There's a detail in Juana Estrada Hernández's account of returning to Zacatecas after twenty-two years that stops you cold. The morning she left, her father pulled her aside and told her: the day you arrive in Mexico is the same day we arrived in America. Same date, same crossing, in opposite directions, and she would be making it on a thirty-three hour bus ride with her aunt, who spent most of it telling her who she was about to meet and what they would do together, the whole journey functioning as a kind of extended threshold before the homecoming itself.
Estrada Hernández was born in a cluster of small towns between Buena Vista, Los Griegos, and Luis Moya in Zacatecas, Mexico, and immigrated to Denver with her family at seven years old. She's now an award-winning printmaker and assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, a trajectory built through community college, Fort Hays State University in western Kansas, and an MFA in printmaking at the University of New Mexico. The path required people who showed up at the right moment: a high school art teacher who paid for supplies out of pocket and later turned out to hold her own MFA from RISD, a college advisor who drove from Kansas to Denver to talk her parents into letting her go, sitting with them after dinner until they said yes.
She found printmaking almost by accident, two weeks into her first semester after switching from physics, having Googled it the night before and assumed she'd be designing clothes. What she found instead was a process that could hold everything she cared about, drawing, narrative, labor, repetition, the stubborn insistence on getting it right.
Los Caminos de la Vida, Desde Aqui Para Allá, her second solo show at Hecho a Mano, is the work that was always coming, even before she knew it. The title borrows from a song written by Omar Jiménez in 1993 and translates roughly as "the ways of life, from here to there." The show is a collection of lithographs and ceramic pieces made in the aftermath of that return trip: family members who had existed only as voices on a phone, suddenly fully present; agricultural land her family has tended for generations; her mother playing tamborazo; a niece drawing in the dirt; the red pickup truck she grew up landscaping in, somehow there too. The work is dense with personal iconography without ever closing itself off to outside entry.
Running underneath everything is the condition that made the long absence possible in the first place. As a DACA recipient, what she calls being "DACA-mented," the ability to move freely across borders is not a given, and the current political climate lends that fact a weight that presses against every image in the show.
"Neither from here, nor from there," goes the phrase dreamers share, but Estrada Hernández makes work that refuses that verdict, insisting that belonging can be carried across any distance, tended across generations, and passed on in spite of borders.