TIERRA DEL SOL by Carlos Jaramillo, Pomegranate Press

8 × 10 in
92 pages
Digital offset printing
Softcover open spine Swiss binding
Embossed back cover text and matte laminated cover
Pomegranate Press, 2022
Expanded edition, 500

For the children of immigrants, the countries that their parents left behind sometimes exist more as myths than actual places—things that we hear about but don’t experience can take on a fantastic dimension. Later, in adulthood, those myths often materialize into poignant yearnings, becoming stones carried in our shoes, or half-formed relationships demanding to be made whole. The photographer Carlos Jaramillo, a first-generation American born to a Mexican mother and a Colombian father, has in recent years sought to fill in the spaces of his identity that his parents intentionally left blank. ‘To them, leaving their countries is a big victory, and because of that idea, they held us back from understanding our roots,’ he said. Jaramillo was twenty-four years old when he visited Mexico for the first time. The commitment to American assimilation that he had in his early youth faded, and he began to explore a sort of third place: the flux that exists between two cultures...

Far from ameliorating his feelings of otherness, approaching Mexican culture has often left Jaramillo with an even more palpable sense of distance. His recent photo series, Tierra del Sol, came about after he attended, for the first time, a five-day charrería event in Pico Rivera, outside of Los Angeles, where he moved two years ago, at the age of thirty-one. Charrería, akin to rodeo, is as much an aesthetic performance as it is a display of athletic prowess: in the traditional Mexican sport, men and women, dressed in elaborate costumes reminiscent of Mexico’s post-Revolution era, mount horses and flaunt their equestrian skills.

—Ana Karina Zatarain, The New Yorker Photo Booth