Letras de Esperanza (Letters of Hope)
00:10:16 loop video with audio2025-2026
Script: letters on hope and belonging written by the Story Telling For Tomorrow Project
Audio Engineer: Carl Dixon
Music: Kristina Stamatis
Visual Production: Andrea Garcia Vasquez
“Letras de Esperanza” is a video animation that layers generations of stories around migration, belonging, home, and hope. The impulse to make this video work came about during Nuestras Historias, a project I was working on at the Museo de las Americas, Denver with Kristina Stamatis between 2024-2026. Kristina invited the work from The Story Telling For Tomorrow Project directed by Antero Garcia, Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, into the Nuestras Historias context because it resonated with the themes of culture, identity, and the current political state of the country. We wanted to invite inter-generational voices to the narrative that our exhibition was telling. The Stoy Telling For Tomorrow Project wrote a series of letters to home. The prompt was broad enough that it allowed for people to either describe home, describe why they left home, explain to their children and loved ones what home means, and it gave the members of that community a moment to reflect on where they were in 2025.
My role in this video project was to create the visual element. I did not know what to expect from these letters, so when all 10-15 of them finally arrived in my inbox, I listened repeatedly. The letters are all anonymous and I don’t have any information on who these people are or where they are from, but I could hear their voice (or perhaps someone else’s voice) reading the letter to home. I heard children, I heard grandmothers, I heard pain, happiness, love, and longing. I thought about my own family and their migration to the United States. I thought about my own migration to Germany. To migrate to another country is a process of grieving that only migrants can understand. You loose a part of the place you call home, and with that, you loose a part of yourself. You keep those memories close to you, and a cycle of remembering and longing repeats itself over the years taking different shapes and weights as time keeps moving forward.
The cycle of grief, the intergenerational experiences of moving, leaving behind, and belonging, the power of love and family are all elements I wanted to capture in this video. Using Blender, a 3D modeling and animation software, I built a generalized suburban landscape with lawns, parks, trees, and a highway that loops in a never ending route above and through the neighborhood. Old home video footage from my own family throughout the early 90’s is also being used in this video.
Viewers watch the POV of navigating this suburban landscape against voices describing the ocean they used to live by, the desert they now call home, the ceremonies they used to partake in, parents explaining their identity to their children, and children thanking their parents for a better life. The POV bounces, floats, walks, and flies around in a choreography with the audio and music designed by Carl Nixon and Kristina Stamatis.
“Letras de Esperanza” is not translated and doesn’t have subtitles, you either get it or you don’t. To listen to each letter as it was originally written and spoken, visit: https://www.thethroughlinesproject.com/nuestras-historias-exhibit#/testimonios-de-esperanza/
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