Angelica Tapia, a graduate student in the School of Art, Art History & Design and multidisciplinary artist from Lexington, Nebraska, was one of three artists nationally to participate in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Latino Día de los Muertos installation earlier this month.
“It was really exciting,” Tapia said of her selection to participate. “It was so much fun. It was my first time going to D.C. When I graduated from high school, my mom made the comment, ‘You’re going to go to Washington one day.’ And I was surprised by the comment, why would you say that? Such an odd thing to say. Seeing that comment come to fruition in this surprising way, when the opportunity came about, I had to do it.”
Tapia was initially contacted by Ana Diaz-Orozco, the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies Community Engagement Coordinator at the University of Nebraska Omaha, who had coordinated a previous exhibition that Tapia had exhibited in.
“Ana reached out to me saying someone wanted to talk to me about possibly doing the altar for Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, from the Smithsonian,” Tapia said. “And I was like, absolutely! Get me connected, and that’s how I initially started into it.”
Professor of Art Aaron Holz was excited about her participation in this installation at the new museum. The National Museum of the American Latino started exhibiting work in 2022 after it was founded by an act of Congress in 2020. The National Museum of the American Latino is currently raising funds for their own building, so the exhibition was held at La Cosecha, a Latin American marketplace in Washington, D.C.
“I was so thrilled to learn that Angelica was one of three artists from across the country to install their work at the Smithsonian’s new Latino Museum,” he said. “It is wonderful to have Angelica represent her artwork, Latin culture and UNL through the museum’s Día de los Muertos programming. Angelica works across a variety of media including sculpture, printmaking, painting, and collage, and the altar piece she created for this interactive exhibition employs all her interests and skill sets. This opportunity gave Angelica a chance to challenge space at a large scale, and I hope that she finds takeaways as she prepares for her MFA Thesis Exhibition this spring. I couldn’t be more excited and happier for her to have this experience.”
Joshua Segovia, the public programs coordinator of the National Museum of American Latino, asked Tapia to come up with a proposal for an altar and research names to honor from Nebraska, preferably Latino Nebraskans.
“During that time of planning, I reached out to several professors here in Lincoln and in Omaha. I reached out to [UNO Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino/Lain American Studies] Thomas Sanchez and to [UNL Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies] Laura Muñoz. They gave me a couple of names that I sent out to the museum, and they chose who they wanted me to honor,” she said.
Tapia honored the life of Elvira C. Hernandez (1902-2012), whose life journey embodied resilience and the strength of the immigrant experience.
Born in Chalchihuites, Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1909, Hernandez immigrated to the U.S. at the age of six, living in Kansas City, Kansas, and El Paso, Texas, before settling in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, at age 10 in 1920. Beginning at the age of 11, she worked full time in the sugar beet, potato and other crop fields, alongside her family. She also made tortillas for her family to sell. She continued to work up to and including the time when she and her own husband, Michael, tended their own farm between 1950-1965.
After her husband’s death in 1965, Hernandez dedicated her life to community service and advocated for migrant farm workers, aiding in citizenship applications and exposing labor abuses. She opened a women’s Senior Center to provide fund-raising activities and out-of-town trips. She was a familiar presence in nursing homes and hospitals, regularly visiting to comfort the sick and elderly. She also spent time cooking for family and only stopped making her famous flour tortillas when she could no longer roll out the dough with her gnarled hands. She calculated that, throughout her life, she rolled out more than one million tortillas.
“One of the things we included in the altar was her family framed her one millionth tortilla that she made, and so that was part of the altar,” Tapia said. “And then we also had the short hoe that she used for over 50 years farming.”
Tapia said working on the altar was a great opportunity to honor Hernandez’s legacy.
“Her son wrote a book about her [which was included in the piece], and Professor Muñoz actually uses that book for her Mexican-American history class,” Tapia said. “That was a really cool connection there when she recommended her to me. And when we got the chance to say, okay, this is official, we’re going to honor her, it was such a great opportunity to honor her legacy.”
While in Washington, D.C., Tapia had the opportunity to visit other museums, including the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum.
“I love going to art museums,” she said. “I ended up crying three times just because I get really captivated by some pieces.”
Tapia said her family didn’t celebrate Día de los Muertos when she was growing up, but she has come to appreciate the tradition more recently.
“We didn’t have an altar at home. It wasn’t until I moved out that I created my own altar,” she said. “I had made a painting of my grandma that passed, and I put it up there, and so I just started reconnecting with those traditions. Honestly, this is my first time being able to do a huge installation and incorporate this tradition.”
Tapia hopes the history of more Nebraska Latinos can be documented in the future.
“There are legacies of really interesting Nebraska Latinos, and I think that needs to be documented more,” she said. “This experience just made me realize the importance of it a lot more. I started more research of different names, and I wondered why aren’t they written down somewhere? Why don’t we have a little booklet or pamphlet on these people? Maybe once I’m out of school, I’d like to do more research and kind of preserve those names and honor them in a different way.”