It's a bird. It's a plane. No, it's a Mexican! One woman's photography changes the definition and race of superheroes.

DULCE PINZON IS A PHOTOGRAPHER with a clear objective. She wants to challenge what is socially accepted and shift public consciousness.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Her recent series of photographs, The Real Story of the Superheroes, portrays Mexican immigrants at work dressed in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Pinzon's work is so timely that audiences may believe the project was conceived after the proposal of new immigration legislation drove immigrants to protest in the streets earlier this year. However the project began germinating after September 11, 2001, when the notion of "hero" was brought to the foreground of public conversations.

Pinzon, who like her subjects hails from Mexico, isn't shy about the intersection of art and politics. At the end of an hour-long interview on her photographs, she comments, "I thought we were going to talk more about politics."

Her faint voice vibrates over the telephone line as she describes the Mexican president's visit to New York City following the destruction of the Twin Towers. Vicente Fox publicly recognized the Mexican women whose husbands died on September 11; his vow was to help the widows as they grieved the loss of "Mexico's heroes." Unfortunately, action did not follow his public statement. Pinzon was again frustrated with the Mexican government's inertia.

It is not a fluke that themes of immigration, race and identity consistently appear in her photographs. Pinzon, who now lives in Queens, New York, came to the United States in 1995 following the worst devaluation of Mexican currency in history. "There were so many limitations," she recalls. She saw many Mexicans lose their life savings.

She arrived in the United States with a student visa to train as a photographer and stayed on with a tourist visa that did not allow her to work. Without proper documentation, she was forced to earn a living as a waitress. She then worked as a labor organizer and an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor for a nonprofit organization before dedicating herself completely to her photography.