Darren Vargas Nurses His Bruises at the Ropes

IN IMAGES

In 2025, American photographer Darren Vargas walked into a boxing gym in the Coachella Valley, California, where Lee Espinoza, a septuagenarian known locally as the godfather of boxing, has been training the neighborhood’s children free of charge since the 1980s.

By Guénola Pellen. Images by Darren Vargas.

Moretón means bruise in Spanish. Under this title, Darren Vargas gathers the images he took in this singular club, founded by a Mexican immigrant who became the builder of a sanctuary for the desert’s youth.

“Walking into that place for the first time… I couldn’t help but notice this overwhelming feeling of home,” he writes, likening the gym to the house of an old relative you love but haven’t seen in years.

Before the lens, Lee Espinoza offers a face made for the movies: the flattened nose of an old slugger, weathered brows, a gentle gaze behind his glasses, somewhere between Rocky Balboa and the patriarch nobody dares contradict.

Around him gravitate kids with bandaged fists and entire families in club tee-shirts, posing among belts in glass casings, trophies, and yellowed match reports stapled to the walls.

“This story is not about boxing,” Darren Vargas states, plainly. Here, children come “to build themselves up,” “to stay out of trouble,” “to reconcile and sometimes with themselves.” The film grain and warm tones of his images lend them the texture of a family album.

This book is also a tribute to his grandfather, Esmael. A man of few words but great generosity, who passed away in 2020. Darren Vargas finds in Lee Espinoza that same economy of silence, and addresses to him, through images, what he never managed to tell the other.

The shadow of another elder hovers over these pages. In 1993, photographer Martine Barrat published Do or Die, born of her years spent in the boxing clubs of the South Bronx, where she wrote: “It is in places where there is violence that I find love.” Darren Vargas, perhaps unknowingly, extends this tender lineage of the ring.

For boxing, a land of humble origins, keeps telling the same American story: that of men who shed their blood and sweat to be born again, men back from the brink, bound together as a makeshift family. Darren Vargas adds his own variation: others climb into the ring to escape poverty, he stands at the ropes to make peace with his dead.

Forgiveness is written between the lines. “I made many decisions out of fear, but I have been learning to forgive myself over the years,” the photographer confides, before thanking Lee Espinoza: “He allowed me into his house, to spectate and document, and asked for nothing in return.” Humble and generous, like his grandfather.

Moretón by Darren Vargas is published by Rocket Science Studios and available for $60. A donation from each copy sold goes back to the Lee Espinoza Coachella Valley Boxing Club.