Conversation Series Sofa Issues Winter 2026
Loremakers
Sarah Luu with Adela Cardona Puerta
“I am the official hummus maker of my family. One Christmas, I had made the hummus because my mom needed help, and I followed the recipe exactly as I had seen her do it. When my grandma tasted it, she asked who made it because it tasted like her mom’s hummus, and I was like: I can die now. I don’t need to achieve anything else.”
Adela and I first met through a screen. I was slouched in a rigid plastic chair, shivering cold. The sun was already setting well before the evening, and the skies were cloudy grey. Adela, on the other hand, was calling from the backyard of her grandmother Lucy’s house, where the sun seemed to always shine bright against the ever clear blue skies, where the plants always stayed lush and green. She freely roamed around on the grass, sharing about her work with grapevines, inherited clothing and ancestral dying techniques. I was eager to meet her.
Over a year later, Adela and I are friends more than just two classmates. Both of us work with our ancestral lineages, using our personal archives and ephemeral knowledge to inform our research. I’ve been wanting to learn more about diasporic communities outside my own to gain a deeper understanding as to how displacement can impact how families keep records of their ancestral histories. During this conversation, I learned about a word Adela goes that her sister bestowed upon her: Loremaker.
Loremakers are the curious ones. The ones always asking questions. The ones that see the importance of a generational narrative, especially for the displaced. The ones that know how easy and quick it is to fade away. The ones that will do anything to ensure that doesn’t happen. It was through this conversation with Adela that I realized there could be more similarities than differences, and much of that is uncovered through persistent curiosity. And as it turns out, sometimes, labels do matter. And they can help us get the work started.
Sarah Luu: What was it like to learn about your family history when you were younger?
Adela Cardona Fajury: The part of my family that I’ve always learned more about has been my father’s side. And that’s interesting because my grandma Tita on my mother’s side is not someone you can prompt to talk. She doesn’t talk as easily about her past, but also because I’ve always had more affinity with my other grandma, Gaby. I truly feel like there’s something there that’s beyond this life.
…do you know anything about family constellations?
Sarah: Family constellations? What is that?
Adela: It’s a technique. I haven’t done it myself, but it uses a theater-like reenactment method to put yourself in the position of your family and understand their perspectives within yourself psychologically and spiritually. So I use my paternal last name, Fajury, on my Instagram. There was a moment when I realized that by including Fajury, I’m putting myself in the position of my great-grandmother. Family constellations help with putting yourself on the right spot of the family tree.
When I went back home, my grandma’s dementia had advanced a lot. She has three sons. They’re useless in terms of her care, as the men of our generations and our cultures are allowed to be. So, I was the one that was like, “What the fuck is going on here? Why aren’t you taking care of her?” I put that on my back and that was technically not my thing to carry, but nobody else was doing it until I convinced my dad. He’s the one that people are afraid of. I told him he had to use his capacity to be an asshole for good.
Sarah: I understand that frustration, especially when your grandmother has been a main source for you to learn your heritage and ancestry. Do you feel a sense of urgency in continuing to learn as much as you can through her stories in her current state of health?
Adela: Yes. I don’t think it ever felt urgent until now, though it’s always felt inevitable.
Sarah: What’s the earliest exchange you’ve ever had with your grandmother?
Adela: I was born in Bogotá and none of my grandmothers lived there. I always enjoyed when my grandma Gaby would come over for Christmas and bring these sealed glass jars filled with these pastries called rollitos. They were supposed to be fig rolls, but because figs weren’t easy to get in Colombia, she replaced the filling with guava. I remember her bringing those again one year and I just decided to talk to her about it.
Sarah: How did these exchanges evolve as you grew older? Especially since she didn’t live in Bogota?
Adela: Well, we eventually moved to the outskirts of Pereira. Grandma Gaby lived in that city. I would go to school, do my homework at my grandma’s house, and then I would go to dance class, which would happen twice a week. I’d always been fast to do my homework. I’d finish and go straight to my grandma and be like, “Okay, what story do you have to tell me today?” We would then just talk for hours until I had to go to my dance class.
I feel like there’s always that someone in a family. There’s always one that’s the chismosa of the family, the one that tries to dig. It’s a role that my sister calls…the Loremaker. That’s a term that I recently feel like I’m identifying myself with now because it holds a genetic connotation.
By having a label, there is a definitive role to fill and a responsibility to hold. We see that no one is questioning the history of our family in the ways that, say, you and me are. We’re ones that are trying to piece together a story that can be passed on.
Sarah: I always envied families that have generational scrapbooks and collections of inherited objects…photos and momentos stretched back multiple generations. Often with immigrant families, we are lucky to have tidbits of just the last. Is there anyone else that you rely on to find out about your family history?
Adela: Two of her sisters are still alive, so I rely on them. One of them is my grandma Lucy. I say grandma because she would kill me if I say great aunt. She’s a force! She still takes care of her garden. She still paints. She’s funny as fuck, like she’s one of the wildest. And she was once the best seamstress of her community.
