Oct 17, 2025 [Book] Artist Talk: Sandra Trujillo

“I think about food the way I think about art and literature. I think of them all as these really simple, effective links.
They all kind of create their own systems of communication.”

– Sandra Trujillo

Wednesday, October 15, marked the final day of Hispanic Heritage Month. The celebration, which begins annually on September 15, offers an opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate the vast and lasting contributions of various Latin cultures.

This year, in recognition of the occasion, the Rare Books Department spoke with Sandra Trujillo, a Hispanic artist based in Georgia, about her separate, though related, artists’ books: Funeral Food and Trouble.

Funeral Food
Sandra Trujillo
 Guadalajara, Mexico: Impronta Casa Editora, 2019
N7433.4 T748 F86 2019

The individual works are rich celebrations of community, family, and Hispanic culture. Drawing inspiration from the food, art, and characters of her childhood, she creates an intimate and multidimensional narrative about growing up in a Chicano household during the 1970s, made complete with moments of poverty, joy, mischief and, most importantly, food.

Trujillo’s talent lies not only in the writing itself but in her ability to tie her words to the visual and material aspects of her books. The results are two tangible expressions of Hispanic identity that are nothing short of delicious.

Trouble
Sandra Trujillo
 Guadalajara, Mexico: Impronta Casa Editora, 2021
N7433.4 T748 T76 2021

In the conversation that follows, Trujillo shares why these stories matter now more than ever.
Please note that the interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.
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Q: Tell me a little bit about yourself. What do you do?

A: I teach at Georgia College State University. We have about 1700 students and it’s a public liberal arts college. I love it here and I teach art. The University supports everything I do.

Q: Where are you from?

A: I actually grew up in Vallejo, California. It was named after a general or something who did not have a good history. It was a naval town so there was always an influx of people and different cultures. There were a lot of cultural exchanges. I grew up there and went to college at Berkeley and lived in San Francisco until I started traveling, like an artist hobo does.

My family is Hispanic and all of our family friends are Chicanos and all of our families are intertwined. I’m one of eleven children, my mom and dad had a lot of kids. Half of my family was born in Colorado and then we ended up moving to California for work, as many families did in the 60s because of all of the farming and construction and things like that. My older brothers and sisters spoke Spanish in Colorado but then when we moved to California everybody started speaking English. It’s so funny how that happens. I think you adapt to your place. But yeah, in our culture the families were always together. Some of us were related, distant cousins, things like that. And so, that’s kind of where I come from.

Q: I’m not Hispanic but my family immigrated from Italy and the cultures sound very similar, with food at the center of both!

A: I’m so glad you brought that up because there are so many things that are connected, like food or literature. No matter what, those things are always going to describe or reflect who we are. And sometimes, you have to hide the things that are a part of your identity, and sometimes you want to reveal them. What I love about food and family and culture is that narrative that goes with them. You get to describe your identity in many, many ways and I love that.

Q: From the research I’ve done you’re a woman of many trades! Mosaics, ceramics, writing, and book arts, you do it all. That said, it seems that people and food seem to be at the heart of all that you do. Why are these themes are so closely intertwined for you?

A: I’m glad you could see that. It seems so disparate: ceramics, mosaics, writing, but I think about food the way I think about art and literature. I think of them all as these really simple, effective links. They all kind of create their own systems of communication. I mean, in academics, there are a bazillion new kinds of programs being developed, like food studies and food waste. In many ways, people are still really pushing the narrative of food into academics because for so long that story was only a part of a private, domestic space. Think about what happens in your grandma’s kitchen, for example. That’s a special place. You learn things there. You create memories and experiences there. At the same time, you’re totally being trained in that space. I love that transference of an intimate, domestic space informing your future behavior. I think that food and art and literature, they all have a space. They all have a small niche that’s becoming wider in academics, it just took a couple of people to make it happen.

Q: So, going off of that a bit, what do you feel the role of food is in Hispanic communities in particular?

A: In Chicano families, what happens with food is that you know that it’s not just nutrition. It’s a cultural act. It sounds cliché, but I’m telling you the truth.

Q: I believe you! I feel like that really came across in Funeral Food, through the character of your mom in particular. Obviously, she was grieving your father’s death but that seemed secondary to the care she showed for her family, especially through food. I loved her as a character.

A: Thank you, thank you. I tried really hard to express my anecdotes as truthfully as I could. Even my brothers were like, “How do you remember that?” and that’s just what I do. I remember. And she struggled. Families struggled, all families struggled, from doing the kinds of jobs that nobody else wanted to do. You try to make ends meat with really simple things.

Q: I’d love to know how you came to artists’ books and why you felt like they were the right medium to tell these stories through.

