Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá—¿Y Ahora Qué?

(Here and There: The Right to Belong / Neither Here Nor There—Now What?)

In this historical moment—marked by political extremism, mass displacement, and the slow violence of cultural erasure—migration can no longer be understood as a single act of crossing. It is not a beginning or an end. It is a condition. It is a continuum. It is a life lived across borders, languages, and systems of power.

Aquí y Allá: El Derecho de Perteneceris a binational exhibition that brings together Latin American and Chicano artists living in the United States alongside Mexican and Latin American artists working within Mexico and across the region. Presented in Mexico City, the exhibition positions the city not merely as a host, but as a critical site of encounter—where histories converge, identities are renegotiated, and the meaning of belonging is actively contested.

This exhibition begins with a shift in perspective.

For decades, dominant narratives of migration have focused on departure—on the act of leaving, of crossing into the United States, of arrival into the “other side.” But today, another reality demands attention: return.

Return through deportation.
Return through self-deportation.
Return through necessity, survival, or choice.

And in that return, something fundamental is revealed:

Migration does not end at the border. It begins again.

Mexico stands at the center of this unfolding reality. It is a pass-through for Latin Americans navigating perilous migration routes. It is a site of return for those expelled from the United States. And it remains the motherland for Chicanos—whose identities have been shaped in the tension between inheritance and displacement, memory and reinvention.

Yet return is not a simple homecoming.

Those who come back often arrive as strangers in familiar lands—carrying hybrid identities, altered cultural references, and languages shaped by absence and adaptation. English may dominate. Spanish may fracture. Spanglish emerges not as deficiency, but as evidence of survival. Accent becomes a marker. Identity becomes a negotiation.

They are seen—and misseen.

They are recognized—and rejected.

They are told, implicitly and explicitly, that they are no longer fully from here, nor entirely from there.

Ni de aquí, ni de allá.

This exhibition inhabits that in-between space—not as a deficit, but as a powerful site of cultural production, resistance, and transformation.

Artists based in the United States expose the mechanisms of power that shape migrant life: detention, surveillance, racialization, and the criminalization of movement. Their work reveals how policy enters the body—how it fragments families, alters futures, and attempts to erase cultural presence.

Artists based in Mexico and across Latin America respond from another vantage point: they witness the arrival of returnees, the emergence of new identities, and the tensions that arise when national belonging is disrupted. Their work interrogates how societies receive their own—how authenticity is policed, how difference is marked, and how solidarity is built or withheld.

Together, these perspectives form a binational dialogue—a conversation across borders that is as much about perception as it is about lived experience.

At stake are urgent questions:

• Who has the right to belong?

• What defines cultural authenticity—and who gets to decide?

• How do language, memory, and tradition survive displacement?

• What responsibilities do nations hold toward those who leave—and those who return?

In this context, cultural erasure is not metaphorical. It is enacted through policy, through rhetoric, through the systematic dismantling of identity, history, and community. It is a form of violence that operates slowly, persistently—reshaping how people see themselves and how they are seen by others.

And yet, against this, artists insist.

They create.
They document.
They remember.
They transform.

They refuse disappearance.

Aquí y Allá positions art as both archive and intervention—a space where memory is preserved, identities are reimagined, and new narratives emerge. Through painting, printmaking, installation, performance, sound, and moving image, the artists in this exhibition construct a living record of a people in motion.

A people in negotiation.
A people in resistance.
A people in becoming.

Presented in Mexico City, this exhibition calls on audiences not only to witness, but to reflect—to confront their own assumptions about migration, identity, and belonging. It invites a deeper recognition: that the stories of those who leave and those who return are not separate, but intertwined.

That the border does not divide experience—it multiplies it.

That belonging is not given—it is claimed, contested, and redefined.

And that in this moment of rupture and possibility, we are all implicated in the question:

¿Y ahora qué? / Now what?

Because the answer will not be found in policy alone.

It will be shaped in culture.
In memory.
In community.
And in the spaces we create—like this one—where truth can be spoken, and new futures imagined.

Curator:Dr. Martina Ayala