Mala Yerba

Mala Yerba is an ongoing project exploring Latin American youth as life persisting where least expected. In streets marked by inequality, these images reveal constant resistance — a generation growing through concrete and surviving neglect.

“Mala yerba nunca muere.” The phrase is often used to dismiss what refuses to disappear.

Across Latin America, youth — especially those from working-class neighborhoods — are frequently portrayed as threat, excess, or problem. This series confronts that narrative. Through high-contrast light and hard shadows, the images reveal bodies moving through spaces marked by inequality: fenced sidewalks, overheated streets, polluted water, public corners under watch.

To be young and Latino is to grow within systems shaped by colonial histories, economic instability, migration, and state control. Yet it is also to inherit rhythm, community, and an untranslatable sense of presence. These photographs hold that tension.

Soccer in the street becomes reclamation of space. A glance toward the camera becomes refusal. A body in water becomes both vulnerability and freedom. The environment appears rigid — concrete, metal, boundaries — but life persists, pushes back, reorganizes itself.

Like weeds splitting pavement, these youths are labeled invasive, disposable, dangerous. But what is called “mala yerba” is often simply life growing where it was never meant to.

Mala Yerba is a study of resistance — not loud, not heroic, but constant. It is about a generation that survives visibility, control, and neglect, and continues to exist on its own terms.