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Ana Mendieta Taught Me About Dispossession and Identity
The artist made it her life’s work to honor what was lost under colonization. Decades later, I tried to follow in her footsteps.
“Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.” — Zora Neale Hurston
On Valentine’s Day of this year in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I had a drawing by Ana Mendieta tattooed on my back. I can’t see it without the help of a mirror, but I know it’s there — an image most vivid when I close my eyes and summon it to the surface of my skin. Some people think it looks like a fern, or a fossilized rib cage, or maybe a hot pepper. For me, it contains all these possibilities and more.
When she was alive, the Cuban American artist let this image take many forms. She sketched it in her notebook. She carved it onto a cave in Cuba. Then she took photographs — of the pages of the notebook, of the sculpture in the cave — and these were the photographs I brought to the tattoo parlor on Calle Loíza. The image has been sustained through a series of transpositions: a game of diasporic telephone.
The dictionary’s enumerated meanings teach us that we must learn to sustain losses and injuries just as we must learn to sustain…
