Life Is Tough...But So Are You

Itzel Alejandra
52 pages
21 x 15 cm
Offset-printed w/golden ink
Language: English
First edition 2024

Life is tough…but so are you, Itzel Alejandra's first book, it’s an emotional and intimate journey inside El Paso - Texas. A publication that unravels fragmented memories and the history of the desert through the author’s lens.

The work of seven years traveling to El Paso to document her family, friends, surroundings and its inhabitants, Itzel peels layers of her own life interspersed with the realities of the borderlands. As Colombian journalist Christina Noriega writes in the essay included in the book, “Itzel conjures up this vision of El Paso – one of Mexican-American pride and resilience – through dozens of snapshots of the landscapes, iconography, and the people that remind her of the place she calls home”.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Itzel Alejandra is a multimedia artist from El Paso, TX currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. In her work she explores the ambivalence of the US-Mexico borderlands utilizing photography, video, and ceramics to document and recontextualize the history of Northern Mexico, Texas & the southwest. She is a founding member of Colectiva Cósmica and has recently exhibited at Greenwich Pottery House and Pace Gallery.