Derek Walcott, the West-Indian poet and Nobel Laureate, refers to language as "a place for struggle". As soon as we begin to use language we begin to wrestle with its legacy. My upbringing on the Tijuana-San Diego border can attest to this. Each community has its own interpretation of history. Within my paintings, the use of collage helps to accentuate this process as it reiterates how language exists in layers, adding and subtracting to the bigger picture. The source of the materials is often ephemeral in nature. They range from magazine cutouts to flyers, as well as painting and stitching. This generates a rich and diverse vocabulary that reiterates and reinterprets by emphasizing the tension between fact and fiction, familiar and exotic. By doing so, I constantly question the autonomy of the materials and mediums I work with. Through a combination of local and foreign imagery I pair up day-to-day paraphernalia such as local buildings and graphic design with the superficial, yet paradoxically spectacular narratives offered by the world at large.