Esmeralda Rodriguez Eguia
Esmeralda Rodriguez Eguia doesn’t have your typical artist back story. One filled with endless crayon doodles and Play-doh sculptures. With a chuckle, she still remembers making her mother complete her art projects in 2nd grade. At that young age she didn’t feel like she could actuate the ideas in her head, which stopped her from expressing herself through art. Music was a different way of exploring her creativity, and she took to the clarinet with abandon. She worked hard and became a state-ranked clarinetist throughout her schooling. But her musical upbringing was a double-edged sword. She mastered the instrument and had pride in her abilities, but her journey to that achievement was fraught with confusion and anxiety. While receiving training by a widely esteemed instructor, she and other Latino music students were often berated with racist language as encouragement to “do better”. Classical scores that were performed were made by mostly white, male composers. This left little familiar representation or room for inspiration. The experience left a deep sting, and her musical aspirations lost priority in her life after that.
Rodriguez Eguia was born and grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas (1988), close to the riverbanks skirting the lines between the U.S. and Mexico. Her predominantly Mexican community was small and supportive, so a move to Austin to attend the University of Texas was a big culture shock. Initially she went with the intention of being an English major due to a romanticized ideal of the subject. Rodriguez Eguia quickly changed her mind after attending a talk by the University’s Dr. Luis Urrieta Jr before the start of her first fall semester. He spoke of educational inequity, as well as the Chicano resistance and struggle for justice. This was the first time she heard of Mexican American history told through this empowering lens. She was also struck when another student raised her hand and told Urrieta “It sounds like you want white people to feel guilty for your struggle”, to which he replied “maybe you should”. Sitting in the audience at 18 years old, she instantly knew she wanted to sound like Urrieta. She wanted to see the power of her community as he did. Rodriguez Eguia changed her major to Mexican American Studies right then and there.
A masked piece with cacti growing on its forehead. A reference to Mexican-American people who are berated for forgetting their original culture.
Rodriguez Eguia took the cultural studies route for her undergraduate degree, which emphasized anthropology, sociology, and education. She received her Bachelor’s degree in 2011, and made her way to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. There she received her Masters degree (Culture Curriculum and Change, 2014) as well as a PHD (Cultural Studies and Literacies, 2018). Her art form became her academic writing. She found her passion in qualitative research, mainly through documenting Latina women’s testimonios of injustice and creative resistance. Writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s book, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, became a major intellectual stepping stone for Rodriguez Eguia. The book, which explores Chicana identity through the lens of sexuality, gender, race, and colonialism, was formative to her understanding of such systems. “I am my language” was just one of the many lines that stuck with her. Rodriguez Eguia loved exploring the contradictions, tensions and code switching that happened when the two cultures came together in the U.S. She proudly submitted a paper written in Spanglish, cementing the hybrid language’s relevance and legitimacy. She also presented her academic work in Spanish to a majority English speaking audience to highlight academia's propensity to analyze Latinx people's stories but still systematically close the door on them (when asked to translate, she simply said no). An empowered Chicana feminist identity unafraid to claim space in places that were not built for her or those like her is one of the many positive outcomes of this educational journey.
Rodriguez Eguia aligned her interests and found that working with students gave her incredible insight into an education system purposely built on inequality. She set out to empower 12 and 13 year old girls to share their life experiences with her as a mentor. What she found was that these Latina youth were already rejecting the oppressive game of schooling and practicing their own agency and it was her role as an educator to bring those youth voices to the forefront. Rodriguez Eguia was proud to give them a safe space to practice this growth, and helped them express their experiences through a final art project.
Rodriguez Eguia moved to the Chicago area after her good friend Andrea Macias gave her a place to stay and establish in the city. She worked for a non-profit North of the city, creating after-school programming with social and emotional learning in mind. While the job suited her, the work culture there did not. After standing up for herself as a coworker escalated micro-aggressions to outright discrimination, Rodriguez Eguia left the organization. In her current role, she is positioned to take part in a major initiative to provide holistic support to the city’s community college students. The program (funded by a big bank) is meant to give a community of self identifying women of color a space to unpack the intersection of higher education and the workforce. Rodriguez Eguia is looking forward to developing the curriculum and seeing it make big changes in people’s lives.
A joyful vessel in honor of her late uncle. Her memories of him are playful and joking- including him cracking confetti-filled Easter eggs on his nieces and nephews heads.
Rodriguez Eguia has taken the cacophony of life experiences (good and bad), and organically transferred them into the artwork she makes at Lincoln Square Pottery Studio - Learning Center. Initially she would tag along with Macias to open studio on the weekends to observe. At one point, Macias even gave Rodriguez Eguia two pieces to glaze. It was still another year before she would snatch up one of the few open spots at the studio and she has now been at the studio for a year and a half. As of late, the artist has been forming portrait busts. She’s been spending a lot of time lovingly shaping and reshaping the noses on the pieces. It occurred to her that the noses were familiar. It turns out she was creating them as an homage to friends and family she’d grown up with. Beautiful, strong, Brown features that are sorely missing from the world of art. Now, with a creative finger on the pulse of her own heritage, the artist has opened the floodgates and her ideas are plentiful.
“Washed by the sun”, a sculptural bust by Rodriguez Eguia
Rodriguez Eguia has recently changed the clay she uses for her sculptures. No more cold, white stoneware, but instead a warm brownish red clay that dapples granular magnesium specks across her compositions after the final firing. The hues of this clay speak of her home. They resemble the earth she grew up walking and playing on- dirt from the Rio Grande Valley. The artist nervously awaited the arrival of the new clay body at the studio in July, hoping to have enough time to create her piece titled “Loss and Resilience/ Brackeen v. Haaland” for the studio’s Pottery of Protest 5 exhibition. Lucky for the studio and Rodriguez Eguia, the clay arrived on schedule, and she made a piece in a Tree of Life style, with sparse feathers dangling from its branches. The delicate feathers represented the thousands of Native American children who were forcefully removed from their homes and illegally placed with white families before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. The same fear has reared its ugly head again; a new lawsuit trying to overthrow the act would open up a new world of separations and heartbreak.
Esmeralda Rodriguez Eguia with two of her most recent pieces. One created for the studio’s POP5 event, the other to be used as part of the Dia de los Muertos remembrance celebrations.
Rodriguez Eguia just finished a stunning skull candelabra, as seen on some altars during the Dia de los Muertos remembrance celebration. Whereas she used to fill the surfaces of her ceramics with bright colors, now the artist deliberately leaves areas devoid of glaze. The bare clay symbolizes and connects her to the long tradition of unglazed, earth colored pottery from Mexico. The artist knows that working with clay is meant to be in her life. When she first hit her groove in the hand building class, she let out an unencumbered laugh. This expression of joy means that she’s in the zone- a place where her memories, ideas and creative aspirations all work together to assist her process. As long as she can’t stop this laugh from bubbling up, she knows what she’s doing is right and good for her.
