White Horses Always Run Home

Marcela Huerta

Gabeba Baderoon

Marcela Huerta’s project proposes an intimate, poetic portrait of the author’s mother, Yolanda Huerta, a refugee of the 1973 Chilean coup. The two will participate in somatic practices to find new ways of narrating the histories that have shaped their relationship. They will revisit the geographies of Yolanda’s refugee story: Maipú, the neighborhood where she lived before being abducted; Mendoza, the city where she spent her solitary time in hiding; and Winnipeg, the place where she painstakingly built a new life.

These trips will inform the subsequent manuscript, portraying not a past trauma but an enduring one that lives in the ways she relates to the world. In unearthing intergenerational trauma and documenting it through a multifaceted process, White Horses Always Run Home aims to create an emotionally cathartic access point for reflecting on how past atrocities shape the struggles of the present, while also creating an empathetic and collaborative poetic experience between a mother and daughter.