quinceañera is a celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday, marking the transition from childhood to womanhood. Families typically spend an average of $20,000 and prepare for the celebration for years. (...)
For this image, I followed Flor during her official photo session with a local photographer in Caborca, one of the most violent towns in the state of Sonora. In December of the same year, a group of gunmen stormed another quinceañera celebration in the same area, shooting six people dead and leaving 14 more injured. The motivations behind this incident remain unknown at the current time. Sonora, Mexico. 2021.
The Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy, introduced in April 2018, mandated criminal prosecution for adults entering the US unlawfully, and resulted in the separation of families, since (...)
children could not be held in criminal detention facilities. The policy faced criticism, leading to an executive order in June 2018 to halt family separations by detaining families together. In the picture a plate with a Thanksgiving scene painted by Norman Rockwell is placed beside the border fence at Tijuana Beach. Mexico. August 2018.
As a contemporary interpretation of “Our Lady of the Iguanas” by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, I’ve reimagined that iconic image to highlight the fascination that drug cartels have for ex (...)
otic animals. The image was photographed in Hermosillo, Sonora, featuring a tegu lizard and a model whose identity I cannot disclose. Mexico. March 2019.
I discovered Felicity by chance in 2015 while driving around the roads of southern California. Its unique history and logic, coupled with its proximity to the Imperial Sand Dunes border fence with (...)
Mexico, sparked the inspiration for this project, transforming the migrants’ journey into a voyage to a hollow Center of the World, and the travelers into the heroes of an outdated adventure book. California, USA. October 2019.
The price for crossing to the US from Tapachula with a people smuggler (colloquially known as a coyote) can depend on what you look like. Africans and Asians need to pay more, because migration off (...)
icials require a higher bribe to overlook the traveler at the checkpoints, since they cannot pretend they are locals. This is what Marcos, an experienced coyote, shared with us, together with a comprehensive list of the checkpoints and the amounts payable to progress in the journey to the North. He said he could organize trips by plane to get to Tijuana in a few hours for $15,000, and also cheaper options traveling by road and foot for several weeks for as little as $2,500. Chiapas, Mexico. August 29, 2020.
The official center of the world is in Felicity (California), a very small town with just a couple of houses that was founded by the French ex-parachutists François Istel. The town's key features a (...)
re a 21-foot-tall stone-and-glass pyramid, a church on a man-made hill, and the Museum of History in Granite, which Istel has been developing since the town's founding. It was declared the official center of the world by the Imperial County Board of Supervisors in 1985. 2019.
The second time I went to Hierve el Agua I found the place empty with just a couple waiting by one of the pools. The woman started walking into the water and I ran to take a picture, but my camera (...)
would just not work. After trying everything I could to fix it, I had to give up and decided to sit next to the man to know more about them.The man told me they were brothers and that the place was sacred. He asked me if I wanted to take pictures and I replied that my camera was not working. He then told me to try again, that after our talk, it would work. And it did. Oaxaca, Mexico. April 2018. All images © Cristina de Middel / Magnum Photos