Sarah: Do you think that ties to the themes of your practice anyway? How did she become a seamstress?
Adela: Yes, especially because I use textiles in my practice.
She became a seamstress because she didn’t do well in school due to a neurodivergency that was never diagnosed. And so my great-grandfather was like, I’m not gonna pay for your schooling anymore. You’re going to go work at your uncle’s farm.
Within the town the farm was in, there was a seamstress who took her in and passed down her skills. Because of this history and the fact that she’s still lucid at 100 years old, I rely on grandma Lucy a lot. That’s why I was learning remotely last year. I was at her farm as part of a pilgrimage I was doing with the women of my family that are still alive.
Sarah: Could you tell me a bit more about this pilgrimage?
Adela: It’s how I do my research. Because they’re too old to travel, I travel to all the women in my family that are still alive. So there’s Lucy, who lives in a town four hours away from my home by car. There’s also Manira Chujfi. She isn’t directly related to me but we are connected through the SWANA community in Colombia.
Manira is the same kind of extraterrestrial person that we are. Nobody else was doing or even interested in doing what she was. She wrote a book specifically about “Arabic” immigration in the Coffee Region where my ancestors settled.
Sarah: Did this pilgrimage ever lead you anywhere?
Adela: Well it got me to her book. And in this book, it includes many pictures of the very first of the SWANA families to immigrate to my family’s region. One of the pictures has a family that bears the Fajury name, Mama Adela’s last name and another of the Issa or Iza name, which was Papá Camilo’s last name.
Sarah: That’s incredible. Since Manira isn’t related to you, how did you manage to connect with her?
Adela: I lived extensively in a small town. People know people. I knew of her. I asked my dad if he knew her, and he did. He told me she was an aunt to one of my very distant cousins. Through that tidbit of information, I was able to get her number. She was very sweet upon meeting for the first time, immediately welcoming me into her house and telling me her story over pistachio croissants and Lebanese coffee.
Sarah: And you wouldn’t even meet her if you didn’t even ask.
Adela: Exactly. It was really cool.
Sarah: That’s something that’s so interesting to me. Even though you belong to a different diasporic community, it seems our experiences are often parallel. We both rely heavily on oral histories, heirlooms and photographs to build an understanding of our family narratives. As an experienced loremaker of your family, how do you think others in the diaspora should self-inquire about their own family histories?
Adela: I like to think about the personal and the identities we hold as an invention. And it’s not an ecstatic entity, it’s a narrative entity that keeps creating. In order to create your own narrative entity (and this is also a therapeutic work), you have to go straight to the root because that’s where the source is to inform you on how to build your own story. You’ll be able to pull from the gifts of your ancestors and try to heal their wounds.
For example, my grandmother’s ability to speak four languages could be a genetic link to why I have a gift for languages. And my great grandfather on the Colombian side was an amazing journalist, which was what I ended up doing myself.
Sarah: Do you think it’s important that we engage in critical self-inquiry?
Adela: Yes. Especially when we think about it on a systemic level. Both of us are a part of marginalized communities. It’s important for us and people like us to write ourselves in history because we’ve never been a part of history with a capital “H”. And that, of course, is deliberate. It’s cultural erasure. So we combat it by learning about it locally and intimately.
It starts small, but the more you inquire, the bigger the web is weaved. When you begin to collect small truths from different people, you eventually can piece it together as one.
Sarah: What things do you do to connect with your ancestry?
Adela: Cooking.
Sarah: Cooking! What sort of ingredients shaped your home?
Adela: Parsley, for one. My memories smell like parsley. And this not even me being poetic, this is me being literal. Olives…I could eat a whole jar in one sitting! Also pistachios, garbanzo beans, tahini paste, and almonds.
Sarah: How do these ingredients show up in your cooking?
Adela: Well, like you, no recipes are written down. That’s now how things work. I learned how to cook from my mom, who was taught how to cook from a Lebanese family friend. Because I’m the Loremaker, I try to cook exactly as they did with the exact same ingredients.
Like I am the official hummus maker of my family. One Christmas, I had made the hummus because my mom needed help, and I followed the recipe exactly as I had seen her do it. When my grandma tasted it, she asked who made it because it tasted like her mom’s hummus, and I was like: I can die now. I don’t need to achieve anything else.
Sarah: How has your family supported you in embodying the role of the loremaker?
Adela: In regards to recipes, it was interesting to see my sister’s thesis for industrial design. She did this mock enterprise for different flavors of hummus after doing this whole research on food, pulling from interviews she did with other Lebanese families in our colony back home. As she conducted those interviews, I came with her and wrote down those recipes because no one else had done so before she began her work.
In terms of the rest of my family, I think they just got used to me asking outrageous questions early on. According to my mom, I’ve been asking weird questions since I was a kid. She encouraged it though, always following with, “I don’t know, let’s find out.” My family just humoured me. And my grandma is such a storyteller at her core, she enjoyed sharing stories with me as much as I enjoyed listening to her. But, when it came to me wanting to do a documentary about my family, I ran into a lot of resistance.
