En Foco's mission is to support artists, help make their work visible to a broad audience, and build accessibility to under-served communities. Periodically, we will feature artists who have received an award through our Photography Fellowship and Media Arts Work-in-Progress programs. Both were created to support artists of color who demonstrate the highest quality of work as determined by a photography panel of peers and industry professionals. This week we feature the work of En Foco Media Arts Fellow LaChris Alfaro.

I’m a Mexican-born, New York-raised immigrant. At the age of nine, my mother and I left Puebla, Mexico, to cross the U.S. border. During my high school years, I found photography to be my form of expression, a practice that allows me to connect with people and weave neighborhood stories that can empower and visualize the blossoming of immigrant communities. I’ve learned that power stands when people define their own sense of history, context, place, and vision. As a photographer, I strive to create work not only for community but with community, as they hold me accountable. In 2009, I graduated from the Borough of Manhattan Community College with an associate's degree in Video Arts. In 2021, I received a bachelor's degree in Media Studies from Hunter College.

Corazon Monarca are vignettes with personal archives that stem from my own immigrant experience and context that reveal my mental, physical, and spiritual transformations to illustrate meaningful therapeutic expressions, cultural lifestyles, and ancestral belief systems that aided my family’s survival.

I, like many people in the U.S., found myself fending for my physical and mental well-being because of the privatization of healthcare. This made me think about the resources available and unavailable for undocumented immigrants and how western traditional health frameworks don’t align with the needs of non-white, non-European people.

In 2009 my mother went back to Mexico because of my grandfather’s death. Her leaving left me to fend for myself, and in her absence, I have been longing for her essence. I wanted to explore the nostalgia through my mother’s objects, the photos she left behind, and the artifacts that I saved.

This is the portrait of my grandfather at his high school, a book he sent to my mother while she was in the US, and a phone card I had recently used to call my mother in Mexico.

The intimate dialogue of my own memories as a migrant: We transform in mind, spirit, and body. We become a hybrid, a conflict lingering between two worlds. Still, we learn to navigate and conquer limitations outlined by oppressive institutions decades before our birth.

Collages I made to find healing. Finding & Redefining my identity.

header image: video still. Poem by my mother Elizabeth Alatriste.

At the beginning of 2015, I had the privilege to reunite with my family in Mexico via an “advance parole” permit. As an undocumented young person, I was unable to see my family for over 18 years, which led me to miss my grandfather’s last living days. The impotence of not being able to travel with my mother to care for my only father figure became a catalyst for my present work. When I reunited with my mother in Mexico she had a notebook full of poems she wrote during our time apart. Through the editing process of this video, I saw myself soothing intergenerational traumas.