Ana Mendieta repeatedly used her own body not only to interrogate her role as a female artist but also to reaffirm her cultural roots and connect to the land of her native Cuba. Her counterrevolutionary parents had sent her to the United States as a political refugee when she was a child. This series of photoetchings documents sculptures that Mendieta made during several trips back to Cuba as an adult. The artist carved the Esculturas Rupestres into the soft limestone walls of caves outside Havana and named some of them after goddesses venerated by the indigenous Taíno tribes. Yet rather than directly mimicking the representational practices of native religion, Mendieta drew from them creatively in her ephemeral carvings. The designs and titles evoke primordial female forces while also referring to the artist’s own body, showing her attempt to physically and symbolically reconnect with her native soil.