Yo Quería Ir Contigo is a photo book I workshopped and finalized during my last semester in college, exploring the grief created by inhumane immigration policy.

Like a lot of my other photo and writing projects, Yo Quería Ir Contigo operates as autofiction, entertaining the worst fears shared by my family with the places we know best as a backdrop. Though my hometown Worcester, MA is a sanctuary city, that fact cannot quell the very real anxieties my family and countless others experience for simply engaging in public life. Being an immigrant in America is a form of social death, a state with limited mobility, visibility, sociality, and agency; the lack of discourse around this social death only compounds the isolation of the experience. I needed this photo book to communicate the degree of mutual, unconditional care innate to families and communities like mine—as well as the irreversible grief and helplessness caused by the undue loss of that family.