Nowhere to go

Nowhere to Go documents the political and geographical isolation of childbirth in rural America. In a country where one in ten people of childbearing age lives in Texas, maternity wards are vanishing. Set in the windswept plains of the Texas Panhandle, this work follows Silvia Esparza, a Mexican-American midwife, as she provides critical prenatal and birthing care in a region increasingly abandoned by the healthcare system.

Through an intimate visual language, the project traces the gestures of care and endurance in moments of extreme vulnerability. It is a portrait of women laboring not only through birth, but in resistance, choosing care that exists outside a collapsing healthcare system, one that too often fails to recognize them as full human beings when their lives are weighed against profit margins. In these births, care becomes defiance, and presence a political act.

By turning away from the clinical gaze, Nowhere to Go chooses instead to dwell in intimacy, to focus on the quiet beauty of the act of giving life, and on the bonds forged in those fragile, essential moments of care.

Beyond documenting a maternal health crisis, the project explores the moral reconfiguration of rural America in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturning. It reveals a deeply fractured nation, where bodies, especially those of women, are caught in the crossfire of culture wars. Deeply unequal access to care has become a fault line of American democracy. Nowhere to Go asks a simple, urgent question: what becomes of a society when the most essential forms of care are pushed to the margins?