The Bronx Documentary Center is a nonprofit gallery and educational space that is currently hosting the annual Latin American Forto Festival, focusing on communities in Puerto Rico, Peru, El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela and Colombia. In the current political context, these communities are particularly vulnerable to violence, injustice and displacement, and the festival feels sober and meaningful.
Massive photos are being watched this weekend around the Bronx Documentary Center and around the Melrose community in the South Bronx. From July 24 to August 3, the festival is located throughout the city’s other boroughs: Loisaida Center in East Village, Manhattan, Elmhurst Terraza 7 in Queens, and Caribbean Social Club in Toñita, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Instead of making a public call, the festival team contacted Latin American photographers, photo editors and curators directly to investigate the latest projects that affected them. The final selections conducted by festival curator Cynthia Rivera and Michael Kamber, founder and co-curator of the Bronx Documentary Center, included twelve projects from seven different countries. Rivera told observers: “We tend to repeat the country, especially Mexico.” He noted that the best representation of these territories reflects the origins of the local population in the center of the Bronx documentary.
The festival’s tenor is now in its eighth year. “We try to always balance the story from violent to relaxed,” Rivera said. “Sometimes, because of anything that is happening in the world right now, or it’s easier because things are actually too intense, like during Covid, we know people need some kind of breakthrough mentally and visually.” Staying balance is hard to work hard, but it’s still a desire: “If we go too far in a way, for example, too hope or too violent – then we don’t have to give a fair overview of what’s going on in Latin America. In the middle of the game falling into the middle, people will get a uniform competition to start if this is the first time they learn any social issues and stories from different places.”
These social issues and stories cover a wide range. In the series Movimento emConstrução ((A movement under construction)Coletivo fotoflores is a self-organized settlement led by teenagers in Brazil, setting out to express appreciation for the struggles of the community, provide education and confirmation as a legitimate political tool to fight for housing. Similar spirits injected into the series Aqui Amanece Mas Tarde ((Arrive later on dawn), a collaboration between Sara Escobar and Pablo Ramos, which includes the 1970s-Mexico City housing cooperative Cooperativa Palo Alto, built in the 1970s, won a victory in gentrification. The series focuses on local totems such as the altars of Virgen de Guadalupe and Street Murals.
From Mexico, too The cause of the jungle Curated by Bats’i Laboratory (Bats’i is the Tzeltal concept of “real spirit”), the collective highlights the Mayan downgrade community in Chiapas, where sixteen photographers are presented. In 1992, the countdown of Don Diego de Mazariegos, the 16th-century conqueror of Antonio Turok, is a powerful black and white image, along with Dondo Diego de Mazariegos of Antonio Turok, and 2019 2019 photos by Isaac Guzmán, which reads a woman with a baby with a radical left fist.
A more overwhelming series, Gabriela Oráa abandoneddocument of the Venezuelan crisis. Oráa started independently, covering a wave of protests, and her work has been in international news organizations such as Reuters, AFP and Getty Images. Enrique Martínez borrows a man (Enrique Martínez) – see sunbathing or attending funerals at the entrance of his house.
In a more microscopic context, Charlie Cordero’s long-term documentary project explores the Santa Cruz del Islote community, an African Colombian community near the Columbia coast, “the island of two football fields on one island,” whose 700 residents wrestled, struggling with few resources and rising sea levels. (The grim island may be underwater in a few years.) Despite these difficulties, his image is shocking and colorful, whether it is a battle depicting local residents training a rooster to fight or a bright and beautiful pink braid leaning against a weathered blue wall.
Boris Mercado’s black and white photo depicts the decline of once luxurious buildings in downtown Lima in a very vague and contrasting style, Santa Elisa shows the iteration that appears in the iteration as it is a shaky complex housing poor residents live on mattresses on the floor. In one image, a six-year-old boy pointed out a toy gun to the photographer, which is a devastating fact that the subject was shot several times in a street fight shortly thereafter.
Photographer Carlos Barrera’s clear title Life and death of a country without constitutional rights Since President El Salvador declared a “state of emergency” in 2022, censoring mass citizens imprisonment and moratorium on basic civil liberties has curbed the law’s freedom of assembly and due process. The series is the 2025 World News Photography Championship, and the jury praised Barrera: “This story resonates with people and reflects the global impact of immigration politics as many El Salvadors face a prospect that has been deported back to the violence they once fled. Also from the project by El Salvador, Jessica Orellana The silence of water The country’s water crisis is presented through women’s experiences in a quiet but no longer cheerful series where women are forced to face drought, and the scarcity of rare water sources is not contaminated by toxic contamination by arsenic and boron.
More locally, Carmen Mojica’s photography is symbolized by the flags in the city spaces and communities on the streets, while Mikey Cordero DIASPO RICO Exploring the immigration and identity of Puerto Ricans, “What is the Federation of people with identity on two lands?”
exist Self-replacementAs journalist Annie Correal recently wrote, photojournalist Federico Rios documented an increasing number of immigrants who were forced to return home, “do exactly what American officials want them to do,” as journalist Annie Correal recently wrote, has gone through a risky journey through Panama and reversed their original Northern pursuits. Rios’s work, published in the New York Times in May, shows a 25-year-old man who was deported by Texas and will force his return to Venezuela to take passengers on a broken boat or travel south from Panama on the streets under the sea. “According to immigration, officials and rights groups, the busy new ship route is a sign that the Trump administration’s tough tactics are having an impact,” Correal said. “Those who travel to Venezuela know their relatives, many are hungry and have little to offer.”
Exceed Self-replacementThe ugliness of American social and political reality vaguely exist at the music festival. “Part of it feels more like a reason to celebrate Latin American culture, facing what’s going on with ice and borders. It feels like a particularly cautious reason not to attract ourselves, to our neighborhoods, to our photographers, many are threatened, in their own country.” These extremes are difficult to navigate, but ultimately, even if the risky participants tell Rivera, “and even more reason to push and tell their stories anywhere.”
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