Guusje Sanders on Claudia Cano

Retrato de Familia (Family's Portrait), 2010, woven photography, 30 x 22 in.

[Image description: An image of a Latina woman from the shoulder’s up. She has brown eyes and cropped brown hair. Upon first glance, the image is made up of small rectangles that look like large pixels. Some of them are out of place, giving the image a glitchy air. Looking closely, it becomes apparent that it is made of woven strips of photographs.]

In my time as a curator working with artists from all over the world, as well as San Diego community members, I have found that there is often a through line in conversations about immigration and what happens to one’s identity when uprooted from a particular place. In the construction of identity as an immigrant, a duality appears as different cultural legacies engage in battle over one’s self-expression. Lived experiences and cultural influences in one country create a certain perspective on the world; that outlook is challenged when surroundings change. Many immigrants face a shift in social standing, new forms of discrimination, and stereotyping based on their heritage. At the same time, exposure and assimilation transform their world view, opening their eyes to new societal systems that are harder for someone completely ingrained in a particular culture to see. In many ways, immigration fractures one’s identity. The immigrant gains a new understanding of oneself as an outsider, often in more than one place, and ends up weaving together multiple fragmented experiences into a new person. Artist Claudia Cano expresses the complexity of this ongoing strife of cross-border cultural heritage in her interdisciplinary practice. Filled with humor, Cano approaches her work as a dichotomy that is celebratory yet critical, strong yet vulnerable, and claims space for both her own and others’ stories.

Cano explores this pluralism with the series Identities, in which she weaves together photographic portraits. In Retrato de Familia (Family’s Portrait), Cano integrated headshots of herself, her husband, and children. As a bi-national family from Mexico and the United States, each member comes with their own unique background, epitomizing the way families and communities are made out of different experiences and not simply defined by singular descriptions. The woven portraits push the viewer to think about identity beyond colonial classifications of race and gender, and instead think about its construction as something fluid. In response to a society that constantly asks people to label themselves while simultaneously questioning their belonging, Identities creates a space that shows how identities are continuously changed by the places and people surrounding us. Each person’s history is intricately connected to their future, and everything is impacted by their lived experience in the present. This continuous flux creates a liminal space in which migrant identities and their ambiguous sense of belonging find themselves, churning between different locations, temporalities, and qualifiers. 

Such liminality is paralleled by Cano’s process; as she combines the (relatively speaking) new medium of photography with weaving traditions, she connects cultural legacy to different states of existing. In Mexico, weaving is a way of sharing ancestral narratives that are filled with long-standing practices and cross-generational knowledge. By combining the two artistic processes, Cano demonstrates how identity, like her mediums, is intertwined beyond a single space and time. 

The construction of identity and the mediums Cano uses are integral parts of her work. The ideas raised by Identities set the stage for her next body of work, Rosa Hernandez— the Cleaning Lady, in which she challenges systemic singularization of Brown identities. Cano was born in Toluca, Mexico in 1966. In 2001, she moved to the United States, where she was confronted with the stereotypes and inequality surrounding Brown and immigrant labor. Having seen different approaches to domestic labor in both the United States and Mexico, Cano takes a critical look at how different cultures deal with those considered outsiders, and the larger structures around gendered and immigrant labor practices. 

Rosa Hernandez— the Cleaning Lady, 2013, photograph, 30 x 24 in.

[Image description: A Latina woman stands in front of the oven range in an upscale kitchen. She has a black pageboy haircut and wears a pink and white maid’s uniform, and has a mop beside her. She looks sternly at the viewer.]

From this, Rosa Hernandez— the Cleaning Lady was born. Rosa is one of Cano’s alter egos, personified through performance. Rosa cleans unconventional spaces during unusual times, such as art galleries during an opening and the waterfront sidewalks as tourists walk around her, taking selfies. She is inconspicuous and yet unexpectedly and assertively present as the smells of her cleaning products draw the senses to her performance. Rosa is the embodiment of a fictional cleaning lady from Mexico living and working in the United States. She is a representation and a challenge to the value system around the perfect domestic laborer. She works hard. She is neat, respectful, polite, and does all of this for little to no money. Furthermore, she serves as an indicator of the European colonial legacy that constructed a distinct social class system with designated forms of labor for each class. Rosa wears a pink maid’s uniform, which outwardly marks the role she fulfills, one separate from the people around her. The uniform is designed in a traditional European style and symbolizes assimilation and the silencing of cultural individualism of native communities. She also wears a Catholic scapular, another remnant of what was brought to the Americas during colonial times. Yet Rosa refuses to be invisible. She is unabashedly present in public and private spaces with her body, her tools, and the scents from the cleaning materials, lingering long after she has left.

Rosa Sweeping the Port of San Diego, June 2019, performance documentation

[Image description: A woman in a pink and white maid’s uniform stands in a public space, in front of a trash can and turned away from the viewer. Part of a ship and a building covered in scaffolding are visible in the background. On the right of the image, four figures with long hair stand together jauntily, as if having just posed for a picture.]

Performing domestic labor as a Brown immigrant woman in non-domestic spaces, Rosa subverts the assigned role society prescribes to her. Maintenance labor, such as cleaning and gardening, is often contracted out to a workforce that has been made invisible and is underrepresented, as well as unprotected, in social, economic, and political policies. As an act of defiance, Rosa takes her work to the public where she demands to be seen. There is a performativity of labor as it becomes something that is done by people outside the home or institution, as the hirer lays claim over the perfect building and landscape and the hiree performs the labor without being part of these spaces. When Rosa moves the performativity of this labor into the public eye, the complexity and multiplicity become both existential and nihilistic: existential in that Rosa is looking to understand and question her place in the world as she navigates space outside the private sphere, and nihilistic in the frivolousness of cleaning of these public spaces. The absurdity of these dueling journeys to find meaning and the purposelessness of the search are, fundamentally, a result of the systemic violence and invisibility inflicted upon her identity and body. Rosa, however, is empowered as she unapologetically claims space and challenges the gaze. 

