Dale Muñequita

Dale Muñequita is a digital collage series that reclaims and reimagines the aesthetics of queer Caribbean identity through a deliberately subversive use of AI. By generating imagery of dolls—figures historically tied to white, heteronormative beauty—and transforming them through collage, I intervene in the visual culture that has long excluded and distorted the narratives of Caribbean femmes.

As someone from the Caribbean diaspora, I carry the knowledge that we are a stolen people: displaced, fractured, and yet endlessly generative. Barbie has often functioned as a tool of cultural violence—teaching girls of color that they must strive to be something they are not. In this work, I use AI not as an end, but as a starting point—a medium through which I distort, layer, and recompose new worlds.

Through digital collage, I queer Barbie and ground her in Caribbean intimacy, pleasure, and sisterhood. The act of collage is itself a practice of resistance and repair—cutting, reassembling, and asserting new visions where old ones erased us. This series is a love letter to every queer Caribbean femme who was told she didn’t belong in the fantasy, the toy aisle, or the future.