On view: Our Language, Our Story
October 18, 2025 – January 31, 2026
Galería de la Raza presents Our Language, Our Story, a powerful photographic exhibition by artist Joyce Xi in collaboration with the Asian Law Caucus. Through striking portraits and deeply personal narratives gathered from immigrants across the Bay Area, the exhibit asks: What does it mean to be seen, heard, and understood in the language of your heart?
Conceptualized in 2023, this project was initially created to document immigrant experiences and highlight the need for language access in everyday life. Expanding from the first six stories exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2024, the project now encompasses more than 20 cultures throughout the Bay Area that are reflected through their language and stories. In today’s political and social climate, this body of work celebrates and centers the fullness of these community members and leaders; friends, family, elders, neighbors, co–workers, teachers, entrepreneurs, artists, students, vendors, and people of faith. Together, they represent the backbone of our communities and an essential part of our social fabric. These images highlight the deep relationships we foster, and the joys and hardships immigrant communities face living in an English-dominant society.
Over several months of interviews and visits to community centers, family celebrations, neighborhood hangouts, and organizing meetings, Xi built relationships with these individuals and listened to their aspirations, struggles, dreams, love, and resistance. Visitors are encouraged to consider the experiences of immigrants and refugees by reading their stories, listening to their language, and witnessing their day to day lives. Our Language, Our Story affirms that language is far more than a means of communication. It is a vessel of memory, a source of cultural continuity, and a powerful assertion of self. To speak in your native language is to resist erasure, to demand dignity, and to claim space.
“Language helps you identify your people in a new place, it fills your ears with familiar warmth.”
– Alejandra Oliva, Rivermouth
Read the individual stories featured in the exhibition below.