Women Photographers and Mexican Modernity: Framing the Twentieth Century [1 ed.] 1032313560, 9781032313566

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Women Photographers and Mexican Modernity

The photographers discussed in this book probe the most contentious aspects of social organization in Mexico, questioning what it means to belong, to be Mexican, to experience modernity, and to create art as a culturally, politically, or racially marginalized person. By choosing human subjects, spaces, and aesthetics excluded from the Lettered City, each of the photographers discussed in this volume produces a corpus of art that contests dominant narratives of social and cultural modernization in Mexico. Taken together, their work represents diverging and diverse notions of what is meant by Mexican modernity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography, women’s studies, and Mexican studies. Julia R. Brown is Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University. She served as associate editor for the journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos from 2017 to 2020. Her research is concerned with Indigenous representation in Mexican visual cultures. She is a Fulbright-García Robles recipient. Radmila Stefkova is an education technology professional and researches media and visual literature. She has served as an associate editor for the Spanish and Portuguese Review for three years and as a regular contributor to the cultural magazine Latin American Literature Today. Tamara R. Williams is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Executive Director of the Wang Center for Global Education at Pacific Lutheran University. Her area of specialization is the Latin American long poem.

Routledge Research in Gender and Art

Routledge Research in Gender and Art is a new series in art history and visual studies, focusing on gender, sexuality, and feminism. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. French Women Orientalist Artists, 1861-1956 Cross-Cultural Contacts and Depictions of Difference Mary Kelly Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists Mistress-Pieces Edited by Brenda Schmahmann On the Nude Looking Anew at the Naked Body in Art Edited by Nicholas Chare and Ersy Contogouris Nell Walden, Der Sturm, and the Collaborative Cultures of Modern Art Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe Sexually Explicit Art, Feminist Theory, and Gender in the 1970s Christian Liclair Food, Feminism, and Women’s Art in 1970s Southern California Emily Elizabeth Goodman Women, Collecting, and Cultures Beyond Europe Edited by Arlene Leis Women Photographers and Mexican Modernity Framing the Twentieth Century Edited by Julia R. Brown, Radmila Stefkova, and Tamara R. Williams

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Genderand-Art/book-series/RRGA

Women Photographers and Mexican Modernity Framing the Twentieth Century

Edited by Julia R. Brown, Radmila Stefkova, and Tamara R. Williams

Designed cover image: Juana López López. Mi tía está tomando fotos. [My aunt is taking photos]. Chiapas, Undated. Courtesy of Marta López López. First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Julia R. Brown, Radmila Stefkova, and Tamara Williams; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Julia R. Brown, Radmila Stefkova, and Tamara Williams to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032313566 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032313573 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003309352 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix 1

PART I

Gendering the Gaze: Frame, Context, Collaboration

15

1 In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?)

17

ELI BARTRA

2 The Margins and Potential Horizons of Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Modernity in Four Photographs by Tina Modotti, Kati Horna, Mariana Yampolsky, and Elsa Medina

31

RYAN LONG

PART II

Counter-Perspectives: Ideologies, Subjectivity, and Corporeality

43

3 Earth Images: Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico

45

ELISSA J. RASHKIN

4 Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography

58

NATHANIAL GARDNER

5 Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other: On the Photographic Communication of Graciela Iturbide

76

TANIUS KARAM

6 Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity: Lourdes Grobet’s Family Portraits DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER

90

vi Contents PART III

Re-Presenting Gender and Race

105

7 Solidarity and Witnessing in the Photographs of Marta Zarak

107

VIVIANE MAHIEUX

8 A Record of Things Seen: The Photographs of Frida Hartz in Irma Pineda’s Guie’ni Zebe/La flor que se llevó

119

TAMARA R. WILLIAMS

9 Seeing and Feeling the 1990s: Phototextual Explorations by Maruch Sántiz Gómez and Xunka’ López Díaz

133

JULIA R. BROWN

10 The Untold Story of Black Mexico: Uncovering the Identity of the Afro-Descendant Woman in the Photography of Koral Carballo and Mara Sánchez Renero

148

ROSITA SCERBO

Epilogue

164

Index

167

Contributors

Eli Bartra is a distinguished professor at the Metropolitan Autonomous UniversityXochimilco and National Research Emeritus of the Sistema Nacional de Escritores (SNI, CONACYT) and resides in Mexico. Born in 1947, Bartra holds a doctorate of Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and is the author of Nude and Naked Women in the Arts: Mexico and Beyond; Feminism and Folk Art; Women in Mexican Folk Art; and Frida Khalo: mujer, ideología y arte, as well as the coordinator of Debates en torno a una metodología feminista, among many other publications. Julia R. Brown is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Film at Florida Atlantic University. She resides in the United States. Brown holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was previously Editorial Assistant for Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. Her forthcoming monograph examines the interstices of National territory, Indigenous territories, and visual cultures in twentieth-century Mexico. David William Foster was faculty head of Spanish and Portuguese and Regents Professor of Spanish at Arizona State University. He resided in the United States. Foster (1940–2020) held a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Washington, and published over 50 books, among them, Urban Photography in Argentina; Nine Artists of the Post-Dictatorship Area (2007), along with countless articles and book chapters. He also served as editor for multiple academic journals, including Chasqui. Nathanial Gardner is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Glasgow. He resides in Scotland. Gardner researches representation, text, and image. He is the author of The Study of Photography in Latin America: Critical Insights and Methodological Approaches and his work has appeared in numerous journals worldwide. Tanius Karam is Professor and Researcher in the Academia de Comunicación y Cultura at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México. He resides in Mexico. Karam holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. A member of the National System of Researcher, he is Scientific Director of the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers. He is a contributor to Zócalo, a magazine specializing in communications. His most recent book is Carlos Monsiváis, between rituals, migrations, and other resources of ubiquity (2023).

viii Contributors Ryan Long is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, the University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in the United States. His areas of study are Mexican and Latin American literature and culture. He has written Queer Exposures: Sexuality and Photography in the Fiction and Poetry of Roberto Bolaño and Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State. He is currently writing a book about Hannes Meyer. Viviane Mahieux is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine, and resides in the United States. Mahieux teaches and writes on contemporary Latin American literature, with a focus on Mexico. She is the author of Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life (2011) and has published in various academic and cultural journals in Mexico and the United States. Elissa Rashkin is a researcher at the Centro de Estudios de la Cultura y la Comunicación at the Universidad Veracruzana. She resides in Mexico. Rashkin is the author of Soy de nación campesino. Representación y memoria en el agrarismo veracruzano (2022) and other books, articles, and chapters on twentieth-century Mexican and international film, photography, literature, and cultural history. She currently edits the journal Balajú, Revista de Cultura y Comunicación de la Universidad Veracruzana. Rosita Scerbo is Assistant Professor of Afro-Hispanic Studies at Georgia State University. She resides in the United States. Scerbo’s research interests include Afro-Latinx narratives, the Black Woman’s Experience in the Hispanic World, Intersectional and Transnational Feminism, Visual Culture, and Digital Humanities. She holds a Ph.D. in Latinx Visual Studies from Arizona State University. Through her teaching, mentoring, service, and research she advocates for ethnic minoritized groups and other underrepresented communities in the United States and Latin America. Her latest publications and teaching endeavors focus on Intersectional and Transnational ARTivism and the Cultural Aesthetics of Black Latina Women. Radmila Stefkova is an Educator Partnerships Manager at Course Hero. She resides in the United States. Stefkova holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research deals with Hispanic graphic novels and memory, and she is the author of various articles and chapters on the subject, including “My grandmother collects memories: Gender and remembrance in Hispanic graphic narratives” which appears in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Books. She has been an editor and regular contributor to the e-journal Latin American Literature Today. Tamara R. Williams is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Executive Director of the Wang Center for Global Education at Pacific Lutheran University. She resides in the United States. She coordinated the bilingual edition of Ernesto Cardenal’s El estrecho dudoso/ The Doubtful Strait (1995); co-edited, with Leopoldo Bernucci, Literatura a Ciencia Cierta: Homenaje a Cedomil Goic (2011); and with Sarah Pollack co-edited, Los oficios del nómada: Fabio Morábito ante la crítica (2015). Her current research explores the elegiac dimensions of twenty-first-century Mexican long poems that give expression to the individual and collective suffering of the protracted War on Drugs and the related perils of late-stage capitalism, including the phenomenon of gendered violence and the unfolding catastrophe of the Anthropocene.

Acknowledgments

Tamara R. Williams The idea for this book was seeded following an annual conference of the UC Mexicanistas, an academic association I wish to acknowledge for its vision, for the enthusiasm and generosity of its leadership and members, and for its intentional embrace and celebration of collaborative work. Together these elements have led to decades of research productivity of exceptional variety and quality that have focused on Mexican cultural production. A special thanks to the authors of the volume not only for the high quality of their contributions but also for their timely attention to deadlines and publication protocols, pandemic not-withstanding. Above all, a heartfelt thanks to Julia Brown for the invitation to co-edit this volume. As book projects go, this one has been—hands down—a true pleasure due, in no small part, to her thoughtfulness, excellent communication and organizational skills, integrity, and attitude. ¡Sí se pudo! Julia R. Brown A labor of love such as this book owes its existence to the collective efforts of people across countries and institutions, straddling myriad areas of expertise and professions. All are united, though, by a collective enthusiasm for photography, and in particular for that produced over multiple generations in Mexico by pioneering and extraordinary women. Research for portions of the book were made possible through the support of a Fulbright García-Robles Grant from 2021 to 2022. Many people, archives, and organizations helped this book come to be. This book would not exist without its contributors, who approached the project with alacrity. Thanks are also owed to Carlota Duarte (Chiapas Photography Project), Helena Rojas Pérez (Chiapas Photography Project), Mariana Huerta Lledia (Centro de la Imagen), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Library and Archives. A big thanks as well to our editor at Routledge, Isabella Vitti, and her assistant, Loredana Zeddita, who saw us through a pandemic and gave excellent council. My deepest gratitude to Tamara R. Williams, whose brilliance and lucidity helped this book find its footing. Finally, to Luis, for accompanying me through this project and through life.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Introduction

Nationally and globally, modern Mexico has become familiar to viewers thanks to the communicative powers of contemporary photography. The medium witnesses and documents the twentieth century in its entirety, producing an archive of the country’s genesis through some of its most turbulent years. Photography has captured changes in Mexico’s reality, from a highly centralized, authoritarian government to a bloody and chaotic revolution; from an emerging project of national identity to agrarian reform; from a student activist movement to a feminist movement and indigenous rights movements. As Diana Taylor points out, the archive captures these time-space shifts, that is, continuous transitions in Mexico’s sociopolitical reality.1 It also has an affective—generative, emotional—power over its viewers. The archive of feelings, as Ann Cvetkovich puts it, has the unique capacity to transform the subjective and intimate into the political and national.2 Within this archive, a significant number of contributions were generated by women photographers. Yet while their work has collectively instigated a shift in contemporary photography, knowledge of this corpus is, at best, uneven. With few exceptions,3 only the work of a very few—most notably Tina Modotti, Graciela Iturbide, and more recently Mariana Yampolsky—some of whose images have become closely associated with Mexico’s twentieth-century nationalist imaginary, have received deserved critical attention.4 The works of many others, however, remain largely occluded within and outside of Mexico thus preventing consideration of the photographic projection of Mexico’s twentieth century as seen when women are behind the lens. While not exhaustive, the essays in this volume revisit the photographic works of a representative selection of Mexican women photographers and interpret them as artists as well as cultural critics whose photography offers a unique framing of modernity in Mexico over the long durée of the twentieth century. They examine an exemplary range of photographers—from the elite, urban and centralized to the rural, domestic, and marginal—each informed by unique experiences, aesthetic affinities, and political commitments. The analyses also situate each photographer within the distinct political, social, cultural, and aesthetic contexts that intersect with, and inform, their work. Together, and notwithstanding this range, the essays point to continuities among the photographers. Notably, the work of a significant number of the artists studied in the volume are migrants, immigrants, or emigrants thus yielding a peripheral relationship not only to photography, but also to society, being that they are cultural outsiders. More importantly, and without exception, all face the challenge of producing their work as they negotiate the constraints of being women in a male-dominated profession. Through their resistance to, and transformation of, the constraints imposed by the gender factor, DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-1

2 Introduction they broaden the parameters of the medium—its contents, forms, and functions—as well as its modes of production by prioritizing collaboration over solo projects. By engaging the reader’s gaze across the spectrum of archives, finally, the authors of this volume make evident that women photographers have established a significant and coherent legacy in questioning power structures, social hierarchies, and related visual reinforcements of stereotypes and exclusions. These, in turn, reveal new and subversive ways of seeing that include keen attention to corporealities, particularly those of women, indigenous peoples, and other marginal groups. A brief overview of the history of photography in Mexico illustrates how the emergence of women in the medium was gradual and limited by the constraints of a maledominated society. Daguerreotype technology arrived on Mexican shores in December of 1839, making its way directly to Mexico City. Early technology was expensive and both cameras and images were available only to the elite and well-connected with the funds or acquaintances to be able to observe the apparatus and its product firsthand. Portrait photography, by all accounts, was a respected and well-remunerated profession. Yet, as Rosa Casanova has observed, photographers generally needed to have access to a high enough caliber of education to permit them to read and understand manuals and to write advertisements. Photographers also needed to be versed in the social codes and customs of their elite clients and to have access to the resources to purchase and maintain equipment and studio props thus precluding women’s involvement.5 With the Porfiriato and the advent of the twentieth century, new technologies and spaces emerged across the country but especially in Mexico City, and photography’s role took on new dimensions as people witnessed these changes. Where the photography of the late nineteenth century had mostly been oriented toward portraits and anthropological–archeological documentation, photography in the early twentieth century occupied itself with capturing the perceived range of types of people in Mexican society, as well as new technologies like the trolley car and even new styles of architecture and urban development.6 Indeed, some of the first commercial photographers in Mexico were foreigners hired by Mexican enterprises in order to document Mexico’s modernization.7 It was at the turn of the century, too, that wealthy Mexicans began to engage in photography not as a source of income but rather as a hobby. These individuals, unrestricted by economic need, were able to experiment with the medium by experimenting with subjects, composition, and aperture. The medium once again gained new purpose with the arrival of the Mexican Revolution as photographers—many of whose names have been lost in time—found themselves in a very different, documentalist role as the visual recorders of war. In a parallel development, in the early twentieth-century (even in the midst of the Revolution) photographic images conveyed elite and middle-class illusions and aspirations for Mexico and its perceived progress toward technological advancement and industrialization.8 Indigenous peoples along with both the urban and rural poor were mostly excluded from this illusion, but with the advent of the revolution, new mestizo nationalist sensibility inspired photographers to document a new subject: the dark-skinned campesino or peasant farmer-turned revolutionary soldier. It was in the context of the Revolution that women appeared alongside men in portraits for the first time not as mothers, sisters, or wives seeking to assert their social status, but instead as combatants in the country’s civil war. It was also in the years of the revolution that women had the opportunity—for the first time in Mexico’s recorded history—to stand behind the camera and take photographs. As men were off

Introduction 3 fighting in the war, women took charge of photography studios and even opened their own. According to Rebeca Monroy Nasr, some of the first women to work professionally as photographers included María Maya, who opened studios with her brothers in 1904 and 1910, Catalina Guzmán, who also opened a studio with her brother in 1914, and María Luisa de González, who opened her studio in 1913.9 It was during the same decade that rolls of 35mm film became commercially available: this allowed photographers to develop their own film. Suddenly, photographers were able to produce at a much higher volume than before. This technological advancement and its consequences for the photography world were compounded by major social and political shifts in Mexico: by the end of the Mexican Revolution, Mexico had been forever changed, as had the art world and the professional, artistic, and political roles available to women. Monroy Nasr asserts that the modernization of photography in Mexico was manifested by the Mexican Revolution.10 With the Revolution, the Mexican photographic arts scene changed, as did art overall: candid photography and images approximating spontaneity appeared for the first time in Mexican photography.11 Avant-garde art movements in Europe were influential in Mexican art movements. Futurism, surrealism, and even dadaism interrogated the relationship between politics, the human mind, technology, and art. These movements also reconsidered art’s ability to convey meaning in the face of the ineffable: the horror of war and mass death. The concerns preoccupying artists in Europe were also those of artists in Mexico, but there were other pressing questions. Following the Mexican Revolution, painters, photographers, printmakers and even musicians— along with the country’s preeminent academic and political intellectuals—took up a debate which, while hardly new, felt urgent: what did the post-Revolutionary Mexico stand for, and who, or what, represented it? By many accounts, the arrival of Italian-born photographer Tina Modotti on the Mexican avant-garde art scene in 1924 along with Edward Weston was decisive for the direction the medium would take and for the role women would thereafter play in it.12 When she arrived, still few women had access to a camera and dark room, much less to the educational foundation required to become a photographer. Within a nationalist concept of modernity in Mexico, moreover, technology and machinery were still associated with masculinity: to operate a camera, then, was to trouble the idea of modernity by exposing the limited space it made for women to participate in it. In the coming decades, Modotti and other women like Mariana Yampolsky, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and Lourdes Grobet would break convention—and taboos—by dedicating themselves to photography and in doing so, often forgoing a life as a housewife with the monogamous marriage and domestic labor that life so often entails. In turn, these photographers become experts in the ever-changing technology and experimenting with techniques and themes, establishing themselves as innovators and technological experts as well as pioneers of artistic expression using the medium. Further innovations in camera technology during the 1920s and 1930s gave photographers in Mexico access to features allowing them to personalize their art. The invention of lens reflex cameras added new features like variable shutter speeds and detachable lenses, allowing for photographers to play with light and motion in their images. As photography emerged in the 1920s 1920s and 1930s as an art form ripe for experimentation and subversion as well as an exemplar of modern technology and of artistic innovation, so too did gender roles and the question of women’s roles in a modern Mexico became major themes of art and lives.

4 Introduction Two distinct movements that can be observed in Mexican photography in the postRevolutionary period favored the inclusion of women artists. The first was the effort to establish photography as an art form on par with other visual art forms that had achieved global notoriety as was the case for Mexican painting—with the muralism of Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros—and for cinema, with what is known as the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema (1930–1969). Individuals, groups, and collectives, with a penchant for experimentation, including placing images in dialogue with the work of other visual and non-visual artists, emerged to bring their images to wider audiences. While some, like Yampolsky, aligned with the social and political commitments of Mexican muralism,13 others, such as Kati Horna, built on the legacy of surrealism brought to Mexico from Europe by figures like Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud. Political and aesthetic ideals and practices, however, were not always mutually exclusive as was the case with the Grupo Proceso Pentágono, which included Lourdes Grobet (who will be discussed in Chapter 6) and was founded in 1973 “to produce works of conceptual art that assumed a critical stance against domestic repression and torture and the abuses of imperialism in Latin America” (Goldman 8). Other collaborative ventures went into creating spaces and institutions to advance and support the art of photography. In the area of education, lineages of women photographers were established. Álvarez Bravo, for example, taught Yampolsky at the San Carlos Academy of the Arts; Horna taught Grobet at the Universidad Iberoamericana. Collaboration and advocacy, finally, made possible the creation, in 1976, of the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía [Mexican Council on Photography] spearheaded by Pedro Meyer, Lázaro Blanco Fuentes, and Raquel Tibol, which was followed by the first biennale exhibition in Mexico devoted solely to the art form in 1980. It was not until 1994, however, that photography was sanctioned by the state with the creation of the Centro de la Imagen [Center for the Image] for the purpose of addressing the gap that existed in Mexico related to photography as an artform. The second, which coincides with the first, was the development of nuevo fotoperiodismo, a response to government repression, mainly the Dirty War carried out by the PRI against left students and guerilla groups throughout the 1960s and until the early 1980s. It included the notorious state-mandated Massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968 that, it should be noted, was documented by the now acclaimed Mexican journalist and writer, Elena Poniatowska, in her classic photo essay, La noche de Tlatelolco (1971). Following the revolution, photojournalism flourished both as an arm of state-dominated media and as a prolific dimension of print media in popular culture. Beginning in the late sixties, however, heightened awareness of civil and human rights locally, regionally, and globally, repressive dictatorial regimes throughout Latin America, including the Guatemalan genocide that targeted Maya populations, and increased militarization in Mexico, galvanized artists, intellectuals, and the press to speak out and take action. This was especially the case in journalism that saw a growth in the number of left-leaning daily newspapers, mainly unomásuno (founded in 1977) and La jornada (founded in 1984), which also instituted ideologically driven changes in the workplace that prioritized the contributions of photojournalists as an effective strategy of opposition. Within this context, the Mexican feminist movement began to flourish and opportunities for women followed. The newspapers hired teams of like-minded photographers and encouraged them to pursue the stories that interested them. Among them were a significant number of women including Marta Zarak and Frida Hartz, who will be discussed in chapters seven and eight, respectively. The layout of daily papers changed substantially as the size of their photographs increased and were used as front-page material. For the first time in the history of

Introduction 5 Mexican press, moreover, photographers—both men and women—were given full credit and paid for their work, which contributed to its overall quality. Among the priorities for the fotoperiodistas was coverage of the civil wars in Central America. Another was the need to document state-sponsored repression of guerrilla movements and land-dispute-related conflicts in rural Mexico, most of which disproportionately impacted indigenous communities and indigenous women, in particular. That several of the photographers were women keen on recording the consequences of armed conflict for indigenous women yielded one of the most extensive and compelling archives of images of indigenous women in contexts of violence and war. Unfortunately, it remains largely unknown and in need of critical attention. A subsequent development related to photography and indigenous communities, which dovetails with advances in the field of anthropology related to cultural self-representation, is the Proyecto Fotográfico de Chiapas [Chiapas Photography Project], or CPP. The project seeks to provide indigenous Maya peoples in Chiapas with opportunities for cultural and artistic self-expression through photography and, since 1992, has had a considerable impact to the degree that over 300 indigenous men and women from different ethnic groups and religious backgrounds have learned how to use photography as a mode of personal artistic expression, and many have undertaken projects that celebrate and engage members of their communities. (chiapasphoto.org) Two photographers from this project, Maruch Sántiz Gómez and Xunka López Díaz, are examined in Chapter 9. Regardless of the progress made, women photographers faced persistent challenges as ancillary members of largely male-dominated artistic spheres in Mexico, which meant that they were required to mentor and collaborate with one another as a means of coping with professional exclusion. Since its inception, the photographic medium, as with writing, filmmaking, and other professional arts, belonged to the Lettered City and its cosmopolitan, formally educated, and masculine milieu of Mexican urbanity.14 In the hands of women, photography had to be reinvented and resignified, often against the dominant masculine rhetoric. Frequently obligated to be autodidacts and questioned for their professional artistic aspirations, women photographers could not readily gain access to the intellectual, male artistic circles of the Lettered City without the right connections, and few gained a public role in these groups. Nonetheless, these women insisted on participating in the artistic and cultural dialogues of their day; not just within the elite, intellectual circles in the metropolis, but also within other notable artist and art movements such as muralism, surrealism, and modern architecture, to name but a few examples. They continually formed their own spaces for artistic dialogue and inspiration, and ingeniously took up photographic subjects to which they had unique access. These practices, in turn, laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of women artists. Based on this history of gendered exclusion and taking our cue from the photographers discussed in this volume, we deliberately choose to focus our frame on women, a necessary task to go against the grain of the “universal male photographer and a universal male spectator” (Solomon-Godeau 7). The volume steps away, however, from the assumption that any of the featured photographs propose a feminist aesthetic or reveal the gender of their creator. Rather, the essays in this book reiterate the assertion made by Dina Comisarenco Mirkin that the art of photographers like Tina Modotti and Lola

6 Introduction Álvarez Bravo, among others, manifest traces—what Comisarenco Mirkin calls “una especie de contagio” [a kind of contagion]—of what she describes as an “ineludible condición femenina que les ofreció, incluso sin proponérselo de forma consciente, algunas de las pautas para interpretar sus respectivos mundos” (151). But what do these gendered traces consist of? There are challenges as well as multiple responses to this question. On the one hand, regarding challenges, the volume brings together the work of photographers whom we identify as women, an a priori risky category. Namely, in her influential Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler had already argued that such a thing as “a woman” could not exist, explaining that this concept or any gender labeling for that matter, is a category created by language. Poststructuralist feminism, inspired by Butler’s ideas, proposed that gender is entirely performative, an argument that has been criticized—and which the critic has addressed—for disregarding issues of gender-based violence and economic oppression. Indeed, disregarding “a woman” as a concept with political backdrop while dealing with any period of Mexican history would be a problematic assertion. Taking stock of the lives and work of Mexican women from the vantage point of the twenty-first century requires acknowledgement of hardened gender classifications, buttressed by weighty social and political norms, in a way that complicates the ontology of gender that Butler proposes. Mainly, the discussions around women photographers consider the intricate relationship between visuality and gender and the processes of seeing within all implicated parameters. In this regard, our conversation is informed by Teresa de Lauretis’ perspective on gender as a historical construct, in opposition to Butler’s cultural construct. While our discussion does not eschew Butler’s theories of gender reinscription, their focus on language pose limitations when dealing with visual expression. De Lauretis, as a film critic, sees gender as a concept that has much to do with seeing and being seen. In other words, the concept of “a woman” is rooted in historical patterns of perception that define not only how gender is understood, but also seen. As Claire Raymond emphasizes, “a woman is not so named but so seen” (4). Another challenge is the mutability of categories such as “gender,” “female,” and “photography,” which present discursive and epistemological difficulties. These include how to articulate a relationship between gendered, female experience, and photography when gendered experience must be described circumstantially and when photography is ontologically elusive. To this point, Raymond observes that “the question of what is a photograph runs parallel to this question of how one might define the term woman, for it is precisely in photography’s fluidity and protean capacity - for better and for worse - that its relationship to gender emerges” (1). Her observation that working definitions for photography and gender are both tied to human perception as well as cultural beliefs and social practice, moreover, help shore up this ontological dilemma and reinforce the possibility that gender experience and photographic arts affirm one another because of their shared dependence on perception and experience to be defined and re-defined. It is with this relationship in mind that this volume and its chapters propose to tackle the concept of a “female lens” in both the technical and metaphorical senses. The question common to the study of gender and photography, in other words, is: what does it mean to see and be seen? On the other hand, traces of gendered experience as a factor that shapes artist sensibilities have been proposed in relation to numerous artforms other than static photography. Lisa French, who examines gender and subjectivity in the work of women film directors, observes that “gender causes an inflection which might be described as an awareness of

Introduction 7 ‘Otherness’ or difference, and that women share this and recognize it as a factor of the experience of patriarchal culture” (11). This inflection—an awareness of one’s perceived otherness within patriarchal culture—allows a woman photographer to be aware of the numerous ways people may be marginalized within a given society. Such awareness influences, in turn, a photographer’s interactions with her photographic subjects and their lived spaces, as well as the ways she sees them. Raymond supports the supposition that photographers’ lived experiences as women inform their approach to the art form, influencing all elements of their work from composition and lighting to subject choice and themes. Writing on photography and the nature of a feminist aesthetics, she suggests that the photographer “shows what she sees and also shows what she refuses; the frame delineates an act of presentation and a boundary. The photographer opens the space of the gaze in the created frame of the image” (9). Thinking in line with Raymond, it is argued here that the women whose works are discussed in this volume each present a unique aesthetic that is inseparable from the way the photographer sees and what she wants to be included within the frame. Taken together, the works of the women photographers featured in this volume interrogate the medium’s aesthetic possibilities by restructuring what and who is captured within the image’s boundaries. Within the contained space of their images, the gazes of each of the women examined in this collection are unique, subjective, and multiple. Viewed collectively, their corpus is also distinct from the photography produced in Mexico by male artists. As “women” behind the camera in a highly patriarchal and heteronormative Mexican society, each brings to bear a tacit or explicit interpretation of the specific Mexican and transnational context in which she lives and creates. In their totality, the images discussed across this volume constitute an archive attentive to corporeality, particularly to that of women, indigenous peoples, marginalized urban communities, and other sectors of Mexico’s populations. It also embraces those relegated to the status of Other within historically dominant Mexican visual discourses that historically emphasized racial mestizaje and romanticized rural agricultural and urban industrial labor (tropes repeated frequently in murals and engravings as well as photography itself). Moreover, sensorial and emotional sensitivity is a transcendent element within this body of work. The images capture seemingly ordinary subjects and interactions in homes, on city street corners, in armed conflict, and in the agricultural fields, and in doing so, they question ontological and anthropocentric hierarchies. Furthermore, these images often employ technical experimentation to capture the intimacies of private bodies, spaces, and material objects in a response to the highly gendered, anthropocentric, and hierarchical societies in which they lived and interacted. By extension, gender, class, and nationality—among other determinants of individual power—influence the way subjectivity is photographically narrated through conscious decisions the artist makes about focus, framing, and composition. This kind of sensitivity—or these kinds of sensitivities—are not innately gendered. They are shaped by the historical and social conditions that imposed limitations on experience and by being in the world. The fact that matters of sensation, power, bodies, and anthropocentrism come up in so many chapters within this volume indicates that, perhaps, while gender is not always on the forefront of the artists’ minds when shooting, ontology, anthropocentrism, and hegemony very much are. And how could they not be? During the twentieth century, bodies gendered as female have been categorized, measured, disciplined, and controlled to massive effect. To deny that any of the artists discussed here was affected by patriarchal systems of power would be misguided.

