“I contend that given the continuous trauma of the legacies of colonialism, ritual, as a generative socializing practice, tracks how altar-making continuously invokes a communal and embodied relation with the dead and bolsters resistance to multiple oppressions including the secular split from spiritual life in the everyday. ”
My work focuses on how death is taken up among marginalized communities experiencing multiple oppressions. In particular, I study how Chicanas, with Catholic colonial histories employ resistance to racial and gender domination. Accordingly, I research the strategies employed in altar-making practices by women who are assigned inferior positions and disproportionately tasked with domestic and religious education (Turner 1985). For Chicanx peoples, Catholicism plays a primary role in structuring hierarchical gender roles which relegate women to inferior social positions and overlook them as vital conduits of community transformation. However, in Chicanx aesthetic traditions, altars are taken up by women of marginalized communities to push against heternormative gender roles and generate social transformation through religious art practices (Mesa-Bains 1990). By invoking the dead, many Chicanx altar-makers maintain a conception of death that is vital to enactments of resistance against gendered inequality. For instance, Amalia Mesa-Bains treats altars as a site to invoke her female ancestors, both familial and unrelated, to reconceive the role of women in the home (Mesa-Bains 1990). Thus, I treat altar-making as a case study to examine the critical interventions that maintain relations with the dead and facilitate transborder resistance.