Thank you!
Acknowledgments
In collaboration with my ancestors and future generations, this project would not have been possible without the inspiration, support, collaboration, and shared thoughts of my communities.
Special thanks to:
Jason Knight, Randa Hadi, Stephen Song, Estephanie Barrera, Mo Jardinico, D Wang Zhao, Kenia Hale, Pilar Hinojo, Ritesh Gupta & the Useful School community.
Thank you for providing a space for me to be vulnerable with you.
About
This website was created in community but led and stewarded by Hugo Gonzalez as a project for the Decolonize, Divest, and Create class at the Useful School.
Hugo was born in New Jersey to two immigrant parents, from Mexico and Colombia. He grew up queer and introverted in an immigrant working-class community, and often felt alone. He learned and read more about his culture, his people, other writers and poets who despite having long passed, were describing feelings Hugo thought were only his. This website is for people with similar backgrounds who feel like they don’t fit into the dominant culture, and sometimes not even their own.
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Hugo’s Reading List
DDD Are.na Channel
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Colophon
Colors
Colors are #ff0000 and background is #ffda6a & #fe980a. The colors are inspired by marigolds or cempasuchil. In the Mexican tradition cempasuchil are flowers used to decorate altars for day of the dead. They bloom in time for the celebration and it is said their smell attracts the dead to guide them back home. The flower petals are scattered in a path that lead to the relatives home, and are believed to serve as a bridge between our world and those of our passed family members. You also see the flowers scattered throughout the website, so that this digital space can serve as a bridge as well.
Flowers
I also took a lot of inspiration from digital gardens, and thinking about how I can foster communal growth and organic dispersal of knowledge. I pushed the metaphor more literal and wanted flowers to grow out of the website and for different types to be different media. Other flowers include baby’s breath, cock’s comb, and different species of cempasuchil.
Layout
The layout is inspired by altars or ofrendas in the Mexican tradition during day of the dead. Which is actually a celebration that lasts multiple days and is filled with comemoration and remembering those who have passed. I also diverge from a traditional style of ofrenda by choosing to layer the pictures in a nonlinear overlapping order that attests to an indigenized perception of time, where our ancestors are just as much present with us in this very moment as they were in the past.
Fonts
The fonts are Salsa BT from Bastarda Typefoundry for the header and IBM Plex Mono for Bodytext. Bastarda is a Colombian type foundry that created the font inspired by the fonts on vintage salsa vinyl album covers. I chose this font because of my Colombian heritage and Salsa’s transnational diasporic history. I chose IBM Plex attempting to call back to its open-source and international nature while reappropriating its corporate tech-industry uses to imagine and serve an alternative future centered on community and spirituality.