While an undergrad at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned her BFA in 2020, Jennifer Teresa Villanueva took a large-format photography class for which she began shooting on film with a Toyo four-by-five camera. An unwieldy contraption, it’s not easy to lug on the L, which Villanueva regularly did to and from the six-bedroom house in Belmont Cragin she shared with her parents and paternal grandmother — all three Mexican immigrants — as well as her younger brother and several other relatives.

Returning from school one day, she noticed that her ever-present grandmother wasn’t there. A tough woman with chronic kidney disease, she’d checked into the hospital. “It completely broke my heart,” says Villanueva. “I thought I was going to lose the most important woman in my life.” Not long after, Villanueva began capturing images of the abuelita who’d helped raise her.

Eventually, she also turned her lens (or lenses — she transitioned to a more-portable Mamiya RB67 film camera and to digital) on her factory-worker parents and her brother, who was then in his last years of high school. Even as Villanueva went to grad school at the University of Texas at Austin, then moved to Brooklyn, she kept taking photographs on trips home. “I just felt an instinct,” she says. “I visited the Art Institute all my life and ended up going to the school, and I just felt like I saw no representation of Mexican American families in the U.S., so this grew into something much larger and layered about the complexities of the shared immigrant experience.” Early on, her father bristled at the intrusion. Now? “He’s very proud of how far this project has gone.”

“I made this screen-printing series in grad school,” says Villanueva. “That’s when I had the opportunity to be away from my family and really think about their journey — of them adapting to life in the U.S. while looking back at what they’d left behind in Mexico. I had this idea to use family archives rather than just fine art photographs. That’s an I-130 form, Petition for Alien Relative, overlaid. The left photo is from my parents’ wedding. Every time I’d go to Mexico, my family there was like, ‘After your parents got married, the next day they left for Chicago and never came back.’ They were trying to escape poverty. My dad told me they wanted to bring money back to Mexico to build a home in Monterrey, but they stayed because they knew there would be more opportunity for their children if they were born in the U.S. The image on the right is from when we all went to New York in 1999. You can see the twin towers in the back, which is very chilling.”

“My father really wants to be the man of the household, and this image of him fixing our bathroom sink emphasizes how he tries to take care of us and be proactive in many ways. He never learned plumbing, but he’s doing that to avoid the extra cost. I admire my dad because he taught me how to be self-sufficient and strategic about certain things, including how to take care of a home.”

“This is my grandmother making tamales. It’s such a labor-intensive thing: You have to unwrap and separate the corn husks and kind of knead the masa. It takes hours. With her age and disabilities, she doesn’t do it often, but she’s the only one who can make them right. She never lets physical weakness get the best of her.”

“I took this in 2018, right after my large-format photography class ended. It was the second time in a year my grandma was hospitalized. She needed surgery on her abdomen. This image is really important to me because you can see her vulnerability but you can still see her fierce gaze that’s like, ‘I’m going to get up from this really soon.’ ”

“This is my brother in his bedroom his junior year of high school. He’s studying for the SATs while playing Fortnite. I admire his impressive multitasking abilities! I don’t know how he managed to get good grades, but he will graduate from Brown University this year. I had more weight on me in the household, while his job was to focus on school. So him getting into Brown was a team effort.”

“This picture is so Chicago-coded. I took it in November 2020 on a day when it was 65 degrees. My parents couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pull out the grill to make carne asada — grilled skirt steak. We heat up tortillas and eat it like tacos. My mom is setting up a ginormous boom box to play cumbia, classic music that was brought to Mexico from Colombia.”

“The iconography is the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is rooted in the story of St. Juan Diego, who had a vision of the Virgin Mary in Mexico. The stickers are from the 2020 election. My brother had just turned 18, so I dragged him with me; it was very symbolic for us to vote in honor of my parents’ 27 years of labor and sacrifices on American soil. The photo on the left is my parents outside their first Chicago apartment. I believe my mom was already pregnant with me there, so they’re about to be parents.”

“My mother was not happy with me for taking this picture. She was like, ‘Why are you not helping me?’ She often works seven days a week, eight to 12 hours a day, at the factory because weekends are overtime, so she does all the grocery shopping and laundry before her shift in the afternoon. Her body is slowly shutting down because of the hours she stands at the factory and the noise from the heavy machinery. She worries for everyone, but not so much herself.”

“I took this in 2018 in the kitchen, which is so cramped we literally had to take turns eating. Left to right, it’s my visiting aunt and cousin, my aunt who lives in the house, my grandmother, my aunt’s mother who’s staying with us, my uncle who lives with us, and the hand on the right is my cousin who lives with us. I call this our Sunday brunch, because before the pandemic, we had a tradition where each Sunday morning my dad and uncle would buy barbacoa and carnitas, and we’d just eat and talk. We all lived in the same household, but we hardly saw each other, so we’d catch up about work, life, kids. Now people don’t really visit. They have picked up other jobs and are overworked, and my brother and I have moved on. So this was a significant time.”