Tara – Einstein Medical School, Bronx, New York
I broke up my mask into four different quadrants. The first lower right quadrant on the right half, is really supposed to represent a lot of my family and culture that is really important to me. The lower right quadrant was painted by my niece and my two nephews who play a very important role in my life.
On the upper right quadrant, I have the Puerto Rican flag to represent half of my culture because I am half Puerto Rican. Over here, I have the centerpiece to the Nicaraguan flag to represent the other half of my culture. And then I have little symbols too that correspond to each culture. So, this is a drum called a Tambura, and that is very commonly seen in many Caribbean Hispanic cultures such as the Puerto Rican culture.
And then these symbols here are Mayan glyphs, and so I have Mayan ancestry from my Nicaraguan side of the family, and these represent things like this symbol represents blue for my favorite color. This symbol is supposed to sound similar to family because my family’s very important to me. And this symbol is sounds similar to the word remember to always remind myself to remember my culture and to remember where I came from.
On one side of my mask, I drew a city, so big buildings to represent an urban area and a crowd. And so most of the people in the crowd are dressed in reds and oranges and yellows, and those are, to me, colors that I feel sort of blend together very well. And randomly dispersed in the crowd are little black figures, and so that just represents my desire to work in urban environment and deal with underserved and minority populations.
When it came to that last piece of my mask, with all these question marks, I was unsure about what else I wanted to express about myself, and so I sat, and I thought about how my legacy could often best be represented by how people remember me. And so, this last part of my mask is meant for other people to fill in. so this is really just meant for other people to leave their impressions of me. And that is my mask.