GUADALAJARA.- Yvette Mayorga’s exhibition at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara takes her back to the place she always talks about leaving. Throughout her career, she has made art about her family’s journey from the Mexican state of Jalisco to Chicago, exploring her immigrant parents’ struggle to gain an economic foothold in the United States, starting in the 1970s. Mayorga, who is 33, also examines how first-generation Americans like herself sort out their cultural identities.

Mayorga’s signature approach is to apply acrylic paint to canvas, using pastry tubes, piping out thick, frilly lines that resemble frosting on the fancy wedding and birthday cakes that are popular in Mexico and within Mexican American communities. The technique recognizes cross-border connections while also honoring the physical labor by many immigrants when they arrive in the United States.

The Guadalajara exhibition, Mayorga’s first international solo show, is titled “La Jaula de Oro” (“The Golden Cage”), a term meant to be a metaphor for the false promises of immigration. Curated by Maya Renée Escárcega, it features paintings inspired by family photos, as well as clay pieces made during a recent residency at the city’s storied Cerámica Suro factory. The museum is bathed in bright pink, including its facade and interior walls, which were custom colored for the occasion. The show’s centerpiece, a pink 1974 Datsun station wagon that was bought online and that Mayorga decorated in her flowery style, symbolizes the mobility of immigrant families like the artist’s own.

Below are edited excerpts from a recent video interview with Mayorga, who was in Chicago.

Q: I have to first ask about technique. How do you make all those layers of ornamental paint?

A: I use acrylic paint and an acrylic medium that makes the paint a little bit more dense. Then I mix it with whatever color that I’m working with and then put it inside of a piping bag. So, it’s almost like I’m drawing with it and making lines that are a drawing of the painting itself — like a guideline for me to know where I’m going to fill in and have the most relief, and then I can go back and forth in those areas. And then it dries. That’s why I’m usually working on four pieces at once, because while one work is drying, then I do it to the others.

Q: You use an actual pastry bag, with the tips that a baker would use?

A: Yes. I’m the most fond of the ones that bakers use to make an edge around a cake. My second favorite is the one that makes a texture that looks like grass.

Q: It’s labor-intensive, no doubt.

A: All of this was for me to have this sort of metaphor in my work, to talk about the American dream, and to also talk about labor in my family, specifically. I wanted to focus on the jobs that my parents did when they first got here. My mom worked at a department store bakery for, I think, 20 years. I was also thinking about gendered labor and wanting to explore that more in my practice. It’s not just about my mom. I’m putting her at the forefront to talk about our contribution in general, and also to critique and question these gender roles.

Q: I want to stay on the idea of women’s work because, in a sense, your work is hyper-feminine. Everything is pink and frilly. There are flowers and fashion, and in the self-portrait you are showing, you have exaggerated makeup, fingernails and eyelashes.

A: Definitely, for me, it’s become a powerful tool within my work. This hyper-feminine approach is very much a proclamation of myself — that these works are made by me. I’m placing myself within this structure and within art history, and the idea of men mostly dominating this sort of portraiture and these sort of positions. It feels radical that I can assert this power while having my nails look this way or having these false eyelashes.

Q: You have had solo exhibitions in the U.S., including at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Momentary at Crystal Bridges, but this is different. Both of your parents came from Jalisco, where the museum is. How did your emotional connection influence working at this museum?

A: It’s not often that, as Mexican American artists, we get an opportunity to show this work — which is very much about being Latinx in the U.S. — in Mexico. And so those were things that I was thinking about. But the part that I was the most excited about was the fact that it is my parents’ home state, and I spent a lot of time in this state growing up, until I was about 18. We spent all summers there, and I actually went to school in Zacatecas in third grade. I really think that spending time there contributed to me being an artist.

Q: You know the region well. It is the starting point for your art.

A: And it was very important for me to talk about my experience of going back. I’m viewing it from not necessarily being from this place, but being around this place, feeling like this place is also somehow my home. Having been here in Chicago, making this work for the last 10 years, I was very curious about how it was going to be received, what kind of conversations were going to come up. I thought that maybe some of the work would not be understood in the same way, but it was actually the opposite. I feel like the work was very well received.

Q: There is clearly a baroque influence in the exhibition. It is so excessive and indulgent, like all those ornamental churches from Mexico’s colonial era. There is a little bit of bad taste to it, no?

A: I think from spending so much time in Mexico, during these summers of my adolescence, I was surrounded by so much baroque architecture. I spent so much time inside Catholic churches. I feel like spending time with this architecture kind of formed my taste because, for me, it wasn’t just a church. I was also viewing all the paintings inside of the church, all of the golden, gilded edges. I had a lot of questions about why these paintings were there, why churches were made in this kind of, you know, decadent way.

And through investigating colonialism in this way and then tying that to art history, I started to also map out the ways in which colonialism has had its obvious impacts within my family lineage, which I can also link to migration and how we ended up here. And I can also link it to the way in which we include this sort of celebratory decadence in our birthdays and our weddings. To me, the rococo is sort of a perfect way to reference the American dream.

Q: At the same time, you plant these images within your paintings of contemporary American pop culture symbols; I recognized Tweety Bird and Hello Kitty. One painting is set in a McDonald’s restaurant.

A: It’s a picture of me and my sister and my niece inside of a McDonald’s. It was something that was very familiar and something that’s very much, I think, a part of being “first gen” in the U.S.

McDonald’s was the fanciest place that you could eat at in the ’90s for my family on a Sunday. If we got there, you know, it felt like, OK, everything is fine, everything is good, and you feel very American at the same time.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I’m currently working on a large-scale public art project with Times Square Arts for fall of 2025. And I’m also working on my first solo show since 2017 here in Chicago, this June at Monique Meloche Gallery.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.