Fernando is a multidisciplinary artist and documentarian based in New Orleans. Working across photography, video, and writing, his practice reflects a Mexican and Indigenous worldview while centering people of color, immigrants, and diasporic communities in the U.S. Through portraiture, street photography, and layered visual storytelling, Fernando explores the beauty, complexity, and resilience of everyday life—while also engaging themes of cultural celebration, displacement, and social justice. His work offers both intimate glimpses and critical reflections shaped by his experience as a Mexican artist living and creating in the U.S. 

Fruit for Thought: Journeys Between New Orleans and Honduras is a three-part documentary series exploring the connections between Honduras and New Orleans through three key food commodities: bananas, palm oil, and coffee. Each episode traces these foods, revealing deeper histories of labor, immigration, tourism, indigeneity, environment, architecture, and cultural exchange. The series is unified through the story of Sllim Ydur, an Afro-Honduran musician based in New Orleans, whose experiences serve as a narrative thread across all three episodes. Arriving in New Orleans in 1959 as a young laborer on the banana docks, Sllim went on to pioneer Caribbean funk music, run for mayor in the 1990s, and later become a DJ and community organizer in the 21st century. His journey—from unloading bananas to political organizing and music-making—embodies the longstanding, reciprocal ties between Honduras and the Crescent City. Overall, the series weaves together the global journeys of the stories of people–from banana moguls to dockworkers to bakery owners and construction workers–through the framework of food commodities. This documentary is rooted in local contexts and place-based histories, with themes that offer critical insights into some of the most pressing historical and contemporary issues of the twenty-first century.  

Portrait by Fernando Lopez