The Lotería Project

As a first-generation Mexican American, I inherited lotería as both a cultural artifact and a social ritual. The deck occupied a contradictory space within my upbringing: visually childlike yet embedded in adult environments of gambling, humor, coded sexuality, and racial representation. Neither wholly innocent nor overtly critical, lotería became an early lesson in how images carry values, histories, and contradictions.

This project reimagines lotería as a contemporary symbolic system through which to examine Mexican-American identity and the rituals of modern life. Positioned between inheritance and reinvention, the deck asks what images define us now, what contradictions they reveal, and what future generations might learn about our values through the symbols we choose to preserve.

Drawing from the visual languages of traditional lotería, tattoo flash, and classical iconography, each card transforms a familiar object, figure, or ritual into a contemporary emblem of devotion, aspiration, anxiety, or belonging. These images function simultaneously as tattoo designs, collectible artifacts, and studies in cultural symbolism, bridging distinctions between folk tradition, commercial image-making, and fine art practice.

By translating the visual logic of inherited symbols into the context of contemporary life, this work asks:

What are the relics of modern existence, and what do they reveal about who we are becoming?