The Purity of Blood is a road-trip style body of work made throughout the so-called American West. The project loosely traces recorded sites of violence made against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the formation of the West. Many of the violences were done by White mobs, extra-legally in the spirit of ‘frontier justice’. I started visiting these sites with questions of my own mixed genealogy. I set my lens to its narrowest focus, animating a line that separated the white mobs from the brown bodies they were targeting. It was a line running directly through me. The largest waves of attacks came in the wake of the Plan de San Diego, drafted by Mexican Revolutionaries to secede these western states into a freed country. The plan called for the killing of all adult, white men throughout the area. It was discovered, however, and a wave of targeted attacks towards innocent Mexican-Americans followed. I began to see in the soft, unfocused areas of my prints another vision of the frontier—a lost vision, the free land dreamed of by those revolutionaries.
