Adjunct Patricia Vázquez Gómez Explores Language and Migration Through Art
buuts’ (still) | Courtesy of Patricia Vázquez Gómez
According to her bio, PSU alum Patricia Vázquez Gómez “lives and works between the ancient Tenochtitlán and the unceded and occupied lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah and other Indigenous peoples,” and even from a cursory glance it’s clear that this geographic split has influenced her multidisciplinary art practice. Vázquez Gómez has explored themes of migration and culture across borders in projects ranging from a mobile art gallery and cultural center in a retrofitted school bus, a performance produced in collaboration with day laborers at the MLK Workers center, and an installation including found objects left behind by migrants in the desert. Her forthcoming installation at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, titled ja’ / buuts’ / t’aan, continues her creative research into these themes, combining video and audio to create an immersive experience of language and place. ja’ / buuts’ / t’aan opens at PICA on March 13, and will remain on view through May 31, 2025. More info can be found here.
In addition to her teaching and professional art practice, PSUFA is excited to share that Patricia Vázquez Gómez has also accepted the position of Interim Chair of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice, serving on our union Executive Council beginning in Spring 2025. To mark the opening of her show at PICA and her new role in the union, we interviewed her about the show and what drives her creative work.
PSUFA: How long have you been teaching at PSU? What dept./classes do you teach?
Patricia Vázquez Gómez: I have been teaching in the Art Department for about 7 years. The first class I taught was a seminar on the Ethics of Engagement for the Social Practice MFA students, I still teach that class. I have taught other classes for undergraduate and graduate students: Introduction to Art and Social Practice, BFA Research and Proposal, Vertical Lab and a few seminars.
What inspired this project? How did you get involved with this community/subject matter?
The project has a few origins. The oldest root is my long standing desire to learn an Indigenous language. I was born and raised in Mexico and I was brought up speaking Spanish. My family must have spoken an Indigenous language at some point, but that got lost, and with that, parts of the history and culture that I didn’t have access to.
Shortly after arriving in the US, I did many years of work with immigrant and labor rights movements. Through that work I came in contact with Indigenous speakers, mostly from Mexico and Guatemala. My observation was that in the context of migration, Indigenous Languages disappear within a generation. That increases the languages’ chance of extinction. I'm not a linguist or an anthropologist and I am not approaching what I'm doing through the lens of those disciplines, but I definitely have had this longing for exploring the presence of Indigenous Languages from South of the border in the US.
Photo courtesy Patricia Vázquez Gómez
When I moved to the neighborhood where I live in NE Portland, I realized that maayat’aan is very present. I would go to the store, or to a protest, or to the food cart and hear the language. I learned there are a lot of families in the neighborhood using maayat’aan every day. I was surprised, but mostly very moved by having the language so alive in my immediacy!
What do you hope viewers will take away from this project? Is there a kind of impact or action you'd like to see out in the world as a result of people spending time with this work?
What I am most interested in is the work having an impact on the families I have been working with, and particularly the kids. I want them to believe that their language is valued beyond the people who speak it. That if they wanted, they could use their language to engage in cultural production, as some folks are doing these days. That institutions and individuals would be willing to fund that production. One of the things I have learned through my research is that, at least in the Mayab (what we now know as Yucatán, México), it is more profitable to learn English than to continue speaking maayat'aan. If folks speak English they can have access to jobs in the tourist industry —"salarios de hambre" as we say in Spanish (starvation wages) but it is the only option that many Mayans have. But there's nothing in terms of economic advancement that comes with speaking maayat'aan. The very few folks making some money from speaking the language are cultural producers: writers, rappers, singers. So maybe it is through the cultural sector that we can start changing that.