LO QUE HUBIERA SIDO
Ten years after my mother’s passing I discovered love letters from her first boyfriend. The letters span from 1979 to 1980, at the onset of the Salvadoran Civil War. While my mother, Patricia Cruz, migrated from El Salvador to the United States, her boyfriend, Sigfrido Reyes, was funded by the forming leftist party to study in the Soviet Union. The story of their lost love examines displacement, and how Cold War Era politics played out within Latin America.
This is a personal story of unforgetting for a first-generation person in the USA. It explores the complexities of memory and attempts to help re-contextualize: our understanding as first-gen people, immigration policies and contemporary global relations.
This project was originally presented as a physical installation that used augmented reality (AR) to reveal the story in digital space. AR is an interactive experience that overlays computer generated digital content in the real world.
Physical artifacts such as family photographs, letters and newspaper clippings were hung on a wall in the style of a Salvadoran household. As the user pointed their phone camera at a given artifact, a video or image was revealed over the physical artifact.