The 2025 Latin American Foto Festival Grapples with Extremes
The Bronx Documentary Center, a non-profit gallery and educational space, is currently holding its annual Latin American Foto Festival, spotlighting communities in Puerto Rico, Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia for this edition. In the present political context, in which these communities are especially vulnerable to violence, injustice and displacement, the festival feels lucid and meaningful.
Large-scale photographs are on view at the Bronx Documentary Center and around the South Bronx’s Melrose neighborhood through this weekend. From July 24 through August 3, the festival expands across venues in the city’s other boroughs: Loisaida Center in Manhattan’s East Village, Terraza 7 in Elmhurst in Queens and Toñita’s Caribbean Social Club in Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
Instead of doing an open call, the festival team reached out directly to Latin American photographers, photo editors and curators to survey recent projects that affected them. The final selection, made by festival curator Cynthia Rivera and Bronx Documentary Center founder and co-curator Michael Kamber, encompasses about a dozen projects from seven different countries. “We tend to repeat countries, especially Mexico,” Rivera tells Observer, pointing out that the territories represented best reflect the origins of the Bronx Documentary Center’s local population.
The tenor of the festival, now in its eighth year, shifts with the times. “We try our best to always keep a balance in terms of types of stories that range from violent to light-hearted,” Rivera says. “Sometimes it falls to the more intense side because of whatever is currently happening in the world at the time, or it falls more lighthearted because things are actually too intense, like during Covid, and we know people need some sort of break mentally and visually.” Being balanced is hard to strive for but remains an aspiration: “If we go too far one way—say, too hopeful or too violent—then we aren’t necessarily giving a fair overview of what’s happening in Latin America. Falling in the middle at least gives people an even playing field to start from, if this is the first time they are learning anything about social issues and stories from different places in Latin America.”
Those social issues and stories cover a broad range. In the series Movimento Em Construção (Movement under Construction), a self-organized settlement spearheaded by teenagers in Brazil, Coletivo FotoFlores set out to valorize the struggle of their community, offer education and affirm squatting as a legitimate political tool in the fight for housing. A similar spirit infuses the series Aqui Amanece Mas Tarde (Dawn Arrives Later Here), a collaborative project by Sara Escobar and Pablo Ramos, which features the 1970s-era-built housing cooperative Cooperativa Palo Alto in Mexico City that has won out over gentrification. The series spotlights local totems, like altars of the Virgen de Guadalupe and street murals.
Also from Mexico, The Reasons of the Jungle was curated by the Bats’i Lab (Bats’i being the Tzeltal concept of “authentic spirit”), a collective that highlights Mayan-descended communities in Chiapas, and here showcases the work of sixteen photographers. There’s a powerful black-and-white image from 1992 of the toppling of 16th-century conquistador Don Diego de Mazariegos by Antonio Turok, and Isaac Guzmán’s 2019 photograph of a woman carrying a baby with a militantly raised left fist.
A more downtrodden series, Gabriela Oráa’s Abandoned, documents crises in Venezuela. Oráa began independently, covering a wave of protests, and her work has been in international news agencies like Reuters, AFP and Getty Images. By way of one man, Enrique Martínez—seen sunbathing at the entrance of his home or attending a funeral—Oráa reflects the breakdown of essential support systems, which accelerated Martínez’s death by prostate cancer since his diagnosis came too late due to a lack of available medical care.
In a much more microscopic context, Charlie Cordero’s long-term documentary project explores the Afro-Colombian community of Santa Cruz del Islote—“an island the size of two football fields” off the coast of Colombia—as its 700 inhabitants wrestle with scarce resources and rising sea levels. (Grimly, the island may be underwater in a matter of years.) Despite these hardships, his images are striking and colorful, whether depicting a local resident training a rooster for a fight or a girl with bright and beautiful pink braids set against a weathered blue wall.
In a very blurry and contrasty style, Boris Mercado’s black-and-white photographs of the decline of a once-luxurious building in downtown Lima, Santa Elisa, show its present iteration as a crumbling complex housing impoverished denizens residing on mattresses on the floor. In one image, a six-year-old boy points a toy gun at the photographer, devastatingly prescient of the fact that the subject was shot multiple times in a street fight shortly thereafter.
Photojournalist Carlos Barrera’s unambiguously titled Life And Death In A Country Without Constitutional Rights scrutinizes mass citizen incarceration and the suspension of basic civil liberties, ever since El Salvador’s president in 2022 declared a “state of emergency” that repressed freedom of assembly and due process under the law. The series was a World Press Photo Contest winner in 2025, and the jury praised Barrera: “The story resonates beyond its borders, reflecting the global implications of migration politics as many Salvadorians face the prospect of being deported back to the violence they once fled. The photographer’s work, undertaken at enormous personal risk, brings viewers closer to the human cost of authoritarianism.” Also from El Salvador, Jessica Orellana’s project The Silence of
More locally, Carmen Mojica’s photography explores the entanglements between South Bronx and Puerto Rico from the late 20th Century to the present day via the symbolism of flags in urban spaces and communities in the streets, while Mikey Cordero’s Diaspo Rico explores Puerto Rican migration and identity in the question “What is the commonwealth for people with identity in two lands?”
In Self-Deportation, photojournalist Federico Rios documents the growing number of migrants who have been coerced into returning to their homeland, “doing exactly what American officials want them to do,” as journalist Annie Correal recently wrote, undergoing risky journeys through Panama and inverting their original quests north. Rios’ work, published in the New York Times in May, shows a 25-year-old deported from Texas who will forcibly return to Venezuela, as well as passengers on broken-down boats or on the street in tents as they make their way south from Panama. “The busy new boat route toward South America is a sign, according to migrants, officials and rights groups, that the Trump administration’s harsh tactics are having an effect,” Correal states. “Those heading to Venezuela knew their relatives, many going hungry, would have little to offer.”
Beyond Self-Deportation, the ugliness of the American sociopolitical reality looms over the festival. Of the current disheartening atmosphere, Rivera says: “Part of it felt like even more of a reason to celebrate Latin American culture in the face of everything that’s happening with ICE and the border. And part of it felt like a reason to be extra cautious and not attract attention to ourselves, to our neighborhood, to our photographers, many who are under threat in their own countries.” These extremes were difficult to navigate, but ultimately, even with the risk, participants past and present all told Rivera that “this is even more of a reason to push and tell their stories anywhere that they can.”
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