![illuminations rgv illuminations rgv](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/a5/e6/ee/a5e6eeb811d7f215bf6483d48be7efb5--the-family-church.jpg)
![illuminations rgv illuminations rgv](https://illuminationsrgv.xolights.com/vendors/30/small/10228%20bn.jpg)
Illuminations is more than a lighting showroom. So it’s nice now that we’re able to have that second location for our customers’ convenience.” We’ve had customers from the Lower Valley come to McAllen to shop. “We’re just excited about the Brownsville location opening,” Garza said. In April 2017, Illuminations expanded with a second store opening in Brownsville. “We’re very close, so I couldn’t see myself working with anybody else but my family.” “There’s nobody else that you can trust as much as you do family,” Garza said. Founded by Garza’s parents, Gustavo and Gracie Garcia, Illuminations is now co-owned by Garza and her two siblings - D’Ann Torres and Marco Garcia. Illuminations is a family-owned lighting fixture showroom that has served the Rio Grande Valley since 2000 at its McAllen location. “Most people don’t realize all the work that goes into it, all the details that are associated with choosing lights for a new house, until they come across the problem, so we help them avoid those problems before they are faced with them,” said Melinda Garza, a co-owner at Illuminations. That’s where the experts at Illuminations come in. From floor plans to wall color and everything in between, there are so many ways to personalize a living space - right down to the light fixtures that brighten each and every room. There are a plethora of decisions that go into building a house. In this way, Futuro Conjunto creates a future space of memory that recognizes the importance of the past while thinking of a better tomorrow for the RGV and beyond.Family-Owned Illuminations Offers Personalized Lighting Expertise This effort is one that demonstrates the potential of community-building that emulates the tradition of the corrido itself and what it means to think of a future together, even in the face of contemporary apocalypses. Looking to the past in order to project us into the future, Leal and Vela in many ways echo the late José Esteban Muñoz's feeling of the "warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality." 4 Embracing the coalition of meanings of "futuro" and "conjunto," Leal and Vela assemble a noteworthy and diverse group of collaborators, including musicians, singers, rappers, voice actors, community members, and artists. 3 In the face of these local terrors, Futuro Conjunto speaks to the possibility of a communal future that extends beyond this region.
![illuminations rgv illuminations rgv](https://illuminationsrgv.xolights.com/vendors/179/small/06622_02.jpg)
As these liner notes signal, the RGV is a terrain where environmental degradation, surveillance, assault, murder, discrimination, and emergent "astro-capitalism" converge. It allows us to consider the lingering effects of domestic and foreign policy that continually shape this region. įuturo Conjunto is particularly resonant.
#ILLUMINATIONS RGV FULL#
This Latinx story is full of familial, historical, and communal longing, which speaks to what Leal and Vela term the "speculative regionalist possibility": that is, how the intersection of individual memory-how it is imparted, desired, reimagined, and transformed-intersects with the oppressive forces that produce and reproduce the erasures and silences of history. Framing the story of the bootleg concert is a listener's search for his maternal ancestors in the RGV. 2 As Leal explains in these liner notes, the corrido tradition indexes history and communal storytelling, showing us how the personal is an aperture for the communal. Futuro Conjunto encapsulates the violent rupture that takes place in this geography by focusing on the "textures of struggle" as they transform into song. Through a mix of audio, video, and animation, Futuro Conjunto projects its audience almost a century into the future, telling the story of a bootleg copy of an underground concert in 2120 at the end of the Second Mexican American War.Ĭomprising a small portion of the U.S.-Mexico border, which Gloria Anzaldúa influentially described as an "open wound," 1 the Rio Grande Valley tells a larger transnational story. Set in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), leal and vela present the imagined geographies of tomorrow, the other suns that form the theoretical framework for our special issue. What does the future sound like as imagined through the apocalyptic past? How does this soundscape emerge and who will sing it, play it, paint it? These are some of the questions jonathan leal and charlie vela take on in their transmedia project, Futuro Conjunto (2020).