"On the 26th of January in 1855, within the walls of Iglesia de San Juan Bautista in Motul de Carrillo Puerto in Yucatán, Mexico a young boy is baptized and adopted by Paulina Palma. The circumstances surrounding his adoption are unknown. The exact date of his birth is unknown. On the nearly illegible Certificate of Baptism, one of only two surviving records, there is only a mention that he was born in Motul de Carrillo Puerto and that he resided, possibly with his parents, on the property of Paulina Palma. As she adopted him as her own son, he was given her last name: Juan de la Cruz Palma. The details of Juan de la Cruz Palmas short life (he died at approximately twenty-five years of age) are, much like the lives of his children, grandchildren, and to a certain extent his great-grandchildren, riddled with seemingly inconceivable expanses between what is known and what is unknown. Utilizing forms such as ekphrasis and epistolary, the collection sources photographs, postcards, and official documents as deftly as rumor, suspicion, and supposition to uncover the consequences, by choice or circumstance, of migration and immigration between Mexico and the United States across seven generations. Surveying the terrain of what one knows and does not know, what one inherits and disinherits, the collection wrestles with every departure, each arrival, and the authors inevitable return to determine where and to whom he belongs.

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