Pandemic Mother Map during the early stages of Covid-19. It was funded by the “Pandemidiarios On the Border” grant program through the @confluencenter at The University of Arizona. Centered in the Sonoran Desert, the projects responded to living through Covid-19, in this particular place. Tucson Weekly and Alexandra Pere recently covered Pandemidiarios and my project was featured! The projects were also recently archived in the Special Collections at the library at the University of Arizona. You can see the project by clicking here.
Inspired by the story that my Great-Great-Grandmother emigrated from Altar, Sonora, Mexico, to Phoenix during and ‘epidemic’, "Pandemic Mother Map" visualizes the cyclical nature of pandemics through the my own ancestral line across five generations, my families movement through the Sonoran Desert, and the occurrence of three global pandemics (epidemics) spanning 131 years.
This idea came about because of the burden the pandemic placed on mothers. I saw my friends and family struggling in different ways while reading about mothers leaving the workforce in record numbers. Personally, I had so many questions about how to help my child through Covid beyond homeschooling. “What did she need from me?” At the same time I was struggling with how to help my mother who was in the hospital in a different city. “How do I keep the people I love safe?” It was in those moments I thought about my Grandmothers, especially my most favorite human ever, my Grandma Preach and how incredibly strong she was. I kept thinking, this is not new, so why don’t we know what to do??? My relatives experienced epidemics and pandemics, the times they lived in saw the “Russian Flu”, smallpox, and the Flu of 1918 and yet, here I am. I became curious about the deeper time of Pandemics and the resulting movement of women across borders, in and out of certain sectors of society, and the deep and hidden work we do to care for others.