Camryn Loor

A Woman Confused” (2024-2025)

As someone with both loves and hates of many many authors, philosophers, painters, singers, guitar players, YouTubers, having to choose a thinker to craft an essay around was something I thought would be an impossible task. But upon learning more about Ana Mendieta in my Latinx Art and Visual Culture course, which I took concurrently with Writing the Essay, I found my thinker and this essay became something much more personal than I had initially expected. Ana Mendieta immigrated from Cuba to America in the same year that my grandparents immigrated from Cuba to America, and she did all she could to convey the feeling of loss of attachment to her motherland that is still felt across generations of families of Cuban descent in the U.S. today, including my own. She shares my beliefs in the power and importance of nature, heritage, sentimentality and femininity. Overall, Ana Mendieta is someone to whom I feel a deep connection and someone I wanted to both honor through this video essay and use as a voice to discuss our shared  beliefs. I wanted to show  others how she gives me  hope for the possibility of the deconstruction of power systems that destroy connections through her bold demonstration of her own deep connections with the earth and with her heritage. Creating this essay in a video format was both daunting since I have no experience putting together videos of any kind, but it also gave me the opportunity to achieve two goals. These were to present the works and thoughts of Ana Mendieta with my own thoughts and the thoughts of Willow Defebaugh, but also to create a shrine to my Cuban heritage I care so much about by weaving together videos of the Cuban landscape, people, and culture with songs by Cuban artists. I am proud of and deeply attached to this video essay I have created as I feel it has achieved exactly those goals.


Camryn Loor is from Houston, Texas and is currently studying Anthropology and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has a wide range of other interests from mathematics to visual arts to philosophy, and she runs on lots of coffee and Led Zeppelin. This essay was crafted out of Camryn’s love for art, her family, and her Cuban heritage, as well as her commitment to promoting environmentalism, respect for femininity, and decolonization.