Capilla del Hombre

31 de marzo 2023

Today, I visited a museum of Oswaldo Guayasamín, who is very famous. He’s been the subject of many an internet research when I was younger, and today I saw his house with portraits of Mercedes Sosa and Paco de Lucia. I fell in love with this one piece, named “Wretched of the Earth.” So beautiful were the pigments, the movement, the music of this man, dead now 24 years. I wonder at the anguish and tenderness with which he worked.

Famous, known about by many people. People look at Guayasamín, and they know his prayers and frustrations––in his chapel of man. Many people know of his prayers for an Earth made of men, less wretched. Many know of his prayers and yet his painted hands reach toward the heavens, not among other hands, held tightly, unified by this wish. I suppose this wish of men less wretched lives in songs sung, guitars plucked––in the music of Latin America. Right now I am enjoying another prayer––”Solo le pido a Dios” by Mercedes Sosa.

My tia washes dishes as she sings along with Sosa. I remember the glow of the computer screen relaying images, some pixels brightening a darkened room, and the sound of my Papi playing Paco de Lucia; that reminds me of this moment with water running and sounds soothing me of what I feel is a lost identity. I wish, sometimes, that I had stayed here where identity can be found in family, in art, in a language that I now stumble upon without fluency.

But that is another world, where hands don’t point upward in prayer, but hold one another.