Rituals
by Lindsay Quintanilla
Mandy Cano Villalobos, Asphalt Rising, fake birds, doilies, human hair, wicker plate, wood, candy, broken toys, Angel wings, costume jewelry, pompoms, beads, Christmas ornaments, leftover crafts, artificial flowers, fabric dye, adhesive; 26 2/5 × 26 4/5 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
RITUALS
Lindsay Quintanilla | NOV 2022 | Issue 20
July in Vegas is a sweltering, feverish month. The days are long and airless. The heat sears itself onto everything, impossible to escape, almost impossible to keep breathing. The mountains are covered with dry dust. The flowers that bloomed during spring shrivel and die. Cacti are one of the few plants that remain alive and I always admired their toughness. Occasional thunderstorms disrupt the nights, and the air lingers with Creosote bush.
The rain always triggered a feeling of euphoria because on rainy nights, when we were little, Cecilia and I ran outside shoeless. The mud was slimy between our toes. The rain splattered on our matching cotton dresses, mine was lavender and Cecilia’s was a sheen-green. My mother got them at the thrift store for a dollar. We didn’t care that we were warned not to ruin them since they were reserved for special occasions. Our Barbie dolls were left forgotten on the porch as we spun each other to “Ring Around the Rosie'' while our ankles got drenched in mud and whoever fell first was the loser. As we spun under the water, we almost looked like we were made out of diamonds. All our surroundings were bleary; we were woozy with renewal. The shouting, pushing, and dragging inside the house no longer mattered because the water cleansed us. Afterwards, we loved to watch wounded birds in the nine-foot wooden cage my father built. My mother liked to save the injured birds who landed in our yard or our lemon tree. She’d wrap them in a towel, place a kiss on their head, and give them a safe haven until they were ready to face the world again. She did that to us as well after my father shook us like rag dolls. We’d get close enough to hear the birds fluttering their wings, shaking off raindrops from their little injured bodies. Sometimes if we were bold enough, we’d walk inside the cage and stand under them while their feathers stuck to our bodies.
Spinning in the rain and watching the birds was only one of the rituals Cecilia and I developed. As we got older, the rituals expanded. We had different ones for every scenario. When we didn’t want to deal with the never-ending fighting in the kitchen, we’d journal. I’d write a line and she’d write a line. It was always nonsensical things that we thought solved the meaning of life. One time we came up with, “Our bodies are infinite, not stopped by space or time.” That stayed with us. We felt unstoppable. We’d repeat it every time we could no longer hear ourselves in the house.
When my father broke our television with a baseball bat, we pulled out the Hot Cheetos from our hiding place underneath the bed. We liked to sneak out to the 7-Eleven on Pecos Ave to buy ten bags at a time and hide them for days when we couldn’t face our reality anymore. We ate them with our feet up against the wall. We wanted our dirty footprints to be forever imprinted on the wall. We leaned our heads off the edge of the bed, getting high off of the rushing blood. After we talked about everything and nothing, we drove Cecilia’s rickety Toyota Supra with the windows rolled down only because they were permanently stuck that way, but we didn’t care because the wind cleared our minds. The sweeping air through my hair energized me. I loved sticking my arms out to feel gravity’s pull against my pulsing hand. It reminded me that I was real. We’d drive to the suburban neighborhood named Seven Hills. It was intertwined in the hills, so hidden that if you blinked, you’d miss it. The roads were less buckled, less broken than in North Las Vegas. There was no trash in sight, no brown people, no signs in Spanish. We wanted to live there. We picked our future house, the one with the Romeo and Juliet balcony and the heart-shaped shrubs. After fantasizing about our future houses, we liked to go to the parking lot on Eastern Ave overlooking the airstrip at McCarran. The plane engines muted our thoughts. We’d sit on the hood of La Supra to take in our city. MGM’s green glow gave the sky an alien-like appearance and Luxor’s white beam that sliced through the night made us fantasize what it would feel like to be abducted by aliens. New York, New York’s skyline looked washed out next to the fuschia colored letters of the new stadium. We watched the fake artificial lights from afar, searching and searching for our truth.
Lindsay Quintanilla is a writer from Las Vegas, Nevada. Lindsay is currently working on her first novel. She’s been invited to participate in ZYZZYVA Workshops and The Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. Lindsay’s work has appeared in PALABRITAS. She holds an MFA from The University of San Francisco. She is currently living in Houston, Texas where she spends her days trying to perfect gluten free pastries and find the perfect walking trail.
Mandy Cano Villalobos is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, 2D, performance, and sculpture. Her projects explore ideas of home, memory and cultural identity. Cano Villalobos has exhibited in venues including Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, CA), POSITIONS Art Fair (Berlin, DE), Proyecto T (Mexico City, DF), the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum (Clinton, NY), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, (Chicago), The Museum of New Art (Detroit, MI), Hillyer Art Space (Washington, DC), Gray Contemporary (Houston, TX) and La Casa Pauly (Puerto Montt, Chile). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, and The Chicago Reader, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship, and has been awarded grants from multiple organizations including the Gottlieb, Puffin, Frey, and Chenven Foundations, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Cano Villalobos is represented by Mu Gallery in Chicago and drj art projects in Berlin. She works in Grand Rapids, MI and Brooklyn, NY.