Detour is based on the concept of imagined geographies, a term proposed by Edward Said to comprise the ways that other places, people, and landscapes are represented. Said argues that memories are often affected by invention to fit certain aspects of identity to create a feeling of belonging to a group or culture.I want to explore the connection between identity and geography and challenge it

In this dérive, I explore my surroundings in a different way, looking for familiar elements of my emotional ecosystem in a new place I’ve never been before.

I created instructions for my dérive, based on the common elements that I would find back at home, symbols of my life and identity as someone who was born and raised in Mexico according to the stereotypes and social constructs and at the same time adding emotional content to these elements.

I chose the Fruitvale district in East Oakland because it is known to have the biggest Mexican community and because I’ve never been there before. Pretending to find iconic elements of my identity in a place based on the superficial values of an area would only reinforce the stereotypes that I try to avoid, so I left it open to the possibility of finding resources or not.

This project represents my own experience as an outsider in a place where based on stereotypes should feel familiar to me.

This detour did not pretend to find a definite conclusion, the purpose of it was just experimentation. The success of it was not finding my identity or not; it was about challenging these proposed theories that sounded true to me but also opened to testing.

At the end of the trip, I realized that even if I found elements that were reminiscent of my homeland, my connection with the place was superficial; I still felt I was walking in a non-familiar place disguised as my country.

Identities cannot be forced to happen or exist even if there is a set of instructions that tell you what to exactly look for. Even if I found some elements that spoke to me, some others appeared to be reminiscent of somewhere else and not that place exactly.

Since the beginning of the dérive I was not expecting to find a new home and also, I didn’t expect the place to fully embrace me. My last thought about this experiment on psychogeography is that identities are so complicated, personal and subjective that they cannot be completely understood and summarized by theories and scholars.

Do I have to be Mexican or Bay-Arean? Should I choose between those? I guess I’m both now.