Celebrating home, one frame at a time

Hector Emanuel photographs social and environmental issues in Latin America and the States

Dancers perform in Llachon during a fiesta celebrating the patron saint, Saint Anthony of Padua, and the community’s anniversary in June 2013 (all pics: Hector Emanuel/Washington Post)

When I was 13, in 1981, I immigrated to the United States with my parents and sister from Peru. Since that time the DC area has been my home. In many ways, I’ve lived a hybrid life based on values, traditions and experiences of two countries, which is nothing unusual for immigrants. But as I’ve gotten older, and the reality that I have lived in Washington for about three-fourths of my life has set in, I have become more nostalgic for Peru – family, food, friends, traditions.

Three years ago I embarked on a long-term project exploring my roots; in particular, I wanted to document daily life, festivals and traditions in Lake Titicaca, Puno, where my Italian great-great-grandfather immigrated to in the late 1800s, from Italy.

Like me, he was an immigrant and a photographer. and He was also a writer, and musician, and completely immersed in the life and culture of his adopted home, never returning to his native land.

By the time I was born, my family had long left Lake Titicaca, but that’s where many of the great stories I heard as a child came from.

And as the folklore capital of Peru, it is also central to Peruvian identity. Whereas Puno was a new land that meant a new identity for my great-great-grandfather, for me it is a land of inherited memories and part of my identity. Like my great-great-grandfather, I, too, have made my life in a new country. In most ways Puno, in the Andean high plains with an altitude over 12,000 feet, could not be more different from Washington, yet both places represent home for me.

Hector Emanuel photographs social and environmental issues in Latin America and the States