Hablamos su idioma
There are things we do not choose. We are born into a history, a family, a language, traditions, images, and a particular way of seeing the world. Over time, we may distance ourselves from some of these things, transform them, or rediscover them, but they remain part of who we are. I am part of that story. It is my heritage.
In 2007, I painted Hablamos Su Idioma, an oil-on-canvas work created through the Canvollage technique. When I look at it again today, after so many years, I find something in it that may have already been there, even though I could not yet express it in the same words: the need to recognize where we come from and to ask ourselves what we do with what we have received.
Heritage does not arrive to us as a finished piece. We receive it in fragments: in a word, a recipe, a celebration, a song, an image, a family story, a way of working, believing, relating to one another, or understanding the world. We often live alongside these things without stopping to consider everything they contain, until something makes us look again. For me, that something can also be art.
As an artist, I feel a responsibility toward the things that form part of my identity. One of those responsibilities is to give them expression; not simply to represent them, but to recognize them, explore them, and find my own way of sharing them. I do not intend to speak on behalf of all Hispanic people or to summarize such a broad and diverse heritage in a single painting. That would be impossible. Each person carries a different story. My responsibility is to speak from mine, from what I have experienced, from what I have received, and from the way I learned to see. And perhaps, when we dare to speak honestly from what is our own, we can create a space where others can recognize themselves as well.
That is why Hablamos Su Idioma has never meant only speaking a language to me. We also speak a language when we recognize certain gestures, flavors, sounds, symbols, landscapes, memories, and ways of relating to one another. There are things that need no translation because we recognize them through experience. Our heritage, however, is not uniform. It is made up of many stories, many places, and many voices. Within Hispanic heritage, there is enormous diversity, and we do not have to be the same to recognize ourselves as part of a shared history.
I believe that is where something fundamental emerges: we need one another as a people. Not to think alike, nor to erase our differences, but to recognize one another. No community can sustain its history if its own members stop seeing it, passing it on, and giving it new ways to exist. Heritage does not remain alive simply because we preserve it untouched. It remains alive when we know it, share it, question it, and are also capable of transforming it.
This is where I find myself returning to Canvollage. In Canvollage, the fragment is essential. Without the fragment, there would be no Canvollage. A fragment may have belonged to another image, another moment, another composition, but when it is separated, it does not cease to exist. It retains something of its history and, when it encounters other fragments, begins to participate in a new reality. Perhaps our heritage has something of that as well.
We receive fragments from those who came before us. We carry them with us, interpret them, transform them, and, in some way, pass them on to those who come after us. To transform does not mean to forget. Sometimes it means finding a new way for something to continue living.
That is why I believe art also has a responsibility to memory. It can preserve what time threatens to erase, but it can also make it visible in a new way. It can remind us of who we were, ask us who we are, and sometimes help us imagine who we might become.
Painting Hablamos Su Idioma was, and continues to be, my way of participating in that conversation. Not of speaking for everyone, but of placing my own voice within a story that is much larger than I am.
Today, as I look at the work again during Hispanic Heritage Month, I feel that its title can be read differently. No longer simply as a statement, but as an invitation. We speak its language. We speak the language of our stories, our memories, our differences, and the things that still bring us together.
Perhaps recognizing our heritage should not lead us only to look backward. It should help us look at one another. Because a truly living heritage is not only what we receive; it is also what we choose to do with what we receive.
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