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Hernández is a first-generation Salvadoran American photograher from Los Angeles, California. Trained initially as a historian, he earned his Bachelor of Arts in History, Cum Laude at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While at Nebraska, Hernández wrote his Honors thesis on La Matanza of 1932, one of El Salvador and Latin America’s most violent episodes during the 20th Century. His analysis was premised through the lens of race, ethnicity and social class exploring anti-Indian and anti-communist sentiments along with deconstructing the concept of ‘mestizaje’ as an instrument in the nation-building process. Subsequently, Hernández moved on to earn his Master of Arts in History at Texas Christian University (TCU). He earned a Graduate Fellowship at TCU to continue studying La Matanza, Hernández also won the Boller-Worcester Research grant to travel to El Salvador in 2013. While at TCU, he participated in an assortment of oral history projects throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. His specialty includes El Salvador along with U.S. Latino/Borderlands history. He is self-taught photographer, picking up his first actual camera while in journalism class at Marina Del Rey Junior High in Los Angeles. His creative process involves examining historical records through archival work and secondary sources in efforts to gain a better understanding of his surroundings. Further, utilizing a Postcolonial paradigm, he seeks to provide the narratives from the subaltern perspective.
Gear Used
Fujifilm X-T30 I
Fujifilm X-T5
iPhone 13 Pro Max
iPhone 16 Pro Max
Blood and Fire: Visual Explorations of Post-Conflict El Salvador Environment and Society. Hernández, Osmín Rodrigo. M.A. (2023-Present)
In Blood and Fire, Hernández explores how a Post-Conflict Salvadoran society—following more than four decades of tumultuous and extreme violence—adjusts to a new regime change that ushered relative social and political ‘stability.’ From a diasporic perspective, Hernández seeks to exhume what it means to be Salvadorian, a culture that has been limited to geospatial and imagined borders. Hernández documents the quotidian life of Salvadorans living under Martial law (Régimen de excepción), that the Nayib Bukele regime implemented shortly following a considerable spike in homicides amid the COVID-19 Pandemic (March 2022). The ley de excepción suspended fundamental constitutional rights for Salvadorans, along with unfastening the doors for arbitrary state apprehensions and clandestine state-sanctioned violence. The ley contributed to building a maximum-security prison that houses up to 80,000 inmates (or close to 1 percent of the country’s population). Although initially used as a temporary measure to combating gang violence and restoring state hegemony throughout the country, martial law remains enacted to the present day.
Despite decades of state-sanctioned violence and repression against the civilian population, the country has not reconciled with its melancholic and volatile past. Hernández attempts to contextualize the historical memory and strives to reconstruct utilizing multifaceted visual landscapes to the viewer through rural and urban backdrops. Despite a growing international interest for tourism after decades of conflict, Hernández explores the challenges in how the unregulated tourism industry is quickly leaving behind the marginalized communities along la Costa del Bálsamo(Balsam Coast) region and throughout the country. Further contributing to the challenges, a newly establishing and expanding cryptocurrency elite class, composed primarily of U.S., Canadian, and other Global North settlers, have established in these coastal communities of the small Central American republic. These added intangible stressors interpose to the ever-growing wealth disparity, where the minimum wage is $17 USD a day. In the mountainous country the size of New Jersey, with one of the highest population densities in the region, these stressors contribute to a growing demand and competition for natural resources and spaces. The rapidly encroaching displacement and growing extreme poverty continue to permeate Salvadoran society along with arrivals of deportees from the United States who seek to reestablish themselves in society.