For many, Ana Mendieta is the victim in an infamous and unsolved death that resulted from a fall from a thirty-fourth-story window in the home of her husband, the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. In the downtown New York art world of the 1970s and early 1980s, she was one of the first Latin American woman artists, and the only Cuban, to achieve indisputable prominence on the art world's terms, without compromising her own. For the Cubans, she was among the first exiles to renew bonds with her homeland and express in her art the pain of rupture that is so much a part of Cuban history. For me and every other Cuban American, Ana opened up a way of looking at our own existence. Any of us who choose to confront the manifold dimensions of the exile and the colonial and neocolonial violence that create our fractured identities as New World Hispanics will retrace her footsteps.

She was born in 1948 into a wealthy, politically connected Havan family and lived a comfortable early childhood, but the conflicts that determined the future of her class after the Revolution were soon to shape Ana's life. Heeding the anticommunist claims of the Cuban Catholic Church, Ana's parents sent her and her older sister Raquel to the United States in 1961 through Operation Peter Pan, a CIA-backed project designed to encourage imigration and family divisions. Upon arrival in the United States, the girls were placed in a camp with adolescent delinquents. After this transitional period, they were shuttled form one Iowa foster home to another. By the time they were reunited with their mother, who arrived in Iowa in 1967, their father had been imprisoned for his CIA connections and would not be released for another decade.

Ana began her life as a foreigner in relative isolation, without the imaginary and often sclerotized vision of a homeland that an exile community usually provides. She faced on her own the racism and cultural ignorance of a homogeneous American environment, and later in her career, would sensitize her art world colleagues to their own forms of prejudices. One of the first important choices she made as a young adult was to study visual arts, reaching graduate school at the University of Iowa multimedia and video art progrm in the early 1970s. At the time, the program was extrememly receptive to anti-gallery, anti-art-as-commodity currents on the rise in New York, which doubtlessly contributed to Ana's creative trajectory. American critics and colleagues have been quick to point out that Ana combined these developments in performance, body art, and site-specific sculpture with feminist concerns, and some have even mentioned Ana's interest in her "roots."

Ana's understanding of Afro-Cuban ritual and music and of Latin American history was the result of self-conscious research more than osmosis. Going to the heart of Cuban popular culture, Ana uncovered a history of cultural adaptation and response to the disruption and dislocation of the New World colonial experience, as well as the murmurs of preexistent, precolonial forms. Appropriating from Santeria, the synthesis of Yoruba religion and Catholicism, what she called its "healing imagery," Ana drew on rituals and symbols that affirm social bonds, connect the practitioner to the past, and seek to overcome limits of time, place, and mortality. Santeria is essentially perfomative, integrating process and objects, and singling out the transfromative power in the act of making meaning out of natural materials and human gestures. In her Silueta series, which whe worked on throughout the 1970s, Ana hewed her own figure into various landscapes in Iowa and Mexico, expressing her desire to establish her place in the world by retracing an elemental connection with nature. Using gunpowder and firecrackers, she would burn signs of herself into sand and soil; using mud and feathers, she would blend herself into the landscape; using blood mixed with tempera, she would metaphorize her pain.

Moving to New York in the late 1970s, Ana established ties with the feminist and the Thirld World subcultures of the art scene. She also joined the Cuban Americans involved in El Dialogo, a series of talks held during the Carter administration's rapprochement with Cuba which led to the release of dozens of political prisoners, including Ana's father, and the possibility for many exiles to visit Cuba. (It also included negotiations for new imigration policies, which were to backfire with the 1980 Mariel exodus and later be terminated as a result of Radio Marti.) After nineteen years, Ana returned to Cuba, taking a group of artist friends with her. Already accustomed to transforming her sentiment into symbol, Ana proposed to execute an artwork in Cuba, and went back again in 1981 to carve her figures into the caves of Jaruco, just outside Havana. She herself became a symbol of friendly reunion, appearing on Cuban television and in magazines at a time when there was still hope of more amicable relations with the United States.

When she arrived in Cuba, Ana's work had already begun to change. The Rupestrian sculptures made in Cuba are part of a transition to a graphic style in which the female form is refracted through mythological and precolonial symbolism. Titling her works in Taino, the language on one of Cuba's indigenous peoples, Ana created works that self-consciously blurred the lines between art and archeological artifact, between "prehistoric" cave painting, iconic glyph, and sculpture.

Ana left her mark not only in Jaruco, but in Cuba's artistic community. She arrived at a time when a young gerneration of visual artists were undertaking a critical revision of history and cultural practice. She encouraged them to take risks, to experiment with forms and techniques they had had little access to during the cultural isolation that marked Cuban artistic life in the 1970s. To the young Cuban arist Jose Bedia, who had been developing his own hybrid asthetics out of archeology and Afro-Cuban ritual, Ana was a kindred spirit. For Marta Maria Perez, whose work includes photographs which document her pregnancy and the popular myths that enshroud it, Ana's work no doubt serves as an important point of reference. To Gustavo Perez Monzon, who was working with young children not far from where Ana carved her Rupestrian sculprures, her engagement with nature offered an alternative model of artistic activity to him as a creator and educator. For the painter and insatiable art/media consumer Flavio Garciandia, discussion with Ana on Cuban popular culture and cultural identity undoubtedly hilped him to refine his use of kitsch.