Eloquent images of migration in Mesoamerica
During the month of December, the Mesoamerican Program promoted a regional amateur photography contest "Miradas en Movimiento: Focusing on dignity, ensuring protection". The virtual community InformArte en Movimiento served as a basis for disseminating the call as well as for the interested public to comment and vote for their favorite photos.
At the end of the vote, about 30 thousand people and entities in social networks were reached and could see proposals that illustrate the importance and necessity of various initiatives to protect migrants, ranging from providing information and supporting the defense of their rights, to providing safe spaces and migration assistance. Also, those who were encouraged to take and send photographs did not fail to refer to the protection of migrant children, the vulnerability of children and adolescents being one of the most acute challenges in this region.
After an intense vote through Facebook and Twitter, Juan Luis Carvajal, Laura Ruggiero and Miranda Cuevas were winners of the first three places of the contest, with the photographs "Come on!", "Look" and "Collateral damage that disappears in the landscape". Five more images received special mention and will be part of the itinerant exhibition "Miradas en Movimiento", an initiative of the Mesoamerica Program that seeks to promote dialogue on migrations in the region from an artistic and integration perspective.
Link to photo gallery
Photography
Title: ¡Adelante!
Author: Juan Luis Carbajal
In the words of a winner
“I studied human rights and political science and I have always focused on the issue of migration. I am Italian, so the Italian experience of seeing thousands and thousands of people coming from Africa or the Middle East every day pushed me to work on this topic. Then by the coincidences of life I got to work on this same subject in Central America. In Costa Rica I worked with the migrants Gnäbe-Buglé, who are a population that migrates from Panama to Costa Rica for the coffee and banana harvest, so there was assistance at the border. In El Salvador, I worked with an NGO in a project on the prevention of migration. I participated in the contest because it was a good opportunity to raise awareness about this important issue. "
Photography
Title: Miradas
Author: Laura Ruggiero
“I believe that today in 2017 in a world where we spend most of the time on social networks, information travels very fast, but it is not the same thing to share an article or a PDF, as a photo. If you are already drenched in the topic you will open the link for a report on the conditions of migration in Central America, but if you do not know anything, it is clear that a picture is worth a thousand words as the saying goes.
There are also people who do not know about the migratory route of Central America. The Central Americans themselves do not know what happens to a little more than their home and the Central American countries are so small that it is really a step: you go out and see another world.
I am excited to find platforms as interested and active as InformArte en Movimiento ".
Laura Ruggiero - Winner of the second place of "Miradas en Movimiento 2016
Photography
Title: Daño colateral que desaparece en el paisaje
Author: Miranda Cuevas
Link to photo gallery