This work began as a digital residency with Duke’s Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South. I treated the Arrob@ blog like a locket—an intimate object, worn close, meant to hold something personal. Not just as a form of adornment, but as one of concealment. What happens when that locket is opened by clicking a link?
Each post—a Polaroid, a digital collage, a poetic note—became a kind of entry, not just into a diary but into a different operation of time and a triangulation of space and experience. The blog asked: what’s worth holding onto? What’s worth showing? I wrote daily. Sometimes about memories. Sometimes just about the weather. It was always about being seen when so often I feel unseen. The question of color—of skin, of desire, of warning, of judgement, of history, of ethics, of curiosity—ran throughout. The title came from something someone said to me once. “I love your color.” I’m still not sure what they meant. Distance, intimacy, the offer of anonymity—all became part of the exchange. I think of this as a locket you can’t wear and you can’t close. It’s always open. And paradoxically, it holds something—but I don’t always know what.

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