In the series When I Grow Up… I want to be an alcoholic (WIGU…IWTBAA), I explore the feelings of alienation and class struggle using marker and acrylic paint on canvas. This past year, my cousin sent me an array of home movies documented by her mom in the 1990s. In these home movies, the Peralta’s can be seen taking vacations to the lake, celebrating one of the Peralta’s college graduation, and dancing the night away at my Nino’s (godparents) wedding after party. The process for WIGU…IWTBAA reveals the illusions of joy created by the American Dream, the phenomena that had slowly started to deteriorate during the Reagan era.  For this series, I first started out by hanging the canvas on a wall to project the home videos onto the canvas. I started my paintings by laying down a base color that is visible underneath the painted layers colors; pink, teal, and light purple. While the home movies were projecting, I found snapshots that I felt most connected with me and my memories growing up and traced them onto the canvas with crayola marker. I was only one year old in most of these videos, I wouldn’t truly remember the events transpiring. The subtitles The After Party, Our Vacation, and Shelley’s Grad ‘98 (not pictured) all speak to the toxic patriarchal values that we are conditioned with throughout our childhoods. The text on the paintings relate everything back to the home movies, a reference to memory only digital video recording can capture. The paintings serve as guidelines for a new perspective on memory and storytelling. In the paintings, there are multiple figures with similar facial features and mannerism which assumes the viewer to think about family systems and hierarchy. In The After Party, my mom is holding me at the door of my nana’s garage where a variety of parties, barbecues, and after-parties were held throughout that span of the previous Peralta generation.  Next to my mom is my nana and she’s holding a mug of coffee as we watch the norteños (Northern regional Mexican band) play their instruments to the family. In Our Vacation, my dad and tio Miguel are seated at a table in the lake cabin for the Peralta family summer trip that year. Empty bottles and red solo cups decorate the surface. Not fully rendered glass bottles and discombobulating of space creates a tension that questions the lucidness of the subjects. These were common occurrences I needed to immortalize. Concurrent with those unhealthy activities displayed in the painting series was a consistent drumbeat of education, education, education.