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La Casita Cultural Center began Latino/Hispanic Heritage Month with the virtual opening of its “Abuelas” exhibit on Tuesday.

The event featured a tour of the exhibit, presentations from some of the artists and a performance by spoken word artist Denice Frohman. The “Abuelas” exhibit is open for guided visits by appointment with masks and social distancing.

Bennie Guzman, the communications manager at La Casita, coordinated the technological aspects of the online event. In past years, La Casita would welcome over 250 people into the space for exhibit openings with food, dancing and music, said Tere Paniagua, the executive director of La Casita. While that cannot happen this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, Guzman is working to ensure that the virtual experience is still enjoyable and meaningful.

La Casita holds a themed exhibit every year that opens in September for Latino/Hispanic Heritage Month and remains on display throughout the academic year. The idea for an exhibit centered around “abuelas,” the Spanish word for grandmothers, came up last year.

While researching the topic further, Guzman said he and others at La Casita discovered more layers within the “abuelas” theme, and it became personal for many of them. Now, during the coronavirus pandemic, the show is particularly important, Guzman said.

“People are not able to see their families, especially elders in their families, so this is a way for us to celebrate those things that we have been missing out on for the past couple of months,” Guzman said.

Spoken word artist Denice Frohman performed at the virtual event after a tour of the five installations at the exhibit. Screenshot by Mandy Kraynak

In many Latino families, grandmothers serve as both matriarchs and cultural anchors, Guzman said, adding that abuelas pass down traditions and family stories. In addition to honoring abuelas, the exhibit challenges stereotypes of Latina grandmothers as submissive and demure.

“It’s about spotlighting that what you think an abuela is may not necessarily be the case and that there’s a lot more to these women than most people think,” Guzman said.

Paniagua misses being able to have members in the community come together at La Casita. This year’s virtual event will have more of an emphasis on sharing stories in the exhibit’s content than on interactions with other people, she said.

“The way you connect now has to be more about how compelling the story can be and how much people can connect with these stories,” Paniagua said.

The virtual event allows people who are not in Syracuse to experience the exhibit. A few families who have moved away from Syracuse are reconnecting with La Casita through the virtual event. About one-third of the approximately 15o people registered for the event as of Monday night are not in New York, Paniagua said.

La Casita will continue to collect stories from community members after the opening of the exhibit and throughout the academic year, Paniagua said. When choosing artists for the exhibit, Paniagua sought out people who created work that would engage the audience.

After the tour of the exhibit, Frohman, a spoken word artist and poet from New York City, performed. She held up a framed photo of her abuela, Doña Teresa, and encouraged the audience to invite their own abuelas into the space before performing her first poem of the night, “A Woman’s Place.”

Frohman performed at Syracuse University last year as part of the Inaugural Potash LGBTQ+ History Month. Guzman said that La Casita fell in love with her work, so Paniagua reached out to her about the “Abuelas” event.

The opening event took place on the first day of Latino/Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs through Oct. 15 and commemorates the independence of multiple Latin American countries.

“We really want to celebrate the history and culture in our communities and just really want to spotlight that there’s a lot more to our culture than meets the eye,” Guzman said. “With every show that we do, we always try to dig a little deeper and celebrate more and put a spotlight on the things that make our culture what it is.”

La Casita holds a themed exhibit every year that opens in September for Latino/Hispanic Heritage Month and remains on display throughout the academic year. Courtesy of Bennie Guzman

The exhibit features Guzman’s work, along with the work of Juan Juarez, Juan Cruz and Daisy Arroyo.

Guzman has two installations on display at the exhibit. One of the installments honors his family and focuses on the passing down of knowledge through the generations. Five generations of women in Guzman’s family all lived on the same street for more than 20 years.

Guzman’s other installation depicts the Virgen de Guadalupe, or the Virgin Mary, surrounded by photos of organizations made up of grandmothers who are fighting for social justice, such as Abuelas Responden and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.

Another artist, Peggy Robles-Alvarado, created “The Abuela Stories Project,” an anthology that features seven models and 14 women writers. The abuelas featured in the anthology include polymer clay artists, dancers, drummers and jiu-jitsu champions. The 14 writers wrote poetry and prose based on the photos that Arroyo took.

“In essence, abuelas are super important. Whether she was detrimental or scandalous, or whether she is this unknown, mysterious creature, which one of my abuelas is, it is a root of where we come from,” Robles-Alvarado said.

Robles-Alvarado said that the anthology incorporates a range of emotions that connect to what it means to be an abuela. She also created an interactive piece inspired by the anthology, in which she asked people to write down their abuela stories on small pieces of paper.

“These snapshots are indicative of this tradition in many Latino families, where you have people carry around little pieces of paper that mean so much,” Robles-Alvarado said.

In a manuscript review, Robles-Alvarado was told that there were already enough abuela stories. But she considers it her mission to gather stories about abuelas and study their importance.

“We don’t need anyone to tell us that our stories are valid. We know they’re valid,” Robles-Alvarado said. “We just have to put them out there, so I think that’s why this month is so pivotal for Latinx people to tell their stories — whatever the story is.”

Published on September 16, 2020 at 12:05 am

Contact Mandy: ackrayna@syr.edu | @MandyKraynak