Rosa Hernandez at The Gildless Age, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA, September 3, 2016, performance documentation

[Image description: A scene in an art gallery, with a group of people standing together on the left. On the right, turned away from the group, is a woman in a pink and white maid’s uniform, dragging a mop across the floor.]

Not only do these performances question domestic labor, they also point out the lack of accessibility for and tokenism of Brown artists within the formal art institution. The institution is influenced by the same systems under which our larger society operates, a phenomena reflected in the historic oppression that has dictated which artists have been part of the art historical canon, as well as the pretense of the term “diversity” so frequently used by museums and galleries. Rosa’s performative presence as a member of the cleaning staff in the white cube is a powerful and self-aware insertion of her identity into a conversation from which she has been excluded. Her presence questions the gaze of visitors, curators, and institutional leaders, and the ways their gazes prescribe the spectacle to Cano’s performance.

A sus órdenes, 2019, silk screen printing, embroidery, and beads on upholstery fabric and footstool

[Image description: An upholstered footstool, seen from above. The legs and frame are painted neon pink. The fabric on its top is in an abstracted, floral pattern of gray and pink, with small bits of blue and yellow. The phrase “a tus órdenes” is written in black letters on the fabric.]

The ideas presented in the Identities series and Rosa Hernandez performances pertaining to migrant experience and the gaze come together in Cano’s screen printing and embroidery works. These works, however, turn further inward, diving deeper into Cano’s own cultural upbringing and changing perspectives. Moving from the vulnerability of Rosa’s performances, Cano continues to lay herself bare as she takes a closer look at the beliefs and traditions with which she was raised, and learns to understand her early life experiences in a broader societal context.

Las Memorias del Mantel (Memories of the Tablecloth), 2017, silk screen printing, embroidery and beads on upholstery fabric, 48 x 92 in.

[Image description: Twelve rectangles are arranged in a grid against a gray and black background. Each rectangle has a different colorful illustration on it. A pattern of gray dots lays across the images entire surface.]

Cano has spent a great deal of time with the Mazahua people, beginning when she was a child and played with a Mazahua friend close to her age. Cano later studied embroidery and weaving with Mazahua women. The Mazahua are Indigenous people from Mexico whose main economy is agricultural work. Mazahua take great pride in their textiles and ceramics, and the women carry traditions with them in the form of the symbolized garments they wear. The strong cultural heritage is portrayed in the textiles’ patterns and serves as a form of storytelling as the motifs share their beliefs, feelings, and ideas. During the agricultural off-seasons many Mazahua people migrate to bigger cities, where the women fill roles as domestic laborers, forced to change into uniforms worn in these types of positions (such as the one Rosa wears). 

During the time Cano studied and worked alongside the Mazahua women, she learned some of the beautiful stories behind the embroideries. Now incorporating her own storytelling in her patterned work, such as Las Memorias del Mantel, she draws parallels to the class structures in place in both the United States and Mexico as they pertain to migrant and women’s labor. “Embroidery, “ Cano says, “is a construction of identity, celebration of womanhood, and a way of decolonizing.”

Los cepillos de limpieza de Rosa #5, 2020, silkscreen on paper, 30 x 20 in.

[Image description: Black silhouettes of a dish brush and a scrub brush are repeated across the image. Each has a neon pink shadow. The background is a neon green, blue, and pink pattern with a repeated, faint shape that looks like a figure in a dress.]

Cano’s screen prints continue to incorporate these patterns, but bring more explicit attention to domestic labor by printing the silhouettes of cleaning supplies on top. She uses images of cleaning products commonly used in Mexico, such as Fabuloso and Suevecitel, but alters the names to Fabulosa and Suevicita. Changing the products to the feminine form is a nod to the women that, most of the time, perform this role. Using psychedelic motifs as a way to distort the image, Cano disrupts the fantasy that consumerism imprints on us. Popular advertisements for cleaning products frequently depict the epitome of the domestic goddess, ruler of her domain. With this product, they promise, you too can create your own perfect utopia. Cano calls attention to what the advertisements are: a performance of domesticity. With these works and the Rosa performances, she makes clear that domestic labor is often done by people outside of the home and, ultimately, poses the question, “Who is using these products to clean whose ‘utopia’?” The screen print series speaks to the continued invisibility of domestic laborers perpetuated through marketing, and how systemically ingrained the problem is. 

Tareas de Limpieza (Cleaning Tasks) installation at The Front Arte Cultura, 2021, silk screens on 14 x 14 in. panels and silk-screened wallpaper, 60 x 90 in.

[Image description: A rectangular area of pastel-colored, patterned wallpaper on a white wall. On top of the wallpaper hang two rows of four panels. Each panel bears a print of a cleaning product bottle over a different colored patterned background.]

Also at play in these ads is the conservation of “marianismo," or the glorification of women as virtuous, moral, and perfect in some Latin American cultures. Cano incorporates her humorous and no-nonsense response to that ideal into the works, plastering the objects with text: “Limpio tu mierda” (clean your shit) and “Ni santa ni perfecta” (not a saint, not perfect). Cano acknowledges women’s agency, not as the ideal moral compass nor the good immigrant, but rather as a presence whose labor, history, and culture matter. 

Through her work, Cano ultimately claims space for healing through the relief found in humor, by recognizing the lived experiences of people systematically made to be invisible, and by celebrating the relevance and influence of traditional practices such as weaving and embroidery to guide and inform contemporary artistic practices. 

Guusje Sanders is Associate Curator at Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, CA.