Dream Machine Archive: Rendering Mexican Immigrant Women's Dreams

Abstract

Through the use of print, sculpture, video and sound, my thesis installation, films and album create a stream of video and sound consciousness by listening or watching the dreams of Mexican immigrant women surveyed through a year-long dream hotline (888)573-2186. I question: Can the rendering of Mexican immigrant women's dreams through a media landscape give insight into the complexity of identity and land? In this project, I have remixed audio recordings of Mexican women immigrants (including myself) reciting their dreams with Mexican commercial logos, home footage and imagined soundscapes. The thesis artworks embody a spirit and aesthetic of rasquache and the resulting immersive video rasquache diary explores how our place of origin is stamped into our memories and present identity. The research is constructive, rendering many portraits of psyches from callers far away from home, and shows how media hastily pasted together can give us the texture of a memory or dream. Along with the use of radio, sound, video and sculpture installations, I used the images of fruit as a way to understand immigration's intertwined complexity in creating personal identity. Fruit, like people, must pass specific inspections and rules to be admitted into the US. Both are subject to labeling systems that have a complex hierarchy based on origin. Unlike fruit, humans can assimilate, thereby shifting their perspective, nearly erasing a memory that can only be visited in a dream. Inspired by the term Pocha, meaning rotting fruit but used as a slight towards assimilated Mexican Immigrants/ Citizens, I created a visual language for internal experiences of assimilation and immigration. The audio, video and print works simultaneously explore dreams and identity as landscapes through media as a psychodynamic tool. This written thesis archives dreams from the project as well as maps out the methodology and process of Dream Machine Archive through written text, poetry and a train ride outline.