Las Jergas: Rosa Hernandez Performance at Bread and Salt by Claudia Cano
From "Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana" (City Works Press, 2025)
Performance at Bread & Salt, November 13, 2023
“I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep.” ― Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
For The Last Group Show, an open call for regional artists to exhibit at Bread and Salt last November, I reached out to founder James Brown and offered Rosa’s services. Someone needed to clean the galleries during the opening while hundreds of artists exhibited their work. After a series of emails and texts, James and Rosa had a signed contract.
Rosa arrived at Bread & Salt the night of the opening, where dozens of visitors and artists were cramped in the main gallery, making it almost impossible to walk through. Rosa collected the jergas (cleaning rags) from one of the pedestals. They were part of the exhibition.
Rosa walked discreetly through the spaces, cleaning the counters of the coffee shop, collecting trash, dusting the tables of the courtyard, wiping the windows of the artist-in-residence studio, and taking care of the trash and toilets in the bathrooms at the Athenaeum Art Center. This was my first performance since the pandemic, during which Latina women experienced the steepest employment losses of any major group.
At the end, Las Jergas (cleaning rags) were returned to the exhibition, dirty and dusty. They were no longer rags; they became a commemorative act to archive the ephemeral performance and generate a dialectic of presence and absence. The repositories of past action—both a prop and an artwork. The only testimony to Rosa's presence.
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Rosa Hernandez exists in me as a complex self-recognition, an intersubjective way of seeing the world in which I live. My accent and brown skin are stereotyped in spaces rarely occupied by women like me. Experiencing cultural exclusion and misconceptions and raising a bi-racial family have presented me with significant challenges. Every day I cross a mental border, translating and carrying my Mexican house on my shoulders, to step into my American home. Ni de de aquí, ni de allá (I am not fully here nor there). I believed that time would heal and the strangeness would fade. But political tensions between countries, the proximity of the border, and my surroundings have not changed. Under many circumstances, I experience alienation through this code switching. Only Rosa and I understand each other.
Using cleaning tools on my serigraphies and found objects, I intend to create a subversive vernacular mechanism to underline the job of Latina workers. The archive and repository of my performances. (Taylor, 2003)*
.Rosa represents a series of assumptions and preconceptions as part of the belief that most nannies and cleaners are Latina or Mexican. Navigating a space mostly occupied by white people in a fictional character, I attempt to quietly question the audience, to delicately provoke a reaction in the other, the viewer, and invite them to reflect on the complications that Latina women go through when living in a migrant country.
*Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (a John Hope Franklin Center Book). 2003.
Claudia Cano is a multidisciplinary artist and educator with an interest in performance, photography, video, textiles, serigraphy, and social practice. Her studies include projects that observe the interactions between Mexican and American cultures. As a Latina artist, Cano focuses on addressing the marginalization and inequality that women in the immigrant community face. Originally from Mexico, Cano left there in 2002 to reside in San Diego, California. Cano has lectured, taught courses, performed, and exhibited at universities, community colleges, and museums in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tijuana and currently lectures at SDSU.
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