“At the beginning of my career, I would choose a subject that I was interested in, and then doggedly pursue it,” the photographer Christina Fernandez said in 2023. “The way that I work now is very different. I work with a digital camera. As we know, the cameras are much more portable. I take my camera on road trips; I photograph around my neighborhood.” During a career of over three decades, the Mexican-American Fernandez has drawn inspiration from her heritage, exploring everything from her family’s ancestry to daily life in the Mexican-American neighborhoods of Los Angeles. A new survey of her work at the San Jose Museum of Art holds special resonance given a regional history that includes Cesar Chavez’s advocacy for Mexican farmworkers and San Jose’s current status as a sanctuary city. A highlight of the exhibition is Fernandez’s installation Untitled Farmworkers, a grid of 54 photographed index cards detailing the injuries, punishments, and other abuses suffered by farmworkers. Originally created in 1989 when Fernandez was an undergraduate at UCLA, the installation has since been updated to include cards describing current adversities faced by migrant workers, from the pandemic to climate change. —Paulina Prosnitz