This is Chacha’s first edition of her journal. Limited to ten hand-bound photobooks. Each copy is stitched and bound by hand, printed on recycled paper, with a hand-painted title. The final page is signed and editioned.

Intro:

“The last week before the city shut down, I boarded a plane. New York behind me. My degree half-finished. The subways already ghosting. The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mexico opened like a dream I thought I had lost. My town, emptied of tourists, returned to itself. The cobblestones rinsed clean by rain, parakeets spilling down from the mountains, fish flashing in water that had long forgotten their shape. Every face was a childhood face. Every corner familiar again.

The world felt like it was ending, so I turned backwards too—into old journals, old rolls of film, memories stored in machines that struggled to hold them. The rains pressed in, humidity swelling through the house, mould creeping at the edges of everything. My hard drives flickered. My computer failed. Each rescued file was a pulse of survival, proof that we had lived, that we were not yet erased.

And when the first wave of chaos passed, I went outward—onto the lonesome roads I had always longed for, roads emptied at last.

From Nayarit north through Chihuahua into New Mexico.
From New Mexico to Colorado.
Colorado to California.
California south to Baja.
Across to Mazatlán.
Back to Nayarit.
Nayarit through Texas.
Back again to Colorado.

So many borders. So many nights camping. The blur of headlights on highways where time no longer seemed to move forward.

This book is the home I built for all of it: the salvaged images, the grain of film, the fading colors, the lonesome roads, the laughter of friends naked in rivers. A fragile archive made tangible. A world that was ending and beginning, all at once.

An archive of the past, woven with the photographs taken as the world retreated into silence and my road trips began.”