Last month, the South Bronx transformed into an outdoor gallery, as the Bronx Documentary Center’s 8th annual Latin American Foto Festival spilled beyond gallery walls to claim the neighborhood’s sidewalks and streets. What began as an exhibition became something more: a celebration of resistance and the power of images to bridge worlds.
Curated by exhibition manager Cynthia Rivera and BDC founder Michael Kamber, the festival showcased work from across Latin America, turning the Melrose neighborhood into a living museum where strangers gathered around powerful photographs lining the sidewalks.
The opening reception on July 10th drew crowds from all five boroughs, salsa music pulsing through the streets as people danced between displays, the scent of Mexican food mixing with summer heat.
For Rivera, accessibility drives everything. Street-level exhibitions met people where they are, catching them in the rhythm of daily life. “It’s like, I’m walking by, I need to get home or I need to get to this next place or I need to pick up my kids,” she explained. “So it’s like, let me be able to walk by a space that’s also displaying a story outside that I can connect to.”
This year’s roster included voices from Puerto Rico to Brazil: Colectivo FotoFlores, Tortugas al Viento and Bats’i Lab from Mexico, Gabriela Oraa and Federico Rios from Venezuela, Charlie Cordero from Colombia, Boris Mercado from Peru, Carlos Barrera and Jessica Orellana from El Salvador, and Carmen Mojica and Mikey Cordero from Puerto Rico.
Yet Rivera and Kamber’s curatorial vision extends beyond simple access. They carefully balanced immediate relevance with deeper storytelling. “There always has to kind of be a balance between telling stories that are always very relevant as to what’s happening right now and also telling stories that are more kind of family oriented, inviting for people, not just about immigration or not just about a whole country falling apart,” Rivera said.
The festival became a platform that elevates overlooked narratives while supporting artists who risk everything to tell them. Gabriel Melhado’s FotoFlores Collective embodies this community-centered approach. Born from organic need in 2019 when Brazilian teenagers approached Gabriel to learn photography, what began as casual weekend walks evolved into something transformative.
The collective, children aged 10 to 18 with Melhado, 32, as sole adult mentor, created a city-funded exhibition titled “Movement Under Construction,” documenting daily life in Ocupação Flores Do Campo. “I was really proud and I was really excited about the idea of bringing them with me,” Melhado said of presenting their work at BDC. “BDC is kind of like a model for us… It’s a very community based project…to enhance the community struggle.”
Tortugas al Viento, founded by Pablo Ramos and Sara Escobar, captures overlooked narratives through collective storytelling that prioritizes community voices over individual perspectives. Their project Aqui Amanece Más Tarde documents gentrification and territorial struggles in Mexico City’s most affluent areas.
“It’s a project about cooperatives living in Latin America, workers of mines, people who went to work in a zone that was abandoned in Mexico City,” Ramos explained. The collective followed seven years of resistance by the Palo Alto Cooperative until the group dissolved last year, though residents remain. Rather than being displaced, they defended their land and lifestyle, transforming their neighborhood into a symbol of collective resistance against urban inequality.
Carmen Mojica brought an intimate perspective with her project documenting personal experiences living in New York City before returning to Puerto Rico. Her photographs capture everyday life across decades, but these images nearly disappeared forever. “All of the information these pictures got deleted, before moving from New York back to Puerto Rico, I decided that all my negatives needed to be in an archival plastic,” Mojica says in Spanish.
Many images span the 1970s through 1990s, decades when the South Bronx burned and rebuilt. Yet Mojica sees beyond grand narratives of urban transformation. “I’m always interested in seeing the change in the South Bronx, that to me is still the same…but the people change.” Spanning four weeks, the festival extended beyond static displays with film screenings, community open-mics, concluding with a final block party celebrating both stories shared and bonds forged throughout the event.
As images eventually come down from neighborhood walls, what lingers is the spirit of connection these photographs created, carried forward in the community until next year’s festival returns to transform the South Bronx once again.
More information on the Bronx Documentary Center’s website.
