I was born in the United States to parents both born in Cuba. I’ve spent my life balancing on that hyphen between Cuban and American, and finally decided that it was time to explore my Cuban-ness, and the history of my family — a history I distanced myself from.

And so it was that I found myself in 2016 traveling by car in Cuba, from Havana to Cienfuegos, then to Camagüey, Las Tunas and Trinidad. Along the way, I witnessed the daily lives of the people through dusty windows and heard stories from them wherever we stopped. I took it all in and searched for myself — my roots — in the faces and lives of strangers.

I photographed the Cubans with a distance between us filled with my fears of not belonging, and my longing to belong. I collected images of them, as if possessing them — these snapshots of their lives — would fill the gap that left me teetering between the two worlds of my hyphenate identity.

It took those years after my first visit, and countless hours spent poring over the photos I made there, to see what was in plain sight. In my photographic menagerie I saw their stories, and mine, and that of us all.

The space I inhabit on that hyphen isn’t a void, it isn’t a confusion of identity. It is my identity.