I move easily through language, yet when it matters most, I choose silence. This work begins in that tension between what is said and what is kept.

As the middle child, I learned to live between presences seen, but not always heard. I became fluent in listening, in holding space, in recognizing when a voice could disappear. That in between became a way of being. It echoes the experience of immigration: to exist between languages, between homes, between versions of the self. To translate constantly, and still remain partially unspoken.

Silence, then, is not absence. It is a strategy. It is protection. It is inheritance.

In a country that depends on immigrants yet seeks to erase them, silence becomes political. It can shield, but it can also contain. It carries the weight of what cannot be risked, what must survive.

Lips move through my work as thresholds. They hold and release, conceal and reveal. Sometimes they close around stories shaped by fear or care. Sometimes they open, tentative, resistant, claiming space where there was none. They mark the fragile line between voice and disappearance.

Butterflies “mis mariposas” trace another language. They cross borders without permission, following routes older than nations. Their movement resists containment. They embody transformation, migration, and quiet defiance.

My work lives in the space between speaking and withholding. It asks what remains when silence is carried through family, through migration, through time. And what it means, finally, to break it.