VEGA

VEGA

Some of my earliest memories of my grandfather are rooted in a place my family called El Bosquecito—a wooded clearing near a stream in the hills of Yauco, not far from my grandparents’ home in Almacigo Alto. Reaching it meant traveling down a narrow dirt road scattered with loose stones, but at the end waited something far more enduring than a destination. It was where our family came together.

The adults played dominoes, shared food, danced, and filled the air with jíbaro music. My grandfather was known for pulling one person after another onto the dance floor, and if no one accepted the invitation, he would happily keep dancing by himself. As children, my cousins and I wandered down to the quebrada, stacking rocks to dam the water and create small pools where we could play. We searched between the rocks for tiny freshwater crayfish my mother called langostinas. I still associate that place with the sound of music, the movement of the water, and the feeling of the cool stream around us.

Those memories also extend beyond what I experienced myself. There are old family photographs from the 1970s showing gatherings at El Bosquecito before I was there—birthdays, relatives together, moments preserved in fading photographs. Seeing them reminds me that the place belonged not just to my childhood, but to a family history already unfolding before I entered it. My own memories became another layer added to something that had been taking shape across generations.

Looking back, I realize those gatherings taught me something that couldn’t be learned from photographs alone. Family history isn’t inherited only through names and stories. It’s passed between generations in laughter around a domino table, in music shared after a meal, in the movement of water over stones, and in places that quietly become part of who we are.

VEGA is both a portrait of my grandfather and an homage to those moments. The found dominoes embedded in the work speak not only to the games he loved, but to the conversations, traditions, and relationships they carried.

Like memory itself, the dominoes become small pieces that, when brought together, reveal a life, a family, and a legacy greater than any one piece could tell on its own.