As a child of only two or three years old, I hated my reflection in the mirror. "If only I had blond hair," I thought. "Then I could be beautiful."

Almost twenty years later, I remembered those viscious thoughts with sorrow and regeret. I began to reflect upon the mass media images of women who looked like me: the "firey," "spicy" Latina to whom I did not relate--the "bad girl" I never wanted to be.

I wondered about the women who played these characters and how they felt about themselves and the ways they were presented for public consumption. In this self-portraiture project, I put on their personas as attempt to understand them as the people behind celebrity--and to understand my own relationship to them and their characters who so impacted my own self-perception. (35mm and medium-format film, varying emulsions)