“Verdant Land”, The Deep Roots of the American West
A century of Mexican-American migration flows through the portraits Kathya Maria Landeros has made of her own family and the agricultural communities of the American West. Verdant Land bears witness to resilience, to belonging in the land, and to the verdant promise that drew generations of Mexicans northward into what was once their own territory.
By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Kathya Maria Landeros.
In the highlands of central Mexico, a village stands nearly empty, hollowed out by emigration. Here, Kathya Maria Landeros lived as a young girl with her great-grandmother, Mama Chuy, “a seemingly frail woman of indomitable spirit,” according to the photographer, who spent her life traveling back and forth between the United States and Mexico, following the rhythms of agricultural labor that defined her family’s existence.
She shared stories of Landeros’s great-grandfather who went to Arizona in 1906 to work in the mines, of her grandfather who served as a bracero, of her grandmother and parents who also journeyed north to work the fields.
These family histories became the seed for Verdant Land, a project that evolved over nearly two decades into “a larger reimagining of the American West—a recognition of a century of agricultural labor that has drawn workers, including my ancestors, to the United States in search of a better life”.
Working with a large-format camera between 2011 and 2024, Landeros photographed along California’s Central Valley and into eastern Washington, in communities defined by agricultural work and the predominantly Latino labor that sustains them.
The work envisions the fertile landscape of the West as “an imagined land of opportunity and promise for all immigrant families, not just my own,” states Kathya the photographer. Yet she captures the complexity of that promise.
American flags displayed alongside religious shrines, rows of identical worker housing against arid hills, a faded “La Milpa Lavanderia” sign at dusk. These details speak to both belonging and precarity, to communities that have cultivated this land for generations while never being fully welcomed.
Her photographs carry particular urgency in 2025, as the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement intensifies across these same agricultural regions. ICE raids have torn through farmworker communities, arresting workers whose labor sustains America’s food system.
Landeros’s work becomes a counter-narrative to dehumanizing rhetoric, a visual insistence that Mexican-American immigrants “are not strangers to the history of this nation”. Her lens honors what has too often been rendered invisible: the century-long contribution of Latino workers to the prosperity of the American West.
Children appear frequently in this work, their presence insisting on the right to imagine a future in this landscape. They stand against the political rhetoric that would portray these families as temporary, as less than truly American.
A boy in a formal suit leans against a vintage car with the easy confidence of someone who belongs exactly where he stands.
In a moment when fear dominates immigration policy, when families are separated and communities terrorized, Landeros’s photographs offer something essential: evidence of presence, proof of cultivation, documentation of deep belonging.
The title itself—Verdant Land—speaks to fertility, growth, abundance. It describes the gardens her subjects tend, the orchards they harvest, the children they raise. It is both description and claim, both memory and insistence. This is arid land made green by labor that built the American West, tended by families who have totally deserved their place in its history. Families like Landeros’s own, who have cultivated it, in every sense of that word, for more than a century.
Verdant Land by Kathya Maria Landeros, published by Dust Collective, is available at the price of $55.
