For her accessories brand Fiera, 26-year-old Jazmin Delgado draws inspiration from her family—mixing and mashing her designs based on her relatives who first got her into art. The south-side native began as an earth and environmental sciences major at the University of Illinois Chicago before making the switch to art.

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Taking a Latin American colonial art class “forced” Delgado to reflect deeply on her culture and identity as a queer Latina. In this course, she studied Latin American art history before and after Spanish colonization. It showed how this history has shaped who Mexicans are today and was a catalyst for showing Delgado how to express herself.

“In a lot of ways, it inspired me to try to understand more about my background, my identity, my culture, and the historical context of where I come from in Mexico on my mom’s side,” Delgado said. “I have always been a curious person—that’s why I went into the STEM field and ultimately switched to art. I feel this class created a bridge of [my] STEM and creative background with my culture. [It] helped provide me with more language to understand how me being a third-generation, queer Latinx creator came to be.”

Having family members who hadn’t finished high school or who had a limited elementary school education, it was crucial for her to understand where she came from as she worked on projects for the course. 

Soon, she landed on the project that would kick off Fiera: a purse made out of Modelo beer boxes, which merged her experience growing up with a hyperfeminine mother and hypermasculine father. For Delgado, these purses blended the experiences her family did not know how to talk about.

“It’s a powerful experience that I try to tell and share [with] the bags and art I make. I wanted to encapsulate my mom’s side and then my dad’s side,” Delgado said. “It’s kind of integrating these pieces that I think of as portraits of them into one singular item, which ended up being this makeshift purse you couldn’t use but looked like you could use it.”

She developed Fiera from that initial project, sourcing new bag materials and colors; attaching charms, chains, and key chains to the bag; and working to develop new concepts for her brand. What stayed the same was how she always kept her family in mind when developing each bag—whether it be in their abstract likeness or through the skills they’ve taught her.

Bag additions such as chains and key chains were inspired by many ventures in Delgado’s life, including how she made jewelry with her mother.

“I started to apply these skills I learned as I was growing and figuring out what I liked a lot into the bags that I was making. Initially, I was making bags with a person in mind, with a certain experience in mind,” Delgado said. “It’s like making jewelry pieces that I’m adding to the bags.”

Beyond being inspired by her family, Delgado’s purses also gave her the chance to relish in her inner child and understand herself as a queer femme.

“I always had a bag with me, like a personal connection. I was always that little girl that had her bag that had everything in it. Like if my house burned down, it was okay because I had everything I needed in my little bag,” Delgado said. “Truthfully, I think growing up . . . I always honestly struggled with [my identity]. I felt like I haven’t really been so confident in who I really am until college because [I was] so heavily influenced by my culture. . . . Coming into my queerness, understanding that there’s more tools and language for who I am that isn’t just a Mexican woman. I am a queer woman. I’m a pansexual woman. I’m also genderfluid, and I don’t always care to be solely identified through being a woman either.”

Delgado was drawn to bags because they were “always a staple item within a woman’s closet,” and that made her feel safe. “I knew I wanted to share that kind of moment as well, and bring that same kind of love and care into a piece that’s also fun and expressive and not really constricted to like a gender binary.”

Delgado is brimming with new ideas for Fiera’s future. The first innovation is small but mighty and incorporates her previous STEM background. On each new bag, a wrench charm is now included, which Delgado made using a 3D printer.

The next steps add a little more time to the creation process, but Delgado looks forward to the ride as she considers what she wants for the brand in the coming years and looks into expanding Fiera’s universe into clothing.

“I started working for a manufacturing company, and I am an apprentice in embroidery,” Delgado said. This new job has immersed Delgado into the world of colors and textiles. She’s learning how brands run their collections and plan their drops; the job has also inspired her to start the process of creating her own ready-to-wear clothing and made-to-order pieces, and she has been releasing experimental pieces such as the Fiera wrench T-shirt.

“For the clothing collection, I am hoping to release it . . . come springtime. I have been experimenting more with the material I work with now and finding ways to continue this conversation and visual language for my understanding of what it is and what it looks like to be a queer Latinx artist and be Fiera for me,” Delgado said.

With so much potential in Fiera’s universe, Delgado is open to it all. “I think my new job opened my mind to the endless possibilities of what I can do with the brand and just made me really excited to start playing around and working on samples and really bringing these ideas I have in mind to life in the realm of fashion outside of accessories.”