bocas indomables/untamable mouths is an installation that creates embodied experiences of materials, mythologies, mother-goddesses, writings, dreams and sounds from rebel and disobedient water, creatures, and women that wildly speak from the cracks between worlds. If water has memory, then to tap into its substances means that we can still hear the rushing voices of the things—ancient and future—interrupted and displaced.

The project is based on a series of ritual-performances that were activated in collaboration with Paayme Paxaayt, a.k.a the L.A. River and the bodies of water that delineate the border between México and the United States, that is the Gulf of México, the Río Bravo/Grande, the Colorado River, the Tijuana River and the Pacific Ocean. Informed by matter’s dynamism and agency, multispecies collaboration, indigenous knowledge, and speculative fabulation, this exhibition offers alternatives to our dominant water imaginaries and aims to build a closer relationship between bodies of water, humans, and the creatures that inhabit them. Through wearable sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography, and natural dyeing, bocas indomables/untamable mouths invites audiences to rethink materiality, reflect on the ways colonial history is constructed, and reconsider how we craft and share stories.

bocas indomables/untamable mouths weaves together the stories of the Pacific Lamprey, a jawless fish native to the L.A. River but now extinct; of La Malinche, the enslaved Nahua woman who served as an interpreter for the Spanish conqueror Cortés during the colonization process in what is now México; and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which arbitrarily designated the Río Bravo/Grande, the Colorado River and the Gila River as borders.

MFA Solo Exhibition show presented at USC Roski Gallery Graduate Building on April 2025.