From Ochazuke to Adobo: Care, Memory, and the Immigrant Kitchen with Julia LaChica

From Ochazuke to Adobo: Care, Memory, and the Immigrant Kitchen is a multidisciplinary installation that grows out of artist Julia LaChica’s ongoing work on caregiving, family history, and diasporic identity. Building on themes first explored in A Promise Unspoken, a memorial project for her mother, this installation extends that inquiry into food, migration, and the ways culture is continually made within everyday domestic spaces.

LaChica understands ochazuke and adobo as living archives—recipes as pedagogy, kitchens as classrooms, and caregiving as cultural transmission. Growing up Japanese/Filipino in San Francisco, she learned culture not through formal institutions but through daily acts of cooking, storytelling, and adaptation. This project situates those intimate memories within broader immigrant and diasporic histories.

Through visual art, text, and ritual gestures, she examines how families preserve, hybridize, and reinvent traditions across generations. LaChica is particularly interested in how memory is carried forward within queer, mixed-race, and diasporic communities. In this work, cooking and caregiving become forms of cultural production and resistance—acts through which we sustain one another and make belonging possible. 

The exhibition will be on view from June 24-August 15 during OACC open hours (12 noon-5 pm) or by appointment. The June 26 artist reception with Julia LaChica is free to attend with registration at the link below. Light refreshments will be served.