aqui y alla: una manera de ser (here and there: a way of being)

This thesis support paper explores a body of work based on drawing and painting representing my LatinX family. In this paper, I intend to probe, contest, address, and resist our colonial history to contribute to resilience, empowerment, and a nuanced LatinX identity in a visual format. In this paper I contextualize my family within a post-colonial Latin American history, investigate the role of painting in perpetuating dominant colonial tropes, as well as engage with theories of the center and marginality. I also discuss the aesthetic strategies of haciendo caras (making faces), performing brownness, and parody, concluding with a discussion on mimicry/ambivalence and a method of healing the colonial wound. The artistic practice I outline in this thesis paper fluctuates between research and creation to engage with decolonial strategies in figurative painting and non-figurative drawing. This practice creates resistance against coloniality through visual creations.