Adilia De La Llana first arrived in the United States in 1987, but she could never quit her home country completely. When her husband passed away in 2020, De La Llana was living in Nicaragua again. Her son, who lived in the U.S., urged her to join him.

“For three months, I cried and cried,” De La Llana said in Spanish, her voice breaking. “I’d have to leave my home. Everything I had built over there.”

On a recent visit to The Women’s Building, a nonprofit in the Mission, De La Llana, showed off an embroidered image of her seven-year-old self and her father in the fields of Nicaragua. The piece is inspired, she said, by her land, and “the way it feels to long for it.”

De La Llana’s work will be exhibited as part of Threading Resistance , an embroidery workshop and exhibition hosted by

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