8 Introduction The reality of being a gendered, racialized, classed, or otherwise categorized Other within twentieth and twenty-first century Mexico connotes shared positionality: light skinned mestiza women are affected by the heteronormative patriarchy in Mexico as are indigenous Maya women. Likewise, extractive capitalism affects working class urban women as much as it does rural farming women. Though shared positionality may not always be formally recognized in interactions between photographers and their subjects, a tacit recognition of shared struggles between the two is potentially powerful. An implied understanding that photographer and subject are affected by the same systems of oppression may be untraceable in the structure and composition of a photograph, just as intent is often impossible to discern, but the power dynamics in a photographer–subject relationship, however fleeting, are more discernible. French advances this claim by noting that women can film or photograph intimate events and situations that may be inaccessible to male photographers due to perceived power disparities. Numerous authors in this volume also affirm this position in their exploration of how women photographers approach their subjects horizontally and in acknowledgment of shared positionality before a white, heteronormative patriarchy (among other systems of oppression). Indeed, in the chapters that follow, images portray people and bodies in ways that normalize those bodies, treating them with reverence within a visual economy rather than fetishizing or tokenizing them. The visual economies developed by the photography in this volume unmask what Walter D. Mignolo dubs “the mirage of modernity” (17). As Rubén Gallo points out, the idea of modernity that circulated among artists and intellectuals in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s was closely bound up with technological utopianism, conceived of as machine-driven force “that would lead humankind to a better future and would advance the goals of socialism by producing a kinder society where all men and women, regardless of race or creed, would live together in harmony and peace” (7). These decades saw sweeping agrarian reform, a careful intellectual and cultural campaign to center mestizo culture and identity, and the nationalization of various industries aimed at remedying deep economic and social inequality in Mexico. Despite these successes, following decades would see the Partido Revolucionario Institucional [Institutional Revolutionary Party], or PRI, align itself politically and discursively with foreign investors and domestic elites while marginalizing non-mestizo and non-white subjects of the state. In contrast to the early, egalitarian promise of Mexican modernity, much of the twentieth and even the early twenty-first century in Mexico has seen systemically unequal access to clean drinking water, electricity, telecommunications, infrastructure, personal safety, stable politics, and a robust education system. Throughout the twentieth century, eagerness to maintain the mirage of economic and technological modernity in Mexico compelled Mexico’s military and government to suppress labor movements and student activism; to destroy working-class neighborhoods, and to normalize the deregulation of domestic labor. With all this, it must be acknowledged that Mexico’s modernity has never operated outside the scope of colonialism: it has always relied on domestic and international hierarchies of power and wealth for its existence. The photographers in this volume, all of whom lived or live as women, benefit to varying degrees from the technological advancements and conditional human rights afforded by Mexican modernity. Nevertheless, what they share besides their gendered experiences and their vocation is the fact that their images lay bare the unevenness of material modernity in Mexico. If photography indeed allows an artist to capture the optical unconscious—that which is invisible with the naked eye—as Walter Benjamin suggests, then

Introduction 9 perhaps part of that which is laid bare by these photographs is the way Mexico’s modernity is bound up with a “logic that generates, reproduces, modifies, and maintains interconnected hierarchies” (Mignolo 17). Taken together, the photographs construct a visual archive of those peripheralized by said hierarchies. In doing so, not only do the images expose Mexico’s modernity for its illusory paradoxical nature; they urge spectators to envision other, anti-racist, anti-classist, and non-patriarchal modernities. It is the assertion of this volume that many of the women photographers discussed hereafter contribute to a broader project of articulating “trans”-modernity, a solidaritous network of relations among those systematically marginalized by Mexican modernity as it evolved over the twentieth century; mestizo, Afro-mestizo, and indigenous peasants, Central Americans, the urban poor, queer folk, and women.15 The book is organized into three thematic sections. The first, “Gendering the Gaze: Frame, Context, Collaboration,” sets the stage for the volume’s exploration of the way women photographers experienced and exercised their craft within the unique context of Mexico’s post-revolutionary twentieth-century nation building process and how this shaped their unique re-visioning of Mexican modernity. It considers the historical challenges women faced as consummate outsiders in the profession as well as the creative approaches they sought to overcome them. As artists, intellectuals, migrants, and activists, for example, they consistently pursued collaborative projects and sought dialogue with their peers while interrogating systemic inequalities in their midst. In the first chapter, Mexican feminist philosopher and scholar of the visual arts, Eli Bartra, pursues the central question of the nature and qualities of photography by women with a specific focus on their portraits of women. Grounded in a critical definition of portraiture as a historical genre, her analysis of the works of two photographers—turnof-the-century, Natalia Baquedano, and contemporary portraitist and activist, Lucero Gónzalez—identifies two common traits of portraits of women by women that are distinct from those of male counterparts: their dynamism and warmth of tone and atmosphere. In the following chapter, Ryan Long considers key contextual continuities shared by four photographers whose lives and work span a century: Tina Modotti, Kati Horna, Mariana Yampolsky, and Elsa Medina. All encountered barriers on account of their outsider status as women that were further complicated, in some cases, by religion, ideology, or national identity. These barriers notwithstanding, they embrace the work of visually documenting the political developments following the Mexican Revolution that shaped their lives and work: the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968, and the social and political upheaval brought forth by the neoliberal paradigm in Mexico and Central America. Whether by choice or necessity, moreover, they actively supported each other in their work and sought to collaborative with like-minded photographers or as part of larger projects with affinal individuals. While their aesthetic practices varied, finally, their work makes evident a commitment to use photography as a vehicle for social critique; as a means to make visible underrepresented subjects— women, children, members of indigenous groups, laborers, artisans, immigrants, protesters, rebels—as well as themes that include, but are not limited to: women’s cultural production, the material conditions of work, education, and state repression. Women Photographer’s second section, “Counter-Perspectives: Ideology, Subjectivity and Corporeality,” brings dimension and complexity to the work of canonical photographers such as Tina Modotti and Graciela Iturbide offering new critical approaches to their work as well as exposure and analysis of their lesser-known works. It considers various ways that the female lens in Mexico has constructed gaze differently unsettling the

10 Introduction Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heteronormative visual economy that dominates in Mexico to this day. Elissa Rashkin’s chapter on Tina Modotti, arguably the most iconic and studied Mexican woman photographer, examines a series of recently released images that were produced as part of her collaboration with the radical agrarian movement of the 1920s as well as with the Indian agronomist Pandurang Khankhoje, exiled in Mexico due to his participation in India’s independence efforts. Following a succinct critique of one of the dominant trends in “Modotti Studies,” mainly the tendency to fictionalize parts of her life in ways that project the desires of mostly male authors, she proceeds, boldly and effectively, with an assiduous contextualization and analysis of the photographic production from this period. By examining Modotti’s role in what Rashkin describes as “one of the key revolutionary adventures of the early twentieth century in Mexico,” the photographer comes to life as a dynamic and politically engaged worker. Challenging the false binary between the aesthetic and the political, Rashkin underscores the distinct formal qualities of the images from this stage of her production even as they record activities of the agrarismo movement, its leaders, the places, and spaces they worked; the men, women, and children that sowed and reaped the land; and the fruits these yielded. Similarly, Nathanial Gardner’s essay examines Mazahua (1993), a collaborative photobook project comprised of sixty-eight black and white images produced by Mariana Yampolsky with textual commentary by the aforementioned Mexican writer and journalist, Elena Poniatowska. Commissioned by the local government of the Estado de México in the center of the republic, the project’s focus is on the complex challenges faced by Mazahua indigenous women as the men from their communities leave their villages to migrate north. In addition to providing insights into the nature and long history of the remarkable collaboration between Yampolsky and Poniatowska, Gardner argues that as a later and mature work, Mazahua provides unique insights into the aesthetic underpinnings of Yampolsky’s entire oeuvre, mainly her adherence to the tenets of humanist photography. Her emphasis on human subjects and more specifically on themes of ritual, youth, and creation, he argues, align with the post-war movement’s efforts to uplift the shared dimensions of human experience, thus promoting empathy and solidarity among all. In his sociocultural communicative reading of three images by Graciela Iturbide, Tanius Karam’s chapter proposes that the acclaimed photographer succeeds in projecting an “alternative modernity” in so far as it runs counter to the Mexican post-Revolutionary hegemonic modernity that was patriarchal, Euro centric, and urban; that was unable to embrace, much less represent, differences without succumbing to their erasure or distortion and to folklorization and othering. Grounded in concepts derived from phenomenological sociology, his analyses suggest that Iturbide’s images activate a dynamic of intersubjectivity that invite the viewer into a shared experience and context yielding a quality of horizontality as well as empathy for the condition, and respect for the dignity of her human subjects. The final essay of the section by the pioneer of queer studies of Latin American and Latinx literary and visual texts, David William Foster, considers the ways that the photographs in Lourdes Grobet’s Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits (2009) unmask the spectacle of hypermasculinity of one of Mexico’s most popular pastimes by documenting the varying dimensions of “manhood” in the luchador community by including images of queer bodies as subjects. Moreover, to the degree that the family portrait is a photographic genre that is complicit in the reproduction and imposition of heteronormative sexuality, Foster argues, Grobet’s images engage viewers in a complex transgressive exploration of anti-heteronormativity that subverts what Judith Butler refers to as

Introduction 11 the “reiterative power” of compulsory heterosexuality (Gender 185) by broadening the frame to include other sexual and gender identities and make visible a range of “families” that don’t adhere to the composition of the traditional nuclear or extended family. Part three of the book, “Re-Presenting Gender and Race” collects four chapters that acknowledge the ways Mexican photographers have used the medium to challenge the historic exclusion and limited representation of women who are Indigenous, Afro-mestizas, campesinas, or poor from photographic portraiture and other visual archives in Mexico. Drawing on Azoulay’s work on the ethical status of photography, the chapter by Viviane Mahieux argues that the work of Marta Zarak, a practitioner of nuevo fotoperiodismo, makes evident a quality of horizontality—“a framework of partnership and solidarity”—that eschews recurring tropes of Mexican indigeneity while also breaking with conventions that separate the photographer from her subjects. Zarak’s photography, the author argues, not only makes otherwise invisible women visible, but it also imbues them with hitherto unseen agency. In the following and related chapter Tamara R. Williams’ underscores the power of dialogue between image and text within a single work, and the capacity for the work of photojournalist, Frida Hartz, to extend the symbolic and political reach of the poetry of Zapotec writer and activist, Irma Pineda, across indigenous communities and across time. In her discussion of Hartz’ trajectory within the nuevo fotoperiodismo movement, Williams underscores the extent to which her choices when shooting directly reflect her commitment to activating photography as a form of solidarity with other women, including indigenous women. Her discussion of Hartz’ emotionally charged photographs of indigenous women living in defiance of the military occupation in Chiapas during the 1990s refract Pineda’s bilingual poems which explore the depth of the pain inflicted on indigenous communities by Mexico’s so-called war on drugs, and invite readers to consider the role that militarism, the state, and the patriarchy have to play in both instances. Julia Brown’s chapter pivots in a significant and necessary way to delve into the work of two Tzotzil photographers from the Chiapas region, Maruch Sántiz Gómez and Xunka López Díaz, both participants in the Chiapas Photography Project and creators of two of the first books of photography by indigenous women ever published in Mexico. Brown reads the images of these texts with care and sensitivity paying attention to how, in the stark simplicity and beauty of their chosen material objects—a comb, a basket of chiles, a pair of plastic sandals, a sleeping child—and the succinct articulation of their cultural significance in the captions, the project becomes an index of the affective weight of the impact of neoliberal extractivist policies on their day to day lives, on their families, and on their communities. To the extent that the objects and their meanings are made visible, moreover, they become the site for an indigenous epistemology that goes against the grain of the nationalist institutional knowledge production that historically used photography to advance assimilationist strategies. As a bookend to the framing this volume provides for a century of photography in Mexico, Rosita Scerbo’s chapter on the photography of Koral Carballo and Mara Sánchez Renero underscores the glaring absence of Black Mexicans from twentieth century photographic production. Indeed, “The Untold Story of Black Mexico: Uncovering the Identity of the Afro-descendant Woman in the Photography of Koral Carballo y Mara Sánchez Renero” underscores how the representation of Black Mexican women in Mexican visual culture and history has been extremely limited from the time of the conquest through the end of the twentieth century. The chapters by Mahieux, Williams, and Brown make clear that visual storytelling gained traction during the latter decades of the twentieth century, lending visibility to

12 Introduction victims of state and systematic violence. Carballo (a photojournalists for nearly two decades) and Sánchez Renero inherit the visibilizing tradition of these prior generations of photographers. As Scerbo’s chapter demonstrates, the exclusion of Black Mexicans from Mexican historiography, coupled with objectifying representations of Black women in Spanish American and Mexican visual culture, gesture to the physical and economic types of violence enacted on Black Mexicans since the conquest and through the twentieth century. These two photography projects, put in dialogue with one another by Scerbo, produce a visual economy that demands Afro-Mexican communities be recognized by spectators as an enduring and vibrant presence in Mexico. Carballo’s and Sánchez Renero’s art continues this tradition—initiated in the previous century—of interrogating the bounds of Mexican modernity through photography while visualizing new kinds of intercultural and feminist solidarities. Notes 1 Taylor, 19. 2 Cvetkovich, 117. 3 A notable exception is José Antonio Rodríguez’s Fotógrafas en México 1872–1960 (2012). An expanded catalogue of an exhibition with the same name at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the book identifies and describes Mexican women photographers in four categories: pioneers, modernists, vanguardists, and humanists. 4 Book-length projects include: Tinísima (Elena Poniatowska, 1992); Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography (Andrea Noble, 2000). Tina Modotti: Photographer & Revolutionary (Margaret Hooks, 2017); Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to Fly With (Fabienne Bradu, 2006); Juchitán de las Mujeres 1979–1989 (Iturbide with Poniatowska and Mario Bellatin, 2010). Graciela Iturbide (Marta Dahó, 2018); Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide (Isabel Quintero and Zeke Peña, 2017), Mariana Yampolsky: Imagen, memoria (Yampolsky with Elizabeth Ferrer, Poniatowska, and Francisco Reyes Palma, 1999); Alegría: el legado de Mariana Yampolsky en la Universidad Iberoamericana (Teresa Matabuena Peláez, coord., 2018); Miradas: Mariana Yampolsky (Teresa Matabuena Peláez and Guadalupe Ayala Banuet, eds., 2023). See also Gallo (2005), Flores (2008), Mraz (2009), Tejada (2009), and Gardner et al. (2012). 5 Casanova 8–9. 6 Del Castillo Troncoso 59. 7 John Mraz, 7–8. See also Mraz’ chapter on photography during the Porfiriato and the Revolution, pp. 13–58. 8 Del Castillo Troncoso 78. 9 Monroy Nasr 2005, 119–120. 10 Monroy Nasr 2013, 77. 11 Ibid, 79. 12 See Monsiváis (1980), as well as Noble, Gallo, Flores, and Tejada. 13 Goldman 2. 14 We refer to the Lettered City as defined by Ángel Rama; the creative and proscriptive spaces of Latin America’s intellectual elite, which summarily excluded women up through the early twentieth century. 15 Dussel 76.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 2011. Casanova, Rosa. “De vistas y retratos: la construccion de un repertorio fotográfico en México, 1839–1890,” in Imaginarios y fotografía en México. Emma Cecilia García Krinsky, ed. Mexico City: Lunwerg, 2005. pp. 3–58.

Introduction 13 “About the Chiapas Photography Project.” https://chiapasphoto.org/about/about.html. September, 2011. Comisarenco Mirkin, Dina. “La representación de la experiencia femenina en Tina Modotti y Lola Álvarez Vravo.” Revista de Estudios de Género. La ventana, vol. III, no. 28, 2008, pp. 148–190. Cvetkovich. Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Dahó, Marta. Graciela Iturbide. Mexico City: Fundación MAPFRE, 2018. Debroise, Olivier. Fuga mexicana: un recorrido por la fotografía en México. 1st ed. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994. De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Del Castillo Troncoso, Alberto. “La historia de la fotografía en México, 1890–1920. La diversidad de los usos de la imagen,” in Imaginarios y fotografía en México. Emma Cecilia García Kinsky, ed. Mexico City: Lunwerg, 2005. pp. 59–118. Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah. “Mirar desde los márgenes o los márgenes de la mirada. Fotografía de dos mujeres indígenas de Chiapas.” Debate Feminista, vol. 38, no. 19, Oct. 2008, pp. 91–113. ———. Viaje de sombras: Fotografías del desierto de la soledad y los indios lacandones en los años cuarenta. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2019. Dussel, Enrique. “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures).” Boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 3, 1993, pp. 65–76. Flores, Tatiana. “Strategic Modernists: Women Artists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico.” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 29, no. 2, 2008, pp. 12–22. French, Lisa. “Women in the Director’s Chair: The Female Gaze in Documentary Film.” In Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics, Boel Ulfsdotter, and Anna Backman Rogers, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Gabara, Esther. Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Gallo, Rubén. Mexican Modernity. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2005. García Krinsky, Emma Cecilia, coord. Imaginarios y fotografía en México: 1839–1970. Mexico City: Lunwerg, 2005. Print. Gardner, Nathanial and Arjen Van der Sluis. Mariana Yampolsky: mirada que cautiva la mirada. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Fundación Mariana Yampolsky/Museo de Arte Popular, 2012. Goldman, Shifra M. “Six Women Artists of Mexico.” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 1982, pp. 1–9. Iturbide, Graciela. Eyes to Fly with. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. ———. Juchitán de Las Mujeres, 1979–1989. Cynthia Steele, Adriana Navarro, and Christopher van Ginhoven, trans. Mexico City: Amigos de Editorial Calamus, 2010. Matabuena Peláez, María Teresa, coord. Alegría: el legado de Mariana Yampolsky en la Universidad Iberoamericana. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2018. Matabuena Peláez, María Teresa and Guadalupe Analya Banuet, coords. Miradas: Mariana Yampolsky. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana. 2022. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Modotti, Tina, and Margaret. Hooks. Tina Modotti. Aperture, 1999. Monsiváis, Carlos. “Notas sobre la historia de la fotografía.” Revista de la Universidad de México. December, 1980. pp 5–6. Monroy Nasr, Rebeca. “Del medio tono al alto contraste: la fotografía mexicana de 1920 a 1940,” in Imaginarios y fotografía en México. Emma Cecilia García Kinsky, ed. Mexico City: Lunwerg, 2005. pp. 119–180.

14 Introduction ———. “Revolución Mexicana y la modernidad manifiesta en la fotografía.” Patrimônio e Memoria. Unesp, vol 9, no. 2, July–December, 2013. pp. 71–89. Monsiváis, Carlos. Maravillas que son, sombras que fueron: la fotografía en México. 1. ed., Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2012. Mraz, John. Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Noble, Andrea. Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Poniatowska, Elena. La noche de Tlatelolco. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1971. ———. Tinísima. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1992. Quintero, Isabel, and Zeke Peña. Photographic. The Life of Graciela Iturbide. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017. Rama, Ángel. The Lettered City. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Raymond, Claire. Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics. Oxfordshire and New York: Routledge, 2017. Rodríguez, José Antonio. Fotógrafas en México. 1872–1960. Madrid: Turner, 2012. Segre, Erica. “The Hermeneutics of the Veil in Mexican Photography: Of Rebozos, Sábanas, Huipiles and Lienzos de Verónica.” Hispanic Research Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, February 2005, pp. 39–65. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography after Photography: Gender, Genre, History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Tejada, Roberto. National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Yampolsky, Mariana, et al. Mariana Yampolsky: imagen, memoria/Image, Memory. Mexico City: Centro de la Imagen, 1999.

Part I

Gendering the Gaze Frame, Context, Collaboration

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

1

In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?) Eli Bartra Translated by Tamara R. Williams

Women’s Photography? To write about the photography of women in Mexico is the equivalent of flirting with the latest trend. The international recognition of some women photographers, along with the worldwide fame of the women photographed, and the number of women who have emerged in the field in recent years make it a required topic. My interest in it, however, is because I consider it important to pay attention to the phenomenon of visual culture as a means to get to know and understand it better. Photography is, along with literature, a trade and an art form into which women have entered in overwhelming numbers. To speak only of Mexico, for several decades now, these two areas of cultural production have been taken by storm by women who, in turn, have also been creating cultural spaces of their own. However, fame, that which makes people known and recognized beyond their places of origin and which is measured using male-gendered values, allegedly universal, has been reserved for a few exceptional women. The attributes of “excellence” have been and are enjoyed by only few. But is there such a thing as female photography or women’s photography, or should it simply be called photography? I believe that photography by women exists and that it is necessary above all to be knowledgeable about it. Therefore, it is important to compare it with that of other women and with that of men. For my part, it is impossible for me to show all the differences that are thought to exist between the photography of women and that of men. I will limit myself to putting on the table some minor issues that point in that direction. There are those who consider it anachronistic to pursue these questions and to respond that, in effect, photography, like any other form of artistic expression, has to do with gender. There are women photographers and so there is photography by women. It is important, therefore, to know if there are differences in photography based on gender. The content? The form? Regarding art, in general, and photography, in particular, I believe it can be said that there are general tendencies that distinguish and differentiate, that which is created by gendered subjects with their specific sexualities.1 There are, moreover, distinct histories within the field with regard to photographic genres. Naturally, it can be argued that there are also differences between one individual and another, which, of course, is true.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-3

18  Eli Bartra However, individuals can be grouped with their peers. There remain some situations that are shared by social groups; it is not possible to think that each individual in a society lives in a totally different context from another in the same group. In the case of female photographers, I believe that, as women, they share similar historical and social experiences and belong to the same, albeit heterogeneous, group. To begin with, they have had to share similar discriminatory treatment by historiography. It is already commonplace, but it is worth reiterating that the history of world photography simply forgets women as does historiography tout court. And then, as we know, there must be those that arrive, generally women, to redress this absence and write a parallel history of photography by women.2 The Mexican photography by women that is most well-known and recognized in the world is the one that represents “the people” and represents “Mexicanness,” the more exotic the better, because it is the most admired outside of Mexico. To name an example, it is the work of Tina Modotti from the twenties and thirties of the last century; of Lola Alvarez Bravo, who photographed throughout most of that century, from the twenties through the 1990s; and of Graciela Iturbide that spans many decades. These photographers, influences aside, have something in common in so far as they photograph otherness (in this case that which is alien for them is the poverty in Mexico), difference, without being picturesque but with a taste for the exotic. Modotti, one of the great photographers of the century, it is assumed out of political conviction, jumps into the ring deliberate and consciously to lasso the Mexican people, the poor, and especially women. In the case of Alvarez Bravo and Iturbide, they photograph beings with distant and evasive gazes. They freeze the misery, the sadness, and the tragedy of their country and turn them into their protagonists. The Photographic Portrait To be fair, these photographers not only explored this vein but they also produced portraits, above all Álvarez Bravo, who has a series focused on famous individuals that are quite interesting and professional. However, it is curious that most of these portraits appear to be posed artificially. There are one or two exceptions; she has, for example, a pair of her then-husband, Manuel Álvarez Bravo. In one he appears reclining in an armchair, reading, and there is a sense of freshness and spontaneity; in another, he is busy handling a camera. But, as I say, all the others are solemn, hieratic, and passive; practically none of them shows a smile.3 Iturbide does not do portraits, although she does photograph many people. Not even when she names a subject in a title is it a portrait as is the case of her, Rosa de Juchitán (Rose of Juchitán).4 In it, a woman appears naked, alone, but it is not a portrait of Rosa as she is only an interesting “object” to be photographed in that place, in that light, and in that frame. One of her most famous images is Nuestra Señora de las iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas).5 I believe the photograph of this woman is also not a portrait. It could be that woman or any other one since what is most important are the iguanas on her head, the angle, and the light. In a word, she probably seeks the aesthetic element in the photograph and, possibly, to document what is different and strange as a primary objective. On the other hand, Modotti took several portraits like the one of her partner Julio Antonio Mella, of women like the one of her sister Yolanda, or of cultural celebrities such as Dolores del Río and Anita Brenner. All are clearly portraits of specific people with names and surnames.

