As a boy in catholic school, my teachers told my mother that they wished I drew “virgins instead of mermaids”: a good catholic boy shouldn’t be concerning himself with fluid half creatures. They couldn’t reconcile the image they had of me: unassuming, quiet, behaved; with the wilder and sinuous feminine inner self betrayed by my drawings. La Guadalupana Pelágica is my response to this memory, and the symbolic, visual union of these intensely warring halves.

With her, I further syncretize the virgin on the hill, a beloved and already heavily syncretic symbol of contemporary Mexico that melds the european madonna and the indigenous fertility goddess Coatlicue; with the queer mermaid symbol; in the process simultaneously assimilating and defying my mexican catholic upbringing by creating my own personal deity. 'She is at once: past, present and future, virgin and mermaid, madonna and whore, catholic schoolboy and homosexual.'