Voces y Caras

Created by Latinx students at the University of North Florida, Voces y Caras (Voices and Faces) is an oral history and digital humanities project documenting the voices of local Latinx residents in the Jacksonville Metropolitan Area. Over the past fourteen years, hundreds of interviews have been conducted, recorded, transcribed and archived-forming a rich database of stories focused on immigration, heritage, and the diversity of experiences among Latinx cultures. Through its public exhibits, website, and annual public presentations, the Voces y Caras project has showcased largely invisible perspectives, connecting heritage Spanish speakers with their cultural and historical backgrounds, and allowing students to recognize themselves in the stories of others-ultimately creating communities inside and outside the classroom.

Since its inception, Voces y Caras has taken place during Hispanic Heritage Month, featuring a local artist. This year, MOCA Jacksonville is honored to present Cuban-American artist, Ricder Ricardo. Ricardo's multidisciplinary practice investigates migration, memory, and the ongoing negotiation of identity shaped by displacement. Born in rural Cuba, Ricardo relocated to the United States at the age of fifteen, and his work emerges from lived diasporic experience, inhabiting a mutable in-between space where belonging is continually redefined.

Led by Dr. Constanza López Baquero, professor of Latin American literatures and Spanish at UNF, Voces y Caras is an affiliated project of the UNF Digital Humanities Institute. Special Thanks to Michael Boyles, coordinator of graphic design in the UNF Office of Teaching and Learning, and UNF Spanish and psychology major Alma Cruz, project intern.

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About the Artist

Ricder Ricardo is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates migration, memory, and the ongoing negotiation of identity shaped by displacement. Born in rural Havana and relocating to the United States at the age of fifteen, his work emerges from lived diasporic experience, inhabiting a mutable in-between space where belonging is continually redefined.

Working across painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and installation, Ricder constructs figurative and surreal environments that reflect the psychological and political conditions of migration. His visual work is often contextualized by his own written poems, which draw from personal diasporic experience and serve as parallel sites of reflection and potentiality. Influenced by thinkers who engage borderlands, futurity, and hybrid identity, his practice reimagines cultural memory as a generative space shaped by fragmentation, resilience, and becoming.

Ricder is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Art at Florida State University and holds a BFA from the University of North Florida. His work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Coronado C3 Gallery and The Bridge Art Foundation in San Andreas, California, as well as Hera Gallery in Rhode Island. His work has also been featured in publications such as RADX Magazine, Talon Review, and JAX TDY. Through a multidisciplinary and research-driven approach, Ricder positions displacement not as rupture alone, but as a site of potential—one capable of producing new cultural imaginaries and modes of belonging.