The Portrait as Historical Document
From 2012 to 2014, driven by curiosity, José Manuel Mireles attended and photographed the collective wedding ceremony in Ciudad Juárez. The particular character of the couples who take part in this event drew his attention away from the spectacle of thousands of people getting married on the same day.

These portraits not only capture the moment a couple decides to marry but also tell, through that event, a fragment of the city’s history—one closely tied to migration and its shifting social dynamics. As Mireles notes, many of the couples were people who had arrived in the city during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s seeking work or hoping to cross into the United States, and who, for various reasons, remained at the border.