Los Angeles, California

Sonia BasSheva Mañjon celebrated her installation Invisible Identity in the exhibit - An Idea Called Tomorrow – at the artist opening on December 4, 2009, at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California.

Mañjon has been working on this project for the past five years and results from her dissertation: The Experience of Immigration and Acculturation of Four Generations of Dominican Women in California.

Invisible Identity: Mujeres Dominicanas en California, a photographic/video installation documentary, examines the stories of four generations of Dominican women in a single family who immigrated to California. This project began with the question of identity within physical space, the identity of the story collector, a Dominican American woman living in California questioning issues of race, ethnicity, and culture, and the perception of living silently between two worlds (Dominican and American) and belonging to neither.

To understand this dilemma, it is important to understand the stories of the women who came before her in order to uncover the history of how she came to be Dominican in America. The installation recreates a small-scale Dominican living room. Six transparent 14" x 18" photographs of the women suspend from the walls. The video component is a looped DVD of comparative stories of the women, their examination of living either an immigrant or bicultural existence. The matriarchs in the documentary, Abuela and Mami, migrated to America from the Dominican Republic in the early 1950s. One begins to understand the similarities of the women’s journeys, even though they speak of experiences that span 40 years.

As more immigrants struggle with the difficulty of maintaining their cultural identity, and their children find it harder to identify with their parent’s traditions, this project aims to give voice and recognition to those Dominicans who seek to maintain their cultural identity and traditions while living in California.

The exhibit runs through March 7, 2010. The California African American Museum is located in Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, Los Angeles, CA. For more information, visit www.caamuseum.org. Their phone number is 213-744-7432.