Daniela Chaparro’s work is inspired by her personal and familial history. Chaparro uses painting as a medium to highlight inviting scenes of the infamous city of Juárez. Her use of color is intuitive and based on memories from her childhood living and growing up in what was at the time known as the most violent city in the world. Her flatness and cropping of images functions as a snapshot of the scenes that happen in a moment but speak of the mundane but notable lives of the fronterizos. The integration of opaque and transparent colors speak to the layers that Juarenses experience by living in the border cities.

Chaparro does not aim to romanticize or further exploit the city of Juárez and its people, but to add to the narratives of the Mexican-American border. People from the border are often seen as disposable or as ones’ whose lives have been reduced to martyrdom. Chaparro’s practice focuses on the people of Juárez and everyday life; not as a place of survival, but where tenderness and violence coexist.