Blue tortillas are the same colour as the sea here.

I embroidered this piece with the phrase «Blue tortillas are the same colour as the sea here». I used a 6 strand, cotton, dark blue thread on natural, cotton fabric. I used 6 strands to free hand embroider the phrase in Spanish first, then divided the final stitch in half to use 3 strands to embroider it in English, then divided that and ended up using 1 strand to embroider it in Dutch. I am still learning Dutch, so if I were to assign a number of strands to express my confidence or closeness to the language it would be 1, not 2. This is the reverse:

I wanted to express my relationships with different languages I’ve collected in my migrant experience. By not defining «here» with the name of a place, the piece is open to interpretation as to where «here» is or «there». Language has a special role in the act of «othering». The word «tortilla» remains the same in the three versions of the phrase, and, in a way, it symbolizes, my Mexican identity. On the one hand, it can be viewed as a concept that is able to stay the same, but it can also mean that Mexican identity is untranslatable. Even though, I make an effort to find substitutes of the things that help me construct it. Perhaps, it can also be that the word «tortilla» and, with it, Mexican identity occupies an in-transferable place in other languages.