My own amateur artwork - painted during YAGM Mexico orientation, Sept. 2023
Colors, easels, and the deeply aromatic smell of acrylic paint. Or is it oil paint? Whatever it is, I feel supremely insufficient in my own amateur art-making as I sit on the bench and observe El Taller de Loreto Atelier: Dibujo y Pintura. A man leans over three young people—all about 10-13 years old, smiling and murmuring something incomprehensible as they pull their brushes across the canvas. From where I sit, one girl’s painting is quite visible—and I am floored. She’s painted the silhouette of a woman’s profile, but what would normally be filled with dark grey is instead filled with a midnight blue sky and a glowing city skyline—skycrapers with hundreds of tiny detailed windows and moonlit-covered walls. Over the skyline she has painted a cliff, and on the edge, another silhouette—a girl sitting, overlooking the city.
I wonder who the shadowed girl is—if it is her, the artista. I wonder if she knows how good she is, how talented, and not just “for a kid.” I am reminded of our tour of public transportation the other day during orientation, and the women-only metro cars—a reminder to me that, according to Pastor Yuly, women in Mexico stick together, look out for each other. I remember learning that femicide is a tragic reality in this country—the idea that being female is enough to warrant a terrible crime. I remember learning about migration the day before, and how women and girls traveling along migratory routes are more than doubly vulnerable than their male counterparts to the dangers of transcountry migration.
But this girl is not migrating. She is painting, and it’s beautiful. A girl sitting over the city, a girl overlooking a home…a girl sitting at an easel. Powerful and safe and hopeful. I hope the artista is painting a reality, a future she can call her own, where she is sitting out in nature, as safe as she is today at this easel. Sitting on a cliff, perhaps, overlooking the city, exposed and vulnerable. But in this future, her vulnerability makes her strong.
Hers is not my story, and mine is not hers. And yet, in this small act of observing, of slowing down to watch and listen, of accompanying from afar, I cheer her on, I offer a prayer. And I know she’s held. Whatever this year may or may not hold for me, I’m grateful for the chance to witness others’ stories, and a glimpse of small feminine empowerment—a beacon of more to come, I hope—during this first week of orientation, in this tiny taller in Plaza Loreto.
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