 My work explores feminism, cuernas y cultura, highlighting resistance and reclamation in the selfie era. I work in a variety of media, including historical processes, video installation, mobile art, and handmade books. As a queer Latina, I believe that emerging technologies allow marginalized spaces to be heard and claimed space. I'm interested in visibility, activism, and intersectional feminism. Having grown up queer on the internet, I use technology to combine my experiences with culture as a tool to examine identity and power. My fucking face is a large-scale video installation and examination of my involvement and a generation's need to document the self. When an exhibit, the three-minute and 42-second video plays on an endless loop, projected 10 feet tall, made in 2011, it contains thousands of photographs spanning two years of my life, shot on a webcam. The availability of digital photography inserted into handheld devices and computers has changed the way that we make and view photographs. Style I self-portraits, selfies, they're an important part of our visual vocabulary, and the ever-growing archive is something that I use to examine and reflect on social media as a digital campfire for tools, as a digital campfire of self-preservation, surveillance, and resistance. Gathering the Embers is a performative altar and interactive offrenda that pays tribute to the erased history of powerful women. Before each performance, the audience is asked to write their names of their departed, assistant trans women heroes on strips of communal red cloth. During that first performance, my mother braids the name covered lestonis into my hair. A projection of video of alter imagery depicts the cycle of life and death. The dialogue over the performance recites the names of the contributed heroes, particularly focusing on indigenous femme heroes, women of color, trans and queer heroes. My mother also speaks, she's not in the house anymore, but she was here, sharing Spanglish stories about her grandmother's long, thick, Venezuelan Indian and Afro-Caribbean hair that she always wore in two long peninsas in long braids. The family stories point to the denial of her grandmother's heritage because of internalized racism and anti-blackness within our Latinx-mixed family, and thus to the erasure of her abuela's existence. I aim to recognize the forgotten histories of strong women that were swept aside for generations and hold communal space and homage with audience members. Gathering the Embers has now grown to include site-based braiding collaborations. I can also be performed as a community-based workshop and has been for femmes and gender non-conforming folks to engage in their own personal storytelling, historical revision and communal recognition. After the performance that was pictured previously, I exhibited the listonness with a body of work that has currently been growing out of the gathering, the Embers series entitled, your abuela's prayers still protect you. It was for my exhibition, Yaus Iwal, which I curated to highlight multi-dimensional works by Latinas and kind of tried to show what unifies us in power. Our goal was to carve out space for mujeres fotográficas for women photographers in San Jose. As a quartet of artists, we are indigenous queer from here, international de aquí, de allá. Our exhibit and performances sought to ignite women and allies to occupy space with us in celebration of our community and our strength. Your abuela's prayers still protect you and evokes rituals and reaction to the patriarchy influenced by traditional practices from the intersections of my heritage. I attempt to conjure a healing space of reclamation. In the landscape, I perform a commentary on feminine vulnerability and strength. My actions critique cultural stereotypes and react against gender violence through the language of traditional healing and curanderismo. Adorned with the communal ribbons from my gathering, the Embers performances, I wanna continue to carry the erased legacies of strong women into the future. Representations of my grandmother's rituals become altars to self-care. Printed on silk and encapsulated into handmade nichos, your abuela's prayers still protect you as a gesture towards the practices of our ancestry utilized for navigating contemporary life as a queer feminist Latinx. I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge my white passing privilege. As many first generation Latinos, I live in La Frontera on the borderlands of upholding my heritage while often being forced to participate in a whitewashing and erasing culture. This work allows me to oppose cultural barriers within my own identity and create a history on my own terms. Still, I find it important to center black and brown folks in our fight against white supremacy and acknowledge that by including myself in most of the work I'm showing here today, I'm only speaking to my personal experiences and those are very privileged. Pulse de Nuestrex Corazones, this is, oh, can I, there we go. Pulse de Nuestrex Corazones was an interactive altar by Maida Guadalupe and I. In memory of the Pulse nightclub tragedy at the Soma Arts de los Muertos exhibition. The installation seeks to highlight the joy, safety, and belonging found in queer dance spaces. Songs from the community were collected to represent the sense of family, sanctuary, and celebration of queer life found on the dance floor. In tribute to the lives lost, many of whom were Latinx, the living altar was activated by the community's interaction, dance, and reflection. And a hashtag. Shift Control Command Power utilizes digital technology to confront environments otherwise difficult for women to navigate. Digital media and green screens allow me to build my own atmosphere to reveal the violent nature of public space. I grant myself the right to inhabit these situations safely by inserting myself, inserting my nude self into the intersections of oppression that I experience as a queer Latina. I reference clothing as a tool for security and resistance against the gaze while ultimately highlighting its inefficiency, clothing and skin are not the consequence of vulnerability and whether one is nude or clothed, the intrusive gaze is ever present. The performance is a critical response to my life as a woman, everyday sexism and rape culture. This large-scale video installation uses the backdrop of San Jose at night to confront public space, objectification, and street harassment. And also, I like to display it 10 feet or larger whenever possible in the public space. You can touch me. Thank you.