Alexis M Ramos

Recetas, Remedios, y Raíces is a body of work dedicated to creating a visual space for people’s healing histories. Its focus is centralized around La Cocina and the many intricate roles women play as kitchen curanderas. In my home, our kitchen curandera was mi Abuela who healed with cooking recipes and mended with remedies passed down from her ancestral roots. My art explores the local culturas’ relationships with food, religion, folk medicine, and the women who pass on these traditions. 

My culture is my craft, and my art comes from the rascuache way of life. Its attitude and aesthetic are in the materiality and color choices of my pieces. Looking back to my rascuache roots of painting on found cardboard, I hope to inspire people to reclaim the potential of our own cultura. I use painting to create an archive of how local Latina/os of the region heal the home, the family, and even how commercial objects are imbued with folk magic. My watercolor pieces are influenced by the scientific approach of Victorian botanical illustrations while also referencing the indigenous Nahuatl codices that were stolen and used to create the De La Cruz Badiano Codex.

My art practice explores the borders where food and folk medicine blur. Drawing inspiration from being raised in el Valle del Rio Grande, the sculptures, installations, and paintings in this body of work illustrate the remedies used to treat culture-bound syndromes such as empacho, an intestinal blockage, that require a sobador, not a doctor. Western medicine cannot heal what it cannot understand and many folk remedies are culturally exclusive to an area or its people. For example, mal de Ojo (Evil Eye) cannot be cured by an optometrist and instead requires culturally relevant folk remedies. My research is fueled by my passion to preserve the oral traditions that are shared through familial ties, but more often forgotten with time. We are creative in how we heal ourselves and others and our medicina comes in many forms and from many places. Many of the ingredients that come from our backyards serve a dual purpose as both medicine and essential sustenance, such nopal, ajo, and the entire arbol de naranja. This is the ancestral knowledge that we live and breathe every day, but it is relegated to the outskirts of a special topics course. 

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Recetas, Remedios, y Raíces is about sharing knowledge with everyone and creating art with a purpose. My goal is to imbue the gallery space with the magic of South Texas folk medicine. There is a strange beauty in the magic of these everyday objects, and how they heal culture-bound folk ailments. I invite the viewers to engage with the space by sharing a remedio from their home and adding it to the installation. By adding to the Recetario we each add our own shared experiences to the academic narrative, thus preserving our legacy and showing that through our traditions we are a shared people.