BORDER BOOK FESTIVAL
FEATURED WRITER AND ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

CORINA GABALDÓN

Corina Gabaldón is an artist, musician, and numerologist from Las Cruces, New Mexico. For the past 32 years she has been involved in music, art, and culture in the educational field, working in school districts in California, Texas and New Mexico. At the same time, Corina has explored metaphysical teachings, photography and ancient spiritual traditions. She infuses her life’s experiences, lessons and talents to create visual, artistic and musical expressions that symbolize her journey, her ancestral past and her soul’s development. She is the founder and owner of www.soulinsights.net, a website offering numerology readings/charts, and original art.
      
Corina was born in El Paso, Texas but lived across the border in Juárez, Chihuahua, México for the first four years of her life. Hoping for a better future and economic opportunity, her parents decided to make a new life and immigrated to the US, crossing the Sonoran desert and settling in East Los Angeles, California. It was there that Corina went to school, earned her bachelor’s degree in Chicano Studies from California State University, Los Angeles and began her educational career. She later received her master’s degree in Education from New Mexico State University. In 1980, Corina had relocated to New Mexico, the land of her Mexican and Tewa Indian ancestors. It was in Las Cruces that she felt her ancestral belonging and the place that has tended her spirit ever since.

Corina has performed her original music as a solo, duet and full band throughout New Mexico. She has written and performed her music for radio, television, traveling performance storytelling/song troupes, photo and art exhibit openings, music, art and literary festivals and at special receptions for authors, speakers, social and political activists and other artists and performers. She has two CDs: Visions Through the Rainclouds, a solo compilation of original songs, and La Concha de la Tortuga: A Creation Myth, a music and spoken-word CD, a collaborative effort with other local artists/musicians from the El Paso/ Las Cruces area.

Corina’s most recent visual artwork, Espíritu Inmortal, celebrates the “immortal spirit,” the everlasting life energy within all of us. Although our bodies die, our essence goes on. Espíritu Inmortal (Immortal Spirit) depicts Death as belonging to the Earth, the Sun as representing the “life force” that does not die but only transforms, and the Guardian Angel who was with us at birth and now guides our spirit/soul on its evolutionary journey. It was inspired by the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration and the ancient Zapotec-Mixtec codices.

Last year, her painting, Ancient Wisdom, was included as the CD cover of La Concha de la Tortuga: A Creation Myth. Ancient Wisdomsymbolizes the journey we take from the waters to the land and into the heavens. It serves as a reminder of the beauty and sacredness of motherhood as well as the birth and nurturing of all things, whether they are physical or in the spirit/mind realm – whatever we give birth to, we must hold it with compassion, respect it’s being, and allow it to grow in it’s own way and follow it’s own path as Mother Turtle does. This wisdom has been on this Earth since the beginning of time.

Corina has recently retired from the Las Cruces Public Schools, where she was instrumental in the integration of the arts into the early childhood and parenting educational programs and the lives of educators, babies, and families. She was this year’s recipient of the Doña Ana Arts Council’s Arts in Education Award.

Corina’s vision is for her artwork to inspire and envelope the wave for a better world and a new humanity – to build peace, respect the diversity of our planet, and honor each individual’s own journey and soul development as we head toward the 2012 shift in global consciousness.