Juntos Lloramos

Juntos Lloramos, Repurposed fountain, Oil paint on hand cut wood, planted garden bed, 2025

Photos by Charles Montoya @indigenouslens

See this sculpture in person outside of the Chapel of Guadalupe in Old Town, Albuquerque New Mexico.

404 San Felipe St NW, Albuquerque, NM 87104

This piece is titled “Juntos Lloramos”, together we cry, together we grieve. My own interpretation of Tonantzin, also known as La Guadalupana. She is not only a Marian figure, but a vessel holding the deeper feminine Teotl. The divine energies of creation. In her body I honor the cosmologies of this land: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, Sun, Stars and the Moon. Through the sprouts of agave, I invoke Mayahuel, and the medicines that come from her. At the center, through the hands and heart, I call upon Mictecacihuatl, our lady of death. Because our Mother Earth is both the giver of life and devourer of all things. She is dualistic. She is Ometeotl. She exists beyond gender, beyond man or woman. That is why her body carries both corn and breast imagery: she feeds us, she nourishes us, and she takes us back when our time is done.  

As I worked on this I was grieving, as a young person would, in a world that often feels like it is devouring itself. I feel myself mourning for Mother Earth and I feel Mother Earth mourning for us. We are witnessing violence, genocide, and displacement. From Palestine to within the so-called United States of America, where the patriarchal violence of war and insatiable hunger for power dictate the lives of mothers and children. In face of this, I turn to ancestral memory and future dreaming.

This is a call not only to survive, but to survive together, to pray together, to grieve together. Even when it feels like we are living in the space between the end of one world and the beginning of another. We still have Mother Earth. We still have each other. We still have our medicine. And our medicine will continue to grow, as it always has, no matter what comes. 

This piece invites you to honor grief as a collective act, and to remember that in the face of destruction, there is also rebirth. That together, Juntos Lloramos.