El Polvo is the title of my senior thesis exhibition. El Polvo is Spanish for the word powder. This is what Mexican immigrants in the 1910s described the powder that they were being sprayed with when they crossed the U.S/Mexico border. Many were not aware that they were being fumigated with DDT. I focus on this specific moment in U.S. history to remind the world of the maltreatment that my ethnicity has endured over centuries. El Polvo is an amalgamation of Catholic imagery, symbols of the United States’ habitual mistreatment of Latinx, and my lived experience in Yakima.

This exhibition contained a shrine made out of pallets and crates. The shrines held apples, candles, paper plates, and a Campesino’s hat dipped in slip. Some of these items were fired and turned into a fragile shell of its original state. The item of the shrine that was untouched by slip was an apple picking bag. This segment was an ode to my community back home.

El Polvo also contained a nude ceramic figure of a Campesino. Clothing dipped in slip is on the floor of the gallery. This figure is crucified on the wall with white powder covering his eyes and hair. White streaks roll from his eyes down his body, while he stands on green military cans. The white powder is referencing back to the fumigations. The figure’s nudity refers back to Mexican immigrants having to strip naked at the border as they are sprayed with pesticides. The figure is crucified to have the audience empathize with Latinx field workers as they do with Jesus. Despite this being a crucifixion, the figure stands with his hands in the air, resilient, as many Latinx immigrants have been over centuries of oppression.

My name Jovita Mercado. I was born to a Chicana mother and Mexican father. While growing up in Yakima, my mother was a warehouse worker and my father was a field worker. They struggled financially, as many other Mexican and Mexican-American families do in Yakima. After my parents divorced, I was forced to set aside my adolescence to raise my younger siblings as my mother worked to support the family. Despite my rocky upbringing, I graduated in 2017 with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree. I then studied at the University of Washington from 2017 to 2020. This is were I learned to utilize the act of making art as a way to gain insight into my upbringing. Through this experience, I have came to the conclusion that I am a Chicana, living on the hyphen of the word Mexican-American. My artwork critiques the United States’ exploitation of my ethnicity, while also evaluating my ethnicity’s oppressive gender expectations. I am specifically making work in response to the prolific amount of violence and abuse that has been occurring at the U.S./Mexico border, and other border-related lands like in my hometown of Yakima, Washington. My work is attempting to humanize my ethnicity away from political jargon. My art is also looking critically at Catholicism and how it has manifested into an acceptance of toxic masculinity and maltreatment of women within my culture. I am a mixed media artist. I work with clay for its ability to mimic organic figures. I paint for my love of color and form. I incorporate found objects in my practice for the history that these items carry.