Sarah: For what reason?
Adela: It didn’t come from a place of malice, but there was a lot of worrying about whether I was able to represent her in a way that doesn’t make her look like a fool because of how much her mind has changed since her dementia developed.
Sarah: I understand. Is there an approach you’ve been able to execute to combat those worries?
Adela: I realized that the thread of my grandma’s memory and history is rooted in fashion. Clothes are the only thing she could really remember. She perfectly remembers every single thing I wear that is hers. I would call her on video and if I was wearing a top of hers, she would be like, “Oh bring that back. That’s mine!”, in her beautiful roasting humor. So I used what she remembered instead of what she did not to represent her.
With these sorts of family histories, I think it’s always going to be something complicated. We’re always gonna run against our own traumas and our family’s traumas, and that might look like having to have conflict with the people you love.
Sarah: How do you navigate that?
Adela: We have this saying in Spanish: It’s easier to gather bees with honey than shit. I tried it with honey, which in my case meant literally being formal with my uncle like “Hey, I think that you have a lot of history and closeness with my grandma. I really want you to be a part of this process and I want your blessing.”
Sarah: Do you think in this case, you have to go against the wishes of your family just to ensure your history is remembered or given the recognition it deserves?
Adela: It’s something I know I will have to do with my mom’s side. I haven’t spoken about this a lot with people because I’m just barely processing it myself. My mother’s father is black. And there’s a lot of anti-blackness that runs on that side that no one ever talks about that makes it hard to unravel.
Sarah: That just makes your work even more significant, if anything. To dig at that. It’s just like you said about working with your grandmother, there’s something bigger than you that’s pulling you toward working with your family. It almost feels spiritual.
Adela: Yes! And interconnected in many ways that are still waiting to be unraveled.
Sarah: With all of these obstacles, obviously you’re going to have to brainstorm. Is there anything specific you have easy access to that you can rely on to inform your research?
Adela: Not a thing, but a person. My sister, who did her thesis on hummus, was never as interested in our family history as I was at first. But since she became a US citizen and processed this new part of her identity, we’ve been able to collaborate.
Sarah: Are there any sort of past projects or ideas that in the past you couldn’t pursue together but feel ready to now?
Adela: I’d like to do a collaboration about Spanish, especially common sayings and slang. For example, Sana que sana, colita de rana. That’s a spell your mom would say to you. In English, it translates to “Heal, heal the bottom of the toad”. It’s what you say when you’re sick or get a scrape. It makes no sense really when it’s translated but in my culture and native tongue it does.
And I’ve also been asking myself specifically about translation, too. Because I feel I always have to do it, whether for spoken language or neurotypicals. So, it’s like, why am I constantly trying to translate myself? It’s exhausting.
Sarah: Do you think it’s because it’s a way for us to justify our work in some ways? When many people are able to understand it, we feel like the work is worth doing.
Adela: Yes. And I also feel like for me it has to do with a life misunderstanding. And an ongoing feeling of being constantly misunderstood. Picking this up with my sister, it’s a way to say fuck it. We’re not gonna translate ourselves anymore. Figure it out. I’m done.
Sarah: There is this expectation of us needing to translate everything, not just with language as your experiences are. I think the biggest argument is making it accessible, but in some cases it enforces a power dynamic.
Adela: There are two wolves inside me. One is about accessibility and the other is about wanting to not have to translate my culture. Language is the space where you can do both.
ADELA (she/her) is a professional in noticing the beautiful small things in life / Una Profesional en ver las maricaditas lindas de la vida. Depending on the day, she poses as an Artist, Journalist, Poet, Storyteller, Archivist, Gatherer, Sustainability, and Social Impact Director. But truly, she’s a druid, a plant dressed in the body of a human. As a Colombian-Lebanese, Autistic x ADHDer, Queer human, she is constantly inhabiting the borderlines and bringing her roots everywhere, to help other people flow with the rivers of their own stories. Her work touches on the themes of family, legacy, mental health, fashion, community storytelling, identity, creativity, and sustainability.
Some of her gifts include an insane ear for music, as well as weaving words and people together. She’s now in the process of getting her MFA in Art + Social Practice at PSU, in Portland, Oregon.
SARAH LUU (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She gravitates towards photography, ceramics, zines, and printmaking in her studio practice. As a first generation Asian American, her work has touched on themes of her mixed Vietnamese-Chinese identity, intergenerational cycles, culture and tradition. She explores outside those topics by pulling inspiration from her lived experience growing up in San Jose, California surrounded by a vibrant arts and music culture. Her current research revolves around the experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora, focusing on memory in domestic spaces, exploring how the microhistories that live within immigrant family archives and cooking rituals may be the building blocks to create generational ancestral narratives. Her work aims to bridge the gaps between elder Vietnamese immigrant generations and their American-born descendants.
She received a BA in Studio Art, Preparation for Teaching from San Jose State University in 2024 and is currently studying for an MFA in the Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University.