In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?) 19 When the “people” are photographed, that is, the poor, rarely are they given a name, much less a surname, who would care? For the working-class individuals in the images of the photographers I have mentioned, not having names is akin to not having an identity nor, perhaps, a distinct face. They are only masks; they are persons only in the sense of a mask. What is important is their function, the role they represent. It is the equivalent of what Diego Rivera does when he paints the working-class masses without faces and only includes the actual physiognomy of those known and recognizable individuals who have a clear identity with a name. If I am allowed a leap to another latitude, it can be said that the German portrait and documentary photographer, August Sander, is a clear example of a photography constituted by portraits without names, which in this case become simply “types.” Because we are dealing with an extraordinary photographer, there is a strong temptation to refer to them as portraits or to treat them as portraits in so far as the photographer has the capacity to give shape to the entire “soul” of the person photographed. However, given my concept of the portrait, Sander’s photographs would not exactly qualify as his intention does not reside in capturing the image of the person for who they are but rather for what they do or represent. His objective was to portray a society, its people, a particular generation during the Weimar Republic in Germany and not individuals; that is, he captures types without proper names. For Sander “the individual is viewed as a representative figure (of a group, of a profession, of a class).”6 Similarly, the Frenchman, Francois Aubert, who lived in Mexico between 1865 and 1869, was a pioneer of photographing “types” in Mexico. And once again, what he does are not portraits, he photographs subjects that are representative of the Mexican people.7 Photographs of sex workers are another example of this phenomenon. Representing “otherness,” they are photographed for what they are and do but these, too, are not portraits. What is being captured is their job. The exception includes the true portraits that they commission for a particular special occasion.8 Portraiture within photography, as is the case in plastic arts, represents a specialty. There are those who are dedicated to taking portraits, some exclusively. It is clear that when photography did not exist, or its use had not become generalized, painters of portraits enjoyed the comfort of having an important socio-aesthetic role. The connections between both kinds of portraiture are obvious; there is also a continuity between them. Today, that function has not disappeared, but it is undeniable that photography has substituted painted and sculpted portraits almost entirely. One of the fundamental characteristics of the portrait (regardless of the kind) is that it captures the distinctive characteristics of the person being portrayed—their singularity— including those that go beyond the strictly physical traits of the face. The portraitist wants to photograph a specific person, not another. The portrayed subjects always have a name that is visible on the portrait in an implicit or explicit way. That is, even when sometimes, in the case of nineteenth-century photography, the person is not identified for us today. When I speak of names, I am referring, above all, to their significance. It is about individuation, about personalization, about how giving a name provides an identity, which has to do, in some way, with the intention of the person creating the portrait. Richard Avedon would say that “A photographic portrait is an image taken of someone that knows they are being photographed, and what they do with this information is as much a part of the photo as is what they are wearing or the way they look.”9 But when photographs are taken of women selling in a market, or fishermen with their nets, or of individuals from Indigenous communities in traditional dress posing in

20  Eli Bartra front of a camera, it is always a case of subjects as objects, of subjects as landscape; their names and surnames (which they do have) are absent. They are, therefore, not portraits; they are not photographs of subjects but rather of what they represent, what they do, and frequently, of where they live or what ethnic group they belong to. Photography is supposed to be the art of the particular par excellence,10 but within that necessarily congenital particularity of photography, there are photos that are more particular than others. Sometimes, it is the context of the photograph, the implicit intention it captures, even the title attached to it, that turns what could have been a portrait into a non-portrait, because the subject is not identified. For example, the photograph taken by Modotti in 1928 of a woman with a supposedly red flag (the photo is black and white) that is titled Woman with a Flag.11 It has been said that she is Benita Galeana, the well-known militant of the Mexican Communist Party, but some studies have confirmed that she is a household worker, Luz Jiménez, who was used as a model by both Edward Weston and Modotti and even by the muralists. For this reason, I believe that it cannot be considered a portrait. Although there is the possibility that Modotti took the photo precisely because it was Benita Galeana, an indefatigable social activist from the State of Guerrero, and not any other woman who could have held a flag in a similar way. What might have been Modotti’s intention in taking this photo? Did she intend to take a portrait of Galeana, if indeed it is her, relying on her complicity, or did both just want to take a photograph of communist propaganda? What’s more, for a photograph to be a portrait, it is not even essential that the face appear; it is enough for only a body to have a name. For example, there is one of the nudes that Weston took of Modotti in 1924,12 which has no face, although he also took some others with faces. Often, it is the photographs’ captions, their titles, which indicate whether they fall within the portrait genre or not. For example, in the catalogue of the CEMCA (Center for Mexican and Central American Studies), there is a 1928 photo of two men riding horses, their chests loaded with bandoliers and hats on their heads. They stare at the camera. It could very well be a portrait, but the caption of the photo says “Two Cristero leaders, San José de Gracia, Mich., 1928.”13 That is, the important thing about this photo is not what people are in front of the camera, but rather that they are Cristeros, anti-secularists who lead a rebellion in the 1920s. It doesn’t matter which ones, although they are in a very specific town, at a specific moment; what is important is the historical context and not the specific subjects. And the titles of the photographs are not always assignable to the person taking the photo. Often, they are given by the researchers, the curators and that is where the intention of the person who took the photograph can also be easily manipulated. Where resides, then, the quality that determines if a photo is a portrait or not? In the person photographed or in the passage of time that erased the memory of their name? In the people portrayed? Or those that label them? I think that, in the first place, what makes a photo a portrait or not is the intention of the person taking the photo. Sometimes, we have someone tell a photographer to take a portrait of them and they stand in front of the camera with the intention of having a portrait taken of them. However, if the intention of the person taking it is not exactly that and, for example, the subject is out of focus and a window is in focus, and the title is “Rain on the windows,” it will not be a portrait. How can we know what the intention of the person who took the photograph was? Often, it is necessary to “guess” from what we have: the image. One of the most direct ways is through the formal analysis

In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?) 21 of the photograph. It can be determined by the framing, by the focus, and even by the relationship that we perceive that was established between the subject and the photographer; of course, it can also be ascertained by the title or the exhibit label that accompanies it, when there is one, (sometimes added by the photographer/or sometimes not). In the CEMCA catalog I refer to above, for example, there is a photo very similar to the previous one, where two men appear (although it could be a man and a woman) with bandoliers and a hat, they are sitting, and on the photo it says: “Chief Liberator Colonel Perfecto Castañón” and at the bottom they put: “Colonel Cristero, Perfecto Castañón, Zacatecas, 1928.”14 The important thing about this photo, obviously, is the naming of the subject, and thus it becomes the portrait of a person, although the caption also contains historical information, and the place and year are provided. It is very common for those photographed, whether or not in a portrait, to look at the camera many times precisely because they believe that a portrait is being taken. Hence, they appear to be portraits; indeed they are often called such, but both the person who took the photograph and those of us who observe it careless about the person than the traditional outfit they are wearing or not wearing, the rifle he carries or the horse he rides, the activity he is doing, or the place where he is. In these cases, the intention is not to portray someone and the subject as such is rather superfluous since what is sought is the aesthetic composition or what we might refer to as socio-historical documentation. Therefore, they should not be considered portraits. In so-called ethnographic photography, this issue is seen clearly. We look at supposed portraits of people and when we read the caption, it often only states the place where they live, the ethnic group to which they belong, or their occupation. Sander is a good example of this, and only because of his skill as a photographer could it be said that in his work, there is a kind of fusion between portraits and types. Regarding the so-called portraits of village women, for example, we see that they are photographed more than anything because they are different, the eye behind the camera sees them as distinct and, therefore, what is photographed is the difference, otherness, more than the people as individuals. There is a publication titled Mujeres vistas por mujeres (Women Seen by Women), which deals with the work of Latin American photographers on women of the continent; they are photographs of women primarily from rural villages, of misery, of repression, of sadness, of marginality.15 There are two main types of portraits, those of famous people and those of “ordinary” people, but in both, there is a clear portrayal of individual identity. Natalia Baquedano and Lucero González It is important to rescue the pioneers of the trade and art of portraiture that women joined later than men; their entry has been gradual since the nineteenth century; however, today there may be as many women as men or more. One of these pioneers is Natalia Baquedano. The other is the contemporary photographer, Lucero González. I chose them to situate myself between two poles of the chronological spectrum of women’s photography in Mexico: one, among the pioneers from the end of the nineteenth century, and another from the twenty-first century. I also chose them because they both create portraits of women.

22  Eli Bartra In 1900 there were thirty female photographers in Mexico, four of whom, according to the census, were in Mexico City.16 In the United States, for example, at the same time, it is recorded that there were hundreds of women practicing the profession of photographers. In that country, they started before and apparently from the beginning and up to 1900, there had been 1600 female photographers, which constituted 1.6% or 1.8% of the total number of photographers.17 Natalia Baquedano Hurtado was born in the City of Querétaro in 1872 and died in Mexico City in 1936, at the age of sixty-four, apparently due to heart disease. In her death certificate, it is stated that she was single and a housewife by profession (!). She came from a wealthy family. Her father, Don Francisco Baquedano, was the owner of a food packing company. I have not been able to find out more about her mother other than her name: Isabel Hurtado. Baquedano had four sisters: Mercedes, Concepción, Clemencia, and Dolores. The family had moved to the capital where she eventually settled. Baquedano was one of the first women to open, in 1898, a photography studio called Fotografía nacional (National Photography) that was in the downtown area of the city at the corner of Alcaicería and Cinco de Mayo.18 Unfortunately, very little is known about the life of Baquedano, only a few loose threads that are yet insufficient to weave the plot of her career as a photographer. She apparently studied plastic arts at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City. She never married and had no children. According to an eighty-year-old niece of hers,19 Baquedano was rather serious, but nice. She says that she had a great friend, La Güera, who was a “companion of hers throughout her life.” She commented that she had been very Catholic, but around the age of forty she became a spiritualist and part of a Protestant sect. I had access to her family archive, almost all of it unpublished in 1995, made up primarily of portraits of her family. Apparently, there exist between 200 and 250 of her photographs. In this archive, there are daguerreotypes as well as flexible nitrocellulose film and prints on paper. There are also glass plates and, according to an expert, Baquedano used two types: those with homemade emulsion and those that were preemulsified.20 What is not known, however, is how many photos of hers exist scattered around the city, or throughout the country, as products of her work in her studio. In certain photographs, she incorporated elements of a different nature and turned them into collages. She glued little flowers and ribbons to them or painted decorations on them. This was quite a common practice in the last century. Perhaps it expresses the transition between the painted portrait and the photographic portrait. The result is rather twee. In the case of Baquedano, it may be that the case that she studied plastic arts but, as far as we know, did not devote herself to painting but to photography, but the former may have influenced her to use this form. We can see the photographic collage style, like the one used by Baquedano, in portraits by the British photographer Lady Mary Georgina Filmer (1838–1903).21 It is very likely that this is a practice toward which women showed some inclination. It is important to note, as has often been done regarding women who practice some kind of art form, that Baquedano did not have children, nor a husband and it is likely that this has something to do with the fact that she was able to dedicate herself to her profession. There are some matters that draw attention to her photography: in the first place, her absolute predilection for women and especially for her sister Clemencia and second,

In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?) 23 the dynamic nature of her portraits. Many of them are posed, but we can perfectly imagine the movement; we see the person in action. For example, there is a photo of her sister playing the tambourine; in another, she is holding up her dress with one hand and touching her hair with the other; in another, she is raising the shawl she is wearing. It is curious that her sister dressed up with clothes and objects from the Iberian Peninsula so that Baquedano could take her photos (Figure 1.1). Did they have a particular attraction to things Spanish things? Did they have a direct relationship with Spain? We know that in those days Spanish outfits were frecuently used. In any case, they make evident that a game was established between the sisters; more than anything, this is what these photos communicate. They are an expression of something quite playful. Something similar happens with some images of María Santibáñez, who was a photographer in Mexico City beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century. There is also a photograph of her parents drinking beer and her father is also smoking a cigar. It is very curious in this photograph, obviously posed, but with activity, to see that the mother, like the father, is raising the beer mug. There is a self-portrait where she is holding a kitten attached to her head with one hand. In all of them, we see the dynamic and the playful intertwined.

Figure 1.1  Natalia Baquedano. Her Sister Clemencia Wearing an Andalusian Dress. Mexico, c. 1900. Source: Courtesy of the Shanti Lesur Archive.

24  Eli Bartra Baquedano successfully employs the resource of portraying people in front of a mirror, very common in the history of photography (and in plastic art). It is another element that adds life and light to a photography characterized, precisely, by its enormous vitality. In one of them, it could be said that there are no differences between a similar photograph taken by a man: it is the sister in front of a mirror but looking at the camera. It is very likely that Baquedano limited herself to imitating this widely used photographic resource. However, there is another one that seems very different to me. The same sister is in front of a mirror not posing but rather in an everyday posture: she looks at herself and has one hand on the furniture and the other on her head. This photo expresses an intimate look. It feels different, there is no tension, it is very relaxed. The texture achieved through the handling of light in her photos is significant; the atmosphere she creates stands out in comparison to other Mexican portraits from the same period. Those of her sister Clemencia, who often smiles, convey a sensual joy but even when she does not, they communicate that feeling. In general, the portraits of that time made by men are hieratic, cold, flat, with some exceptions (see, e.g., some of Guillermo Kahlo, Romualdo García or by the Guerras); instead, hers are warm, alive, dynamic, even mundane in a good sense. The women that she portrays, in general, do not appear to be reserved, or shy, or modest. Of course, there are some where her sister is presented as somewhat modest. But what is striking is that in her portraits you do not see what is expected from the photographs of women of her time. Indeed, what draws attention is the difference between the photographs of women taken by men and these of Baquedano. She has a portrait of Clemencia talking on the phone that I consider excellent and that is a good example of what I am expressing.22 She is a woman in action, at ease, candid. There is another one that is particularly unsettling and, I believe slightly out of the ordinary. It is a portrait of a seated woman with her son or daughter, approximately two years old, standing on the bench where she is sitting (Figure 1.2). The child has wings (as was customary) and, with one hand, is covering the eyes of the woman (the mother?), which forces her to close them. It could be possible to think that this photograph is not really a portrait but rather simply an allegory of love in general—since the child represents a cupid—or of blind maternal love. It could also suggest that motherhood is a kind of handicap, impediment, or disadvantage. However, since it is in the family archive, I tend to think that it is the portrait of someone in the family. Another characteristic of Baquedano is that she portrayed “ordinary” women, not the famous ones. Sometimes, there are studio photographs in which she uses a chair or a table and/ or a backdrop, and everything is always very sober, very simple; in some, the only item other than the photographed subject is a rug. Many others are taken outside the studio, apparently in the open air, and with some greenery in the background, which further contributes to the freshness that her images communicate. In contrast to the beginning of the twentieth century, today dozens of women in Mexico express themselves professionally through photography. One of them is Lucero González. She was born in Mexico City in 1947, a decade after Baquedano’s death, into an upper-middle-class family; her mother was a housewife, and her father was an epidemiologist. She had a son and a daughter, but when she began to take up photography professionally in photojournalism in 1987, they were already teenagers. She studied sociology and has been a feminist since the early 1970s. One of González’s specialties is portraiture, although unlike Baquedano, she mainly photographs well-known women, women who have achieved prominence in the world of Mexican culture.23 She also does portraits of men, but to a much lesser extent.

In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?) 25

Figure 1.2  Natalia Baquedano. Portrait of an Unidentified Infant. Mexico, c. 1900. Source: Courtesy of the Shanti Lesur Archive.

I think that her inclination toward the portraits of creators also has to do with her feminism: she wants to make evident the existence of women who play an important role in the country with faces and names. It is a way to record the work of women, for today and perhaps for the future. For when all that remains of these individuals is what they accomplished and their faces, frozen forever, through González’s lens. In her portraits, González reveals a particularly distinctive personality trait of each of the women photographed. For this, she often uses objects or animals that integrate the photographic context in which her “character” lives. These may consist of an apple, femur bones, a skull, cigarettes, a lighter, some rags… or a cat. The slight similarity in this with Baquedano’s photographs is curious, who also incorporates objects that give dynamism to the photo. For example, there is a portrait of Mexican writer, Ethel Krauze, biting into an apple that captures her in a very spontaneous and even somewhat seductive gesture. Her portraits are often not fully posed, although they may appear to be. In general, people don’t pose for her, they’re just there and she snaps photos; evidently, they are aware of her presence with the camera, but if she can surprise them, she does. This is a very important element for her. Her portraits are of two types: those that she takes with the element of surprise wherein, even though the person is aware that a photo will be taken, she does not pose, and sometimes is even engrossed in doing something, like the

26  Eli Bartra one of Krauze. In others, she directs the photographed person, tells her to move, to grab an object.24 By way of example, she has a type of portrait like the one she did of Graciela Iturbide that is highly thought out, constructed, and highly sophisticated. She portrayed her as a soul in purgatory: her eyes are closed and she is wearing a cardboard on her chest, in the foreground, with flames painted on it. Additionally, she incorporated some little porcelain hands that belong to a collection of Iturbide’s. Perhaps the fact that Iturbide is a photographer forced González to take a more thoughtful photo of her. It challenged her to construct something, together with her, instead of leaving it to chance. I imagine it may have been challenging for her to photograph a great photographer. For González, it is easier to photograph women because she establishes a much more direct relationship with them than with men. She feels more comfortable because she has fewer limitations; it seems that with women she has no self-censorship. When she has them pose, she can tell them to lower their shoulders, to stand a certain way. She keeps a distance from men because she doesn’t want them to think that she is seducing or controlling them. González uses a manual Hasselbrad or Nikon FM camera and three lenses, a wide angle, a normal and a telephoto. She never uses flash. She forces the film, if necessary, which is why some photos are grainy. She prefers to use a shutter speed of 400 mm when the light is low. In other words, she has a technique, but one that works with as few artifices as possible. Most of her portraits are not studio shots and use natural light and on occasion, a spotlight. Hence, in her photos, there is almost always a high contrast. She likes to have control over the camera, which is why she uses a manual and not an automatic. That gives her the ability to get the mood and the texture she is seeking. For a personal image, for uploading to Instagram or publishing in newspapers, she uses a digital Leica. Today, she often prints digitally because the costs are lower. For her portraits of creatives, she uses black-and-white film. However, when she goes on a trip and photographs the women of the Mexican Pacific coast, for example, she uses color film. It is as if she wants to capture those unfamiliar realities just as they are, with all their colors. It is perhaps the way she chooses to better know and communicate the environment of other places and the identity of other people different from her, different from those in her city and milieu. She likes facial expressions, especially the gaze and the mouth. Hands are also very important. The face represents the window to understanding another person. The rest is decorative. Frequently, there is no background and when there is, it is perhaps because the person photographed did not interest her enough. Or because with the face and hands alone, she would be unable to demonstrate the subject’s personality in a satisfactory way. For González, portraiture is a way to better know the people she photographs, who, moreover, are generally people she likes. Publicizing her own work is a way to make evident who she is; through the portraits of other people, she reveals herself. Her tendency is to take portraits only of the face and medium shots, unlike Baquedano who prefers full-length portraits and long shots (Figure 1.3). It is perhaps for this reason that González’s images are, in general, very compelling, and their main characteristic is their strength. In a short time, González was able to “tame” the lens to meet her desired outcomes. It is possible to state that she wants to show the strength and dignity of women and I think she is successful. There is an image of the English Mexican painter Leonora Carrington that accentuates her strength, her somewhat feline energy, with the inclusion of a cat. Leonora and the feline stare at the camera, challenging it. Two soul mates strongly united by the action of the lens that make up a unit. This photograph could be titled “Leonora-cat.”

In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?) 27

Figure 1.3  Lucero González. Elena Garro, Mexico, 1993. Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Another aspect of González’s portraiture is nude photography and within it, the male nude. It is, I think, one more manifestation of her rebellion against the limits still imposed, albeit subtly, by the dominant morality regarding what “real” women should or should not do. It is still irreverent today for a female photographer to take male nudes. There are very few in the history of women’s photography. Let us remember, however, the beautiful male nude of Imogen Cunningham.25 Like Baquedano, there is no doubt that González has an absolute predilection for photographing women. She likes women’s bodies more than men’s bodies; it seems to her that she has more range because men are very stiff. For a portrait of a male nude, she needs to have a close relationship to the subject, that’s why her first model was her partner and then her son. With women, she is more comfortable, direct communication comes easily, she can better understand her subject’s state of mind in the present moment. Although she has specialized in photographing creative women, she says that it does not matter if the portrait is of a well-known or even a famous woman, or a portrait of a woman from a small town, of “an ordinary woman.” In her search for knowledge of a person through photography, she does the same job. She tries to perceive, feel, and intuit who the person is before her using the same approach, whether it is the acclaimed Mexican writer Ángeles Mastretta or Gilberta, a woman from the coast.

28  Eli Bartra González also explored a different form of portraiture, which she considers constructed portraits. For example, she has a series that represents the Nahuatl goddess Xochiquetzal (feathered flower), which she sees as a Venus, as the goddess of love, of sensuality; hence, the semi-nude photograph. Here, she does take into consideration the background. She also builds the context, with hearts, with the walls of the ruins of Xochicalco, with blood, that is, information that supports what she wants to express about these constructed portraits of mythological characters. She also has a series of girls and adolescents from the coasts of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Most of them are sellers of bread, fruit, tomatoes, and many other things. They are all color photographs, and they differ from those of the creators, moreover, because they all have a very underlined and very important context. Here, the backgrounds are as important as the faces and hands. There is a relevant parallel between the portraits of Baquedano and González, and it is the fact that both were strongly inclined toward photographing women. Both, consciously and unconsciously, give us an image of the woman as a whole person, Baquedano by showing action, dynamism and even insinuating the mutilation of women by maternity; González photographed the creative women of Mexico with strength and determination. I must admit that it is impossible for me, without carrying out an in-depth comparative study, to be able to affirm the specific differences between the portraits made by women and those made by men consist of. The most I can do here is to point out some general issues that may be worth considering. We frequently find that the portraits by women are more alive, less static, and less posed. This is a trend that I observe. Moreover, the women portraying women are found in informal, relaxed environments, which is how the photography of both Baquedano and González is perceived. See also, for example, Portrait of Adelaide Hanscom (1905) by Emily H. Pitchford.26 Women photographing women very often transmit a comfortable, warm atmosphere, and this is probably because the relationship between the photographer and the photographed occurs in this way. It is similar to the atmosphere that is created when women gather to talk away from the male gaze and ear. That atmosphere is often imprinted in the photos of women taken by women.

Notes 1 For further discussion, see Bartra. Frida Khalo. Mujer, ideología, y arte. 2 By way of example, I will cite two texts that contribute to filling the vacuum of androcentric historiography: A Naomi Rosenblum. A History of Women Photographers (Nueva York, Abbeville Press, 1994). History of Photography (Women in Photography), London, Taylor & Francis, Vol. 18, Nº3, Fall 1994. 3 See photographs in Lola Álvarez Bravo. Recuento fotográfico (Textos de varios autores), Mexico, Ed. Penélope, 1982. 4 See Graciela Iturbide’s, Sueños de papel, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988, p. 40. 5 Ibidem, p. 37. 6 Graham Clarke (ed.). The Portrait in Photography, London, Reaktion Books, 1992, p. 71. 7 See Arturo Aguilar Ochoa. “Espejo de una época. ‘Los tipos populares de François Aubert,’” Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Jal., Mexico, January–February 1995, pp. 36–38. 8 See, for example, Patricia Massé. “Realidad y actualidad fotográfica de las prostitutas de 1865,” Política y Cultura. Cultura de las mujeres, 6, Mexico, UAM-X, Spring 1996, pp. 111–131. 9 Richard Avedon. “Unas palabras sobre el retrato” in Luna Córnea, Mexico, Nº3, 1993, p. 7. 10 See John Mraz. “Particularidad y nostalgia,” Nexos, Mexico, Nº 91, July 1985, pp. 9–12.

