Abstract

Cruces is a multimedia installation depicting immigrant conditions and experiences throughout landscapes, Latinx communities, and borderlands. Made during the last two years, it is constructed as a multivocal ethnography of immigrants with varying legal statuses, countries of origin, and stages in their journey. The imagery, sounds, and narratives are composed of the distributed yet relational geographies of immigrants’ experience and the pieces are structured to highlight the constitutive elements of human mobilities, such as trains, rivers and immigration hubs, as well as the natural obstacles they face in their perilous transit, such as forests and deserts.

The fieldwork was carried out during summer 2019 and winter 2019-2020, when I collected and photographed the experiences of immigrants and their intersection with the geographies of immigration. By interrelating cities along the US East Coast, US-Mexico borderlands, and the southern Mexican states, the project offers a wide range of ideas, circumstances, and situations immigrants have to face in their day-to-day.

This project explores the ideas of citizenship of immigrants who have settled, the relations on borders and immigrants' hazardous experiences, and the operation of the so-called "expanded borders" in Mexico. Using photographic images, video pieces, maps, and personal notes, the project addresses the complexity and the challenge of portraying such a complex subject matter. Cruces was created using documentary aesthetics and sensory depictions while also critically examining the idea of objectivity through its use of multiple points of view to the migratory experience.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Multimedia installations (Art); Boundaries in art; Emigration and immigration in art; Mexican-American border region--In art

Publication Date

4-23-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Photography and Related Media (MFA)

Department, Program, or Center

School of Photographic Arts and Sciences (CAD)

Advisor

Josh Thorson

Advisor/Committee Member

Catherine Zuromskis

Advisor/Committee Member

Gregory Halpern

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

IMGART-MFA

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