La Santería de Mamá unfolds as a complex installation that embodies Dos Santos’s penchant for narrative intricacies, situating the work as both a visual and conceptual act of cultural decolonization. At its core lies the symbolic resonance of the Amaryllis flower—a motif charged with layered meanings, reimagined here as a vessel for interrogating identity, resilience, and cultural hybridity. By dismantling the hierarchical systems historically imposed upon botanical and cultural symbols, the work raises critical questions about the condition of the multi-emigrated identity within contemporary society.

The installation functions as a constellation of stories, where each flower and sculpture becomes a chapter in an ongoing saga of cultural survival and transformation. The Amaryllis, selected for its enduring vitality and ability to bloom even under difficult conditions, serves as a powerful metaphor for the resilience of Latin American cultural identities in the face of colonial histories and their lingering aftermaths. Rather than accepting the exoticized and hierarchical framing of certain flowers within Western epistemologies, Dos Santos reclaims the Amaryllis as an agent of resistance, granting it narrative agency. La Santería de Mamá thus emerges as a counter-monument—an anthem of defiance and a refusal of systems that dictate cultural legitimacy or prominence.

Through this gesture, Dos Santos weaves together narratives of displacement, devotion, and survival. Each element of the installation becomes a mnemonic device, bearing witness to the complex entanglements of migration and memory. The petals, individually fragile yet collectively resilient, invite the viewer into a dialogue with the unspoken stories embedded within diasporic existence. The installation transforms into a sanctuary: a site where resilience converges with vulnerability, and where identity is articulated not as static but as a dynamic, multi-layered process.

The interrogation extends beyond aesthetics into the broader socio-political field. By dismantling rigid classifications of identity, La Santería de Mamá destabilizes dominant cultural frameworks and calls for a re-examination of hierarchies that govern recognition, belonging, and exclusion. The Amaryllis, in this context, becomes more than a flower: it operates as a disruptive emblem, unsettling monochromatic narratives and foregrounding the heterogeneity of cultural experience.