ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a working class Tejana writer and performer from the Rio Grande Valley. Schooled in Dallas, settled in San Antonio. I’ve never heard a cowboy say yee-haw. Never had a conversation with a daughter of the republic. Growing up in the 80s on Crockett Street, Alamo, Texas, meant ruby red grapefruits and Grease Lightning. Somersaults under a flipping baton. Friday Goth in Reynosa. Big Bird sightings over the horizon and running through open fields arms flying wide open while a dust cropper sprayed pesticides like rain. My cultural roots are a continuous point of artistic inspiration. As an actor, writer, director, educator, and activist/critic, I engage at the intersections of theater practice. My work resides in action, community-building, and struggle.I write short stories, profiles, and nonfiction essays and turn them into transmedia performances. My protagonists are mujer malas, women who rebel against cultural expectations, while at the same time embracing the duality of Tejana-Méx border life, and the complexity of female roles of mother, lover, and Virgen. They are urban legends, la Border Goth. All my characters are isolated and searching for a place of comfort, a place to call home. I linger within my personas for months, sometimes years, adapting them from short fiction to live public-improvisational-interactions, still imagery, podcasts, performance videos, and ensemble plays. Character development is central to my writing and performance methods. I am most alive when performing. I find territories of communion through performance by exploring my most vulnerable and honest self. 

Welcome to my world: La Border Goth – 

a childhood along the Tex-Mex border 

chasing Big Birds, Dancing Devils and Alien Anarchists. 

Living the “in-betweens” 

of myth-making and reality, 

of the divine and demonic, 

of love and hate. 

La Border Goth has a heightened sensitivity to romance, but is othered – 

and likes it that way. 

She’s deep in choque-mode without insurance.

 La Border Goth smears her black eyeliner on purpose, y’all. 

In recent works, I have explored La Border Goth through performance by embodying urban legends like The Donkey Lady and La Lechuza. Now, I am taking my Border Goth-self into memoir-mode and exposing the story of my messy love life as told through the eyes of a newly imagined, finely minted, myth-making mujer: La Chueca. 

COMING IN 2026: “La Chueca y Los Dancing Devils” 

It’s the full-fuerza telling of messy loving that ultimately unmasks messages that critique gender stereotyping, othering, spinsterhood and single parenting as viewed through a politically infused Chicana that grew up in a Mexican family with “traditional” expectations.