MAPPING BELONGING
Latina Women, Migration, Memory, and Collective Creation
What does it mean to belong
somewhere new?
Twenty Latina immigrant women in Calgary came together to remember, create, and reimagine what home, belonging, and community mean after migration.
Through art, storytelling, memory, and collective creation, their individual journeys became something shared.
Part of the research project Everyday Pedagogies of Belonging: Finding One’s Way Through Multicultural Integration in Calgary.
Why this project exists?
Belonging is not only about where we live.
Migration changes our relationship with places, memories, language, community, and even the idea of home. Everyday Pedagogies of Belonging explores these transformations through the lived experiences of Latina immigrant women in Calgary.
Rather than asking only “Where do you come from?”, the project asks:
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What did you bring with you?
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What has changed?
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What makes a place feel like home?
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And how do we create belonging together?
The project brings research, community, storytelling, and artistic creation into conversation to explore how belonging is remembered, experienced, and built.
20 Women.
20 Journeys.
One Shared Space.
WOMEN
They arrived in Calgary at different moments and through different paths.
Some have called Canada home for decades. Others arrived only recently.
They come from countries including Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador and other parts of Latin America, carrying different memories, professions, families, languages, expectations, and experiences of migration.
But during the project, those different stories began to connect.
Women. Mothers. Daughters. Sisters. Friends. Latinas. Artists.
WORKSHOP
The women came together through a creative-sensory workshop designed as a safe space to reflect, share, feel, and create.
Across the sessions, they explored migration not only through words, but through memories, colours, textures, images, objects, emotions, sounds, stories, and art.
The workshop became a space where personal memories could be transformed into something visible — and eventually something collective.
Three Sessions. Three Questions. One Collective Journey.
This is where the story really begins
What do we need to create a place where life can grow?
The journey began with home.
Each woman created a terrarium, using the small ecosystem as a metaphor for the environment we need to sustain life.
Through plants, objects, collage, drawing, and writing, they reflected on the homes they had left behind, the homes they were creating in Calgary, and the homes they still imagined for the future.
How do we find our place in a new territory?
The second exploration focused on belonging. Each woman received one piece of a larger puzzle.
On it, she created a personal sensory map of migration — combining places, memories, emotions, people, languages, colours, textures, and symbols connected to her experience of building a life in Calgary.
Each piece told a different story. And none of them was complete on its own.
What happens when our stories meet?
In the final session, the pieces came together. One by one, the women shared what their artwork represented.
Connections began to appear: similar emotions, memories, losses, hopes, places, and ways of creating home.
The individual puzzle pieces were then assembled into a collective cartography of belonging. Twenty personal journeys became one collective piece.
The final exercise invited the women to identify what connected their individual pieces and what the collective map could reveal about belonging as Latina immigrants in Calgary.
They came to tell their own stories.
They left having created a story together.
What We Created Together
The workshop transformed women stories into collective expressions of migration, memory, and belonging.
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Collective Artwork: Individual puzzle pieces came together to create a collective cartography of belonging, connecting different experiences of home, migration, and community.
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Art Exhibition: Sensory Cartographies of Belonging brings the collective artwork into a public space, inviting the community to experience these stories through art.
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Community Book: The Poetics of Our (Non-)Belonging brings together personal narratives, photographs, and artistic creations from the women who participated in the workshop.
Sensory Cartographies of Belonging
Discover the collective artwork and the stories of migration, home, and belonging behind its creation.
Grand Opening
September 5 · 1:00 PM
Exhibition
September 6–10 · 10:00 AM–5:00 PM
Closing Ceremony
September 10 · 6:00 PM
The Little Gallery
University of Calgary, Main Campus
Located on the 6th floor of the Art Building
About the Project
Everyday Pedagogies of Belonging: Finding One’s Way Through Multicultural Integration in Calgary is coordinated by Laura Montes de Oca, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, and Verónica Briseño Castrejón, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, in collaboration with Centro Latino.
Funded through the University of Calgary Start-up Fund.
Belonging is something we build together.
Landing page design and content by Victoria Soledad Castro.