My Great Grandmother Clara Botello, from the series Este recuerdo [This Memory]

Kathy Vargas here explores a portrait taken of her great-grandmother Clara Botello and her daughters in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). The trio most likely sat for the photograph while navigating the immigration process to the United States, which took several years. Most of the men in the Vargas family died in the Revolution. Her great-grandmother had to lead everyone in their diaspora, during which some of her relatives moved to Laredo, Texas, while others stayed in Mexico, fragmenting her kindred even further.  

As an only child, Vargas believes photographs are crucial for preserving her family’s legacies; as an artist, she employs their photographic archive as treasured raw material. Using the archival photograph as the foundation for her hand-colored additions, she literally illuminates her ancestral past through her imagination. By blending these artistic forms, Vargas transforms a simple photograph of her relatives into a rare, painted portrait. Her painterly process allows the artist to retrace these figures she was not yet alive to meet. Vargas has compassionate motivations for featuring her kin as the subject of her artwork, stating, “they weren’t famous, and I wanted them to be remembered.”