Catracha Matriarch

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Central American scholars empower us to be truthful and unwavering in the storytelling of our family migration histories, experiences with intergenerational and war trauma, while trying to survive and make meaning of our own community identity for ourselves and the world. I had the opportunity to sit down and capture my mother's oral life history. As the daughter of Honduran parents and Salvadorian grandparents, my mother’s story teaches me about the meaning of Central American womanhood, perseverance, healing, love, creativity, and standing in my power authentically.

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As I have come to learn, her life was heavily impacted by family trauma and separation, poverty, gender-based violence, and countless experiences of racism and discrimination. As Dr. Leisy Abrego shares, “my family’s history is inextricably woven into a national and regional history of multiple layers of state and gendered violence that most humans would prefer to forget." Counternarratives, testimonios and cultural memories are the ways in which US Central Americans continue to resist, transform, and exist across the United States and diaspora defined by our own terms. My mother persevered and continues to persevere through her caregiving and noble heart as a wife, sister, daughter, mother, and now abuelita.⁣

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“Catracha Matriarch", a project dedicated to my mami, was curated through photographs, music, and memories of my mom’s experiences navigating love, fashion, and motherhood as a newly immigrated Central American woman in the late 1970s. Her healing, formation of self-identity and positionality in Los Angeles was not only shaped by learning to cope with her difficult experiences, but making sense and healing from these experiences by being resourceful, creative, and bold with her love of music, family, dancing and fashion.