“I’M NOT WEIRD,” reads the back cover of Nuevo South’s inaugural issue. “SOY UN DURAMITA.”
Rodrigo Dorfman, the visionary behind the magazine, says that there is no static definition of “Duramita”—instead, it’s an invitation to second-generation Latino immigrants living in Durham to carve their own identity.
“You ask someone ‘Where are you from?’ And they say ‘Well, I was born in Durham but I’m from Mexico, really. My parents are from Mexico, or from Guatemala, El Salvador,’” Rodrigo says. “They don’t say ‘I’m a Duramite,’ But if you say ‘What if you’re a Duramita? What does that mean?’” says Dorfman. He doesn’t expect people to use the label that much but loves that it pushes people to examine their own identity.
Sure, the “DURAMITAS” edition of Nuevo South isn’t “weird.” But the new quarterly publication is lots of other things: independent, grounded, and ambitious. It’s also impressive to experience, with over 100 full-color pages of local Latino artists’ photojournalism, speculative fiction, and more, bound together into one tangible, bilingual, multi-generational collaboration.
Dorfman, a Durham documentarian and head of local culture and media organization the Center for the Nuevo South, sees projects like the magazine as a way to address the cultural needs of the Southeast’s Latino community. Most recently, Dorfman and the Center for the Nuevo South collaborated with PBS and Firelight Media to create Bulls and Saints, a film about an undocumented family returning home to Mexico after 20 years in the United States.
“[Latinos] have been here for centuries, passing through the night in many ways, mostly as you know, migrant workers or academics or doctors or nannies of academics,” Dorfman explains, referencing immigration to the Southeast. “Mostly it was just people never settling down.”
“At first, all the needs were so urgent,” he continues “You needed security, you needed translators, you needed a way to get a bank account, you needed to get your kids in schools. These needs were urgent, and they took over all the services given to our community because we were in a constant emergency situation. So culture was never institutionalized.”
It’s easy to see the connection between Dorfman, who speaks about his work and community with an energy that spills out in paragraph-long sentences, and the magazine, an artistic product of content that is so varied and yet tells a continuous story from front cover to back.
The story, told in parts, is that of the young Latinos who call Durham home.
In its early pages, the magazine describes “The Great Latino Migration,” a phrase coined by Chapel Hill journalist Paul Cuadros, to describe the waves of Latinos who arrived in the South following President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Reform and Control Act, which gave 2.7 million undocumented migrants a path to citizenship. Around the same time, industries like agriculture, construction, and manufacturing began recruiting cheap labor from south of the U.S. border.
Decades after the Great Latino Migration, it’s up to the next generation to build their own sense of self—whether that’s as a “Duramita” or not.
One science-fiction comic in the magazine, created by daughter-father duo Alegría Rojas-Patino and Miguel Rojas Sotelo,shows pieces of the city—Duke Chapel, the Lucky Strike water tower—taking off into space like rocket ships. Another piece shows the results of a community portrait studio set up in various locations around Durham.
Dorian Gomez, a filmmaker and storyteller whose feature on the Latino-owned businesses of Roxboro Street appears in the issue, says that her generation is characterized by a “DIY spirit.”
“The lack of spaces, the lack of particular resources pushes you to get creative,” says Gomez of her work. “It’s about using minimal resources to create something big, using something as simple as your phone or using an old camera that was used for family photos, and without having to think too much about all of the fancy stencils or the mirrorless cameras. It’s exposure to the most raw version of a medium. And it becomes something much bigger than what was intended or imagined.”
“A record that we exist”
For both Gomez and Dorfman, the analog nature of the magazine is part of what made the concept so appealing from the beginning. In an era when print publications are thinning out, Spanish-language publications are rarer still. Those that do exist often serve larger metros like New York or Los Angeles, and few prioritize visual culture the way Nuevo South does.
“We’re completely bound to the digital age because that is how we communicate with the folks back home,” says Dorfman. But he also describes a connection to the built because so much of the labor done by Latino migrants over the decades has been so physical. “They came to build factories, they came to build houses. They came to work in the chicken plants and pork industry and carpet industry. There’s this feeling that what we value is that which we can touch with our hands.”
Gomez adds that there’s value, too, in leaving something physical for future generations.
“My grandmother used to make some of my clothes,” she says. Similarly, creating a magazine involves “being able to craft something that is also connected to history, that is your history and other people’s histories, a record of the fact that we exist and we will exist.”
Nuevo South, which is fiscally backed by the Southern Documentary Fund, launched with a grant from Durham’s Office on Youth. But going forward, Dorfman and his collaborators hope that the magazine will attract enough buyers and subscribers to continue with a quarterly edition. For those interested in buying a copy, you can find one at the Scrap Exchange, the Regulator, or Tienda Don Becerra. You can also subscribe for future editions at docupainting.com/nuevo-south-magazine.
By excellent coincidence, the boxes containing the first run of the magazine arrive at Dorfman’s door as our video-chat interview concludes. On-screen, Gomez and I watch as he pulls out the first copy. Although he knows exactly what’s in the magazine, he looks just as impressed as someone seeing it for the very first time.
“Oh my god, there are 40 boxes. [Gomez], get your ass down here,” he says to us. “It looks freaking amazing.”
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at chase@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.