¿Quieres Salvar Al Mundo? Empieza por tu Familia / Do You Want to Save the World? Start with Your Family

My long-term project documents my Mexican immigrant family’s daily lives through photographs and screen prints, exploring migration, labor, and resilience. It honors invisible acts of survival while confronting the bureaucratic systems that shape them.

As the daughter of Mexican immigrant parents, both factory workers, my understanding of home and identity has always been shaped by migration, sacrifice, and survival. My grandmother was the first to migrate to the United States, and her decision influenced my parents to remain in Chicago when they discovered my mother was pregnant with me. Like thousands of families, their choice reflected a desire for greater opportunity, even as it came with the daily struggles of labor, displacement, and adaption.

¿Quieres Salvar Al Mundo? Empieza por tu Familia / Do You Want to Save the World? Start with Your Family is my long-term project documenting my family's lives as we navigate the complexities of migration, labor, and care in the U.S. Through color photography, environmental portraiture, still lifes, and screen prints made from family archives overlaid with U.S. legal documents, I collaborate with my parents, grandmother, and brother to tell a story that is deeply personal yet emblematic of many immigrant families: a story of sacrifice, survival, and interdependence.

The photographs capture the small, often invisible acts of care that define our household. My father's exhaustion after a factory shift, my mother sending remittances to México, my grandmother navigating chronic illness, and our shared meals around the kitchen table all reveal the labor and love that hold us together. These intimate images counter reductive narratives of immigrant life by offering the lens of a daughter rooted in trust and collaboration.

The screen prints introduce another layer of narrative, family photographs marked by the bureaucratic text of U.S. immigration forms. The overlay of personal memory with legal documentation underscores the precarious realities of immigrant life, where love and labor are entagled with paperwork, status, and survival. By placing these documents directly onto our archives, I confront how private histories are continually shaped and constrained by public systems of control.

Together, these works explore themes of resilience and belonging. They examine the interplay between private and public spaces and the tension between candidness and staging in documentary practice. At their core, they insist of visibility, on honoring the contributions of immigrant families while making evident the physical and emotional toll of survival in pursuit of the so-called American Dream.

This body of work is both testimony and tribute. A record of my family's history, a medittion on migration and identity, and an offering to those whose stories of labor, care, and resilience often remain undocumented. By bridging photography and printmaking, memory and bureaucracy, México and the United States, I aim to create a visual dialogue that reframes the immigrant household as a site of strength, dignity, and continuity.