By Alice Osborn

Lake Tahoe attracts outdoor lovers from all over the world. Catering to these visitors is a nearly invisible corps of service workers, many of them women from Latin America who work in minimum wage jobs as cooks, servers, and housekeepers. Though they live and work in one of the most beautiful places in the world, few ever have the opportunity to venture outside.

When Truckee Cultural District-based photographer and storyteller Paola Bragado heard funding was available to create awareness for societal issues through the Upstate California Creative Corps, she decided to build upon two decades of work improving the lives of the women who work alongside her in Tahoe’s service industry.

Bragado, who grew up in the mountains of Spain, has traveled the world capturing the stories of migrant women. Many of her subjects are sex workers who labor in clubs and cabarets serving men. Years ago, working in a sex shop in Ibiza, she began to present her colleagues through a new artistic lens, capturing them on camera in yoga poses. “Few would have connected yoga—an internal discipline of the mind and spirit—with my fellow dancers and their external practice. And our customers began to relate to these women, who were normally invisible, in a new way. These women now had agency and autonomy, and were central to their own lives—protagonists of their own stories.”

Over the course of almost three decades, Bragado has worked in food services in the Truckee-Tahoe area, building trust and camaraderie with women whose stories are similar to her own. “I am their friend; I am part of them. I’m talking about this community from the inside. I’m seeing their stories from the inside,” she says.

For her Creative Corps project, Bragado gathered a small group of migrant women who worked at the same restaurant as her in Kings Beach, a large Latinx community in Tahoe. Her goal has been to introduce her co-workers to the very same activities that attract visitors to Tahoe, but which are so rarely available to them.

Bragado led project participants on weekly cross-country skiing trips and facilitated art classes at Sierra Community House in Kings Beach. Participants were able to share their stories in a relaxed and creative environment, all while doing something with their hands that did not involve making food or doing chores for others. 

The success of the project, “No somos Animales Exóticos,” or “We are not Exotic Animals,” was due, in part, to Bragado’s own history as a nomad. “My artistic practice has always been linked to places of passage: spaces and cities that I have temporarily inhabited and in which I have shared spaces with other women who followed trajectories similar to mine.”

Visibility is central to Bragado’s work, but she has had to balance this with the need to protect the identities of her subjects, many of whom are living in the U.S. without documentation. Her solution has been to create animal masks and fashion ski regalia in the style of a traditional Oaxacan Tiliche–a dancing dress made for Carnaval out of brightly colored rags. The participants floated down the ski tracks at Tahoe Donner in their colorful ski dresses and masks, in stark contrast to the snow. They were no longer invisible. 

“One of them said, ‘I have never been outside’ and started dancing,” recalled Bragado. “When they arrived at work they said, ‘I went skiing!’ It was very beautiful. The neighbors saw them and they were part of the territory. We are skiing and filling the clean landscape with all of these colors. We are here to enjoy it too.”

Learn more about Paola and her work at paolabragado.com and at upstatecreativecorps.org.