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As a Mexican-American born on the border and raised in middle America, exhibition organizer Virginia Dodier—photography historian, curator, and director of the Carlsbad Museum & Art Center in New Mexico—has, like many other Hispanic women and girls, experienced the feeling of living in two worlds. She organized Nosotras: Portraits of Latinas to present positive images of women’s lives lived “between here and the homeland.”

Nosotras (Spanish for the feminine “us” or “we”) features 50 photographs, both black-and-white and color, from eight emerging photographers documenting the lives and culture of Latinas, most first- or second-generation immigrants to the United States. These striking images convey dignity and strength in the faces, families, and traditions of multiple generations. For instance, in the series From Inside the Home: A Portrait of Mexican Immigrant Women, Lupita Murillo Tinnen documents “women and the way in which their homes reflect their blending of two cultures,” Karen Bucher’s Growing Up in the Southwest examines life in the booming city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Patricia Gomez explores her Family Connections on both sides of the border in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico.

The exhibition also features selections from five additional photographers: Angela Cappetta’s Glendalis series follows the activities of one young woman and her friends and family during a seven-year period; Nereida Garcia Ferraz’s Habana Vieja/Old Havana merges old snapshot negatives with new digital techniques to create a sense of memory and displacement that transcends barriers of time and space; Mary Teresa Giancoli’s Mexican Lives, Mexican Rituals, Stories from New York City depicts the experience of immigration and the preservation of cultural traditions uprooted from a distant homeland; Scott Nava’s Following the Harvest reaffirms the pride and resilience of the Latin American community in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood; and Tone Stockenström’s Just Because I Live in America follows one Mexican-American immigrant family in a visual contemplation of the impact of immigration upon the social structures of family and home.

Although diverse personal, familial, and cultural influences resonate through each photographer’s images, Scott Nava summarizes the exhibition’s powerful impact and universal appeal with a poignant recollection from his childhood: “As a boy ... I lived in a world that was part Mexican and part American,” says Nava. “The smell of tamales on the stovetop dominated the house, but we would be called to dinner in English. I was a part of both worlds, but not a member of either, and so I couldn’t— and now cannot—ignore the differences. Memories from two cultures shape who I am today.”