Santa C. Barraza, artist and professor from Texas A&M University at Kingsville, paints from her experience living at the cross roads of the Texas borderlands, a “Nepantla,” an inbetween-ness, experience. The Nahuatl word “Nepantla” derives from the mythic “land between” where a collision of two opposing worlds collide and recontextualize to form a third world as an emergence of a hybrid culture and language. Her art reflects this space of living in between, such as the borderlands.
She reclaims and appropriates from opposing cultures, both ancient and contemporary and creates a mestiza (hybrid) iconographic visual expression. The appropriation of the ancient culture of the Mesoamerican becomes re-contextualized into a new format of a mestiza visual language of the borderlands. The artwork manifests itself into an exploration of history, emotion and spirit of the land and human experience of resistance and survival of living between Mexico and Texas.

Arts Exhibition

with an introductory lecture by
Prof. Dr. Astrid M. Fellner
"Arts and Resistance in the US/Mexican Borderlands"