Loteria ’76 is a reinvented version of the original loteria game that is played in Latinx housholds.  Loteria is a game that is a 3+ person game. The objective of the game is to get 4 cards in a row, it is typically played with beans as your ‘markers’.  The game has a card-caller and his job is to explain the card as much as he can without giving the name of the card. The trick here is that if you mark a card that is wrong thinking you got loteria, the game continues. This means victory for the card-caller.  What sets Loteria ‘76 apart from the original is the unique and personable images used, as well as the colors. The significance of the number 76 is that is the is the year my mother and her family migrated to San Francisco from Jalisco, Mexico.

I made this series in hope that through playing the game I get a better sense of the San Francisco through my mother’s eyes. I come from a family of immigrants and the way we bonded was through playing games. My family was often closed off about their childhoods and this version of loteria is an opening to the mystery that is my mother. My move to San Francisco was my first big move and it was set to become my new home away from home. I found myself often gravitating towards the Mission District because of the stories my mom would share with me. In a sense the Mission District became my outlet for my homesickness, and I found myself doing this frequently with different districts and objects in the city.