grandparents. As if all those documents were the legacy they left to us as a family, above and beyond the lived experiences.

Now I find myself putting together a puzzle, stringing together family narratives, documents, images: the story of a family of migrants -always in close contact with their province of origin- who arrived in La Merced in the 1950s, during a period of economic stabilization and development in Mexico… 

In families, nobody says what really matters. 

However, we are that house, the one we live in.