Strategies of Resistance: Immigrant Legacies Beyond Assimilation

Friday April 24th, 2026

On View: April 24th, 2026 - June 7th, 2026

Artists: Lorena Molina, J Molina-Garcia, Martín Wannam, hazel batrezchavez, Dominique Muñoz, Victor Yañez-Lazcano

In the field of migration studies, the concept of “acculturation strategies” describes the various ways in which immigrants navigate their cultural identity within a new host society. This process is often narrowly framed, with generational practices of resistance adopting strategies ranging from complete assimilation into the dominant culture to the rigid preservation of their heritage. However, this binary overlooks the nuanced and subversive tactics many immigrants and their descendants employ to resist cultural erasure and assert their rightful place in the social fabric.

This exhibition aims to focus on the political strategies used by Tesora Garcia, Lorena Molina, hazel batrezchavez, Martín Wannam, Dominique Muñoz, and Victor Yañez-Lazcano, whose many praxis mainly focuses on their identities coming from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala, to challenge displacement and recenter their legacies within the United States. Through photography, sculpture, and performance, the featured artworks reveal how language, objects, gestures, and cultural practices can become tools of resistance against the homogenizing forces of the “American” mainstream.

This exhibition holds crucial significance in a political landscape marked by escalating anti-immigrant sentiment and the persistent marginalization of non-white, non-English-speaking communities. It provides a platform to elevate the voices and creative expressions of historically displaced, silenced, or those consumed by the dominant “American” culture. By centering the resistance strategies employed by Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan immigrant communities, the exhibition aims to foster a deeper understanding of the complex, multifaceted experiences of migration and identity.

Tesora Garcia

Tesora Garcia (she/her) is a Salvadoran-American media artist, writer, and educator whose work investigates how structural violence patterns bodies, dreams, and belief systems. Drawing from migration politics, queer theory, and non-Western esoterica, her projects prototype alternative ways of sensing, belonging, and being. 

Garcia has worked with lens-based media for more than a decade, spanning analog film, digital cinema, performance, and experimental video. Her recent projects, including Pocahontas Revised and Collagen Cult, have been exhibited nationally across the U.S. Her work often merges performance and moving image with ritual poetics, situating marginalized bodies as conduits of resilience and prophecy. As an HIV-positive Indigenous trans woman, Garcia approaches artmaking as a practice of survival and revelation. 

She is currently Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Futures at Virginia Commonwealth University.
 

Víctor Yáñez-Lascano

Since 2009, Victor Yañez-Lazcano has shaped an interdisciplinary body of work that explores the various factors associated with assimilation narratives, particularly as they pertain to language, labor and notions of visibility. He received his MFA from Stanford University and his BFA from Columbia College-Chicago. Yañez-Lazcano has been a visiting lecturer in art at various institutions including Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and recently began his position as an assistant professor of photography at the University of Washington–Seattle. His work has been exhibited at numerous spaces including Roswell Museum(Roswell, NM) Natalie & James Thompson Art Gallery (San José, CA), Perspective Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), and The Chicago Design Museum. In 2016, CANDOR ARTS published Yañez-Lazcano’s series ‘de’ which has gone on to be included in various collections including Yale University’s Haas Arts Special Collections, Indiana University’s Wells Library Fine Arts Collection, and Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library Special Collection.

 

Dominique Muñoz

Dominique Muñoz is a visual artist who embraces excess. His work oscillates between figuration and abstraction. Bold colors and patterns from his childhood blankets construct a visual language honoring origins and revolutions of being. By reweaving these patterns in new directions, he considers how cultural traditions adapt, fracture, and persist through migration. Light becomes an active collaborator, returning these patterns to material objects. Through photography, printmaking, and installation, Muñoz explores the entanglements of assimilation, cultural survival, and queerness using a conceptual framework of visibility. Based in photography’s role as both an archive and an agent of power, he challenges its colonial and heteronormative histories. Dominique earned his MFA in Studio Art from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025 and his BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015.

hazel batrezchavez

hazel batrezchavez’s (b.1994, Stolen Land) creative practice is rooted in the politics of survival and the poetics of movement, moving freely between textiles, performance, and assemblage sculpture. batrezchavez’s work has been exhibited at SITE (NM), Loom Indigenous Gallery (NM), El Paso Museum of Art (TX) Radford Museum of Art (VA), ICOSA Collective (TX), Latinx Art Project NYU (NY). batrezchavez received their BFA in Anthropology and Studio Art from Grinnell College and their MFA in Sculpture from the University of New Mexico. 

 

Currently they reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico where they work as an artist, and Curator of Art at the Art Museum of the National Hispanic Cultural Center. 

 

Martin Wannam 

Martín Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) is visual artist and educator whose work offers a critical exploration of his homeland's historical, social, and political landscape within a cuir viewpoint. With an equatorial perspective that intersects brownness and wildness, Wannam's iconoclastic and maximalist approach challenges mainstream narratives through photography, sculpture, and performance art. His multidisciplinary practice examines the impacts of immigration, systemic structures, utopian ideals, and family on both individual and collective levels. Wannam's dissident perspectives and commitment to freedom dreaming for the cuir individual are deeply rooted in his Guatemalan heritage. 

Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of Fronteristxs & Becoming Sticky Collective.

Lorena Molina 

Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Practice at San Francisco State University. She’s also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supports and highlights BIPOC artists.

Through the use of photography, video, performance and installation, she explores identity, intimacy, pain, and how we witness the suffering of others. The work interrogates relationships and the formation of relationships as political acts that are guided by negotiations of power and privilege.

At the core of her work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges that oppressed groups face in constructing place and establishing a sense of belonging. The work is driven by a deep sense of displacement experienced after a 12-year-old civil war forced her and her family to migrate to the United States. Most of her work stems from a need to find and build community in a way that it’s both tender, accountable, challenging through difficult conversations that makes everybody involved actively question their position and privileges in society.