Jackie Amézquita’s Baked Brick Charts Immigration History in Los Angeles

Over the past winter, Jackie Amézquita neatly arranged several test bricks on her desk in her Los Angeles studio. In deviating from early work, these bricks were made of soil Masade Maíz (corn dough) is an illustration that inserts a mixture of other organic materials (blue pea flower, cocoa, beans, charcoal, bee powder, pollen, coffee beans, refreshment) that gives them a blue and light hue or dark tones of ocher and ocher and black. Amézquita said it is easy to obtain so many biological materials in Los Angeles, which illustrates the city’s immigration history and the legacy of colonialism.

After an eight-day walk from Tijuana to Los Angeles, she began using soil at work. Every time she finishes a bottle of water, she fills it with soil. By the end of the journey, she collected about 18 samples and began to consider where her discoveries were archives and memory. She remembers wondering, “If the Earth could say what? What would it say? What stories would the Earth share?”

Amézquita recalls creation myth Popol VuhAfter some trial and error, the gods used corn to make the first human being human. To make the bricks, she freezes them to keep their shape and then bakes them in the oven for a few hours, flipping them every once in a while compared to cooking the tortillas at com. After drying, she takes them outside to receive some lights before baking for the second time. “I think the sun is giving life and other energy to work,” she said.

It took her about two years to perfect the balance between soil and massa bricks that have been figured out in multiple works, including her 2023 installation El Suelo que nos alimenta. Wall-sized works commissioned by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles biennium, consisting of 144 square tiles made of soil in each community in Los Angeles and cut with drawings representing different communities.

Her brick-related works also evoke the history of immigration, a central issue in Amézquita’s practice, especially with her family. Her mother moved to Guatemala in 1987 and moved to Los Angeles from Guatemala. Her grandmother immigrated from Mexico to Guatemala during the Cristo War in the 1920s and lost the most important documents in the process. “She has to start over from the ashes,” Amézquita said. She added that her grandmother’s resilience made her think: “How do we rebuild the pillars of history that have been deleted, trying to understand and piece together everything?”

These problems inspired her to introduce charcoal and ash into her work before the wildfire broke out in Los Angeles in January and severely affected many of her friends. She now sees them as metaphors of regeneration. “We’re still standing,” she said. “We’re still sticking to it. We can create something from something that is deleted or broken.”

Read more information on the “New Talent” issue in 2025.