MEXICO CITY — Certain images of migrants almost have become cliches in our globalized world of perpetual human movement: Mexican families sloshing across the Rio Grande in the dead of night, young African men huddled over dull campfires in Spanish detainee camps.
But other, less commonplace images challenge preconceived ideas of what it means to be an "undocumented worker," "illegal alien" or simply a person with no fixed home or identity, stranded between shifting borders.
As illustrated by "Laberinto de Miradas" (Labyrinth of Glances), a provocative photo and video exhibition that's on display here at the Cultural Center of Spain through August, immigration today wears many faces. It's a middle-class Argentine woman, driven into exile by her country's 2001 peso collapse. A Cuban man who bears the scars of jail time served for trying to flee to Miami. Hundreds of Brazilians of mixed ethnicities, body types and attitudes, mostly economic refugees from other parts of the country, all crammed into a ramshackle Sao Paulo apartment building, striving to co-exist.
Rather than rehashing familiar imagery and old, circular debates, "Laberinto de Miradas" explores some of the factors that are driving global immigration from Tijuana to Morocco. It also looks at how the condition of being an immigrant, more than just a description of someone's citizenship status, is an existential condition shared by millions of people of wildly varying backgrounds.
"At the end of the story, all of us are immigrants," says Federico Gama, a Mexican photographer whose work is included in the show. "All of us are in a search for something. We would like to be on another side. And also in the sense of, well, where do we belong?"
Taking an unusually expansive view of what immigration means, the show documents how practically any social unit -- rich Mexican women, Spanish sunbathers, Brazilian gay-pride parade marchers, U.S. Panama Canal Zone workers -- can constitute an "immigrant" culture, a community of internal exiles, within its own society.
"Not all immigration is of poor people that don't have food," says Diego San Vicente Charles, the cultural center's manager. The exhibition is "trying to open ourselves to this vision, in order to be able to understand the problem much more globally and in all its levels." Assembled by Madrid curator Claudi Carreras, the show comprises 160 still photos and a handful of short videos, made by more than 30 photographers and video journalist-documentarians. After leaving Mexico's historic center, it will travel to several other Latin American countries. Two companion exhibits will open in coming months, one in Lima, the other in Sao Paulo.
