Casares Cosmología: Tierra, Sangre y Memoria is a multi-sensory, archival, and artistic installation that traces a suppressed history of state-sanctioned violence against the Casares family and broader Indigenous and Mexican-descended communities of the Río Grande Delta. Through visual art, oral histories, land-based storytelling, and original archival research, the installation takes the form of an immersive Story Walk—inviting visitors to journey through place, memory, and ancestral time.
Set between the late 1800s and 1950s, Casares Cosmología confronts a brutal legacy of lynchings, land theft, wrongful imprisonment, and forced displacement—acts enforced through a political machine known as the Boss Rule system. Figures like Sheriff John Closner and Texas Ranger Tom Mayfield played key roles in the violent consolidation of power and property, targeting Tejano and Indigenous landowners. Yet this installation is not just about the violence—it is about survival. It is about memory. And it is about the enduring presence of those who refused to be erased.
Rooted in the artist’s ancestral homeland of Yalui (El Capote and Jackson Ranch), sites on the Underground Railroad to Mexico, the project reclaims histories long buried by fear, silence, and systemic erasure.
In the spirit of Mama Marimba Ani’s teachings in Let the Circle Be Unbroken, this work recognizes that when a person passes from the physical world, their spirit is kept alive by name, by memory, and by the living traditions of the people. Even when personal memories fade, the spirit does not die—it merges into the identity of the collective. Our ancestors live on as we remember who we are. This installation asks: What does it mean to keep memory alive across centuries? How do we honor our dead not only through mourning, but through becoming?
Casares Cosmología is a space for communal witnessing, reflection, and healing. It affirms that to resist forgetting is to resist erasure. That through collective memory, ancestral knowledge, and cultural reclamation, we keep the circle unbroken.
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