A: I was enamored with the whole process. It was all new, I was trying something new. I had to learn a lot about letterpress printing. Texturally, I love how it became an object. I love the tactile element of that process, of artists’ books.

Q: Can you tell me a bit about your publishing house, Impronta Casa? Why did you decide on them to print your books? What did that process look like?

A: A colleague of mine was in graduate school for a very short time with Clemente Orozco who was the grandson of José Clemente Orozco, one of the great painters. And so, she got invited to his printing press in Mexico. She went for a week, and came back and said, “we should do this together.” And I was like, “okay!” I write all of the time, and I’m constantly drawing and creating collages, I’m very active in that way, and so that’s how it started. So, I wrote a grant and we went to Impronta Casa. We prepared our work in advance for the kind of images we wanted and then we sat in the studio every day and made decisions, worked on different things, and that’s kind of how it happened. It took me about a year to put the stories together, because those projects take a long time. Once it was done, Clemente put my Funeral Food at the book fair in Mexico City and one of the Special Collections directors from UC Berkeley, my alma mater, was there and he bought the book. And that’s kind of how it all started. After, I had a lot more stories to write so I kept writing and writing and writing and then I finished the next book, Trouble, in 2021.

Q: I know from other interviews that you were influenced by traditional Mexican printing practices when designing these books. Can you talk a bit about those influences?

A: I was thinking about those broadsides that were printed by Manuel Manilla and Jose Posada, and those kinds of people. In the 1900s they were all printing these individual sheets that had such a huge reach. And they were so effective in talking about social elements, even though they were working on revolutions, but the idea is still the same today. Another aspect I like about those loose-leaf sheets is that they have an element of mobility. They can be passed around, and shared, like how you would pass a plate of cookies around. This idea that they can migrate, I like that.

Q: I’d love to know more about the material aspects of these books. How did you decide on their form and design?

A: Clemente essentially designed Funeral Food in many, many ways. He’s passed away now. He had this knowledge of all of these printers, including his grandfather, Jose Clemente Orozco. Clemente really liked the attitude and sentiment of Funeral Food so he decided to use the same black string to close the book as the one that they use at a funeral. They tie the same black string around your arm. I didn’t even think about closure, that was Impronta’s decision. Clemente is the one who introduced me to these Mexican printers. He was brilliant. It was a hit to the Mexican print society to lose him.

Q: What about the visual aspects? How were the illustrations printed? What was that process?

A: I made my own kind of art to go along with the stories. I actually created these collages to marry the text. Some of them happen at the same time as the story or before the story or even after. It was really fluid the way that worked. But then, I wanted to know how to reproduce the collages and Clemente said, “We should do something with the risograph, I think it could be interesting against this antique letterpress process.” So I said, “Let’s try it!” My original designs are actually like eighteen colors because they were made from collage, but with risograph you could only use two colors so we had to downsize. But I liked how they were 1950s style mimeographs. For Trouble I used watercolor and then risograph. I thought, I’m just going to use a very limited palette. At this time, Clemente had already passed away so we worked on it without him.

Q: That makes me think about the relationship between the two books. Both are very similar in appearance though they were printed at different times and tackle different topics. In your mind, are the two related?

A: Funeral Food was everything surrounding the death of a parent. Trouble is about everything that comes after. So, I tried to think about the moment after the funeral: being a single parent with all of these kids in the house. That’s where “Trouble” came from. I thought about it in terms of time.

Q: What I love about these books is how everything is so connected, it’s a network. So much comes to the surface: poverty, religion, Chicano culture, community, friendship, family, the list goes on and on. When you started writing these stories did you know that you would be building a network or did it happen organically? Tell me a little bit about that writing process.

A: I guess that’s just my nature, it’s how I work. There’s always something really fluid and earnest and honest and funny about my work. But the world is more complex than that and I think that there’s always this other side that tends to unravel the pretty picture, and I guess that’s why I embed an element of satire and irony into my stories. I think my writing is a mixture of happy, sad, danger, frivolity that all mixes together to make a funny stew.

Q: Who are these books for and what do you hope they get from them?

A: When these books were in print, I thought of all of the schools that had these Chicano studies programs, and I thought “I’d have liked to have something like that, something where I could see myself.” I’m an educator at heart, and I think that if you can start a dialogue and add to the gastro-narrative, you can also influence social change. Its an effective tool. Writing and food, they can both be effective in creating change and we need that. We need that now more than ever. Gastro-narratives are easy to consume, but they are statements, nonetheless, about the positive aspects of our culture and you shouldn’t ignore it, nobody has to.

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Do you want to experience Trujillo’s works of art with your own two hands?
Our reading room is open Monday-Friday from 10 AM to 4 PM.
Click here to make an appointment.

Contributed by Theadora Soter, Rare Books Assistant Curator

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