The ongoing series of video portraits, “m(Other)s,” references the 19th-century “hidden mother” photographs. The Victorian genre of photography captured infants sitting on their mothers’ laps, who were unceremoniously covered with blankets—designating them as apparatuses to prop up the children. Long exposure times for early photography required the children to sit still, often with failed results and slightly blurred images. The resulting photographs featured ghostly children perched atop uncanny hidden figures. These video portraits cite this early form of photography while reimagining it with Latinx immigrant and undocumented mothers and their children, derrogatorily referred to as “anchor babies.” A controversial term used in xenophobic rhetoric to refer to a child born to a non-citizen mother in a country that has birthright citizenship.

In each site the series is realized, Rojas films and compensates local immigrant and undocumented mothers made invisible underneath a star-spangled banner (with more than 50 stars), holding their children.The mothers’ narratives—anonymized and in their mother tongue of Spanish—share their stories of sacrifice and resilience, but also illuminate their maternal labor rendered invisible, or “othered,” by immigration legislation and xenophobia.