Xavier Tavera, from “Dulce Maria and Other Stories.” Courtesy of Serpentina Arts.

As you enter the small Gordon Parks Gallery at Metro State University for Xavier Tavera’s new photography show, your eyes go first to the typewriters: a battered old Olympia, inexplicably covered with Simpsons stickers; an ancient IBM word processor; an avocado-green manual model with an artfully crushed plastic ashtray near at hand. Of the 10 large-format prints on view for “Dulce Maria and Other Stories,” fully three of them zoom in on old-fashioned typewriters and the hands captured in the act of using them. The exhibition essay indicates that both the machines and the deft fingers blurring across their keys belong to the professional scribes of Mexico City’s Plaza de Santo Domingo, who make their living typing letters on behalf of those who can’t write for themselves.

The rest of Tavera’s photos are formal portraits, a few individuals and couples, and a number of family shots. In one photo, seated next to his wife on the couch and holding a frilly-dressed little girl in his lap, is a father with his sons –all the menfolk are wearing suits and ties and luchadoras masks. In another, a rodeo clown in face paint and full regalia sits, straightfaced, surrounded by his wife and an ascending line-up of six wholly ordinary kids. Three costumed wise men, ready to assume spots in a passion play but for their stocking feet, stand with the rest of the family for a picture in front of the living room window. A shaman poses solemnly with the ritual tools and fringed apparel of his trade; behind him are shelves laden with LPs and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, and bookshelves packed to overflowing with dog-eared thrillers and sentimental pop fiction.

A bull-necked, heavily tattooed man in white undershirt figures prominently in one of the photographs – at first glance, he’s the picture of a street tough, straight out of central casting. But, as with all of Tavera’s subjects, such glib caricature is at odds with the other details in the shot: the careful crease in his brand-new jeans, or the bevy of fresh-faced, well-heeled and beaming women and girls on his arms.

These are Mexican-American families, Minnesotans by choice and circumstance. Many have turned out for Tavera’s portraits dressed in their Sunday best, smiling for the camera in their living rooms, the younger generations arrayed like fruits of the harvest among parents and grandparents. And in the background is the ordinary stuff of their lives – aging curtains and sofas, walls filled with framed family pictures, mantles with tchotchkes and assorted heirloom whatnots.

As show curator Douglas Padilla writes in his exhibition essay, “Tavera knows that there is magic in the world. As a photographer, he knows that there are doorways to that magic. As a Mexican, he knows that those doorways can be part of everyday life.”

Tavera is known for his work photographing in the margins of community: Latino transvestites and gang members, rodeo participants, passion play actors, circus performers and wrestlers. His work is remarkable for its subtlety; he consistently eschews the sensational for details that showcase the paradoxes lurking in easy characterizations of “the other.”

Xavier Tavera, from “Dulce Maria and Other Stories.” Courtesy of Serpentina Arts.

In the “Dulce Maria” series, he puts those grand, sometimes outlandish figures in the everyday context of their homes and loved ones. Tavera focuses on the human particulars behind those sweeping cultural signifiers, and it’s precisely those idiosyncratic, type-confounding details which draw you into these images’ stories.

The photos are beautiful and evocative; there are no shy colors here. These are lives filled with vivid hues: warm orange and reds, cobalt and sky blues. Tavera’s images are full of intriguing juxtapositions that, as the title suggests, are gravid with narrative possibilities. His is such an inviting, generous gaze: brimming with curiosity, gentle wit and genuine wonder at the abundant variety, and common core, of human experience.

“Dulce Maria and Other Stories: Photographic work of Xavier Tavera,” curated by Douglas Padilla, is on view through October 4 in the Gordon Parks Gallery at Metropolitan State University, 645 East Seventh St., St. Paul.