Crying on the Blue Line Trolley features Andrés Hernández’s first departure from illustration. It consists of analogue photography that takes from and recontextualizes the visual makeup of San Diego and Tijuana into a series of hybrid landscapes.
They portray structures of limitation juxtaposed to structures of liberation, furthering the notion of architectural possibility as a response to architectural violence, and inviting us to consider how places existing in separate environments could somehow be unified.
Seamlessly reframing the border wall and its adjacent fields and estuary alongside the interweaving California highway bridges, Hernández’s first U.S solo exhibition is a daring personal declaration of her commitment to vulnerability and a poetic “fuck you” to the funding and militarization of the Mexcian border.
If Crying on the Blue Line Trolley is a purely audiovisual exercise in the process of encapsulating the melancholic tenderness that lies within the zeitgeist of the border region, My Mother on the Other Side of the Pool, Calling Me Back to Her Wet Arms is her sister, a literary expansion that becomes an explicitly personal autobiography.
This nine-poem collection thrives on its honesty. Hernández narrative is not concerned with the grandiose or the particularly memorable, but rather with the unnoticed and the small. It has no other purpose than to be a diaristic retelling of the poet’s tumultuous relationship with Catholicism, emotional manipulation, sexual assault and a desire to trangress her oppressive surroundings.
