Who are we?

Querencia is a poetic concept rooted in the verb querer, to love, to want. It names the place where you feel most yourself, most grounded, most at home. A sanctuary not just of physical space but of belonging, of ancestral connection, of the kind of safety that lets you draw strength and return to what matters.

In Hispanic and Latin American cultures, querencia evokes a deep attachment to land, to community, to the places that made you. It is the childhood home, the familiar landscape, the arms of someone you trust. It is where you are most fully you.

We chose this name deliberately. The communities we work with and alongside, migrants, deportees, colonia residents, border families, are people whose querencia has been disrupted, threatened, or taken from them by policy, by enforcement, by displacement. Our research is not about them from a distance. It starts from that shared understanding of what it means to belong somewhere, and what it costs when that belonging is undone.

La Querencia Lab is a feminist research and methods laboratory housed in the Department of Sociology at New Mexico State University. We develop, test, and disseminate participatory and visual research frameworks for transborder, multilingual, and community-based research contexts. Knowledge produced in, from, and accountable to the communities that make it possible.