The United States was My Mom
The doors are closed. There are no more screenings of this film.
Synopsis: Sara Raquel S. was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador. She left El Salvador at 16 in 2016, crossing the Mexican border to reunite with her mother who migrated to the United States when Sara Raquel was three years old. Sara Raquel S. became a permanent resident of the United States in August 2021.
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Olga Jaramillo
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Director's Statement
I grew up listening to stories about my family’s experiences during La Violencia, a very dark period of the Colombian history, and the displacement from our hometown. My mother, aunts and uncles shared these stories repeatedly, as if they were ongoing. These stories of forced migration and trauma and the feeling of loss have been an important part of the inspiration for my projects on migration and motivate me to explore and tell stories about the impact of migration on families years later.
On long-form documentary projects, I work with a multidimensional approach in terms of narrative and aesthetics. I use photography, video, text, and archival imagery to tell stories that cannot be narrated only with one medium, in real time and with one voice.
Director's Bio
Olga Jaramillo is a visual storyteller. She documents culture, identity and memory as a multimedia artist based in the Washington D.C., metro area. Informed by her career as an economist, she advanced into photography and brought her social awareness and experience in international development into her visual work.
Olga specializes in documentary photography and film, portraits and social issues. Her most recent work focuses on the intergenerational impact of migration on the families of migrant mothers from Central America.
Olga has a master’s degree in New Media Photojournalism from the George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a master’s degree in Economics from The London School of Economics and Political Science, a diploma in Economics from Birkbeck University, London, and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Universidad del Valle, Colombia.