In and Around Photographic Portraits (or Portraiture?) 29 11 See the image in Margaret Hooks. Tina Modotti. Photographer and Revolutionary, London, Pandora, Harper Collins Publishers, 1993, p. 154. 12 Ibidem, p. 86. 13 See the image in the Catálogo de publicaciones del Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, Mexico, CEMCA, 2nd ed., 1993, p. 105. 14 Ibidem, p. 26. 15 Mujeres vistas por mujeres, Comisión de las Comunidades Europeas, Servicio de Información, Comunicación y Cultura para América Latina, Editorial Ex-Libris, undated. This is the exhibition catalogue created by the photography competition organized in 1988 under the same name. 16 Censo General de Población en 1900, in María de la Luz Parcero. Condiciones de la mujer en el México del siglo XIX, Mexico, INAH, 1992, p. 79. 17 For more information, consult Kathleen Collins. Shadow and Substance. Essays on the History of Photography, Michigan, The Amorphous Institute Press, 1990, pp. 89–103. 18 José Antonio Rodríguez. “Pioneras. 1872–1911,” Fotógrafas en México (1872–1960), Mexico, Turner, 2012, pp. 7–29. 19 Interview with Isabel Araujo Baquedano, February 1995. 20 Conversation with Lázaro Sandoval, photographer, Director of the Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Cuernavaca, Morelos, August 1995. 21 See the photo in Naomi Rosenblum. Op. cit., p. 14. 22 See the image in Eugenia Meyer (coord.). Imagen histórica de la fotografía en México, Mexico, INAH, 1978, p. 80. This book contains seven of her photographs and a total of 122 photographs by different artists, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through 1960. 23 For an overview of González’ portraits of women, see: https://museodemujeres.com/en/ exhibitions/436-a-room-of-one-s-own. 24 Interview with Lucero González, Mexico City, August 1995, May 2023. 25 See photo in Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Photography at the Dock, Minneapolis (USA), University of Minesota Press, 1991, p. 262. 26 See photo in Naomi Rosenblum, Op. cit., p. 80.

Works Cited Aguilar Ochoa, Arturo. “Espejo de una época. ‘Los tipos populares de François Aubert.’” Universidad de Guadalajara. Guadalajara, México, January–February 1995, 36–38. Avedon, Richard. “Unas palabras sobre el retrato.” Luna Córnea. Mexico, Nº3, 1993, 7. Bartra, Eli. Frida Khalo. Mujer, ideología, y arte. Barcelona: Icaria, 1994. Álvarez Bravo, Lola. Recuento fotográfico. Mexico: Ed. Penélope, 1982. Catálogo de publicaciones del Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos. México: CEMCA, 2nd ed., 1993. Clarke, Graham, Ed. The Portrait in Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 1992. Collins, Kathleen. Shadow and Substance. Essays on the History of Photography. Michigan: The Amorphous Institute Press, 1990. Hooks, Margaret. Tina Modotti. Photographer and Revolutionary. London: Pandora, Harper Collins Publishers, 1993. Iturbide, Graciela. Sueños de papel. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988. Massé, Patricia. “Realidad y actualidad fotográfica de las prostitutas de 1865.” Política y Cultura. Cultura de las mujeres, 6, México, UAM-X, Spring 1996, pp. 111–131. Meyer, Eugenia. Ed. Imagen histórica de la fotografía en México. Mexico: INAH, 1978. Mraz, John. “Particularidad y nostalgia.” Nexos. Mexico. 91, July 1985, 9–12. Mujeres vistas por mujeres. Comisión de las Comunidades Europeas, Servicio de Información, Comunicación y Cultura para América Latina, 1990. University of Texas Press, 2009.

30  Eli Bartra Parcero, María de la Luz. Condiciones de la mujer en el México del siglo XIX. Mexico: INAH, 1992. Rodríguez, José Antonio. “Pioneras. 1872–1911,” Fotógrafas en México (1872–1960). Mexico: Turner, 2012, pp. 7–29. Rosenblum, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville Press, 1994. “Women in Photography.” History of Photography. London: Taylor & Francis, Vol. 18, Nº3, Fall, 1994.

2

The Margins and Potential Horizons of Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Modernity in Four Photographs by Tina Modotti, Kati Horna, Mariana Yampolsky, and Elsa Medina Ryan Long

Four twentieth-century portraits complement one another in a way that depicts and imagines different relationships among people, postrevolutionary Mexico, and the form and content characteristic of the groundbreaking photographers who made them. In the somewhat abstract Madre con hijo de Tehuantepec (Mother and Child from Tehuantepec) from 1929, Tina Modotti (1896–1942) places one half-concealed face beneath the chin of another mostly absent face. Modotti often downplays the individual and underscores visual patterns of human interaction, as in her especially famous image, Desfile de trabajadores (Workers Parade) (1926). Kati Horna (1912–2000) demonstrates her interest in women artists and inanimate faces in an untitled 1960 portrayal of Helen Escobedo, an interest also visible in a 1957 portrait of Remedios Varo wearing a Leonora Carrington mask.1 In the group portrait Escuela mazahua (Mazahua School) (1979) Mariana Yampolsky (1925–2002) mixes exceptional light and texture with her dedication to portraying indigenous Mexicans, evident throughout her collection titled Mazahua (1993). Elsa Medina (b. 1952) combines social and political critique with attention to form in Migrante (Migrant) (1987), a combination that also shapes her 1991 image of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s sneer upon dismantling agricultural reform.2 These images span six decades. Three of their respective photographers were born outside Mexico. The fourth, Medina, portrays vulnerable populations at the nation’s territorial and social boundaries. Limits that shaped the lives and careers of all four provide expressive points of departure that allow them to clearly portray the potential and exclusivity of Mexico’s postrevolutionary modernity. I begin briefly with Yampolsky because her portraits of indigenous people contribute to a longstanding discussion about how Mexico’s native and other marginalized populations relate to modernity.3 The incisive cultural critic and chronicler Carlos Monsiváis explains that Yampolsky resists a stubborn atemporality that sustains exclusive visions of modern Mexico because she “no mira el paradigma de la grandeza inmóvil, ni ve en [los indígenas] frutos terrestres defendidos por la Naturaleza de su inclusión en cualquier sociedad” [sees neither the paradigm of static grandeur nor does she see in indigenous people terrestrial fruit protected by nature from inclusion in any society] (135).4 Instead, continues Monsiváis, Yampolsky shows how this alleged timelessness justifies marginalization because it serves as a counterpart to an exclusive form of modern teleology: “Estar fuera del tiempo o llegar a tiempo al destiempo es el signo de la economía y la represión salvaje, no de la raza” [Being outside of time or arriving on time to the wrong time is the sign of the economy and brutal repression, not race] (136). The economic exploitation DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-4

32  Ryan Long of indigenous people through photography, details Monsiváis, consists of “el chantaje sentimental, la búsqueda de la adopción psicológica de los niños [y] la denuncia que descentre el sentido de la imagen” [emotional blackmail, the desire to psychologically adopt children, and denunciation that decenters the image’s meaning] (136). By contrast, Yampolsky’s photos express “el deseo de extraer el ideal del horizonte de lo cotidiano” [the desire to extract the ideal from daily life’s horizon] (136). This operation, argues Monsiváis, makes Yampolsky’s audience acknowledge that “la mayor parte del tiempo y el espacio de las vidas transcurre en la invisibilidad social. […] la fotografía hace visible la memoria” [most people’s moments and spaces occur in social invisibility. […] photography makes memory visible] (136–137). I interpret “lo ideal” as modern Mexico’s potential, a memory to guide viewer’s imaginations toward a future when the so-called “gente de razón [no] invisibiliza a las etnias” [people of reason do not make different ethnicities invisible] (Monsiváis 134). Photography has a disjointed relationship to time similar to what Monsiváis calls arriving on time to the wrong time. In his study of how cameras and other machines, like the typewriter, influence modern Mexican culture, Rubén Gallo identifies one goal of postrevolutionary Mexican art: “to synchronize cultural production to the vertiginous speed of an incipient modernity” (1). The photographers I analyze synchronize the vertiginous speed of the camera shutter’s release with extensive preparation and post-production to make images of lo ideal that combine visual elements with themes of a nation’s ambivalent modernity, depicting hopeful futures, artistic creation, education, and desperate flight. The four women I discuss have excelled in an art men still dominate.5 This gendered context and other factors that make them relative outsiders, such as arriving in Mexico as adults or experiencing poverty and exile, inspire Modotti, Horna, Yampolsky, and Medina’s portrayals of limits and possibilities, including those of a nation and what it could otherwise be. Modotti’s marginalization, which stemmed from her gender, poverty as a child, displacement, and active commitment to communism, informed her portrayal of women, labor, and an unjust society. She was born in Italy and spent a decade in the United States before moving to Mexico with Edward Weston in 1923 (Albers 115). John Mraz proposes that Modotti’s dynamic depiction of laborers in the communist magazine El Machete “may well be the first instances of critical photojournalism in Latin America” (Looking 83). She was no stranger to economic precariousness. As a child in Italy, she worked in a silk mill (Albers 18–19). Edward Sullivan focuses on her gender and writes that as a young woman in the United States Modotti “began her career as a film actress and model – someone who posed for the camera;” but in her own photographs she “inverted the male gaze of which she had been the object” (Sullivan LXXVII). Sullivan continues, “Many of her photographs are of women whom she perceived in a radically different way from the manner in which she herself had been depicted in still or moving photographic images” (LXXVII). His observation that Modotti portrayed women as “symbols of power” (LXXVII) is supported by her photographs of women working, such as Mujer con olla (Woman with Clay Pot) from 1926, taken in Oaxaca. Mraz underscores this image’s “dramatic composition” and the way in which the rebozo the woman in it is wearing is “incorporated into the labor process [and is not] an exotic trapping” (Looking 77). Politically speaking, Modotti’s work in 1920s Mexico revealed the “gap […] between revolutionary rhetoric and reality” (Mraz, Looking 83). She was deported in 1930 amid attacks on communists and an “excuse to round up ‘enemies of the state’” after an attempt on President Pascual Ortiz Rubio’s life (Lowe 44). In 1939 Modotti “became one of the forty thousand Republican refugees of the Spanish Civil War who flooded

Potential Horizons of Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Modernity 33 into Mexico” (Lowe 44) after working in Spain for International Red Aid (Albers 285). Her 1920s photographs outlast the political commitments and struggles that eventually sidelined her creativity and may have led to her early death.6 Hardly an economic outsider, Horna was born to a wealthy family in Szilasbalhás, near Budapest. Because she was Jewish, however, interwar Europe became an increasingly dangerous place. Horna, like other Spanish Civil War photographers, including her childhood friend Robert Capa, helped found photojournalism as a profession and an art (De Diego 67). Similar to Modotti, she portrayed women as strong laborers. One of Horna’s photo spreads in the Spanish feminist magazine Mujeres libres (Free Women), for example, features a nursing mother. Miriam Margarita Basilio writes that the photo and accompanying text “emphasize a woman’s capacity to oversee the management of a welfare institution in times of revolution and war;” and, Basilio continues, “Rather than representing a patriarchal return to order, these articles emphasized women’s important contributions to the war effort while they promoted women and children’s health as key aspects of political liberation” (67–69). In Mexico, where she arrived in 1939 (Horna y Fernández 241), Horna worked from 1958 to 1968 with Mujeres (Women), a magazine founded by Mexico’s first female senator, Marcelina Galindo Arce (de León 76). Christina L. de León highlights the way Horna’s portraits represent artistic production, helping to create what Eli Bartra identifies as important aspects of women’s portraits of other women, namely, “dynamism” and the “force and determination [of] creative women in Mexico” (225). De León writes regarding the Escobedo portrait I analyze as well that its “subtle implication is that the sculptor has essentially created and become enamored with herself – or at least a (masculine) extension of herself” (78), and concludes, “in Horna’s historical and cultural context, such a notion expressed by women artists in these reversed gender terms was still relatively novel” (78). Throughout her career, women, politics, and art remained vital topics in Horna’s work. Yampolsky was drawn to politics and culture by her interest in global tensions and by her family; her great uncle was Franz Boas (Segre 160). After visiting Mexico’s Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop or TGP) the lithographers Max Kahn and Eleanor Coen told Yampolsky about it; and she left the United States for Mexico to join the TGP in 1944 (Berler 11). The TGP’s posters for the antifascist League for the Promotion of German Culture in Mexico and its publication titled El libro negro del terror nazi en Europa (The Black Book of Nazi Terror in Europe) (1943) exemplify its dedication to the kind of international topics that interested Yampolsky.7 Her US nationality was perhaps the clearest marker of her outsider status. This did not stop her from developing, in Elena Poniatowska’s words, “una de las miradas más inteligentes y honestas de nuestra cultura” [one of the most intelligent and honest visions of our culture] (“Algunas fotógrafas” 51). Poniatowska continues, citing Yampolsky, “Nunca me interesa expresar mi yo, sino reflejar en un momento en la vida de la gente que tal vez otros no veían o despreciaban” [I was never interested in just expressing myself but in reflecting for a moment the life of the people whom others, perhaps, never noticed, or disdained] (“Algunas fotógrafas” 52). Yampolsky’s focus on others helps explain Así la construí (This Is How I Built It) (n.d.), a photo of a man who appears more interested in describing his own work than acknowledging Yampolsky’s camera. Medina was in part inspired by her father, an avid amateur photographer (Mraz, “Coartada” 8). She studied industrial design at the Universidad Iberoamericana and took several photography classes at San Diego State University in the 1970s after moving to Tijuana (Abelleyra). One of her first jobs was in a graphic design studio where,

34  Ryan Long according to Angélica Abelleyra, Medina “lavaba las tazas y hacía el café” [washed the mugs and made the coffee]. Between 1983 and 1985 Medina studied with the photojournalist Nacho López (Abelleyra), known for his bold and political portrayal of daily life.8 Medina recalls that “a partir de una posición crítica [Nacho] me impulsó a aprender cómo la foto puede ayudarnos a entendernos como individuos en esta sociedad” [starting from a critical standpoint [Nacho] motivated me to learn how a photo can help us understand ourselves as individuals in this society] (qtd. in Abelleyra). The relation of individual to society characterizes Medina’s photograph of rescue workers under a Mexican flag on what remains of a building destroyed by the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. According to Mraz this image helped Medina get a job at La Jornada (“Coartada” 11), where she worked between 1986 and 1999 (Mraz, “Coartada” 21). Medina became a leading figure of what Mraz calls Mexico’s New Photojournalism, which permitted “the publication of photography not immediately tied to illustrating ‘newsworthy’ events” while also being more gender inclusive, “redefin[ing] what was formerly an exclusively male environment and perspective” (Mraz, Looking 216). Aesthetically speaking, Rita Leistner emphasizes Medina’s impressive timing and use of light, employing patience and years of experience to “captar esas fracciones de segundo” [capture those fractions of a second] that give spontaneity to her work (5), and to register on film “el momento preciso y finito de la colisión entre el objeto y la luz” [the precise and finite moment when light and subject collide] (6). Light and timing feature in Migrante, in which the asymmetrical time of photography (years of practice and hours of darkroom work to remember an instant) parallels the disjointed time of modernity. A man is left behind permanently in Medina’s enduring image of the nation’s limits. Collaborating, mentoring, teaching, and questioning often coincide with being a female artist. According to Naomi Rosenblum, women photographers are historically less competitive than men: “In contrast [to the secretiveness around the discoveries of Daguerre and Fox Talbot] many women urged cooperation, actively supporting their female colleagues by offering advice on matters both practical and emotional” (11).9 Linde Lehtinen notes that writer, scholar, and patron of the arts Anita Brenner, the child of Jewish immigrants to Mexico and in her youth an immigrant to the United States, “often found herself in the position of an outsider, in terms of religion and national identity as well as gender” (15). Brenner moved to Mexico City in 1923, the same year as Modotti and Weston, where she found what Karen Cordero Reiman calls, “a warm circle of intense female friendships” (59). Brenner published several photos by Modotti and Weston in her 1929 book Idols behind Altars; and, from 1958 to 1965, photos by Horna in her magazine Mexico this Month (Sánchez Mejorada 5). Modotti inspired Lola Álvarez Bravo, who, together with her husband Manuel, acquired a camera from Modotti before the latter was deported (Conger 13). Lola Álvarez Bravo taught Yampolsky in a course at the Academy of San Carlos in the late 1940s (Conger 17; Segre 233). Between 1958 and 1963, Horna directed the photography courses at Mexico City’s Iberoamerican University (Espinosa 249); and from 1973 until her death in 2000 she directed the Photography Workshop at the Academy of San Carlos (Espinosa 251). Yampolsky’s dedication to education included contributions to Leopoldo Méndez and Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s book Lo efímero y lo eterno del arte popular mexicano (The Ephemeral and the Eternal in Mexican Popular Art) (1971) (Poniatowska, “Foreword” 7); working with the Ministry of Education on graphic design for grade-school science textbooks (Berler 15); and children’s literacy (Poniatowska, “Foreword” 6). Medina tells her own students that “we are beings conditioned by the historic moment”; and that “If you are aware that you belong

Potential Horizons of Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Modernity 35 to a world, then you have the ability to question everything” (qtd. in Rodríguez 34). Medina’s observation attributes a critical perspective to historical awareness, which she passes on to her students. From Modotti to Medina, this kind of teaching and the women and men whose collaborative efforts make it possible have enabled Mexican photography to test the limits and explore the possibilities of the nation’s horizons, a dynamic process plainly visible through analyses of four images by women whose photographic careers reached aesthetic culmination within and as a product of Mexico’s challenging, uneven modernity. I begin my detailed analyses with Yampolsky and Medina before turning to Horna and Modotti in order to trace a path from limits and marginalization to creation and potential; and to show how these images and the careers and legacies of their creators persist in challenging a chronology of exclusive modernity. Yampolsky’s vision of a classroom of indigenous girls in Escuela mazahua portrays limits and possibilities because it acknowledges marginality at the point of a desire for centrality (see Figure 2.1). Material evidence of poverty in the form of unadorned walls and worn desks contrasts starkly with the concentration and strength evinced by the figures who dominate the middle of this group portrait. These positive attributes represent the ideal extracted from the horizon of quotidian invisibility that Monsiváis identifies in Yampolsky’s photography. Visibility calls out to the viewer from the barrettes in the foremost girl’s hair, the only example of burned out highlights from among the four images I

Figure 2.1  Mariana Yampolsky. Escuela mazahua (Mazahua School) 1979. Courtesy of the Centro de la Imagen, Secretaría de Cultura. Mariana Yampolsky’s work is recognized by UNESCO Memoria del Mundo, México.

36  Ryan Long analyze. Their brilliance emphasizes the image’s light source and its figures’ gender. The barrettes’ visual significance also underscores their function, to keep the girl’s hair from blocking the view of the paper she’s working on. The barrettes also draw the viewer’s attention to two girls who do not belong to the photo’s central trio because they echo the relative brightness of the shawl and the shirt worn, respectively, by the two girls who appear along the center of the photo’s left edge. The blown highlight that starts the viewer’s gaze toward the two girls on the edge emphasizes texture, which is absent in the barrettes but present in the detail of other portions of the photo, including clothing, jewelry, paper, and the girls’ hair. The image’s light begins on that edge, reaches its peak at the barrettes, and extends to the left sleeve of the rightmost girl in the central trio. Light’s path begins behind the girls, suggesting that they should concentrate less on the world outside what is presumably a window and more on the equally presumed presence of a teacher before them. But the light stays on the girls, giving them a leading role in their education. Also highlighted but showing more detail than the barrettes is the earring worn by the girl seated on the right. Following the highlights leads to a ring in the standing girl’s ear. The girl with barrettes wears no earring, perhaps because she is the youngest of the three. Socially constructed signs of femininity reflect the image’s light. The girls’ faces, by contrast, appear to absorb the light, as they in turn are absorbed by work and perhaps a teacher’s instruction. Progress that may come from education is figured by the three central girls’ ages and positions within the photo’s frame. The foremost girl wears barrettes and a braid. The next a braid. The girl in the background has no barrettes and seems to have no braid. Her expression is also stronger, maybe skeptical. Perhaps she is no longer a student but a teacher. In any case, the three central figures create a spiral staircase of growth and learning, the light curving back to the center of the frame, shining on the standing girl’s face. Notable in Yampolsky’s photo is the absence of anything other than the children and adolescents who are in the process of learning and growing. The invisible horizons, light from a window and a teacher standing before and maybe among them, illuminate and guide the ideal of autonomous, educated girls and women. A terrestrial horizon overpowers the marginalized man and central figure in Medina’s photograph (see Figure 2.2), a migrant who plans to leave the nation that likely has not

Figure 2.2  Elsa Medina. Migrante (Migrant). Zapata Canyon, Tijuana, Baja California, May 1987. Source: Courtesy of Elsa Medina.

Potential Horizons of Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Modernity 37 provided him sufficient opportunities to benefit from his own labor.10 The horizon and vast space define the image, whose critical perspective is strengthened by its infinite depth of field. With the wide-angle lens that characterizes much of her work (Mraz, “Coartada” 19), Medina foregrounds the man’s hand, which covers his face, while keeping everything in sharp focus, from the man’s left thumbnail at middle left to the distant tree in silhouette at upper middle right. The ideal Medina extracts from this man’s horizon, which is also a cliff (alluding to the danger of falling that further emphasizes the man’s precarity) is more critical than the one in Yampolsky’s photo, presenting the nation’s failure with little hope for imagining its possibilities. Its critique lies in a paradox at the intersection of exclusion and inclusion. Medina makes visible a man whose invisibility aids his flight, suggesting that increased visibility of his and other migrants’ plights might alleviate the economic conditions that force them into the darkness that approaches throughout the image, taken at sunset. He appears to be drowning in this barren land, only his elbow and the brim of his hat emerging above the paradoxically at once looming and gaping horizon line and cliff. The shadow of his hat’s brim is as dark and absent of detail as the darkest portions of the horizon’s edge. These very dark shadows are nearly equidistant from their respective framing vertical edges. The brightest, actually fully white portion of the image is the small piece of paper the man holds in his right hand. Unidentifiable, the paper attests to the man’s past because it is something he has brought with him; and it may also prompt the viewer to imagine a better future, as if it were an already purchased ticket to travel beyond one’s horizon. Parallelisms abound in this deep world, from the dark shadows that connect the hat and the cliff to the network of roads that crisscross the background and the way they find an echo in the extended fingers of the man’s left hand. His mustache, visible between left thumb and index finger is similar to the tree near a fork in the road in the center of the image. The line of his body’s angle is parallel to the longest visible road in the background, which, just above and to the left of the tree in the center, has a road branching off from it which is nearly parallel to his left elbow. The textures evoked by the man’s mustache and clothing, as well as the pebbles and plants in the foreground, are heightened by the texture of the fast film stock, its speed enabled by its coarser grain. To keep the line above the horizon at sunset especially bright, forming the largest bright highlight in the image, and the details of the man clear and distinct, Medina dodged and burned the print.11 The play of curving lines, highlights, and shadows establishes a visual analogue between the man’s boots and the horizon. The stark situation he finds himself in is reflected in the blacks and highlights of the print, and, in terms of texture, in the contrast between the seemingly soft bundle underneath his right elbow and the hard rock just next to it. Strong differences in black and white values characterize Horna’s image of creation (see Figure 2.3), echoing the work that goes into the photographic process if not the desperation of Medina’s image or the fragile potential of Yampolsky’s. Unique among the four images I analyze is Horna’s apparent use of flash, which often produces shadows absent of detail. The fully black shadow behind Escobedo’s face clarifies and emphasizes her near profile while it also distinguishes her face from the dark but detailed bust. A puzzling reflection in the low center portion of the image, whose surface is indeterminate, matches almost exactly in size and brightness the only finger visible on Escobedo’s left hand. The fact that Escobedo’s and the bust’s heads are completely within the image emphasizes the fact that the two figures’ mirrored shoulders and elbows (Escobedo’s right and the bust’s presumed left) are absent. Head and hand, thought, imagination, and labor, stand out. The clear focus almost entirely throughout the image suggests a small

38  Ryan Long

Figure 2.3  Kati Horna. Untitled [Helen Escobedo]. 1960. Courtesy of the Private Photographic and Graphic Archives Kati and José Horna, A.C. © 2005 Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández (All rights reserved).

aperture setting that would demand the use of a flash in an interior space. The large depth of field gives the viewer a glimpse of the working space that enables Escobedo to use her head and hand, which is centered at the point where lines extending from the noses and eyes of both Escobedo and the bust would intersect. A sense of balance that approximates a yin and yang symbol is reinforced by the white cup that punctuates the lower portion of the otherwise mostly dark right half, a complement to Escobedo’s dark hair on upper left. The texture of the delicate cloth of Escobedo’s blouse echoes the fragility of her left finger, and both stand in contrast to the hard and rough texture of the bust’s head and hand. The confluence of the sightlines and the textures is at the point where the human sculpting and the inanimate sculpted hands come together. Moving from back to front toward Horna’s lens, there is a progression of duration, from the artist’s mortality to the work of art’s likely greater longevity, a progression that does not end with the bust but in fact with Horna’s picture. The mutual support and co-creation in Horna’s image, made memorable in the photographer’s creation as well, appears strongly in Modotti’s partial portrait of a mother and child whose faces are not visible (see Figure 2.4). Here support, creation, and potential take the form of physical strength, a birth still to come, and a prominent ear. Even though the mother holds the child there is a sense of mutual support. The baby appears to be standing on air, signaling exceptional strength. The clearly defined muscles in both

Potential Horizons of Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Modernity 39

Figure 2.4 Tina Modotti. Madre con hijo de Tehuantepec (Mother and Child from Tehuantepec). 1929. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Zigrosser, 1968, 1968-162-39.

bodies are intensified by the density of the image’s intersecting lines. The child’s illusory ability to stand on its own is reinforced by the way in which the bodies are presented vertically and horizontally. The only complete set of extremities visible are the baby’s feet, which anchor the image’s bottom horizon. The two hands on the left vertical edge belong to two different people, and the three arms and three shoulders present mother and child as a matched set. The curve of the apparently pregnant belly at left, recalled by the child’s cheek, finds support in the remarkably upright back of the mother, which in turn is reinforced by the vertical lines barely in focus in the background. Uniting mother and child is the texture of hair; distinguishing them is the fabric of the mother’s clothing against the child’s nakedness. Form overpowers shape in a frame made crowded by the incompleteness of the mother’s head. This, in turn, underscores the form of the baby’s nearly complete head, a curve that combines with a highlight to bring the baby’s ear straight toward the viewer’s eye. “Listen to what I will say and see what I will do,” suggests the futurity embodied here. The sense of sound is paired to potential action through a shared relation to extremities of value: a highlighted ear and a pair of tiny fingers in shadow. The delicacy that tempers the strength of the baby’s present and suggested future appears in the fragile eyelashes just above the child’s cheek. Textures within all four images I analyze compensate for the flat, two-dimensional surface of the photograph. Erica Segre highlights the importance of surfaces in Yampolsky’s

