As a little girl, I was always afraid to cross bridges over turbulent waters. This irrational fear complicated things for my parents since I grew up in Valladolid, a small city in northeastern Spain with a river passing through it. Every time we crossed the Pisuerga River with its abundant current, I asked them to grip my hand and not let go. I had recurring nightmares in which the river overflowed and I was swept away; my parents were unable to rescue me.
The years went by and I learned to manage this terror until last October 30, 2024, when I saw the images of the unexpected flash flood that swept through several municipalities of Valencia. My memory could not stop the images of my childhood terror and the reason for which I grew up in Europe and not in my country of origin, Colombia.
I saw photos of Valencia’s destroyed streets, immersed in water and mud, cars carried away by the current, 227 dead, families looking on helplessly as they gathered up the little that remained of their possessions. “Why didn’t they warn us sooner?” was a constant refrain. I thought my wounds were a thing of the past, but with the relentless floods in Spain, my emotional memory brought me back to the disaster—the mud and water— that marked my life before I could truly remember it: the tragedy of Armero, Colombia.
It has been 40 years since my town was completely destroyed by the eruption of a volcano, taking the lives of more than 23,000 people. I am one of the survivors, but I also belong to the silenced past of thousands of forced migrations and the open wounds of a diaspora of people adopted throughout the world.
I was given in adoption and taken to Spain, where I grew up with a family that always told me the little they knew about my history of adoption, but always with many unanswered questions about my roots.
For many years, these questions lay dormant inside of me, like the lava accumulating under a volcano that appears to be sleeping. But the fire inside sooner or later seeks a way to get out.
My reply has been the creation of Hija del Volcán (the Volcano’s Daughter), a documentatry that tells the story of my search for my origins as an adopted child in the context of one of the worst natural disasters in Latin America. The film began not only as an exercise of personal memory, but as a way of putting into context that which had never been named.
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