""For three months, I cried and cried," De La Llana said in Spanish, her voice breaking. "I'd have to leave my home. Everything I had built over there.""
"The piece is inspired, she said, by her land, and "the way it feels to long for it.""
""Being here with them," she motioned to Ocampo and Carvajal, "I've felt very supported. I feel like they're part of my family.""
Adilia De La Llana first arrived in the United States in 1987 but retained deep ties to Nicaragua. Her husband died in 2020 while she was living in Nicaragua, and her son in the U.S. urged her to join him, prompting months of grief at leaving home and everything she had built. De La Llana embroidered an image of her seven-year-old self and her father in the fields, inspired by land and longing. Her work will be exhibited in Threading Resistance, an embroidery workshop and exhibition at The Women's Building on Oct. 24 with food, wine, and live music. Over eight sessions eleven participants learned to create arpilleras, a Chilean folk-art form historically used to document abuses under Pinochet; Valentina Ocampo created the project as a Migration Studies thesis and co-facilitated it with Cinthia Carvajal. De La Llana found comfort, support, and a sense of family in the group.
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