40  Ryan Long work by quoting the photographer, who says that the “visual surface [of photography] has to be varied – it has to substitute the tactile” (187). Compensation and substitution indicate that connections among human creation, labor, contact, and objects that go beyond what a photograph can plainly express remain latent within and emerge from a photograph’s frame. The photograph acknowledges its limits and prefigures a way to move beyond them. In her analysis of the differences between a strict emphasis on documentary photography and the deceitful transparency it relies upon, on one hand, and the importance of photographic invention, on the other, Esther Gabara, in a reading of Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s Las lavanderas sobreentendidas (The Washerwomen Implied) (1932), argues that this carefully staged photograph, one in which white sheets are left to dry on a large, old agave plant, combines fiction, truth, invisibility, and visibility in a critique of the modern association of sight and knowledge. Gabara writes: “the drying sheets signify that work has been done, but the women’s bodies that do the work are erased” (226). Gabara concludes, referring to the way in which Manuel Álvarez Bravo “creates fictions as he animates objects” (224), that “These images of the invisible are fictions that invent while obscuring their subject, yet they reveal a truth about the erasure of certain forms of labor” (226). For Segre, Yampolsky “distrusts the finished contours of the visible afforded by photography” (187), and for de León, Horna’s portraits of women bring to the fore, “depth, nuance, complexity, and even unknowability” (79). Picturing things to be learned and objects made that are not in the frame; vividly presenting the desperation that drives one to flee the national horizon; representing the process of making art and the finished work in relation to people and other objects; expressing dynamic labor in a still image; these are, respectively, some of Yampolsky’s, Medina’s, Horna’s, and Modotti’s major accomplishments. Medina’s association of historical understanding and the “ability to question everything,” cited above, extends to the critique not only of a particular nation-state but also to the ideas of photographic and territorial borders. The migrant she photographs is at the margins of two nation-states, most likely unwelcome in both. He and Medina’s photograph endure in a space defined not by the illusory incorporation of the vulnerable into Mexican modernity, but instead in a space arising from the combination of a photographer’s skill, vision, technique, timing, location, and experience; a space arising from the intersection of the photographic imagination and history. It is a space like those created by the four women photographers featured here, who are Mexican in the terms Amy Conger defines being Mexican: their lives and work are defined by a “commitment to that place” (9). It is a place defined by figures of learning, flight, creation, and strength; yet to be defined but better understood because of Modotti, Horna, Yampolsky, Medina, and everyone they have inspired, influenced, and taught. Furthermore, these photographers’ focus on movement, relationality, and the material conditions of work, including women at work, resist what Segre has termed, in her discussion of film and visual arts of the first half of Mexico’s twentieth century, “captionalisation,” in which the “contingent moment becomes subject to narrative recuperation and an integrative imperative” (151). Segre and Gabara critique the purported ability of documentary representation to make true by making visible. Monsiváis calls for making visible the ideal within the horizon of an often-invisible quotidian existence. The four images I have analyzed bolster these critics’ observations. Their comparison also introduces viewers and scholars to the richness and variety of a mere fraction of the accomplishments made by women photographers in twentieth-century Mexico. This introduction intends to guide readers toward spaces and times beyond the limits of the frame and the

Potential Horizons of Mexico’s Postrevolutionary Modernity 41 instant of exposure, spaces and times for which critiques and depictions of lo ideal also imagine a place and time beyond a nation’s limits and its exclusive modernity. Notes 1 See Bonet for a discussion of Horna’s frequent focus on inanimate objects, including masks (130; 296). 2 La Jornada, Medina’s employer, did not publish the image because it was too critical (Mraz, “Coartada” 15). 3 Néstor García Canclini’s Culturas híbridas (Hybrid Cultures) (1990) and Luis Villoro’s Ensayos sobre indigenismo (Essays about Indigenism) (2017), whose first edition was published in 1950, are useful starting points for further research into this discussion. Also helpful are the novels by Rosario Castellanos, Balún Canán (1957) and Oficio de tinieblas (The Book of Lamentations) (1962). 4 Translations from the Spanish are my own unless otherwise indicated. For an introduction in English to Monsiváis and his writing, see John Krainauskas’s Mexican Postcards (1997). 5 See Leistner (6). 6 See Albers for a discussion of Modotti’s conflicted relationship to photography after returning to Mexico (325–328) and the likely causes of her death (332). 7 See Long. 8 For a study of López’s work, see John Mraz’s Nacho López, Mexican Photographer (2003). 9 Poniatowska also observes more collaboration among female than male artists (“Algunas fotógrafas” 54). 10 See Mraz for the context of this photo (“Coartada” 15, 19). 11 In an email she sent me on March 15, 2023, Medina confirmed the photo was taken at sunset. She also described how she dodged and burned the photo and identified the film as Kodak TriX, a fast emulsion.

Works Cited Abelleyra, Angélica. “Elsa Medina: Fotografiar para recordar.” Jornada Semanal 437 (20 July 2003). https://www.jornada.com.mx/2003/07/20/sem-mujer.html Albers, Patricia. Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Bartra, Eli. “Women and Portraiture in Mexico.” History of Photography 20.3 (1996): 220–225. Basilio, Miriam Margarita. ““First, Win the War!” Kati Horna, Gendered Images and Political Discord during the Spanish Civil War.” In Gabriela Rangel, Ed. Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press. New York: Americas Society, 2016. 56–73. Berler, Sandra. “Introduction.” In Mariana Yampolsky, The Edge of Time: Photographs of Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. 9–21. Bonet, Juan Manuel. “Kati Horna en su paisaje cultural y vital/Kati Horna, in the Context of Her Culture and Life.” Trans. Fabienne Bradu, John Tittensor, et al. In Sergio Flores, Ed. Kati Horna. Puebla: Museo Amparo, 2013. 128–137; 296–300. Conger, Amy. “Compañeras de México: Women Photograph Women/Compañeras de México: Mujeres Fotografiando Mujeres.” In University Art Gallery, Coord. Compañeras de México: Women Photograph Women. Riverside: University of California Riverside Publications, 1990. 8–41. Cordero Reiman, Karen. “A Modern Woman, between Revolution and Tradition.” In Karen Cordero Reiman, Ed. Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner’s Mexico/Otra tierra prometida: El México de Anita Brenner. Los Angeles: Skirball Cultural Center, 2017. 54–71. De Diego, Estrella. “La foto-reportera como etnógrafa.” In Sergio Flores, Ed. Kati Horna. Puebla: Museo Amparo, 2013. 64–71. De León, Christina L. “Kati Horna in Mexico and Her Representations of the Female Experience.” In Gabriela Rangel, Ed. Told and Untold: The Photo Stories of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press. New York: Americas Society, 2016. 74–89.

42  Ryan Long Espinosa, Ángeles Alonso. “Breve cronología del exilio/A Short Chronology of Exile.” Trans. Fabienne Bradu, John Tittensor, et al. In Sergio Flores, Ed. Kati Horna. Puebla: Museo Amparo, 2013. 246–251; 306–309. Gabara, Esther. Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Gallo, Rubén. Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005. Horna y Fernández, Norah. “El legado y la añoranza: La reconstrucción de la memoria/Legacy and Nostalgia. The Reconstruction of Memory.” Trans. Fabienne Bradu, John Tittensor, et al. In Sergio Flores, Ed. Kati Horna. Puebla: Museo Amparo, 2013. 236–243; 301–305. Lehtinen, Linde B. “Anita Brenner and Photography: Constructing Mexico in Idols Behind Altars (1929) and The Wind That Swept Mexico (1943).” In Karen Cordero Reiman, Ed. Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner’s Mexico/Otra tierra prometida: El México de Anita Brenner. Los Angeles: Skirball Cultural Center, 2017. 140–157. Leistner, Rita. “La sensación en los ojos de Elsa Medina.” In John Mraz, ed. La coartada perfecta de Elsa Medina. Puebla: Casa de las Culturas Contemporáneas, 2016. 5–6. Long, Ryan. “The People’s Print Shop: Art, Politics, and the Taller de Gráfica Popular.” In Stuart Day, Ed. Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. 84–106. Lowe, Sarah M. Tina Modotti: Photographs. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Monsiváis, Carlos. Maravillas que son, sombras que fueron: La fotografía en México. México: Ediciones Era, 2012. Mraz, John. “La coartada perfecta de Elsa Medina.” In John Mraz, ed. La coartada perfecta de Elsa Medina. Puebla: Casa de las Culturas Contemporáneas, 2016. 7–28. ——–. Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Poniatowska, Elena. “Algunas fotógrafas de México/Some Women Photographers of Mexico.” Trans. Irene Matthews, et al. In University Art Gallery, Coord. Compañeras de México: Women Photograph Women. Riverside: University of California Riverside Publications, 1990. 43–55. ——–. “Foreword.” In Mariana Yampolsky, The Edge of Time: Photographs of Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. 1–8. Rodríguez, José Antonio. “Elsa Medina: Photography, Accumulated Knowledge.” Voices of Mexico 86 (2009): 33–37. Rosenblum, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers. Third Edition. New York: Abbeville Press, 2010. Sánchez Mejorada, Alicia. “El legado de Kati Horna.” Artes de México 56 (2001): 2–9. Segre, Erica. Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Mexican Culture. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Sullivan, Edward J. “La mujer en México/Women in Mexico.” In Lucía García-Noriega y Nieto, Ed. La mujer en México/Women in Mexico. México: Fundación Cultural Televisa, 1990. XXIV–XCIII.

Part II

Counter-Perspectives Ideologies, Subjectivity, and Corporeality

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

3

Earth Images Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico Elissa J. Rashkin

Since her rediscovery by feminist academics in the 1980s, Tina Modotti has been a prominent figure in the history of Mexican photography; yet most of what has been written has focused on her personal life as much as or more than her work. Descriptions culled from the writings of others and extrapolations based on her intimate relationships form the basis of biographical explorations that often cross the line between historical and fictional narration. Moreover, due to the complexity of her short yet productive photographic trajectory, a few of her images are quite well known, including Rosas (Roses) (1924), which at one point broke records at auction as the highest-priced photograph in the history of the medium.1 Others, however, have received little attention. Still others may remain in private files, as a consequence of their initial circulation among friends and associates rather than patrons and collectors.2 The varied destinies of Modotti’s photos reflect the complexity of a career in which photography was simultaneously a job, a form of participation in political and social movements, and a means of artistic expression. Many of Modotti’s agrarian photographs only came to light in the current century, when Khankhoje’s daughter, Savitri Sawhney, shared a set of her father’s documents with Mexican archives. These photos include illustrations for Khankhoje’s scientific studies of corn and other crops: images of exquisite texture and detail that showcase Modotti’s indisputable talent for still-life photography. Others, taken in the context of emergent experiments in agrarian democracy, portray rural activism empathetically, documenting collaborative relationships with agrarian leaders such as Úrsulo Galván, allies like Khankhoje, and peasant communities. This corpus confirms Modotti’s vision as strongly humanist as well as aesthetically innovative, and presents new possibilities for study, grounded here in textual and contextual analysis of her photographic contribution. Life Writing: On Women’s Intimacy The present study requires us to set aside many elements of Modotti’s trajectory as an icon of early twentieth-century visual culture. First, the portraits that Modotti made to earn a living, some of which have circulated as much for their artistic quality as for the interest generated by their famous subjects. Also to be set aside are the photos—especially the nudes—of Modotti taken by others, but nevertheless exhibited alongside or even in place of her own work; the tales of lovers and intrigues; and in general, all that has marked her as a feminine legend whose star, for as much light as it seems to emit, always orbits around the men with whom she associated. Were it not for so much baggage, my project would seem to be a simple one, since it concerns only a part of Modotti’s total work, made during a short period of time DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-6

46  Elissa J. Rashkin and with a specific focus: the fruits of the earth and the people who cultivate them. Moreover, the photos from the “Khankhoje File” are no longer lost, but rather held by the Fototeca Nacional photo archive; in 2014, number 50 of the Fototeca’s magazine Alquimia was dedicated to the file, with articles by Isabel Arline Duque, Patricia Massé, and Rosa Casanova, whose analyses I seek to complement rather than duplicate here. In addition, the vast bibliography on Modotti contains excellent studies such as those by Sarah Lowe, Mariana Figarella, and Patricia Albers, among others. Nevertheless, to the extent that Modotti increasingly circulates as icon of a kind of sexy radicalism, academic research is hard-pressed to compete with the myth. While we might imagine that the thousands of pages on Modotti published in numerous languages, countries, and continents would be an ideal source of information, as to some degree they are, they also present a serious obstacle: the disappearance of the subject as such, among the multitude of voices whose opinions form a confusing babble, a game of mirrors and subjectivities. A striking feature of this bibliography is its frequent slippage between biography and fiction. If Elena Poniatowska’s Tinísima, for example, is clearly identified as a novel, such is not the case for Pino Cacucci’s Tina Modotti, published as part of a series on exceptional women. There, although the novelization is not explicit, the invention of intimate dialogues and thoughts attributed to real historical figures implies the liberty of fiction. Yet even in less-adorned biographies that clearly cite their sources, it is difficult to avoid the impression of a novelized life. After all, the story’s protagonist died in silence, after suffering multiple exiles; the most detailed testimonies we have of her, besides the press and police records pertaining to the murder of her romantic partner Julio Antonio Mella in 1929, are those of her male friends and lovers, who created their versions of her in ink, in painting, in photographs and in words. Of this corpus of male-authored texts, perhaps the most notorious is Retrato de mujer. Una vida con Tina Modotti (Portrait of a Woman. A Life with Tina Modotti), by Vittorio Vidali, the photographer’s last companion, also known as Enea Sormienti in Mexico or Comandante Carlos during the Spanish Civil War. Vidali, Stalinist agent, committer of countless crimes in the name of proletarian revolution, and Modotti’s instructor in the unwritten rules of the cause, undoubtedly had much to do with her abandonment of photography and her brutal abnegation—aspects that, unsurprisingly, Vidali does not include in his book. Rather, besides minimizing the importance of photography to Modotti and vice-versa, he portrays himself as protector, even redeemer, of a fragile, displaced woman. While the self-interest in Vidali’s narrative is evident, even an academically solid text such as Antonio Saborit’s introduction to the collection of Modotti’s letters titled Una mujer sin país (A Woman without a Country) chooses to view her through the eyes of others: admirers, suitors, lovers, always male, always owners of the cultural authority conferred on them as men, whatever the nature of their personal lives. While these names make history without requiring relational terms such as “husband/lover of …,” Modotti never escapes the prison of gender. Yet emphasizing Modotti’s condition as a woman, even as an exceptional woman, is not, in itself, the problem. The larger problem is the ease with which many biographers grant themselves the faculty of reading the mind of the other: attributing to their subject desires and weaknesses, appraising her as the object of the gaze of “great men,” and confusing these images created by others with her own artistic and vital creativity. Such accounts fail to reveal a person, and instead add layers to an invention that arose after her own silence and death. Assuming the quasi-divine power to penetrate the intimate

Earth Images: Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico 47 world of a hermetic subject like Modotti, they create plausible narratives, yet, in the end, cannot avoid the oscillation between opacity and annihilation. Agrarianism and Photography: A Way Out? The recurring problem of Modotti as object rather than subject of representation is exemplified in the publisher Cal y Arena’s choice of Otis Oldfield’s Figure (1933) as the cover image for Una mujer sin país, the letter collection mentioned above. Oldfield’s painting depicts a woman seen from behind, naked from the waist up and bare-legged, whose short, transparent skirt showing the curves of her buttocks is the center of the frame. Though Modotti is surely not the model, the association situates her as sexualized object, seen rather than seeing, even when the documents included in the book allow us to “hear her voice” in the intimacy of her correspondence. Such treatment sums up popular approaches to Modotti, even as international feminist media have shifted emphasis (if not narrative strategies) in order to reclaim her as radical ancestor, “firm feminist,” a woman ahead of her time in matters sexual and political.3 How, then, to proceed in our quest to understand this important figure in relevant historical context, without pushing aside her connection to photography, a connection that was not only that of an artist but also part of the everyday life of a worker? The surfacing of images that were little known when the Modotti myth appeared suggests possibilities for reassessment. From the starting point of my own research engagements with sociopolitical and artistic struggles, I am interested in recovering Modotti’s participation as a privileged witness, with an educated eye and a strong political commitment, in one of the key revolutionary adventures of the early twentieth century in Mexico: the radical agrarian movement, or agrarismo. Toward the end of the 1920s, revolutionary agrarianism had grown from being a demand of the masses who participated in the armed conflict under the banner of “Land and Liberty” into a complex social movement. This movement was characterized at times by closeness and at other times by clashes with state and federal governments, and also reflected countless regional specificities. Although it is impossible to encompass here the varied histories of this struggle, most important are the points of convergence between them and Modotti’s trajectory as a photographer. First, in 1927, when Modotti accompanied the painter Xavier Guerrero, her partner at the time, to Xalapa, where they attended a congress of the Liga de Comunidades Agrarias del Estado de Veracruz (League of Agrarian Communities of the State of Veracruz) (Albers 182). This League, founded in 1923, was among the strongest and most radical campesino organizations of the 1920s, and a pillar of national agrarianism. Its leader Úrsulo Galván, also founder and first president of the Liga Nacional Campesina (National Campesino League) in 1926, would have been familiar to Modotti, considering their common participation in the Antiimperialist League of the Americas and the Hands off Nicaragua campaign. Modotti took photos for the magazine Mexican Folkways and created images that would later become iconic, such as the portrait known as Niño con sombrero o Hijo de agrarista (Child in Sombrero or Son of Agrarista).4 In the port of Veracruz, she photographed palm trees and also workers loading bananas for exportation: the latter, possibly part of the series she was creating for a book that was ultimately never published, Canto de los hombres (Song of Men) by the estridentista writer Germán List Arzubide, then living in Xalapa. As editor of the magazine Horizonte, List Arzubide had praised and published Modotti’s work. Their connection had further dimensions; both List Arzubide

48  Elissa J. Rashkin and Galván served as editors of El Libertador, published by the Anti-imperialist League, organization in which Modotti carried out roles including translator, orator, and meeting host, and from which she also led the local campaign against fascism in her native Italy (Albers 144, 146, 175, 180). Her relationship with Guerrero and collaborative friendship with Diego Rivera similarly involved both art and political activism. It was surely this network that brought Modotti to the project headed by Pandurang Khankhoje in Texcoco, in the state of Mexico. The Escuelas Libres de Agricultura (Free Agriculture Schools), six in the state, came about as a project of the Liga Nacional Campesina, steered by Galván; their director, Khankhoje, was also president of the Liga’s agriculture department. After a long period of preparation, the first school, named for Emiliano Zapata, was founded in San Miguel Chiconcuac (Duque 12; Massé 34–35). Present at the inauguration were Modotti, Guerrero, Pablo O’Higgins, Emily Edwards, and Concha Michel, among other cultural figures. Shortly thereafter, in the inauguration of another school at Ocopulco, Modotti took memorable photos of her friend Michel playing guitar and singing in front of an attentive group that included men, women, and children.5 These photographs that document an almost unknown episode in the agrarian movement of the late 1920s are notable also for their formal qualities. Their careful composition at times uses contrasts of light and shadow to create dramatic effects, and other times takes advantage of the abundant sunlight to create collective portraits that show details of the people present and simultaneously frame them in their surroundings, these being adobe walls or the structures of the school or meeting hall, which themselves become significant markers of the campesino struggle. Representations of organized rural workers may not seem, at first glance, an indication of the relationship between photography and modernity. Indeed, the “modern,” in the work of Modotti and other photographers, as well as painters, filmmakers, and avant-garde poets such as the estridentistas, has been most often discussed in terms of cityscapes and the accelerated processes of urbanization that paralleled the growth of photography as a flexible documentary and expressive medium. However, the history of photography in Mexico, as in other countries of Latin America and the global South, reveals the subaltern position that campesinos and indigenous people occupied in a photographic gaze exercised by urban and often foreign subjects and influenced by earlier traditions of exoticism and depiction of the picturesque. The Revolution, however, brought rural actors to the fore as social agents, and these emerged as subjects of photography, different from their folkloric presence in nineteenth and early twentieth-century images in which natives and peasants provide local color similar to that provided by non-human animals, ancient ruins, or tropical vegetation. In Modotti’s photos, participants in the agricultural projects are framed as a politically conscious rural proletariat, seen as such by the photographer who is, moreover, a partisan of the same cause. “Those who appear before the postrevolutionary photographer’s lens face the camera with new gestures, new attitudes” (Rashkin, “Mirada” 104; see also Mraz 43); and to the extent that modernity implies a series of universal rights as well as the recognition of the human capacity to intervene in one’s environment, the country schools and ejidos portrayed in this series are no less modern than skyscrapers and trolleys. In an event celebrating the beginning of classes at the school at Chiconcuac in August 1928, Modotti’s camera registered students and teachers as well as guests such as Rivera, Hungarian ex-president Michael Károlyi and Swiss journalist Federico Bach, representative of Red Aid in Mexico (Casanova 67). On this occasion, Modotti also delivered a passionate speech to the region’s rural workers: a fitting role given her success, years earlier, in San

Earth Images: Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico 49 Francisco’s Italian theater community. Her history as a stage actress, more than her silent film work in Los Angeles, would have prepared her well for the part of revolutionary orator. This event reminds us that Modotti’s participation in social movements in Mexico was not limited to photography. Besides acting as secretary, translator, and other essential yet often invisible roles, she excelled at propaganda, alongside comrades like Rivera, Guerrero, and the similarly multifaceted and undervalued Michel. These figures, according to Rosa Casanova, formed “una suerte de tribu que por un breve periodo reunió a dirigentes agrarios, funcionarios, campesinos indígenas, agrónomos, maestros, artistas y activistas nacionales y extranjeros” [a kind of tribe that for a brief period brought together agrarian leaders, officials, indigenous campesinos, agronomists, teachers, artists and activists, both national and foreign] (70).6 In order to shed further light on this tribe and Modotti’s contribution, it is important to add another element: the National School of Agriculture, point of convergence of science, art, and agrarianism as a movement and as a fundamental social policy during the post-revolutionary years. Research at Chapingo According to the website of the present-day Universidad Autónoma Chapingo (Autonomous University of Chapingo), the university was founded in 1854 as the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura (National School of Agriculture), in the convent of San Jacinto near Mexico City. In 1923, it was moved to the ex-hacienda of Chapingo, adopting the slogan “Teaching the exploitation of the land, not that of man.” Its director was the engineer Marte R. Gómez, a former Zapatista. In 1924, Gómez invited Rivera to paint murals at the site, and also hired Khankhoje to carry out research on corn and other crops. Land adjacent to the school was set aside for this project. Khankhoje’s findings, titled Nuevas variedades de maíz (New Varieties of Corn), were published in May 1930 as the school’s first research bulletin; the experiments it describes and the photography thereof were carried out somewhat earlier. Artemio Cruz León, Isabel Arline Duque y Marcelino Ramírez Castro write about the project in an issue of Revista de Geografía Agrícola (Journal of Agricultural Geography) that also includes a reproduction of Khankhoje’s text and some of Modotti’s photographs. Tracing the agronomist’s biography, they mention that his studies in Chapingo included varieties of corn, wheat, beans, and sorghum, and add that “sus recuerdos de la hambruna en India lo llevaron particularmente a trabajar en lo que él llamó ‘maíz granada’, especialmente por su alto rendimiento y resistencia a la variedad de climas y temperaturas” [his memories of famine in India led him in particular to work on what he called “pomegranate corn,” especially for its high yields and resistance to a variety of climates and temperatures]—Khankhoje’s interest being not only scientific, but also, more importantly, food security (52). Nuevas variedades de maíz posits the premise that, in order to improve harvests, corn must be studied from its origins. Thus Khankhoje began by cultivating the plant teosinte (Euchlaena mexicana), understood to be the precursor of modern corn (Zea mays). He then crossed this plant with corn to produce “teomaíz,” going on to experiment with a curious type of corn spikes whose grains grow on shafts rather than cobs, each grain wrapped in tiny leaves like those that normally encase the full cob. Although these experiments did not produce a better quality corn, Khankhoje proposed their usefulness as a forage crop due to their hardiness and ease of cultivation. After other experiments, Khankhoje’s report moves on to the development of maíz granada, based on a natural genetic feature stimulated by selective breeding, resulting in

50  Elissa J. Rashkin a cob that splits to produce grains in its interior (similar to a pomegranate), with more edible product and otherwise the same characteristics as conventional corn. Rather than draw hard conclusions, the scientist then mentions other corn varieties, beyond the scope of his study, but—like the experiments already mentioned—illustrated with photographs. The sixteen illustrations that Modotti contributed to this text offer much to analyze. Excluding the cover image, the photos belong to two categories: medium shots in which human figures are present in order to illustrate scale, and close studies of the crops themselves. The first photo shows teosinte plants in the field; Khankhoje and another man hold up a cloth behind stalks that barely reach the level of their chests. It is likely that the cloth, which reduces visual interference and shows the teosinte’s characteristics with greater clarity, was the photographer’s suggestion. In the second photo, taken from a lower angle, Khankhoje holds examples of teomaíz, whose height is much greater and determines the image’s composition. The agronomist’s centrality in the picture, framed by the tall stalks and with the vegetation at the edge of the field as a background that lends depth to the shot, links the image to others by Modotti that also capture people in their place of work. What may be different in this photo is that, unlike manual laborers, the scientist Khankoje wears a suit and tie. Nevertheless, he is shown as a man of the soil. The next photo, a medium close-up of the scientist brandishing the upper part of a teomaíz stalk, reinforces this reading (see Figure 3.1). While the illustrative intention

Figure 3.1 Tina Modotti. Pandurang Khankhoje y teomaíz (Pandurang Khankhoje and teomaíz). Nuevas variedades de maíz, 1930.

