Michelle Hernandez

Storytelling through La Pollera

This project uses la pollera — a two-piece dress historically worn in Spanish-speaking Central America by working-class, colonized women — as a storytelling medium. A form of dress, la pollera was enforced by early colonizers between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to establish a social class divide between Spanish colonizers and Panamanian people. The project is rooted in my interest in craft, indigenous communities, decolonization, questioning who is celebrated within a museum’s physical infrastructure, and the preservation of lineage.

I hope to consolidate these interests in this work, thus building a home on a cultural foundation. As a Panamanian-Mexican Latina born to immigrant parents, preserving my culture, my traditions, and my stories has always been important because it provides me the opportunity to speak freely and proudly in a space where erasure is so easy to succumb to. Using an experimental methodology, I’ve reconstructed the elements that comprise la pollera, in combination with text that describes my firsthand experiences wearing one. La pollera represents exactly what prevents erasure after colonization. They gave us a simple white dress to tell us apart, yet we added life to it: color, patterns, and beautiful ornaments provided a medium with which to tell our stories, using the very fabric that was meant to separate us.