Centering a phrase I am told over and over again, “I thought you were just another white girl.”, this book spans an entire bag of corn tortillas - a staple food I’ve eaten since childhood. The first tortilla is printed in an ink matched to the color of my own light skin tone. With each subsequent page, the ink is methodically darkened, up until the final page which matches the color of my brother’s skin tone. The content of the book can be pulled out as a set of cards, a type of aggregate data that can be poured over and compared. How can our own understandings of whiteness/brownness be challenged across a visual spectrum? Where is the tipping point of what we recognize as other?

This book asks the viewer to grapple with these larger systems of how identity is assigned, while also placing the viewer as reader/receiver of this phrase, “I thought you were just another white girl.”  Again and again this phrase must be ingested/digested by the viewer on a new tortilla. To what degree can the viewer control this pacing? It is my goal here to not create a project just around the systemic, but also around the weight of what the individual must bear - to be told by others again and again that you do not look how you are supposed to, and to bear the burden of proof and explanation of why you look a certain way.  While at first giving this explanation might feel neutral, insignificant, or even a chance at an interesting conversation, at what point will the reader face saturation or unbearable overfilling?