No Te Dejes brings Mexican boxing culture to Dallas exhibition

No Te Dejes, an immersive exhibition about Mexican boxing culture, opens at Dallas’s Latino Cultural Center on August 29, 2026, and runs until October 9. The project is the result of five years of photography by Chicago-born artist, filmmaker and photographer David Hanes-González, who is based in Mexico City.

The exhibition presents boxing as more than competition. Through photographs, film, sound and large installations, it explores the faith, discipline, sacrifice and resilience connected to the sport and to the communities that sustain it.

Hanes-González places the visual world of Mexican boxing gyms alongside religious devotion. The display draws on the forms of rings, altars and the Stations of the Cross, linking the physical demands of training and fighting with spiritual endurance. Prayers before bouts, repeated drills, fear and the costs carried outside the ring all form part of the work.

The project focuses on the wider life around boxing rather than only on champions or professional contests. Its images include young fighters preparing for their first bouts, coaches passing knowledge across generations, relatives waiting at ringside and neighbourhood gyms functioning as community meeting places. Religious symbols and daily rituals also show how the sport is inherited within Mexican life.

The Dallas presentation will include a community photography project being developed with Dallas-Mexico Casa Guanajuato and GTO Boxing Club in Oak Cliff. A small group of local participants will work inside the club, photographing training and sparring while learning to record the atmosphere, emotion and culture surrounding the action. Hanes-González will lead the session, with further community and boxing partnerships under consideration.

Casa Guanajuato provides cultural, recreational and civic programmes in Oak Cliff, making the collaboration a link between the exhibition, local fighters and emerging photographers. Hanes-González, born to a Mexican mother and an American father, has spent recent years in Mexico exploring identity, faith and belonging through documentary photography, film and visual storytelling.

His work has been shown at venues including the Embassy of Mexico in Uruguay, the Mexican Consulate General in Raleigh, the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, LOOT Gallery in Mexico City and the Laemmle NoHo 7 Theater in Los Angeles. In 2025, he was chosen for Mexico’s Cultural Offer Catalog for 2025–2026 and received recognition from La Plataforma de Imágenes Contemporáneas of La Central de la Imagen.