While some artists travel great distances to photograph other cultures, Chicana artists like Montana know that they don’t have to go far to find people who haven’t historically been represented in art museums. For almost two decades, Montana has been turning the lens onto her own family and friends in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, sometimes to work through personal tragedy, sometimes to expose structural inequities, and sometimes, as in this image, to simply create beautiful portraits.

When Montana took this photograph, Mayra was telling a story about how she’d been jumped and beaten by a group of women. Bearing a black eye from this recent violence, she stands contemplative in the setting sun, seeming both powerful and vulnerable. Her thin eyebrows and large hoop earrings are often associated with LA chola culture, which has reclaimed a term that had been derogatory and transformed it into an identifier of solidarity and resistance.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)