Carlos Flores

Porta(til) is a series of portable monuments that tether Chicago Latinx/e communities at the frontline of displacement, environmental racism, and the current climate refugee crisis through hybridizing art and community programming for the Day of the Dead festivities of 2024. Each Porta(til) site is designed to be a wheelbarrow and alternative exhibition structure made out of “bandit signs” (put up by gentrifying developers). The design draws from 16th century Spanish portable altars employed by missionaries to colonize Native populations in the Americas and the Southwestern United States. Our goal for these monuments operating as participatory hybrid “ofrendas” is to disrupt the extractive predatory nature of community-collected bandit signs and subvert their intended functions toward placemaking.