Projects
About
Contact
Osmín Rodrigo Hernández, M.A.
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 and notion that has been long contested over its meaning. 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- Present). 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 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 roughly $17 USD a day. In the mountainous country the size of New Jersey, with one of the highest population densities in the Western Hemisphere, 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 back into a post-conflict society.