Dulce Pinzon

In 2006, Pinzón completed a project in which she photographed several immigrant workers in New York City dressed as superheroes[12][18] who, like her, mostly originally came from the state of Puebla in Mexico. "They’re so quiet and hard-working and invisible", Pinzón said of her subjects in a feature article in The New York Times in 2006.[13] "I wanted to pay a tribute to them."[13] Pinzón drew on her nostalgia for Mexicopop culture as a medium to get her views across to through her art.[19]

This series consists of 20 color photographs of Mexican immigrants dressed in the costumes of well-known American and Mexican superheroes.[20][10] Pinzón breaks down the photographs' titles into five sections which not only title the photographs, but also deliver biographical data about the subject.[21] These sections are:

• Name of the superhero
• Name of the daily worker
• Name of their home country
• What the laborer does for a living
• And the amount of money that they send home.

One example of these "everyday superheroes" is the photograph titled "Noe Reyes. He sends hundreds of dollars back to Mexico every month."[20] There are many undocumented workers from Puebla who reside in New York City and who work as dishwashers, deli workers, and cleaning women, etc. and whom are rarely recognized for their everyday acts of sacrifice and heroism in supporting their families in their countries of origin.[22][14][23]

Another example, is the story of behind the photograph Minerva Valencia,[14] who dressed up as Catwoman for Dulce's artwork.[24] Valencia came to New York from Puebla and works as a babysitter in New York. The amount of economic remittance that she sends back to Puebla, Mexico is four hundred dollars per week.[25]

The New Yorker magazine photography critic Maria Lokke wrote about these images:

In Dulce Pinzon’s “Superheroes” series, costumes are superimposed on working-class Mexicans in New York: cooks, nannies, construction workers. These satirical scenes question modern heroism and bring into focus the vital role these individuals play in the lives of their families and in the economy of the larger community, on both sides of the border. She made these pictures, she writes, “to pay homage to these brave and determined men and women that somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.”[26]

And in discussing Pinzon's photographs at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washingtonian magazine observed that :

The iconic "Real Stories of Superheroes" series by Brooklyn-based Mexican photographer Dulce Pinzón depicts Mexican immigrants in the service sector performing their daily tasks while disguised as American superheroes. With titles such as "Aquaman is Juventino Rosas From the State of Mexico. He Works in a Fish Market in New York. He Sends $400 Home Each Week," the portraits memorialize the accomplishments of an enormous but invisible population.[27]

This project is easily Pinzon's best-known series and has been exhibited worldwide in museums, galleries and international art fairs.[21][28][22][14][29][30][31] The process taken by Pinzón in her art photographic activism was cultural consumption (superheroes), customization (Mexican laborers portrayed as superheroes), and intervention (art displayed in mainstream areas such as museums, galleries and art fairs).[32] Inspired by these photographs, in 2015 the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) launched a social media campaign under the tag #MigrantHeroes "to invite people around the world to identify and tell the stories of migrant heroes."[14]

In 2012 the photographic series was published in English, Spanish, and French as a book titled Dulce Pinzón: The Real Story of the Superheroes (Editorial RM, ISBN 978-8415118244).[33][31]

In 2020 the photographs were added to the permanent collection of the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City[34] and classified as part of the Mexican National Heritage.[35]

As it has been noted in academic research on her work,[36][37] Dulce Pinzon's work is also clearly inspired by the dualistic culture within Mexicans in New York.[36][37] She demonstrated this concept of dualism in her 2001–2002 project "Loteria" (Spanish for "Lottery"), which is a traditional Mexican card game. In this project, she used the card images from this well known Mexican card game, and projected these images onto the nude bodies of some of her New York friends and loved ones.[11][38] This project is also representative of the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz Fernández concept of transculturation.[39] By projecting the images of the cards of the "Loteria" game onto the human bodies of New York residents, she demonstrated how culture counter-flows through people's migration patterns, which is a form of cultural remittances.[39]

Funded by a grant from the Mexican National Fund for Art and Culture (FONCA),[40] this photographic portrait project[41] consists of 16 color portraits of "people of mixed ethnic origin in front of primary color backgrounds."[40][42] This work has been described as: "Mexican-born New Yorker Dulce Pinzon, in her "Multiracial" series, revisits the bold color fields characteristic of traditional Latin American art and reinterprets them as brilliant backgrounds for explorations into what color means for an increasingly diverse society, evermore concerned with self-identity."[43]