Private Story
The 2022 Alexia Professional Grant
Summary
In the wake of climate change, political instability and migration, this project, ‘Imagining Family,’ explores how queer, marginalized communities in the Caribbean construct their definitions, politics and poetics of family.
Months after Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico, María José, a transgender artist and activist, founded House of Grace. This House was not a physical home, but rather a network of mutual aid, support and kinship for trans youth on the island. The precarious conditions of post-hurricane Puerto Rico impacted the transgender community twofold as an already marginalized population on the island, leaving them stripped of resources and vulnerable to violence. According to official records, 6 trans people in Puerto Rico were killed in 2020—a devastating toll and one that the queer community believe is undercounted (Rosa & Báez for TIME, 2021). Facing systemic discrimination and violence, House of Grace created a safe space. This “chosen family” shares both affective ties and responsibilities towards each other, often in the place of its members’ biological relatives. Here, each individual plays a crucial role in the security and survival of other members.
Cultural definitions of family are often based on genetics or legal ties. The relationships I am documenting, however, reimagine and reclaim alternative understandings of kin.
To explore this, I propose a long-form reportage of four queer families in Puerto Rico, Haiti, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the Bahamas. In the past ten years each of these islands has faced natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and Covid-19, severely impacting the everyday life of their inhabitants. I will be documenting sex workers and the mutual aid organization Entre Putxs in Puerto Rico; migrants on the border in Haiti; food security in St. Vincent and the Grenadines; and spiritual communities in the Bahamas. The processes of family building and the unique ties of their relationships will be visualised through documentary photography and audio interviews.
As the climate crisis and calamities continue to impact more parts of the world, we know that the strain on everyday survival for marginalized groups is not isolated to Puerto Rico. The grant will allow me to further work on underreported, critical issues in my country and geographic region and explore the nuances of climate change and the long term impact of the natural world on the human experience.
With the project I am proposing, I seek to expand a year-long reporting process to geographies outside Puerto Rico. As a queer, non-binary Puerto Rican photogtapher who has seen alternative family relations imagined and built during Hurricane Maria, earthquakes and the COVID-19 pandemic, I am prepared to expand my photographic language outside the geographical boundaries of my country to understand how our survival-affective language is operating in a multiplicity of territories. By becoming an Alexia grantee, I’ll be able to generate a visual document that shows the multiple dimensions of “natural disasters” on queer bodies.
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