Chisme

Chisme is part of Semillas, an ongoing body of work exploring memory, lineage, and inherited history through family archives. Working from personal photo albums, I treat memory as a living material—revisited, reworked, and transformed. Centered on Martha Magdalena Ramirez, a maternal figure from my family history, the piece examines migration, womanhood, and the quiet ways stories are carried. Set against the cultural shifts of 1970s and ’80s California and the Xicano Movement, Chisme explores Latinidad and gossip as a form of survival—an intimate, shared practice of resistance among women.