Kalena Marshall Garcia
“good with a camera”
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Shared Ground
A collaborative work by Yaqeen Yamani & Kalena Marshall Garcia.
Over the course of a year-long fellowship at DaVinci Art Alliance, Yaqeen Yamani and I collaborated virtually, exploring our shared and distinct connections to land, family history, and community. Our work draws on native lands tied to our great-grandparents, using these sites as entry points to reflect on memory, care, and collective labor. My series traces ancestral and diasporic memory through the backyard mango trees of my Puerto Rican family, capturing the ways in which home, displacement, and structural change shape both place and memory. Similarly Yaqeen’s project focuses on the mulukhiyah harvest in Jericho, where she planted alongside her father on land worked by her Yemeni grandfather, connecting personal and communal histories through seasonal labor and the presence of local women. Together, our work investigates how land, agriculture, and family legacies anchor us in rapidly transforming environments, creating spaces for preservation, storytelling, and intergenerational connection.
Kalena’s Statement
Mango trees are common gathering sites in Puerto Rico. They grow along roadsides, in front yards, or spill over from a neighbor’s lot. Unlike the store-bought varieties, most of these trees produce mangos that are not commercially available; they are known as criollo mangos. Grown from dropped seeds, they become unique hybrids– native to specific yards or neighborhoods. These trees often carry ancestral weight, having stood in place for generations.
Whenever my family reminisces about living on the island, they always mention the mangos from the tree at Abuelita Estela’s house: how they were the sweetest, the best you’ll ever have, and how this one tree, unlike others, seemed to bear fruit year-round. What’s special is that this tree isn’t even in our backyard—it belongs to the neighbors. But it is so massive that it shades their yard, stretches into ours, and even reaches over our casita.
Today, only my papí lives there. The rest of my family, like many Puerto Ricans, are now part of the diaspora. Many were pushed to seek opportunity elsewhere due to economic instability shaped by U.S. colonial policies, the debt crisis, and the forces of globalization. At the same time, gentrification reshapes the island and its neighborhoods. Empty houses lay vacant or become vacation rentals, Airbnbs, and investment properties. The backyards that once held mango trees and generations of memory are increasingly enclosed, privatized, or erased altogether. In the wake of these displacements, homes like my papí’s sit quieter, bearing witness to absences shaped by larger structural forces transforming Puerto Rico.
The photographs in this series were taken in that very backyard, a place once full of movement, now marked by stillness. I purposely obscure images and shift from in and out of focus to reflect the haziness of postmemory—the way stories, smells, and images passed down through my family live vividly in my imagination, even though I did not witness them myself. I pair these photographs with an audio piece of recorded family recollections: precious memories of the house and the tree. The images reflect my experience of a place that no longer exists in the same way, while the audio preserves the warmth and presence of what once was. As I look at these objects like the mangos, the ladder, or the tree, they are filtered through retelling.
Though I return to my papí’s house often, I do so alone, never in the company of the relatives who once made that house a home. Still, the stories they tell—the people, the food, the mangos—ground me to the place.
Mango trees are common gathering sites in Puerto Rico. They grow along roadsides, in front yards, or spill over from a neighbor’s lot. Unlike the store-bought varieties, most of these trees produce mangos that are not commercially available; they are known as criollo mangos. Grown from dropped seeds, they become unique hybrids– native to specific yards or neighborhoods. These trees often carry ancestral weight, having stood in place for generations.
Whenever my family reminisces about living on the island, they always mention the mangos from the tree at Abuelita Estela’s house: how they were the sweetest, the best you’ll ever have, and how this one tree, unlike others, seemed to bear fruit year-round. What’s special is that this tree isn’t even in our backyard—it belongs to the neighbors. But it is so massive that it shades their yard, stretches into ours, and even reaches over our casita.
Today, only my papí lives there. The rest of my family, like many Puerto Ricans, are now part of the diaspora. Many were pushed to seek opportunity elsewhere due to economic instability shaped by U.S. colonial policies, the debt crisis, and the forces of globalization. At the same time, gentrification reshapes the island and its neighborhoods. Empty houses lay vacant or become vacation rentals, Airbnbs, and investment properties. The backyards that once held mango trees and generations of memory are increasingly enclosed, privatized, or erased altogether. In the wake of these displacements, homes like my papí’s sit quieter, bearing witness to absences shaped by larger structural forces transforming Puerto Rico.
The photographs in this series were taken in that very backyard, a place once full of movement, now marked by stillness. I purposely obscure images and shift from in and out of focus to reflect the haziness of postmemory—the way stories, smells, and images passed down through my family live vividly in my imagination, even though I did not witness them myself. I pair these photographs with an audio piece of recorded family recollections: precious memories of the house and the tree. The images reflect my experience of a place that no longer exists in the same way, while the audio preserves the warmth and presence of what once was. As I look at these objects like the mangos, the ladder, or the tree, they are filtered through retelling.
Though I return to my papí’s house often, I do so alone, never in the company of the relatives who once made that house a home. Still, the stories they tell—the people, the food, the mangos—ground me to the place.
Yaqeen’s Statement
This work explores our relationship to land, agriculture, and community through the mulukhiyah harvest. Each year, the season gathers women and families in a practice of care and collective labor. This work is both personal and communal. It begins with planting mulukhiyah alongside my father, on the same land where my Yemeni grandfather once worked and lived, and later my father after him. Drawing on my family’s history while extending outward to the experiences of local residents, especially women whose labor and presence is very present in the season. I had the pleasure of spending time with women from al-Nuiymea village—Rusayila Dreat, Sara, and Intisar Dreat in the season. This work is a reflection on what grounds us in a city where so much is changing. As Jericho undergoes rapid transformation where it’s constantly changing the physical and social landscape, this project becomes an act of preservation, exploring these spaces and settings.