The last time I went to Brazil in 2019, I recall sitting in the living room of my vovó’s house playing with Barbie dolls with my little sister and cousin. While playing, I heard a creaking from the wood floor, and my head perked up. It was my mom walking towards us. She asked us to sit next to her on the couch. She tucked my hair behind my ears and gave me a weak smile through her tears as she told me my older cousin, Bruno, had cancer.

My sister and I wanted to support Bruno and our family however we could. In an attempt to help out with the hospital bills, my sister and I founded our own organization called We The People, where we made and sold jewelry to raise money for Bruno’s operations and medical bills. We would sit in my vovó’s living room on the floor, tying knots, cutting strings and making piles upon piles of jewelry to sell to anyone who walked by my vovó’s house. We sat outside for hours, giving rings and bracelets to people, and by the end of the summer, I would see people walking down the street wearing a piece of jewelry they had bought from us. This changed my life — seeing how fashion became a creative outlet, not only for me, but for my community as well, offering a meaningful way for others to rally around a cause that was deeply personal to us. 

Sadly, my cousin Bruno passed away on June 7, 2020, and one of his last wishes was for the money to be donated to Hospital De Amor in Barretos, Brazil. He was an MMA fighter and competed even through all his chemotherapy. He was the embodiment of strength, and because of what he had endured, I wanted to find my own strength. 

I started making art in all forms and fell in love with painting on jeans in 2020 during quarantine when I was experimenting in different mediums. I wanted people to see me in my art, like how people saw Bruno in the bracelets we made. I wanted people to see my clothes and feel something — to connect with me on a personal level just based on what I was wearing. There is culture in clothing — there is connection, love and pain — and I wanted my clothing to embody all of that. 

I made my first pair of “art jeans,” which is what I call jeans I’ve painted and customized myself, and to be honest, they were quite ugly. But that first pair of art jeans featured characters from all my favorite cartoons, and creating something that embodied a part of my identity made me fall in love with the process. I began finding myself in the things I created, and the more I made, the more I began to learn about my own strength. I found that my work could resonate with others and reflect a part of myself in a way that brought us closer together.