Thank you for visiting! I’m excited to launch Becoming Mexican, a project that explores heritage and cultural identity. I invite you to join along as I document the journey of discovering my roots and forging a connection with my ancestral homeland. Maybe I’ll even finally learn Spanish along the way.

I’m starting by sitting down with people of Mexican heritage that live in my immediate community of Portland, Oregon to hear about their background, their relationship with their heritage, and to see what role being Mexican plays (or not) in their daily life.

If I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that race is loaded. I hope this journey sheds a few rays of light on the experience of second-, third-, fourth-generation immigrants and the sometimes complicated, sometimes vague relationship we can have with our roots. We live in the now, but the way we look and feel is often informed by a past that isn’t directly ours. I want to claim some of that past for myself and examine how having a stronger connection to that past will shape my future.

xo cd

Photograph taken for a project with Vía Raíz.