A job is a personal process that develops individual personalities through the banality of an everyday struggle. There is no one evil or good in a community, just personal struggles; and that is rich and interesting, nothing to be feared.



As a student going to a very expensive art school and being from a middle class family, I've had to work many jobs in restaurants. In every kitchen there were the same race of man, the same language, the same in Arizona along with California. After school I needed money and took a job as a nanny. At the park there are other nannies, all immigrants speaking Spanish. This is a community I am part of but also an outsider, for I don't speak Spanish and this job is only temporary. Even though we are in the park, it is an environment of work I see there everyday; men cleaning the park and the nannies scolding the children, wiping their noses, and kissing them. I feel a kinship with these women and men in the kitchens; the repetition they must participate in creates a craft that links them to me as peers. The same route to the park everyday, just like me, washing plate after plate, push the button, walk through the steam, doing these things becomes a way of life.



These people I've met come from other places with rich histories that are being infused in our American social conscience. The products being used in Mexican kitchens, like these banana leaves to wrap tamales, are beautiful and create delicious experiences. These women in the park are teaching the children Spanish and inhabiting this space with them together, giving the park life. Many of these women are not here legally, along with countless bus boys and dishwashers I have encountered. Regardless of whether this is right or wrong in the grand scheme of the development of America or Mexico; the repetition of their work is becoming a craft that is having an effect on who we are as Americans. Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, my daily life was always associated with a Mexican presence. The typical family house has textiles from latin American origins. The food and sounds of my childhood were closely linked to those of Mexican children because of our proximity to the border. I drive down my street seeing billboards in Spanish, I wear dresses made in Mexico, bright and beautiful, like Frida Khalo who is loved and romanticized. I want to appreciate the innocence in these people I have worked with and joined together in with this process of a repetitious life of work. I don't want to separate that which we romanticize apart from the people with which things that we DO embrace are connected.

I wear traditional Mexican dresses as a statement and because I believe them to be beautiful. These dresses are produced from labor that could only be generated in a place separate from here, a foreign history. I feel lucky to wear something so beautiful and colorful, accessible to me from the immigration of people coming north over borders. I have no Latin American heritage but I feel connected to this place through the people I have met, the Spanish that I hear daily enriching the collage of aspects that make up my life.

There is never enough, I embrace as much beauty as possible. Who do I have to thank for this enrichment? There are Coyotes to bring over the people, but these people I work with, they are Coyotes of culture and crafts, for this I am thankful and respectful. In these times of the creation of new laws and protests, when fingers are being pointed and communities being grouped together, at times arbitrarily; I believe it most important to fight against stereotypes. I want to do my part in acknowledging the events of individual struggle, and I do this by photographing. I believe that to photograph something is to pay it respect, to notice that it is present and having an effect. The man washing dishes is away in the kitchen while I am being a tactful waitress out front. To meet the nannies in the park I had to join a specific community and have a need to be in this tucked away park. All that I can say is that I have been effected by these people that I photograph and am connected with them through our present situations of work and our shared and developing histories; This is what I am celebrating.

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