Photographer Maria Nancy Thomas and poet Rashaad Thomas, a creative couple based in South Phoenix, are using their work to explore a region brimming with the histories of marginalized communities.
This article is part of our Living Histories series, a continuation of the ideas explored in Southwest Contemporary Vol. 9.
Maria Nancy Thomas has taken hundreds of photographs of South Phoenix in recent years, eager to document life in the city she and her husband, poet Rashaad Thomas, call home. She’s motivated in part by the region’s history, but also the rapid shifts this community is undergoing now, decades after she moved from Mexico to Arizona as a toddler.
Likewise, Rashaad has been highlighting life in South Phoenix through the prism of poetry, addressing both historical and contemporary manifestations of racism from redlining to gentrification that he’s encountered since moving to metropolitan Phoenix during his service in the U.S. Air Force.
South Phoenix is a region separated from downtown by railroad tracks, where early twentieth century race restrictions led to segregation of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, as recounted by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Innovation Group, as well as Rashaad Thomas and other residents who’ve called out ongoing economic and environmental injustices.
“I’m hoping our work will serve as a reminder of what is currently there, because it’s changing so quickly,” says Rashaad. “South Phoenix is primarily Black and Brown people, and I want to be a part of that history and legacy,” he adds.
Together, they’ve witnessed an onslaught of new developments including gated communities, the rise of housing costs, decreasing farmland, and the loss of small businesses during construction of a new light rail line. “We’re even seeing the rebranding of South Phoenix to South Mountain, as part of urban ‘renewal’ and ‘rejuvenation’ efforts,” he explains.
It’s all fodder for Rashaad’s poetry, which he shares primarily through live readings, published writings, and regular Instagram posts with short pieces he calls “failed poetry” as a rhetorical means of addressing the ways writers constantly wonder whether their words will be rejected.
Nancy’s body of work includes not only documentation of streets, buildings, signs, and other physical attributes of the urban landscape, but also portraits of people who live among them. For her ongoing series titled I am South Phoenix launched in 2022, she’s started photographing primarily family and friends, with plans to expand her subjects to other community members.
Ultimately, she’d like to publish a related book.
“I want to focus on the people that are already here, taking portraits of them in their homes and also doing interviews, as well as doing research about what this area was like 100 years ago,” Nancy says. “We’d also like to do a project together,” she says of working with Rashaad.
For both artists, finding time and space to fully realize their creative vision has been challenging. Nancy works full-time in the arts sector, and Rashaad is a freelance journalist and stay-at-home father. Beyond parenting, they recount the scarcity of resources such as funding opportunities and creative spaces for showing their work.
Recalling a particularly prolific period of time Nancy spent in Mexico, Rashaad says he’d love to see her participate in a residency where she could really focus on her photographic practice. But he’s also thinking about fresh ways to create and present more of his own experimental works in traditional spaces such as art galleries.
Reflecting on the wider context of their work, Rashaad draws from his own educational experiences growing up in Minot, North Dakota, a state he calls “the Jim Crow of the North.” “We didn’t learn our own histories,” he says. “For my whole life I only read about white artists and authors, until I got to college and began studying my own history.”
It’s one reason Rashaad feels so committed to the work that he and Nancy are doing in their own community. “We existed before slavery, before being forced to live south of Van Buren, before the stigma of South Phoenix as a violent place where only the impoverished live and people are forgotten,” he says. “I want people to see us differently than we’re painted by outsiders.”