Earth Images: Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico 51 is to show “the placement of the cobs covered with their leaves,” the form of the plant resembles a torch, and the human subject directs his gaze slightly to his left, as if to illuminate with the plant the path to a better future—perhaps, as the result of his efforts, toward abundance. The images that follow show the placement of the grains on the cobs, spikes, and other configurations. The relation is striking between these photos and others from Modotti’s repertoire: the shots of plants or objects in which the camera’s gaze generates a sensual exploration of textures and contrasts, on the one hand; on the other, the famous composition that juxtaposes corn with a scythe and cartridge belt in a symbolic synthesis of the Mexican revolution as campesino struggle. This image became the logo of the Free Agricultural Schools, but what is interesting here is how the scientific photos, without the elements that create the other image’s semiotic intensity, possess a communicative force that is less abstract, but equally powerful due to the precision in their composition. If, in the above-mentioned portrait of the agronomist, corn is the torch that illuminates the agricultural revolution, its improvement by means of scientific study promises an abundant harvest both literal and figurative. The maíz granada, an almost round fruit that produces grains both inside the cob and on its surface, becomes a metaphor, not by way of allegorical compositions but rather through the visual depiction of what Weston, Modotti’s photography mentor, called “the thing itself” (see Figure 3.2).7 In the Westonian terms adopted and adapted by Modotti, the corn images made in Chapingo confirm

Figure 3.2  Tina Modotti. Maíz granada (Pomegranate Corn). Nuevas variedades de maíz, 1930.

52  Elissa J. Rashkin that the photographer “saw correctly,” revealing the essence of their subject without adornments, by means of profound and penetrating observation.8 In another context, these photos, like Weston’s shells or the other still lives by Modotti mentioned earlier, would have been received as works of art, capable of producing aesthetic responses beyond mere comprehension of the scientific argument. For example, two close-ups of the unusual corn spikes recall her Flor de manita (known in English as Handflower tree or Devil’s hand tree) (1925) while a vertical shot of the teomaíz shafts evokes to some extent her iconic Lirios (Calla Lilies) (1925) although in this case the placement against a wall, with a window toward the exterior occupying the upper left part of the frame, creates play between nearness and distance, the specific and the contextual. If these illustrations lack the platinum subtlety of Modotti’s “art” photos, it is perhaps because they received less attention in the darkroom; as Patricia Albers notes, by this time “Tina had repudiated ‘perfect platinum prints for wealthy collectors’ which rendered photography a font of consumable objects for the bourgeoisie. Instead, she was making more humble gelatin silver prints and seeking the widest possible audience” (229).9 Even so, they appear in the publication on separate folios rather than intermixed with the text, thus highlighting the visual discourse. The overlap between art and science by way of photography is reinforced by the bulletin’s cover, in which a close shot of a cornfield serves as backdrop for the title, author and other publication data. The composition, in which the corn stalks fill the entire frame, is similar to that of Rosas, Caña de azucar (Sugar Cane) (1929), or even, to some extent, the sea of sombreros in Workers’ Parade (1926). The white space surrounding the green-tinted photo accentuates the image’s aesthetic qualities. Unlike the montages and documentary work that Modotti published in the leftist press, the photo here is employed as a decorative element, without calling too much attention to itself, yet at the same time retains her formalist vision regarding themes of nature and sustenance. Today it might surprise us that Nuevas variedades de maíz (New Varieties of Corn) does not credit Modotti for the illustrations, although several display her signature. Yet, as Cruz León, Duque, and Ramírez Castro observe, the images’ contemporary value is the outcome of the photographer’s retroactive status in an international art circuit (50). At a time when the ontological condition of photography as art was still in dispute, it is unlikely that its illustrative use in a scientific text would have received the recognition bestowed on aesthetic objects. Moreover, artist-activists like Modotti felt themselves to be part of a collective, transcendental struggle, for which, at times, it was important to make, show, and sell “works of art,” while at other times, what was essential was putting one’s labor at the service of the cause. 1929: Turning Point In December 1929, in the vestibule of the National Library, Modotti held her first solo exhibition. This event would also be her farewell, as she would be deported only a few weeks later. Researchers Jesús Nieto Sotelo and Elisa Lozano Álvarez have attempted to recover the details of this event, of which there is no complete record. Using partial sources to reconstruct the exhibition, they were able to identify forty-three works with certainty, with another sixteen bearing generic references such as “nature” or “photodocuments” (25, 30). The selection included Modotti’s formalist experiments as well as images of workers and the symbolic compositions associated with her Communist Party participation.

Earth Images: Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico 53 Absent from the exhibition, it would seem, were the photos of the agriculture schools, as well as those centered on Khankhoje’s crop research. Since these were done as work for hire, it is possible that Modotti did not consider them part of her artistic corpus, although she herself constantly crossed boundaries between photographic genres. In any case, her portrait taken at the site suggests an effort to perform a militant aesthetic “correctly,” not only in the images that are visible behind her but also in the production of her own image: austere clothing and hairstyle, arms crossed in front in attitude of resolve, seriousness in the gaze. At that moment, Modotti was aware of her pariah status in the eyes of Mexican authorities and also of her imminent deportation. In September she had written to Weston, “I feel that if I leave the country, I almost owe it to the country to show, not so much what I have done here, but especially what can be done, without recurring to colonial churches and charros and chinas poblanas, and the similar trash most photographers have indulged in” (Albers 228). Today, the folkloric element to which she referred has not disappeared from the Mexican visual imaginary, but rather is constantly reinvented, for the tourist gaze in particular, and also by “prosumers” uploading images in social media. Nevertheless, Modotti’s call to move beyond the facile continues to resonate in art-photographic circles, supported by the revaluation of her contribution. It is difficult to capture here the complicated scenario that unfolded in Mexico beginning in 1929, when the left fell apart from intense internal conflicts, prior to its reconfiguration in the period of Lázaro Cárdenas and the Frente Popular, or Popular Front (Lear 185–192). That year, Úrsulo Galván was expelled from the Communist Party for deviating from its hard line regarding alliances with local governments. Rivera met the same fate; as a faithful and disciplined Party member, Modotti broke ties with her old comrades, seen now as renegades.10 On par with the radicalization of party policy, this period—known as the Maximato due to the behind-the-scenes domination exercised by former president Plutarco Elías Calles—saw the intensification of anti-Communist repression in Mexico. Modotti’s arrest and deportation finally took place in early 1930, the year of Galván’s death and in which the campesino leagues he initiated began a painful decline. The Escuelas Libres de Agricultura lacked the necessary resources to continue, and the agronomist Khankhoje found himself obliged to turn to different areas of research before returning near the end of his life to his native India, finally independent (Duque 15; Sawhney 18). Ironically, the government that granted Khankhoje citizenship in July 1930 was the same one that had expelled Modotti, ending her photographic career in Mexico.11 Light and Sustenance Returning to the concerns expressed at the beginning of this chapter, it is clear that Modotti’s collaborations with Mexican agrarismo elude the culture industry’s current obsession with her body, love affairs, and sexuality. Indeed, it might even seem that this side of her work had little to do with gender, were it not for the detail that astute readers will have already noted: the near absence of women as visible agents in the agrarian movement of the 1920s. First, let us consider Modotti in relation to Concha Michel, singer, guitarist, and pioneer in the recompilation of the musical history of various regions of Mexico.12 Both women were associated with “artistic” as well as radical spheres; neither had a formal

54  Elissa J. Rashkin role in the PCM, in spite of their tireless activism therein. The divergence in their attitudes with respect to this exclusion is striking: while Michel would forcefully criticize the Party’s sexism and assume a feminist perspective in her later writings, Modotti, humble and self-sacrificing in spite of her many unconventional ways, seems to have been content to work alongside “great men” without showing dissatisfaction with the obvious inequality. Then again, the history in question encompasses various levels of inequality worth examining. For instance, among the “great men” I have mentioned, perhaps the only name familiar to a broad public is Rivera. Students of Mexican art will recognize Xavier Guerrero and Pablo O’Higgins; and in the remote realm of agrarian struggle, Úrsulo Galván rings a bell, if only for the Veracruz sites that now bear his name. Pandurang Khankhoje, though prominently portrayed in a mural by Rivera at the Education Ministry, was an unknown in this scenario until Savitri Sawhney published her father’s memoirs in 2008. Duque’s research uncovered more information about the agronomist’s years in Mexico, while in India, Sawhney organized exhibits and publications. “Indeed,” Sawhney writes, “Khankhoje’s exile in Mexico, and the life and work he made there, might well have been forgotten but for Modotti and her brilliant photographs.” The irony of this rediscovery of a prestigious man of science via a woman who was also forgotten for decades except in supporting roles as lover and muse is, I hope, evident. Incomplete documentation means that the networks of collaboration within the agrarian movement are themselves opaque; more so, if we seek to identify the women who participated directly in agrarian committees and other campesino configurations. The teacher who appears in the photo of schoolchildren at Chipiltepec, the mother who poses with children behind the corn harvest in Miguel Delgado y familia (Miguel Delgado and family), the few women seen at the events at the agriculture schools, and even the two who appear alongside the male guests of honor at the Emiliano Zapata school at Chiconcuac remain anonymous. Also anonymous are the men who supported leaders like Galván in their defense of the land, and who participated in projects like those of Khankhoje in the hope of improving their crops and the lives of their communities. Reflecting on these structured absences, it becomes clear that the frustration provoked by an inability to identify many of the subjects photographed during this relatively recent historical period is not due to a thirst for infinite detail, but rather an effect of the hierarchies of power, both symbolic and material, that determine our access to history. In that sense, we may appreciate the fortuitous return of the “Khankhoje File” to Mexico, without which the agronomist would have remained marginal or absent from studies of the life and work of Modotti; today we know that they were united by fruitful collaboration. The file also sheds new light on aspects of post-revolutionary agrarian history and allows us to witness the emergence in modern photography of a new attitude toward the rural population. Like those of her little-known contemporary, the Veracruz-based photographer Atanasio D. Vázquez, Modotti’s images reject the dominant folklorizing gaze and represent rural workers as active social subjects.13 At the same time, numerous doubts remain. How many images have gone missing: lost forever or yet to be found? Would the discovery of more images change our perception of Modotti’s agrarista connections and commitment? What, finally, is the significance of a project that concludes with more questions than answers? The response, I believe, must be Modottian: that concentration of utopian thought that inhabits the photographs themselves, that which speaks to human dignity and a primordial connection with the earth by way of the people who work the land, as well as the profound beauty

Earth Images: Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico 55 of the thing itself, seen correctly by eyes sensitive to the multidimensionality of visual evidence. To this day, it is common in the Mexican countryside to find people who continue to cultivate corn, in spite of its virtual worthlessness as a cash crop in the neoliberal economy, for the simple pleasure of watching it grow. A similar pleasure materializes, I believe, when we submerge our gaze in Modotti’s earth images and perceive, in their textures and composition, a profound lucidity and compassion: the subterranean desire, repressed but never fully extinguished, for a better world, one more just, more free, more egalitarian. Modotti’s radical photography, in that sense, brings together light and sustenance: the sustenance derived from labor, and the light, in a dark world, produced by art that also nurtures.

Notes 1 In the New York Times of 19 April 1991, Rita Reif reported that the record-breaking amount, paid at auction by an unnamed buyer for a platinum print of the photo, was 165,000 dollars. 2 An example of this is the collection that Patricia Albers encountered the possession of the family of Modotti’s husband Roubaix de l’Abry Richey. After his death in 1922, Modotti continued to correspond with his mother Rose, including in her correspondence over 100 photos that Albers was able to exhibit in 1996 and reference in her 1999 biography, Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. More recently, the 2022 exhibit El espíritu del ’22. Un siglo de muralismo en San Ildefonso included original prints of little-known images lent by the Centro Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego, a cultural enterprise founded in 2021 by the CEO of TV Azteca and the Grupo Salinas. 3 Cristina Sierra, “Tina Modotti, la fotógrafa revolucionaria amiga de Frida Kahlo,” Las Furias Magazine, August 30, 2022, https://www.lasfuriasmagazine.com/tina-modotti-fotografa-fridakahlo/. In 2017, Google posted a “Doodle” in honor of Modotti (https://www.google.com/ doodles/tina-modottis-121st-birthday), resulting in many articles such as Alberto López, “Tina Modotti, la excepcional fotógrafa revolucionaria”, El País, August 16, 2017, https://elpais. com/cultura/2017/08/16/actualidad/1502883379_435717.html. 4 The titles given to Modotti’s works have varied. Here I use those listed in Lowe and in Stéfane Place’s Tina Modotti: The Mexican Renaissance, a small yet important book based on a European exhibition curated by Patricia Albers and Sam Stourdze in 2000. 5 See the cover of the Alquimia issue cited earlier, as well as photos on pages 42 and 70–71. In a 2022 conversation, historian Jocelyn Olcott, a longtime scholar of Michel, raised the troubling possibility that the photo’s subject may not in fact be the pioneering singer and activist. However, a portrait that appears in Michel’s Obras cortas de teatro revolucionario y popular, published in 1931, would seem to depict the same person, enough so that I have opted to risk the error. The doubt serves as a reminder that recreating the history of women and marginalized persons such as labor activists and campesinos inevitably involves the acceptance, if not embrace, of uncertainty. 6 Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 7 “For what end is the camera best used aside from its purely scientific and commercial uses? The answer always comes more clearly after seeing great work of the sculptor or painter, past or present, work based on conventionalized nature, superb forms, decorative motives. That the approach to photography must be through another avenue, that the camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh” (Weston 55). 8 For example, speaking of one of his landscapes of Janitzio, Weston writes: “The lake is a blank—quite without detail. I know just the people who will criticize these prints. But I know that I saw correctly” (201). 9 The text cited by Albers is from an article by Carleton Beals in Creative Art 4, 1929. 10 She wrote as much, regarding their mutual friend Rivera, in a letter to Weston, September 17, 1929 (Modotti 195).

56  Elissa J. Rashkin 11 After reading an early version of this chapter, Emily Hind asked about the role of ageism in Modotti’s later years, when the photographer returned clandestinely to Mexico as a Spanish Civil War refugee. In lieu of an informed response (due to the lack of non-speculative information on the subject), I cite a headline from the daily Excélsior on January 7, 1942: “Olvidada y Envejecida ha Fallecido Tina Modotti” [Tina Modotti has died forgotten and aged; italics mine]. 12 On Michel, see especially the work of Jocelyn Olcott (Revolutionary Women, “Take off that streetwalker’s dress”); also Ester Hernández Palacios, “Concha Michel: en busca de las raíces de la equidad.” 13 On Vázquez, see Rashkin, Atanasio D. Vázquez.

Works Cited Albers, Patricia. Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. University of California Press, 1999. Alquimia, no. 50, special issue Tina Modotti, expediente inédito, January–April 2014. Beals, Carleton. “Tina Modotti”. Creative Art, no. 4, 1929. Cacucci, Pino. Tina Modotti. Translated by Mercedes de Corral, Circi, Colección Bolsillo, 1995. Casanova, Rosa. “Las huellas de una utopía: las fotografías políticas de Tina Modotti”. Alquimia, no. 50, January–April 2014, pp. 53–73. Cruz León, Artemio, Isabel Arline Duque and Marcelino Ramírez Castro. “La investigación agrícola al momento del traslado de la Escuela Nacional de Agricultura de San Jacinto, D.F., a Chapingo, Estado de México, a través de las publicaciones de Pandurang Khankhoje”. Revista de Geografía Agrícola, no. 54, 30 June 2015, pp. 49–53. Duque, Isabel Arline. “Pandurang Khankhoje, el ‘sabio hindú’, en México”. Alquimia, no. 50, January–April 2014, pp. 8–17. Figarella, Mariana. Edward Weston y Tina Modotti en México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002. Hernández Palacios, Ester. “Concha Michel: en busca de las raíces de la equidad.” Luz rebelde. Mujeres y producción cultural en el México posrevolucionario, edited by Elissa Rashkin and Ester Hernández Palacios, Universidad Veracruzana, 2020, pp. 17–47. “Historia”. Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, https://chapingo.mx/rectoria/historia/. Lear, John. Imaginar el proletariado. Artistas y trabajadores en el México revolucionario, 1908– 1940. Grano de Sal and Secretaría de Cultura, 2019. Lowe, Sarah M. Tina Modotti: Photographs. H. N. Abrams, 1995. Massé, Patricia. “Tina Modotti y el agrarismo radical en México”. Alquimia, no. 50, January– April 2014, pp. 30–49. Michel, Concha. Obras cortas de teatro revolucionário y popular. Jalapa-Enríquez, 1931. Modotti, Tina. Una mujer sin país. Las cartas a Edward Weston y otros papeles personales. Second ed., edited, translated and introduced by Antonio Saborit, Cal y Arena, 2001. Mraz, John. Fotografiar la Revolución Mexicana. Compromisos e íconos. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2010. Nieto Sotelo, Jesús, and Elisa Lozano Álvarez. Tina Modotti. Una nueva mirada, 1929/A New Vision, 1929. Centro de la Imagen and Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, 2000. Olcott, Jocelyn. Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Duke UP, 2005. ——. “‘Take off that streetwalker’s dress’: Concha Michel and the Cultural Politics of Gender in Postrevolutionary Mexico”. Journal of Women’s History, vol. 21, no. 3, 2009, pp. 36–59. “Olvidada y Envejecida ha Fallecido Tina Modotti”. Excélsior, 7 January 1942. Place, Stéfane, editor. Tina Modotti: The Mexican Renaissance. Texts by Patricia Albers, Karen Cordero, and Sam Stourdze. Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 2000. Poniatowska, Elena. Tinísima. Era, 1992. Rashkin, Elissa. Atanasio D. Vázquez, fotógrafo de la posrevolución en Veracruz. Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, 2015.

Earth Images: Tina Modotti and Agrarian Radicalism in Mexico 57 ——. “La mirada instrumental. Paisajes veracruzanas a través de la fotografía.” A cuadro: ocho ensayos en torno a la fotografía, de México y Cuba, edited by Juan Arturo Camacho Becerra and Julia Preciado, Universidad de Guadalajara, Centro Universitario de Los Lagos, 2020, pp. 87–113. Reif, Rita. “Auctions”. New York Times, 19 April 1991. Sawhney, Savitri. “Revolutionary Work: Pandurang Khankhoje and Tina Modotti”. South 8 (Documenta 14, no. 3), 2016: https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/903_revolutionary_work_ pandurang_khankhoje_and_tina_modotti. Vidali, Vittorio. Retrato de mujer. Una vida con Tina Modotti. Translated by Antonella Fagetti, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1982. Weston, Edward. The Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. 1. Mexico. Edited by Nancy Newhall, Aperture, 1961.

4

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography Nathanial Gardner

This essay explores primary themes and features of Mazahua (1993), a photobook produced by Mariana Yampolsky and the acclaimed Mexican writer, Elena Poniatowska. Previous head of the Mariana Yampolsky Foundation and expert on her work, Arjen Van der Sluis, has emphasized the importance of this text and image project when he stated that understanding Mazahua, “is key to understanding [Mariana Yampolsky’s] work” (Gardner “Conversation with Arjen Van der Sluis”). Among the text’s distinctive features is its alignment with humanist photography and its exploration of the themes of ritual, youth, and creation. These three topics (which tend to overlap in Yampolsky’s photography) are vital to understanding Yampolsky’s overall oeuvre. Hence, Mazahua is not only a project created collaboratively by women about the struggles of Mazahua indigenous women, but it is also a text that reveals her humanist focus as a photographer and provides keys to our comprehension of her broader body of work. Mazahua is one of the several collaboration projects created by Elena Poniatowska (who would write the texts) and Mariana Yampolsky (would who take the photographs). The duo embarked on several text and image book projects prior to this one, including Tlacotalpan, La raíz y el camino (The Source and the Path), and Estancias del olvido (Seasons of Forgetting). Hence, this project represents a mature collaboration between these two intellectuals.1 While only anecdotal information exists regarding exactly how the projects were elaborated, what is known is that the two women worked in tandem to develop them. Another factor that unites these women and their collaborations is their focus on the underrepresented or the forgotten. In some cases, there was a greater focus on location. Such is the case of Estancias del olvido. In other occasions, this focuses on communities. This is the case of Mazahua. It does so by sharing 68 photographs as a highly developed and nuanced visual essay with Poniatowska’s textual element providing key contextual components that help the reader understand the social context. Subjects such as internal migration caused by modernity and modern economic constructs are underlined in the textual essay and help situate the reading of the pictures. They explain, for example, why there are so few men present in the visual element. The local government in the Estado de Mexico commissioned Yampolsky to create this book and they published it, but there is no information regarding any artistic steer for this project. Poniatowska’s influence should not be understated. There are anecdotal indications of the ties between the two friends and colleagues. One such is the photograph of Elena Poniatowska on Yampolsky’s worktable in her home (the only photograph in that space) that I observed when I was granted access into her home by her widow. At that time, her widower, Van der Sluis, assured me that the house was kept unchanged after her DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-7

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 59 death. This image suggests the closeness of the two intellectuals and Yampolsky’s affinity for her friend. Another is Elena Poniatowska’s presence in the opening of the 2012 exhibition (and corresponding book/catalogue) on Mariana Yamposky’s work shown in the Museo de Cultura Popular or Museum of Popular Culture. Further concrete examples of their collaboration are the photobooks the women created in tandem such as the ones mentioned earlier. Poniatowska travelled with Yampolsky during the artist’s photography gathering. This allowed her friend to observe Yampolsky’s methods and the images she selected. This helped the author to write the texts that help guide the reader on their journey through the visual narrative. In most cases, Mariana Yampolsky created the bulk of the text which were centered on the visual and Elena Poniatowska’s written contribution can be read as an important accompaniment. Yampolsky’s author-friend has underlined the importance of the visual to her texts. For example, on at least one occasion Poniatowska has stated that she considered that Yampolsky’s photographic contribution has been key to projects on which they worked. I am referring to Las mil y una … la herida de Paulina (One Thousand and One … Paulina’s Wound). This text is also one that focuses on the underrepresented and the dispossessed. This book is mostly a textual chronicle that shares the forceful narrative of young woman who was raped by a drug addict and then systematically denied an abortion for the resultant pregnancy by individuals in positions of power in Baja California Norte—notwithstanding it being within her legal right to one in those circumstances. In reference to this project, Poniatowska indicated that Yampolsky’s included photo essay (which also contains the same three elements I will analyze here: ritual, creation, and youth) “saved her book” (Gardner “Conversation with Elena Poniatowska”). In that conversation Elena Poniatowska described her friend and colleague’s visual narrative as the redeeming quality that book possessed. This also suggests the justification for the visual essay being retained in the future editions of it as the other photographic elements of the book (photos taken from local journalism that helped add context to the narrative) were eliminated. Finally, another concrete evidence of the deep collaboration and influence that both women had on each other’s work is Elena Poniatowska’s biography on Mariana Yampolsky and her artistic creation, Mariana y la buganvillia (Mariana and the Bougainvillea). This text is not only a testimony that charts the rise of the artist but also a document that lays out the collaboration between the friends. These details reveal that while both women share a keen interest in Mexico and an eagerness to uncover lesser-known parts of the country to their readers and give voice to underrepresented men and women in Mexico; the themes of ritual, creation, and youth are more closely aligned to Yampolsky’s visual outlook, even when the two artists work together. When underling the themes within Mazahua is useful to take into consideration the indexicality of photographs identified by Roland Barthes. The images included in the book are physical evidence of visual emphasis on actual past events. Such indexes are highly relevant when revealing the individual focus of the photographer, the reaction of the subject (Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography 18), and the contextual material that is also there and can be studied (Mraz 22). However, such discussions around index and photography need to be counterbalanced with Ariella Azoulay’s ideas from the Civil Contract of Photography. Her book reminds us that photography is never fully under the control of a single individual. It is always subject to negotiations between the photographer and the subject (each of which exercises their own control over the final outcome) and that photography is collaboration (Azoulay, “Photography consists of” 187).

