Femme Frontera is an award winning photography book by Arlene Mejorado & Adriana Monsalve published in 2017 by Homie House Press with the sponsorship of the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures.
A spread of the U.S.-Mexico border with images of Maggie's story by Arlene Mejorado.
Where the border ends and the water begins in Tijuana, Mexico by Arlene Mejorado, 2017.
Femme Frontera is a book and project that journeys into the physical borderlands of California and Texas with Mexico through in-depth parallel story telling between the two regions. I explored fronteras (borders) in a conceptual and abstract manner with a non-linear and non-binary structure focusing on people that live in spaces I consider to be “in-between”. Femme is an identity that motions towards liberation and the vignettes illustrated in Femme Frontera offer a window into lives of people who I believe created safety and liberation in their femme-ness. The goal of Femme Frontera was to open up space for migrants and trauma survivors in femme visibility. We blurred the line between art and journalism, playing with a new form of storytelling. Each individual lives in a layered experience, an intersectional reality.
A spread in Femme Frontera: Portraits by Adriana Monsalve.
Lo que se ve no se pregunta / What you see you do not ask, by Adriana Monsalve, Laredo, Texas, 2016
A spread from Femme Frontera:
An excerpt of Lucy's words (left) & a portrait of Lucy by Arlene Mejorado, Tijuana, Mexico, 2017 (right).