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In the images that make up the “Origins & Displacements” series, the signs that Camargo holds cover his face, reënacting the erasure of the city’s Mexican heritage, and downplaying his own subjectivity in order to highlight the history he’s trying to tell. At the same time, he wears Nike Cortez sneakers, a Baja hoodie, and Dickie’s shorts or rolled-up jeans, in order to signal his Chicano aesthetic. His presence in the images, and his recovery of Anaheim’s Indigenous, Mexican, and Mexican American history, is part of what he describes as a move toward a post-colonial Los Angeles shaped by “Chicano futurism,” which, for him, means a desire to write new histories of Anaheim that are present- and future-oriented.
Camargo told me that the “signage work” in “Origins & Displacements” is “very direct and confrontational.” He had a clear message to deliver. But Camargo also captures the humanity of the Mexican Americans who’ve lived in Anaheim for decades, including his own family members. One photo, “Getting That Rasquache Haircut,” shows his brother cutting his father’s hair, holding his head in place as he runs over his scalp with clippers. His father’s eyes are closed, and his facial expression is restful. Another, “More Work After Work,” shows his mother, an employee at Northgate Market, a local grocery-store chain, with her back to the camera, washing dishes in a kitchen illuminated only by a curtained window. When his father first saw the photo of him getting a haircut hanging in a gallery, he asked his son why anyone would be interested in seeing it. But now, Camargo says, his father understands that there aren’t many pictures of people who look like him hanging in galleries or museums: “There’s an absence of these kinds of moments in these places.” Camargo told me that it took about a decade for his father, who, like many other Latino parents, wanted his kids to become doctors or lawyers, to realize, “oh, this is why he chose photography as a career, and why he wants to tell this story.”
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