60  Nathanial Gardner Likewise, as I offer critical readings of Mazahua’s photography, Azoulay reminds us that interpretations of photographs are endless. Context (such as that found in Poniatowska’s accompanying essay) adds analytical sense to interpretations and reveals strengths or weaknesses as Mitchell discusses in What Do Pictures Want, but the potential for variations in understandings in what is presented is ever-expanding. Hence, a broad view and wide and careful reading of the artist’s photographic body can lead to a nuanced and patterned reading that can help the viewer detect the trends in the artist’s photographs, helping us lay bare fundamental considerations of her work. Before analyzing the elements and identifying them in the artist’s work, a few basic points aid in demonstrating why Mazahua can be the base of this study. One reason is because this book was written at a time when the artist had reached a stage of maturity in her work. After having arrived in Mexico in 1944 and having started photographing in 1948, taking classes from Lola Álvarez Bravo in the Academia San Carlos (Poniatowska, Mariana y la buganvillia 10 and 54), by the time Mariana Yampolsky embarked on the Mazahua project, she had significant experience as a photographer and her vision of Mexico had the necessary time and experience to mature. Such skill assured that Mazahua was not a casual exploratory project from a novice, but rather one that reflects maturity of technique and photographic vision. Another reason to study this project is because its ethos aligns with a series of projects taken on by the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute) or INI. These were photography and text projects that were used to reveal the lives of the indigenous in Mexico and their roles in society whilst allowing photographers to explore their interests and work with other experts who write the written texts (Iturbide 1981). The books from that series by the INI have specific context included that help the reader to understand the visual focus and the relationship between text and image. This enables the viewer to comprehend the drive of the project which helps them to filter the overarching themes in her work from the specific ones related to this narrative. Hence, in Mazahua it is possible to observe that Yampolsky repeats themes that are found in other projects while she works with Poniatowska to reveal the evolving situation of the Mazahua in Mexico. Poniatowska writes about the effects of internal labor-driven migration by Mazahua men to the Mexican capital on the entire Mazahua community. This allows her to underline the strong role of women in the community, but also underlines questions about the viability of the community and the future of its traditions if the trend continues. Humanist Photography The three topics explored in this chapter can be seen as a subset of humanist photography. Hence, as a preliminary step to arrive at an understanding of Mariana Yampolsky’s photography, it is useful to briefly discuss the photography genres within which the general body of her images fit. As its name implies, the human subject is the center of humanism. Indeed, Liz Wells and Derek Price explain that the humanist self is found at the center of Western visuality. This idea argues that the human subject “is understood to be the rational centre of the world and the prime agent in seeking its meaning and establishing its order” (69). Humanist photography as a visual movement has certain identifiable characteristics that can be observed in Mariana Yampolsky’s work. With roots in the post war Europe and the United States (Thézy), the period coincides with the photographer’s formation as an artist and her decision to move from the United States (the country of her birth

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 61 and early years) to live and work in Mexico from age twenty until her death. During this period, humanist photography began to be practiced by well-known European photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson, Brassai (Gyula Halasz), Robert Capa (Endre Friedmann), and “Chim” Seymour (Dawid Szymin) among many others in the first half of the twentieth century. Born from a desire to help the common man, humanist photography overlaps with aspects of documentary photography and shares traits with reportage photography used in photojournalism in that it is interested in the everyday human experience. It seeks to witness human mannerisms and cultures as well as conveying their traditions and social trends. In its efforts to connect its viewers with the common man while lifting its location within society, humanist photography strives to show solidarity, document, foment empathy and express humor in the quotidian street experience (Hamilton 178–179). The effort to uplift humanity in humanist photography can also be linked to what Cornell Capa has called “Concerned Photography,” which is photography taken to educate and change the world, not just record it. Humanist photography strove to shore up the notion of an existence of an “universal underlying human nature” (Lutz 277). A clear example of this type of photographic vision and project is Edward Steichen’s exhibition Family of Man, which sought to reveal the shared elements of human sentiment and experience (Gresh 331–332). This last photography exhibition travelled internationally, promoting empathy and unity with an important number of its photographic body being made up of images created by European photographers (Chevrier 177–181). Two of the small number of Latin American photographers who participated in The Family of Man have close connections to Mariana Yampolsky: Lola Álvarez Bravo and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Lola was her photography mentor and Manuel was a close friend and artistic influence (García). As one can observe, the three keys for understanding Mariana Yampolsky’s photography are clearly aligned with humanist photography and can be found in her teachers and contemporaries in Mexico. Part of the humanist trend in Mariana Yampolsky’s photography is how she captures her subject’s lifestyle. She does so in their quotidian spaces (home, church, place of work). Keen to allow her subjects to maintain what they might consider to be intimate elements of their lives, Yampolsky tended to take pictures outside, or in the public square or institutions. When pictures are taken in the home, they tend to be in common areas such as living rooms, porches, or azoteas. Kitchens and public facing schools and offices are spaces or locations of work that can be personal, but tend not to be private, allowing her images to focus on commonly known practices and recognized modes of living known to the Mazahua. Yampolsky’s humanist outlook can be observed in how she portrays everyday human experience and her interest in the subjects’ customs and ways of living. She identifies social trends. She is intensely interested in the popular classes and those commonly ignored such as the poor or the ethnic minorities, or the rural dwellers. (This is a focus she shares with Lola Álvarez Bravo [Walden 4–5].) At its heart, Mazahua attempts to underscore the important role of women in a rural indigenous community. It strives to portray this lifestyle in a way that is positive and encourages the preservation of the traditional as it faces the change demanded by modernity fomented by nearby urban centers in Mexico. This is evident in the three areas I will now analyze. As I begin this analysis, it is important to underline that most, if not all, of the photographs considered under each theme contain references to the other two themes also studied here. This overlapping of themes (which I will overtly reference in my analysis of these images) reinforces their presence in the artist’s work and signals their interconnectedness.

62  Nathanial Gardner Yampolsky’s photography can be read as presenting optimism in its humanist outlook. Perhaps one of the strongest arguments that support such a reading of her work is her inclusion of youth in her art. In many ways, youth, or activities preferred by the youth has become a central focus of Yampolsky’s creative production. Young Mexicans are frequently found in her early engraving work from when she belonged to the Taller de Gráfica Popular. The education of youth is the purpose of the Colibrí series of books that she edited. Homemade toys are portrayed as folk art in Lo efímero y lo eterno del arte mexicano (The Ephemeral and the Eternal in Mexican Art). Graffiti, one of the languages used by the youth to reveal identity, express protest, or demand change, is one of the final artistic concentrations of her photographic oeuvre. All these artistic projects focus on youth and an interest in it that suggest it is a core theme throughout her work. This emphasis can be read as a profound interest in Mexico’s future (Desnoes 8–11). As Yampolsky centered on Mexico’s children she was taking the country’s temperature, checking its pulse, reviewing its vital signs to show her viewers its strengths and concerns. A quick review of the themes of the children in Mazahua and some close reading of selected images, suggest that the children are synecdoches of the community and indications of what may come. Mazahua was Elena Poniatowska and Mariana Yampolsky’s project in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Both women would travel together to the outskirts of Toluca just outside of Mexico City to interview, photograph and observe Mazahua in their local context. What they encountered, as narrated by Poniatowska, was an indigenous community that was struggling. It was depleted of men (due to lack of gainful employment in the region and internal migration). Modernity as a positive development and influence is questioned as the viewer observes a society situated between tradition and modernity and as the written text suggests a breakdown of community due to internal migration owing to modern economic demands. These cracks in the community are also manifest in the visual text via an absence of men in the narrative. As Elena Poniatowska notes in her introduction to Mazahua, as the Mexican capital grew closer, so did its influence. Likewise, so did the city’s demand for resources such as water and timber to fuel its growth. The Mazahua’s way of life faced change and was seen with nostalgia and concern: Somos las mujeres mazahuas, las que antes poseíamos venados y ahora ni hombres tenemos. Todos se fueron a trabajar en la construcción, salieron a las grandes ciudades; allá son albañiles, vienen una vez al mes y luego ya ni vienen. No los volvemos a ver. Somos nosotras las que manejamos la yunta, sembramos, cosechamos el maíz. Vivimos entre las tolvaneras, ésta es una tierra muy seca, desgastada, pobre. Nuestro mayor gusto es el maíz, cuando revienta en palomita, estalla en toda su blancura. Parece el Nevado de Toluca. Entonces, lo enhebramos y vamos enredando los santos, todos envueltos en palomitas. Los floreamos. (Mazahua 7). [We are the Mazahua women, those who once had deer and now we don’t even have men. All of them went to work in construction, they left for the big cities; there, they all work as bricklayers. They come once a month and then they don’t come at all. We don’t ever see them again. It is we who push the plow, who sow, who harvest the corn. We live amidst the dust storms. This is very dry land: overworked, poor. Our greatest pleasure is corn, when it pops, exploding in whiteness. It seems like the snowy ridges of Toluca. Then we thread it together and we wind it around the saints, wrapping them in popped corn. We adorn them with flowers.]2

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 63 Here one observes Poniatowska write for the Mazahua women as she underscores how women in this photo essay underline an important change in demographics. However, we can also observe the emphasis of two rituals that are found in this photo essay, that of the careful and continual cultivation of maize and the presence of religion. To an extent, their presence points to two of the bases of Mesoamerican society. The ritual of sowing and reaping (and the law of the harvest: you reap what you sow) is presented in this photo essay via the sowing and reaping of corn. This grain is a basic staple of diet and is a key presence in Latin America. This is true even in terms of religious thought if one considers the creationist theory presented in the foundational text: the Popul Vuh. In this photo essay the rituals associated with corn show individuality of a community and point to rituals related to corn. In the case of the rituals of religion, there is an element worth mentioning. Religion as an influence in society in Latin America could be considered one of the democratic elements because it is an influence that reaches across a society that possesses significant differences in economic prosperity and individual opportunity. The different and varied rituals associated with religion (that caught the attention of the Jewish immigrant to a predominantly Catholic country) offer a marker of broadly shared Mexican identity that are seen to be one of the focal points of Mariana Yampolsky’s photography. These rituals show a commonality as the sign of the individual within these events, underlining the individual’s ability to form a relevant part of the community. I present two examples of such to clarify these points. Ritual The reader of Mazahua and other visual projects Yampolsky created will encounter ritual as one of her major themes. This consideration is important because they are core elements and experiences that make up society and culture. As defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary, rituals can be seen as religious ceremonies or acts that are carried out in exact manners to achieve specific results, or they can be acts done in accordance with certain social customs or normal protocols. Yampolsky includes both types in her portrayal of the Mazahua. This permits her photo essay to capture both the concrete (i.e., the planting or gathering of crops), which enables the physical and economic survival of the community. By including the religious rituals, she can signal the spiritual, the abstract, and the intangible elements that bind communities together, a shared belief that brings the members together and connects them with bonds linked to belief and feeling. This image is important because it evidences a link that goes beyond the economic or the culinary. Regarding the spiritual, the photographs on pages 36 and 37 of Mazahua both show women and children in a religious setting. Both are taken from within a church (churches are one of the public spaces that Yampolsky explores with her photography). These images evoke ritual, youth, and creation, and suggest a sequence with documentary qualities. I will simply focus on Nave (Vessel), the photograph on page 37 (see Figure 4.1). In it, you can observe women in the act of worship. There is no priest present in the portrayed religious setting which keeps within the overarching theme of this book of an absence of men. Yet the physical position in which these women are suggests that they are in the act of worship. The community gathering of women suggests a shared religious bond, which at the same time is a shared bond with most Mexicans. Indeed, Christian belief is one of the elements that links different social classes and beliefs in Mexico that connects Mexicans across the social divides with the country and

64  Nathanial Gardner

Figure 4.1 Mariana Yampolsky. Nave (Vessel). Undated. Santa Cruz Tejocote, Mexico state. Archivo Fotográfico Mariana Yampolsky. Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. CMY10518.

creates what could be considered a core element of Mexican identity. As a woman of Jewish extraction, Christian belief and worship would have been one of the differences that set her apart from most of the citizens of her adopted country (Garcia). Even so, her photography evidences an interest in the symbols, locations, and manifestations of prominent religious rituals in Mexico. This points to her keen understanding of her local surroundings and her ability to identify important cultural markers within her working context. In Nave you can see that both youth and creation are also present. In the foreground of the image, you can observe that children add an element of movement to the image. While the adults face the altar of the church with their heads down and have their backs to the camera, a young girl has broken the visual rhythm of the scene by turning around and facing the camera, engaging directly with the spectator and the event of photography. This interrupts the scene and adds youthful interaction and energy to it. Even further in the foreground you can see a young boy crawling across the floor. He is the only person engaged in movement. This not only suggests the restlessness of youth who break with the quiet contemplation and mediation of the religious ritual but also adds a symbolic gesture that supports one of the main ideas of this photo essay. Just as the boy distances himself from the group meditation, the other men also find themselves physically distant from the community. While the boy’s distancing is most likely attributed to curiosity or a desire to play, the photo essay and its written texts suggest that the distancing of the men

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 65 from the community and its rituals has deeper social roots. In this manner, the humanist element of Yampolsky’s photographs also becomes evident. The other of three core elements in Mariana Yampolsky’s work, creation is also present in this photograph focused on ritual. In this instance it is part of the background of the image. It is evidenced in the saints who have been dressed by the community. It is also the floral arrangements that have been placed in front of the altar. This is also seen in the arrangements that have been placed behind the altar and around the Catholic saints in the church building. These elements of creation not only evidence community involvement but also local flora and fauna in addition to showcasing the community’s creativity. While rituals that provide spiritual sustenance have ample space in Mazahua, another one of the rituals portrayed is connected to physical sustenance. This is seen through portrayals of farming, specifically the planting, growing, and harvesting of corn. While the written text makes clear that maize is not the only crop that the community cultivates, the visual text focuses on this one. It is the element used by the Gods to make humanity in the creation story in the Popol Vuh. It is one of the major staples of the Mesoamerican diet. It has its origin in Latin American agricultural practice and is deeply connected to this region. Indeed, it is a culinary element that is symbolic of Latin America. Consequently Mariana Yampolsky uses the ritual of the maize cultivation to evidence her nuanced understanding of Latin America and to connect her readers to core ideas linked to creation there. A close reading of Retoño (The Sprout) (see Figure 4.2) from Mazahua will show this with great clarity.

Figure 4.2 Mariana Yampolsky. Retoño (The Sprout). Undated. Ayala, Morelos. Archivo Fotográfico Mariana Yampolsky. Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. CMY10423.

66  Nathanial Gardner If one observes the background, the foreground and then the middle ground with the intention of understanding how the elements support each other visually and unify around the theme of ritual and possess elements of youth and creation in this image, these points become evident. The name of the photograph, Retoño, suggests both the plants that will come out of the ground and well as the youth who are featured near the center of the photograph. The young women and the young plants suggest nature’s established patterns that become the ritual of life, youth, maturity, decline. Both also suggest creation as they are growing, living, elements in the world. The background contains ploughed fields. The foreground shows maguey plants. These plants are closely linked to Mexican identity both visually and in terms of the drink they provide: aguamiel and mezcal (as well as other products such as the penca and the gusano de maguey). Both drinks are part of the social rituals in Mexico. Finally, you can also see that, as with the photographic portrayal of the religious ritual above, there is the suggestion of a man who is separated from the group of women. In this image, only a close reading of the photograph identifies him. In the mid right-hand side of the image a branch of the maguey plant obscures all but the hat and partial view of the head of what appears to be a man. One can only guess that this is a man because he is wearing a sombrero that is like that of other men in the area. The important point underscored here is that the man is also separate from the group, referring to the theme of the men often being separated from the women in the Mazahua community. The fact that Yampolsky focuses on ritual shows her interest in integrating into Mexico, something important to Mariana (Poniatowska Mariana y la buganvillia 39). It also allows her to foreground her vision regarding the important events in Mexico and how they are shared by many as well as how the rituals are part of the common rituals that are a component of the human experience, thus acquiring an ethos similar to Family of Man. In this way, a focus on rituals in her photography allowed her to explore Mexico with greater depth while at the same time linking it to the collective experiences that photographers encounter as they capture the world with their camera. Creation Creation is another central element in Mariana Yampolsky’s visual outlook. In her work, creation is a theme in a very broad sense. This can range from artistic creation to creation related to work or recreation, or even to the notion of creation in relation to family, and beyond. Growing up in the home of an architect and a sculptor, creation would have been one of the themes within the work of her parents and held cultural capital for them. The group of artists that inspired Yampolsky to come to Mexico and begin her career in art were members of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphics Workshop). This group of socially committed artists (created in Mexico City in 1937) included founding members such as Leopoldo Méndez, Luis Arenal, and American-born Pablo O’Higgins. The focus that attracted Yampolsky to this group of creators was their concentrated efforts to fight Fascism and social destruction using left-leaning social politics (Comisarenco Mirkin 4–5). Her work as an illustrator focused on making art to promote ideas that would benefit the future (such as the children who would read the Colibrí series). Her work with lesser-known photographers such as the Enrique “El Gordo” Díaz sought to create a wider, more inclusive photo history of Mexico (Yampolsky and Maawad). All these efforts underline the theme of artistic and other forms of creation as a primary focus of her work. In Yampolsky’s artistic outputs, this theme is often found in the

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 67

Figure 4.3 Mariana Yampolsky. Altar llanero (Prairie Altar). Undated. Santa Cruz Tejocote, Mexico State. Archivo Fotográfico Mariana Yampolsky. Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. FMY9350.

creation of art, but it can also be encountered in broader themes of creation, such as the creation of knowledge, the creation of community, or livelihood as creation. Mazahua is no different. In this series you can observe it in the homemade decoration of the “Santos y Palomitas” (Saints and Popped Corn) of the saints on page 27 (see Figure 4.3). On other occasions, creation is captured in the photograph of the preparation of an offering of dried flowers to the Santa Rosa de Lima. The offering to this saint, has even greater significance to the visually literate because they will recognize that Santa Rosa de Lima (of Lima, Peru) is important because she was the first Latin American Saint to be canonized by the Catholic Church (Hart 12). Yampolsky’s capturing of this points to her nuanced understanding of Latin America and its religious beliefs and rituals and underlining the importance of women within them. I will now turn our attention to two photographs that focus on creation while referring to the other two themes I am exploring here, youth and ritual. Like the Santa Rosa de Lima photograph just mentioned, is that of the celebration of the Virgen de Guadalupe. This is a ritual that is much closer to Mexico as it celebrates the Mexican saint on December 12. As mentioned previously, these rituals would not have been a part of Mariana Yampolsky’s family religious heritage (Fusi 321), yet you can observe that she recognizes them as a key part of the visual heritage in Mexico, indicating the nuanced reading of Mexican culture she developed via her work and time in Mexico. The image on page 34 (Figure 4.4) shows an outdoor makeshift altar

68  Nathanial Gardner

Figure 4.4 Mariana Yampolsky. Día de la Guadalupana (Day of the Virgen of Guadalupe). Undated. Santa Cruz Tejocote, Mexico State. Archivo Fotográfico Mariana Yampolsky. Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. CMY10413.

heavily decorated with flowers and bouquets. The image taken outdoors is in line with Yampolsky’s visual practices of being a non-intrusive photographer, taking advantage of public spaces to this end. The flower creations indicate a community effort to adorn the community-accepted saint. The kneeling pose of the women in front of the altar also suggests the same quiet contemplation that was discussed in the photographer analyzed earlier. This independent worship indicates a community and individually driven religious practice. It also advocates a connection to organized religion, but not a dependence on a priest or nun. Such visual presentation also falls in line with the greater thrust of this visual essay (to describe a community whose men have needed to leave to find gainful employment). Finally, the element of youth is not only captured in the young flowers which, once picked will soon lose the vigor, but also the young boy in the foreground. This young man is also physically apart from the ritual, assumedly because he might be too young and restless to want to sit in quiet contemplation, another suggestion of his youthfulness. However, this sign also reminds the viewer of the other men who are distanced from the women of the community and how this community is, in many ways, another type of matriarchy. This is a theme that Elena Poniatowska has explored with another key photographer, Graciela Iturbide in Juchitán de las mujeres. However, unlike the city of Juchitán which is arguably a matriarchy by choice (though some dispute this description—i.e., Binford), the Mazahua are a matriarchy of changing social and economic factors born of economic modernity.

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 69 Toward the conclusion of Mazahua (page 66) you encounter a photograph that centers on natural form and is reminiscent of Yampolsky’s visual heritage as a photography student taught by Lola Álvarez Bravo (who took lessons from Tina Modotti). Many rows of what look to be ceramic pots are lined up in a way that they seem to stretch out extensively into the horizon creating a landscape of ceramic creation. The far background is darkened in such a way that it becomes a series of dark shapes and lines that abstract the landscape and invite the viewer to focus back on the ceramic pots. The geometric qualities of the pots and the neat stacks in which they are arranged help the viewer to appreciate their aesthetic qualities and point to the endless hours of the potters who have created this. This geometric configuration of ceramic creations also has its ties to youth and ritual. This is found, at least in part, in the functionality of the forms you can observe. This is because these are not just pots, they are pots to be used as ceramic piñatas. In disuse in recent times, for many years, the ceramic pot was the base for the piñata, as opposed to more recent papier-mâché creations. A visual example of this can be found in Diego Rivera’s series of posada painting in the Hospital de niños en Mexico City (La piñata). The ceramic piñata not only needs to be created by the potter, but it requires an additional step in the creation process as it needs to be decorated, be it to acquire the traditional star shape (symbolizing the overcoming of the seven deadly sins) or another one that the owners might deem appropriate (Zolov 461–462). The piñata in Mexico points to the ritual of the fiesta. As noted by Octavio Paz, the Mexican fiesta is more than an Anglo-Saxon “weekend,” “vacation,” or “cocktail party;” it is one of the important rituals linked to Mexican life (Paz 18). Piñatas are present in birthday parties, quinceñeras, posadas and other fiestas celebrated among families, friends, and communities. While it is not uncommon for adults to have a piñata for themselves or to take a swing at one in a children’s party, the piñata is commonly seen as a ritual for children at the Mexican fiesta. Hence, this object references the creative process, suggests a shift in focus from her visual heritage to that of her adopted country, and clearly points to youth and ritual in Mexico. Youth As mentioned in the introduction, youth is a key element in Mariana Yampolsky’s visual outlook. Children are seen running and playing. In Mazahua, they run and dance among the animals and the fields. They learn in school and at home. While in this project you do not see teachers in the photographer’s classic teaching images such as La sal se puso morena (The Salt Darkened) (Macmasters 2), or the photograph of the Mazahua girls in school Escuela mazahua (Yampolsky 1984), you can observe the informal/familiar teachers within the community. Take for example the photograph on page 58 of Mazahua. Therein, you can observe a woman doing the washing with children present. Two look on attentively, while another appears to participate in the activity. Chores are not the only activity learned; community rituals are also part of the visual narrative with a youthful focus. It is possible to observe them in the cemetery with ofrendas for the deceased. On page 28 you can see them helping to transport a religious altar. These activities point to the children becoming part the community though their active participation. This photographic vision of the Mazahua suggests one that is centered around community. Yampolsky uses her photography in this visual essay in a way that furthers of the basic tenets of her vision of the Mazahua, that of a matriarchy born of scarcity. This vision is reflected in her portraiture of the girls and young women. These photos tend to

70  Nathanial Gardner be closeups, whilst the photographs involving boys exhibit more distance between the photographer and the subject. This gives the females a more central role in the visual narrative. Another aspect that merits comment as I consider the role of youth in the photography of Mariana Yampolsky is the epistemological relationship between beauty and youth. Three of the photographs in Mazahua have become signature photographs of this artist’s work. Page 45 exhibits one of them. This photograph centers on a young Mazahua woman. Dressed in traditional clothing, she carries a load in her rebozo. Her gaze goes beyond the camera and out into the undefined distance. Her flawless skin and her strong jawline are complimented by her eyes and her long, braided hair. She represents natural beauty. The load she carries suggests dignity in labor and her gaze beyond the camera and into the unknown future disengages her with the actual taking of the image. She is not like Manuel Alvaro Bravo’s defiant Señor de Papantla because her whole body has shifted away from the camera (Mraz 87). Yampolsky’s photography captures a youth as moving decidedly away from the camera’s gaze as suggested by her ocular focus and body positioning. Both suggest a distancing from the picturesque (similar in style to the one Mraz described in his analysis of the photograph just mentioned). This idea is reinforced with a photo of a similar focus in the essay (see Figure 4.5). It is found on page 25. In it, you can observe a much younger Mazahua girl. Dressed in traditional clothing as well, she carries a chicken. Her beauty is also emphasized as she is the focal point of

Figure 4.5 Mariana Yampolsky. La bendición del gallo (The Rooster’s Blessing). Undated. Santa Cruz Tejocote, Mexico State. Archivo Fotográfico Mariana Yampolsky. Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. CMY10207.

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 71 the photograph in terms of the central position she occupies within the photograph and the lighting of the photo that highlights her facial features while at the same time the attire and poultry distance the image from modern Mexico and cause us to contemplate her beauty and, to a certain degree, the aesthetics of the exotic as well. In most cases in Mazahua the exoticness in the picture is born of the atemporality of the images (though taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s there are few references of modernity in terms of technology or commodity) and via an emphasis of subjects wearing traditional dress instead of modern clothing. As I consider this theme of beauty and youth in Mazahua, one of the important principles that Mariana Yampolsky presents as one observes her photographs helps us to see and understand her humanist viewpoint within her photography. As a photographer, most of her images are taken from a respectful distance and any close ups are taken in such a way as to suggest prior consent. This means an absence of infraganti photography among the entire archive of her photographs.3 Additionally, almost all the photographs are either taken at eye level or from a vantage point that places the photography below her subject. This suggests and promotes an empathetic viewpoint from the photographer and encourages one from the viewer as can be seen on page 65. It is titled El mandil (The Apron) (see Figure 4.6). The name of the photo reminds the reader of the other two themes creation and ritual. This is because the apron suggests cooking (and other domestic chores) that would occur when wearing an apron. It is part of the quotidian creation that comprises culinary labor. It also reminds us that domestic activities are some of the

Figure 4.6 Mariana Yampolsky. El mandil (The Apron). Undated. Reproduced with permission of Elic Herrera and the Centro de la Imagen. Courtesy of the Centro de la Imagen.

