Meet Pedro. And Pedro. And Pedro.

The first Pedro appeared outside a Mexican bodega in Sunset Park. He rushed out of the shop still in his apron to meet the photographer snapping pictures of the facade of his building. “Hey! Why don’t you take a photo of me, too?” he called out to her playfully in Spanish.

Sofía Muñoz Boullosa, a recent arrival from Mexico and a then-student at the International Center of Photography in New York, laughed and answered him back in the language they shared: “¡Sí, claro!”

She snapped photos of him and they sat and talked for hours, mostly about things she couldn’t explain to the people she knew in New York: Mexican culture and food and the things she missed about home. His name was Pedro and he was the owner of the bodega she had been photographing. Something about that name—very common in Mexico and representative of the culture, almost like “John” in English—planted a seed for Muñoz.

“I thought, ‘What if I look for all the Mexican Pedros in New York?’”says Muñoz. “I could say something impactful, maybe, about immigration and about Mexican people in the United States.”

So she set out on her search, scouring social networks like Twitter and Facebook for Pedros nearby, and walking through Mexican neighborhoods asking random people on the street if they knew anyone named Pedro. She met seven Mexican Pedros by the time of her final exhibition at the ICP, and she arrayed all of their photos together as her final project, titled “Pedro.”

The photos are illuminating in their diversity. The Pedros have wildly different life paths and dreams for the future—one is a bartender training to be a professional boxing coach, another is a ballet dancer dreaming of running a successful fashion blog. But Muñoz says they have a shared hope for their future as Americans. They all surprised her with their total willingness to tell their stories, especially those living in the country without documentation.

“I thought some people wouldn’t want to have their picture taken. But it was just the opposite,” says Muñoz. “When I told them about the project, they were excited. They all did it as a way to stand up for Mexico.”

The political climate in which her artwork emerges is not lost on Muñoz, nor was it lost on her subjects. She arrived in the U.S. just as Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican criminals and rapists pouring across the border were dominating national conversation on the topic of immigration. Before she started this project, she had been teaching photography classes to undocumented young people from Latin America, and she decided after that experience that her work in the U.S. would focus on issues of identity and immigration. She wanted to present an alternative version of the narrative being advanced in politics. Her narrative would portray immigrants as individual people with specific stories and life circumstances that were worth knowing.

“I think a lot of people in the U.S. view immigrants largely as a group, and not as individuals. And that was the idea: to show that immigrants and their humanity go so much deeper than any [immigration] status,” says Muñoz.

Her project has, in whimsical ways, also galvanized her subjects and given them a deeper sense of kinship with one another. At her exhibition in early summer, a few of the Pedros met one another, milling in the crowd and looking at their own faces featured prominently on the wall. Just a few mornings ago, Pedro Cruz, her first subject, called her to say he had seen his face in the Washington Post. A friend had shown it to him and he was beaming with pride.

“He said he hopes this changes some people’s mentality about him and people like him,” says Muñoz. “And he said he hopes the photos reach people who need to have their minds changed.”