Rose Ann Chasman

Yo El Diablo (Me the Devil)
papercutting, stamps, plastic shoes

The Source: a book of healing ritual papercuts, good and evil spirits, from the Mexican Otomi Indians. Among the evil spirits – two-faced and wearing the high-heeled boots of the conquistadors, I find ‘myself’ revealed as ‘Lord of the Jews’ (‘Senor de Judios’) with blood-letting knife – to be exorcized by ‘baptism’ with whiskey!

The shoes distill all the distortion of this horrible caricature, by people who have never seen a real Jew in their lives. The source of the image is painful to contemplate – hardly indigenous. My image here is both shod and barefoot, single and two-faced, created with hasty and ungrammatical Spanish!

Partial Translation:
The Lord of the Jews carries a knife because he wants blood, and wherever there is a fight, the Lord of the Jews give the knife to whoever he want to fight with… (Along with the Lord of the Devil) he goes along the road or into the cantina to find his meal.

© Rose Ann Chasman