72  Nathanial Gardner rituals of the quotidian. However, I would argue that the title suggests more firmly the other two themes in Yampolsky’s work. The central focus of this image is youth. This is because there is a closeup of a very young girl. She has a faint smile and appears relaxed in front of the camera, though she does take the hand of the women behind her, suggesting a relationship of trust and confidence between the two. Her beauty and innocence are that which is guaranteed with almost any photography of a young child. She engages with the camera straight on, so much so that the flash of the camera can been seen in the reflection of the girl’s eyes. The fact that you can see hints of the photographer in the reflection on the girl’s eyes helps us to contemplate the collaboration of this photographic event (Azoulay, “Photography Consists of Collaboration” 188). This also reminds the reader of the photographer’s interest in this small child precisely because she is the future of Yampolsky’s adopted country. Mariana Yampolsky uses youth to underscore the humanist interest within her photography. Consider the example on page 36: Plegaria (The Prayer). The name of the photograph points to the ritual that is taking place in the image such prayers that are often used to express religious devotion in such rituals. The capturing of this ritual is one that promotes empathy with her subject as the Christian religion is one that not only connects Mexicans, but it also reaches out internationally as it covers shared ground with others who partake of Christian religious practices such as prayer and even further out to other belief systems that employ prayer or meditation to connect with the divine or transcendent. Hence, this image of the mother taking her young child to the church to worship suggests not only a connection between mother and child (which also mirrors traditional iconography in Mexican churches), it shows how Mexico’s future is being shaped in the present. Creation is suggested not only by some of the decorations in the church (as noted in other areas of analysis) but also in the cap that the child is wearing. This cap, unique in its design, denotes home or community confection. The church setting featured (as opposed to a marketplace, a home, or a plaza) also suggests an interest in activity which is often viewed as one intended to focus on self-improvement of its adepts and foment community bonds, all which link into the ethos of concerned and humanist photography. The sharp focus in the image on the woman and child with a softer focus on the background of the church points to the importance of people and location. Relationships take priority over locations. The rebozo used to carry the young child binds them together, underlining the closeness of the woman and child. The fact that the woman and her child are both wrapped in the same cloth points to solidarity between both. Mariana Yampolsky’s photographs use the youth to ask broad questions about Mexico’s future. Indeed, one way of reading her work is seeing her subject as symbols of Mexico. The artist asks these symbols questions. What are Mexico’s citizens learning? Who takes care of them? What are they creating? What do they play? Who are their friends? What are their beliefs? What rituals guide their lives? Beauty and curiosity are visual hooks employed to catch her viewers’ attention. Yampolsky documents, though she is not so interested in showing us aspects of modern life like Marco Antonio Cruz does with his documentary photography in which the nitty gritty details of modern life and its challenges are exposed (Del Castillo Troncoso, no pagination). Instead, Mazhaua goes beyond the documentary vein prevalent in the key 1978 Latin American photography event “Hecho en Latinoamérica” (Made in Latin America) and its catalogue by the same name. She shows us what could be considered the exotic (exotic for the readers of her book—speaking broadly of middle-class intellectual readers in Latin America, English-speaking North America, and Western Europe), though Yampolsky does not invent it to entertain as can be observed in

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 73 that of her student Flor Garduño’s Witness of time. If you are to understand the exotic as a portrayal of otherness (Said 6), one that is distant and different, it is also important to remember what Anandi Ramamurthy has written about the portrayal of the exotic as I consider Yampolsky’s work. Ramamurthy argues that what is exotic to one is familiar to the other (272). Hence, it is the distance of the reading public from these pictures that help such images be perceived as exotic, though they might have been viewed as familiar to the photographer. It is also location, specifically the non-studio locations, that enables the subjects to negotiate their portrayal and movebeyondtypecasts. As Doy reminds us, when sitters are allowed to situate themselves in their own environment, they often defy the codification of the exotic (Doy 30–31). Therefore, Mariana Yampolsky’s use of public photography helps provide a view of the Mazahua that is more grounded in self-determination and self-portrayal. It is an outlook that suggests that any exotic vision relies on the distance of the reader from the Mazahua. Yampolsky’s vision speaks of ritual, creation, and youth. In a sense, any exotic portrayal is secondary because these same themes reappear to tell the same story in other examples of her work, such as her graffiti archive held in the Universidad Iberoamericana. Yampolsky uses these three focuses as a means of taking Mexico’s pulse and moving her viewers. She helps them identify with her adopted country and commit to its wellbeing as she did through her engagement with her adopted homeland’s rituals, creation, and youth. Importantly, these three themes can be empolyed as cornerstones of larger projects on her work that look past an exoticized view of Latin America and avoid reductionist visions of Latin American photography. At the same time, they can show us how this photographer stands out from other artists. For example, you can observe that Yampolsky is interested in Mexican form over abstract form unlike her visual predecessor Edward Weston. Her focus is more on people and less on the politics observable in the photography of Tina Modotti. Like her mentor, Lola Álvarez Bravo, she uses youth to speak of Mexico’s future, ritual to show you its beliefs and habits, and creation to help you see what they consume, what they think is important, and what they wish to use to sustain their life either through direct consumption or to participate in the market economy of the Mexico she observed. These three themes in Yampolsky’s work offer us a lens through which to understand this artist’s work and how she interpreted the modern Mexico in which she lived. Notes 1 Though Mazahua would not be the last book length collaboration between Poniatowska and Yampolsky. It was followed by The Edge of Time. 2 Translation by Julia R. Brown. 3 Here I am referring to Yampolsky’s entire archive of photographs (including the Mazahua project) held by the Universidad Iberoamericana.

Works Cited Azoulay, Ariella. “Photography Consists of Collaboration: Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, and Ariella Azoulay.” Camera Obscura, 31:1, 2016, pp. 187–201. ——. The Civil Contract of Photography. 2008, Zone Books. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1981, Hill and Wang. Binford, Leigh. “Graciela Iturbide: Normalizing Juchitán.” History of Photography, 20:3, 1996, pp. 244–248.

74  Nathanial Gardner Chevrier, Jean François. “Photographie 1947: le poids de la tradition.” Jean Luc Daval editor, L’Art en Europe: Les années décisives, 1945–1953, Skira, 1987, pp. 177–189. Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía. Hecho en Latinoamérica, Primera muestra de la fotografía Latinoamerican contemporánea. Consejo Mexico de Fotografía, 1978. “Cornell Capa: Concerned Photography.” International Center of Photography, https://www.icp. org/browse/archive/collections/cornell-capa-concerned-photographer Doy, Glen. “Out of Africa: Orientalism, Race and the Female Body.” Body and Society, 2:1, 1996, pp. 17–44. Del Castillo Troncoso, Alberto. “Marco Antonio Cruz (1957), 43 fotografías: Una imagen por cada estudiante asesinado en Ayotzinapa, en el sur de México, en septiembre del 2014.” L’Odra: L’Ordinaire des Amériques, 219, 2015. https://journals.openedition.org/orda/2124#ftn1 Desnoes, Edmundo. “Six Stations of the Latino American Via Crucis.” Aperture, 109, 1987, pp. 2–13. Fusi, Juan Pablo. México a través de la fotografía (1839–2010). Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial España, 2014. Garduño, Flor. Witnesses of Time. Aperture, 2000. García, Cecila et al. “Mariana Yampolsky y Luis Barragán: un diálogo entre la fotografía y la arquitectura.” Actividad Pasada, October 16, 2004, online publication. https://cultura.iteso.mx/ c3/04b/yampolsky.html Gardner, Nathanial. “Conversation with Arjen Van der Sluis.” Tlapan 2015, unpublished document. ——. “Conversation with Elena Poniatowska.” Mexico City 2015, unpublished document. Gresh, Kristen. “The European roots of The Family of Man.” History of Photography, 29:4, 2005, pp. 331–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2005.10442815 Hamilton, Peter. “A poetry of the streets? Documenting Frenchness in an Era of Reconstruction: Humanist Photography 1935–1960.” French Literature Series, 28, 2001, pp. 177–229. Hart, Stephen. Santa Rosa de Lima. La evolución de una santa. Cátedra Vallejo, 2017. Iturbide, Graciela and Elena Poniatowska. Juchitán de las mujeres. Ediciones Toledo, 1989. Iturbide, Graciela and Luis Barjau. Los que viven en la arena. Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1981. Lutz, C.A. and J.L. Collins. Reading National Geographic. University of Chicago Press, 1993. Macmasters, Merry. “Yampolsky perteneció al mejor México, al de la Inocencia.” La Jornada, 5 de mayo, 2012, p. 2. https://www.jornada.com.mx/2012/05/05/cultura/a02n1cul Comisarenco Mirkin, Dina. “A Collective Roar from the Taller de Gráfica Popular: Mariana Yampolsky, Elizabeth Catlett, Fanny Rabel and Celia Calderón.” Artelogie, 17, 2021. http:// journals.openedition.org/artelogie/10348 Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Mraz, John. History and Modern Media: A Personal Journey. Vanderbilt University Press, 2021. Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. Cuadernos Americanos, 1950. Poniatowska, Elena. Mariana y la buganvillia. Plaza y Janés, 2001. ——. “Mariana Yampolsky.” Mariana Yampolsky: Mirada que cautiva la mirada, Arjen Van der Sluis editor, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2012, pp. 37–44. ——. Las mil y una … La herida de Paulina. Plaza y Janés, 2000. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya. Christenson, Allen, translator, University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Price, Derrick and Liz Wells. “Thinking about photography: debates, historically and now.” Liz Wells Editor, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, 2015, pp. 9–74. Ramamurthy, Anandi. “Spectacles and Illusions: Photography and Commodity Culture.” Liz Wells Editor, Photography: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, 2015, pp. 233–288. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Routledge, 1985. Steichen, Edward. The Family of Man. Museum of Modern Art, 1955. “Ritual”, Merriam Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ritual

Fundamental Considerations for Mariana Yampolsky’s Photography 75 Rivera, Diego. La piñata. Hospital de niños CDMX, 1953. Thézy, Marie. La Photographie humaniste, 1930–1960. Histoire d’un mouvement en France, Paris. Contrejour, 1992. Walden, Lauren. “Lola Álvarez Bravo: Subverting Surrealist Photography in Mexico.” Photography and Culture, 2023, pp. 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2023.2181803 Yampolsky, Mariana. Escuela Mazahua. Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, 1984. https://collection.museum.virginia.edu/objects-1/info/2901 Yampolsky, Mariana and David Maawad. Bailes y Balas: Ciudad de México 1921–1931. Archivo General de la nación, 1991. Yampolsky, Mariana and Elena Poniatowska. The Edge of Time. University of Texas Press, 1998. ——. Estancias del olvido. Educación Gráfica, 1987. ——. Mazahua. Gobierno del Estado de México, 1993. ——. Tlacotalpan. Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1987. ——. La Raíz y el camino. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985. Yampolsky, Mariana and Leopoldo Méndez. Lo efímero y eterno del arte popular mexicano (2 vols). El Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana, 1974. Zolov, Eric. Iconic Mexico: An Encyclopedia from Acapulco to Zócalo [2 Volumes] An Encyclopedia from Acapulco to Zócalo. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2015.

5

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other On the Photographic Communication of Graciela Iturbide Tanius Karam Translated by Julia R. Brown

Exploring One Kind of Gaze In this work we test a communicative and socio-cultural gaze in the interpretation of some images of Graciela Iturbide, the well-known photographer from Mexico City. We rely on concepts such as “alternative modernity,” “iconic-analogical hermeneutics,” and “imaginary relationships”: three different categories that are linked from a communicative and socio-cultural perspective.1 Within a communicative gaze, the photographer is seen as an enunciator, and the act of photographing as an enunciative system. The images form an expressive system, which includes signs, icons, and iconic statements grouped into themes in which we can easily identify reiterations and formal treatment strategies (composition, light management, angle, framing). Applying the literary theory of Umberto Eco (1993), we could also say that empirical and model receivers (those imagined by the enunciator) can participate in photographic enunciation. We can think of this recipient—in other words, the spectator—by seeing images of Iturbide in a book, in an exhibition, or in a blog.2 Within photographic enunciation there is a double interpretative system. On the one hand, there is the one carried out by the photographer in accordance with her concept of Mexico, her aesthetic presuppositions, and her particular context. On the other there is the interpretation that the spectator is indirectly invited to carry out, by identifying “indications,” signs, or suggestions that emanate from the photograph itself. The receiver is asked to rethink the reference objects and, more broadly, their possible idea of the other, of Mexico, of culture, and even of gender. Iturbide employs a mediating and communicative attitude, in the sense theorized by Jesús Martín Barbero (1984), ethically linking separate worlds to make cultural paradoxes “inhabitable” in the increasingly complex and interconnected contemporary world. For Martín Barbero, the “communicator” as a socio-cultural mediator can help to harmonize the conceptions and representations that exist between the urban and the rural, the popular with the massive, and to link languages and universes seen as opposites from a dominant and modern logic. In addition to being an enunciator, we also define Iturbide as a socio-cultural mediator within a context that we conceive of as dialogic.3 Iturbide exchanges information between cultural planes without the rigid idea of the subject centered solely on universal rationality. Rather, through phronesis (communicative prudence), the limits of rationality may be recognized, and the rationality of all cultures can be appreciated. Mauricio Beuchot insists on an iconic-analogical hermeneutics and the possibility of communicating through said approach, allowing interlocutors identify those similar points in their DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-8

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other  77 interpretations. Hermeneutics is an interpretational instrument, and it is analogical because it goes beyond a single meaning (all participants give the same meaning to things) where communication is an understanding that has common elements but there may be differences cannot fit. Iconic-analogical hermeneutics, therefore, seeks rapprochement; dialogue, bridges based on intuition, prudence, and skills to identify middle points that bring together actors who are apparently culturally very different.5 In the case of Iturbide, it facilitates an understanding of social groups, of women and people who are photographed in their context and that by “approaching” it facilitates that recipients from distant contexts can feel those images closer and closer, they facilitate an “empathetic” encounter. To better understand the process of photographic communication, some aspects of Iturbide’s life and work will be discussed further on. Iturbide is an artist who not only photographs and transmits but also reflects on her own gaze as seen in her self-portraits. We propose to conceptualize these images as a kind of “photographic self” that we interpret as a game of symbols between how the photographer interprets reality and the way she internalizes it in her aesthetics (for example, in her self-portraits). The artist appropriates some of the motifs, landscapes, and attire from her images and incorporates them into herself; on the other hand, her images allow their recipients to reflect on the photographed people and somehow, indirectly, on themselves.6 Further on, we analyze two of Iturbide’s most emblematic images: Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), 1979, and Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora (Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert), 1979. Both images help us to consider her work in general and exemplify the construction of an “alternative modernity”: “alternative,” insofar as through “photographic communication,” the subject of enunciation invites us to rethink the categories of country, society, indigenous communities, youth, and gender. We ask ourselves if it is possible, within the operation of this “alternative modernity,” to imagine a “cultural balance” (analogical, to use Beuchot’s term) between the self and the other. We wonder if, through this perspective of aesthetic communication (subject of enunciator/enunciator/object/addressee) that we interpret in Iturbide’s work, it is also possible to understand her photography through the application of a certain “philosophy of interpersonality” (Buber, 2017) regarding sameness-otherness where, through imaginary relationships, a shared, communicative semantic space is built in which the communicative actors meet and live an experience of transformation of the notions of self and other. of the receiver or addressee, it is about identifying imaginary reactions, effects, or representations that Iturbide’s photography can generate.7 From the extensive work of the photographer, we choose three images: ¿Ojos para volar? (Eyes to Fly With?, 1991), Nuestra Señora, and Mujer Ángel, in which we propose to identify some features of possible imaginary relationships between the people photographed, the photographer, and eventually the reaction of the recipients. In Iturbide’s work, it is worth noting the leading role played by women in many of her emblematic images (among others, those discussed in this text) characterized by a visuality of the body, the strength of the subject’s gesture, the naturalness of her posture—for example, in the photograph Juchiteca con cerveza (Juchiteca with Beer), 1984—and of the face. As receivers of these images, we recognize an expression of originality and respect, an infrequent presentation that can be seen in other dominant discourses (media, books of text, etc.) of what it is to be an indigenous woman, to be young, to be transsexual, etc. Through Iturbide’s images, this not only helps us, as receivers, to get closer to the “other,” but in some way it can also question the meaning of “being Mexican,” or of 4

78  Tanius Karam “being indigenous” as an experience different from the one that circulates in discourses of the dominant institutions in Mexico. We assume the photographer’s attitude to be communicative and iconic-analogical: that is, a respectful approach to other cultural groups, a disposition toward the other with the desire to know them and spread their culture through their own gaze. As we have said, the cultural framework of this experience is an example of the operation of the cultural framework called “alternative modernity,” which aspires to overcome the vices and excesses of Western modernity (Eurocentric, rational, material, and patriarchal), and where the “other” (the different, the diverse, the distant, and the non-western) is seen in a different way, as in Iturbide’s images.8 In the photographs, this means seeing another type of indigenous person: as a young person; as a man or woman; different from the dominant discourses and those managed by political power. The concept of iconic-analogical hermeneutics that Beuchot has applied to many fields can help us describe this process of rapprochement between the enunciator and the receivers with respect to the objects of reference. Beuchot’s term derives its name from part of a semiotic concept: that of the icon in C. S. Peirce, which is a property of what the author calls “secondaryness,” or the resemblance between the sign and reality, and the analogy that is the comparative process between what is initially far away and my approach to an object initially seen as difficult to understand. Beuchot has applied this concept, for example, to the subject of human rights and to the possibility of establishing a “dia-philosophy,” that is, a philosophy in dialogue with the different concepts of fundamental human dignities. In this instance, the prefix “dia-” means to move, listen, and allow oneself to be transformed, recognizing the incompleteness of one’s own gaze. Iturbide’s photography depicts the Other in a different way. As Cuevas points out, the artist has been able to show us, “[…] una realidad latina, indígena, femenina, no heteronormativa, sin filtros ni ataduras a la autoridad hegemónica, y, por lo tanto, muy increíblemente potente” [A reality that is Latin, indigenous, feminine, non-heteronormative, unfiltered, and unfettered to hegemonic authority, and therefore very immensely powerful] (Cf. Cuevas, 2018, p. 213). We are facing a different view of cultural groups and in this way the photographer helps her recipients to build alternative representations of these existing groups in Mexico. Her work is a confrontation with hegemonic Mexican modernity (dominant, urban, patriarchal, macho) that historically has shown a difficulty in relating to Mexico’s ethnic groups and seeing them beyond simple folklore. Precisely those tensions that make the dominant Mexican modernity inoperative or questionable are perhaps what Bartra (1993, 1999) has called the “post-Mexican condition,” which in the case of Iturbide’s images means recognizing as part of Mexico, the cultural reality of all the women she photographs, including the Juchitecan transgendered people, and the Seri indigenous people in their territory.9 The images thus bring these cultural expressions closer to the area where these images are presented and, above all, seen and interpreted by different receptors. Although Iturbide reveals the influence of teachers such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who was her teacher, and Tina Modotti (whom she did not know personally), Iturbide does not place the ideological at the center of her work. Instead, she attends to the subject in her being with the world, where she appears integral, in balance, natural, and with a new visuality in which she rescues her dignity and makes it easier for the receiver to also identify and value her. Subjectivity and identity are linked under an aesthetic principle

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other  79 that gives us a particular way of looking at women, Juchitán, men and women from any city or neighborhood, young or old Seris in their communities, which Iturbide shows us in portraits where the subjects are empowered thanks, among other resources, to the use of angle, light and distance. Biographic Overview Iturbide was born into a wealthy family in Mexico City. She is the eldest daughter of thirteen siblings and has an education in accordance with a woman of her social class who was educated to marry and be a mother. The fondness for photography comes from her father, who liked it very much, and nothing could have been more distant from his intention than for his eldest daughter to embrace this activity, which was seen as a hobby rather than a life project. One of the features of her formation, typical of certain social classes in countries that were colonized, is that certain elites raise their children as if isolating them from local culture would benefit them, apart from being a sign of status; as if it were better to link them to Europe and the United States than to their own country (Medina, 2001, p. 5). In this way, the author’s own photography seems to confront her dominant legacy and, far from opposing Mexico with the world, forges a dialogue in her travels and in the archetypes of diverse gazes approached with respect, where the world belongs to oneself and to others, intimate and different at the same time. Iturbide initially followed the social prescription: in 1962, at the age of twenty, she married an architect and subsequently had three children (Manuel, Claudia, and Mauricio). Once married, she became interested in cinema. At this time, the arts had formed a dialogue with cinema, and the relationship between literature and cinema was understood beyond a shared identity as forms of entertainment. Rather, both were thought of as true means to transform the cultural, social, and political reality of a time as culturally agitated as the sixties. It was not surprising that Iturbide enrolled at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (University Center for Film Studies, or CUEC), part of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM), in 1969 to study screenwriting. This led her to meet the great photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, who would influence her to reconsider her film vocation and opt for photography, among other reasons because she always prefers to work alone, which is impossible in the cinema, and photography is more accessible to those who want to practice it instead of the complex art of film production (Cf. Colorado, 2012). Iturbide worked as an assistant to Álvarez Bravo from 1969 to 1971, but she was to learn from him something more than the art of light and image; to associate photography with a willingness toward the world through a passion for travel and exposing oneself as much as possible toward the encounter with the other and the exterior. From there, she would develop not only an aesthetic but also a social ethic that would permeate her work and that we refer to in this chapter as “photographic communication.” The very influences that the photographer has recognized allow us a means to delve into her aesthetic universe. The three most important, indicated by Iturbide herself, are the photographers Álvarez Bravo and Josef Koudelka, and the great Oaxacan plastic artist Francisco Toledo, who encouraged Iturbide to incorporate botanical gardens into her iconic and photographic discovery.10 In another circle of influence, it is worth noting the

80  Tanius Karam filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski, and even more so the artists of the Italian quattrocento such as Piero della Francesca. The traveling vocation associated with Iturbide’s photography begins in the 1970s: Cuba and Panama are among the first destinations. In Mexico in 1978, the Archivo Etnográfico Audiovisual (Ethnographic Audiovisual Archive), part of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenous Institute), commissioned her to document the country’s indigenous population. From that phase come the famous photographs of the Seri people (see endnote 7), and the practice of depicting young people of these communities to see how they relate to each other and to their environment, resulting in unusual images of those communities completely invisible in the mass media and the dominant Mexican national culture. A year later, another of the encounters that marked the artist is the one she had with Toledo, who invited her to Juchitán (located in southwest Mexican state of Oaxaca); this would be the base for the production of dozens of emblematic images that have attracted much attention from essayists such as Poniatowska, Keller (Cf. Iturbide, 1989, 2007). Iturbide’s exploration of botanical gardens, particularly the one in Oaxaca, would also be the source of many images broaching the theme of relationships between human beings and nature (Cf. Iturbide, 2004). Commentary on a Self-Portrait Another of the themes that we can see in Iturbide’s photographs are her various self-portraits generated throughout her career. We are not facing the bland selfie that proliferates on social networks and where it is impossible to find a sense of proportion. As Colorado Nates (2012) points out, Iturbide shows herself and validates a style of looking/looking at oneself. In her self-portraits we find a heuristic value reminiscent of painting masters (Velázquez, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, among others) who resorted to this genre not only to portray a subject (themselves) but also to investigate what it means to see and to paint. We can find echoes of this exploration in Iturbide’s self-portraits, serving at times as a means to express her own aesthetics and, additionally, to assume a type of self-representation and an exploration of herself. The self-portrait has a very long tradition that runs from Leonardo da Vinci to Frida Kahlo, passing through the most acute self-analysis in Las Meninas by Velázquez where the artist, as we have said, not only represents the subject (the royal family) but himself appears in the act of painting. From the artist’s centrality in the painting itself, to the context and production conditions themselves, the self-portrait is a genre that helps us investigate the reproduction regimes from which the artist conceives what she sees and perhaps how she expects others to see it. More than an intent to capture physical resemblance to the artist, the self-portrait was, at one time in history, a mechanism to consider the social, professional, and symbolic connotations of self-representations. Instead of the referential or realistic function (“this is the image of the artist”), it is more fitting to see this genre in its function of explaining the iconic-visual enunciation, as in the aforementioned Velázquez. From our relational and communicative perspectives, we propose to see Iturbide’s self-portraits as a representation that brings us closer to the photographer, and that also allows us to perceive the relationship between her and her other photographs, as well as her own vocation to build a meaning of closeness. In her self-portraits, we find a type of relationship through the appropriation of signs: resources of otherness incorporated into

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other  81 her own images. For example, we find symbols that come from the Seris that the photographer herself applies to one of her self-portraits, and in the dead birds she places over her eyes, reminding us of the particular tension of a still life that seems alive; a recurring theme in many of her images. The approach to her self-portraits comprised theatricality (gestures, postures, winks) and a very open attitude where she appropriates some symbols that she has seen in the young Seris, in dead animals, and in Juchitecan women or transgender people. The portrait and the self-portrait are in dialogue (a “self” and an “other”). Iturbide learns to interpret her gaze through the symbols she borrows from others.11 It should be noted that the issue of women’s self-perception cannot be touched on without bringing up the discussion of “the male gaze.”12 In Iturbide’s specific self-portraits we first find a constant throughout her history as an artist. We see self-portraits from 1974 at home with the camera. Then, she incorporates animals, ways of seeing and manipulating these animated beings (fish, snakes, and above all, birds) that she places on her face, caressing them and integrating them into her constitution as an icon in the image. Iturbide makes them part of her, like the thematic content of some of her photographs were part of her. To what extent do those self-portraits interpolate resources, objects, and backgrounds that we have seen in other images? Iturbide’s house, the desert, the birds: how important are they in her symbolic bestiary? Do these self-portraits mean seeing herself as she wishes to see others? Is the constant recurrence to animals a metaphor for our human selves? In ¿Ojos para volar? it seems that the birds tear out the pupils, but the birds are also synonymous with the beauty of the everyday; of the random; and the freedom that is usually attributed to these animals at the point between life and death. Opening and closing your eyes, your mouth, exploring with your eyes open or closed, showing everyday life or the strange beauty of inert beings (those dead animals interacting with living people). Iturbide does not wallow in her gaze as a consecrated artist; everything in her art is an exhibition of the basic features of photographic language: light, shadow, backlighting, movement, and geometry. If we previously appealed to the naive, narcissistic gaze of a tourist—absolutized in the practice of the selfie and where at times the “I” loses all significance—Iturbide, by contrast, knows how to appear immersed in her world of classic and analog photography; in self-portraits, she finds a means to interpret her gaze and work. For this reason, we advance in a particular perspective in communication to describe those movements that transition from the “self” to the “other.” This basis for our perspective of imagined relationships in photographic communication considers the play of self and gaze: of looking and looking at oneself; of being oneself; and momentarily, of being another an/other who has been photographed. Traversing an Image Iturbide’s most studied photographs include her collections of Juchitecan women (Juchitán de las mujeres, 1979–1986), where the tradition of social realism is emulated. Of these, perhaps the most suggestive image is Nuestra Señora, which not only has strong iconographic value but also questions a reality rarely talked about in large urban centers of the country, or—when it is talked about—is generally approached superficially and without the semiotic density to which Iturbide’s photographs invite us.

82  Tanius Karam In an interview with Bradu (2006), the artist recounts the circumstances surrounding the creation of the shot: Es una foto que tomé casualmente en el mercado: llegó esta señora con las iguanas en la cabeza y le dije: “espérame, déjame sacar una foto”. Ella había descargado las iguanas en el suelo y se las volvió́ a colocar en la cabeza. Una sola fotografía de las doce que le saqué, quedó bien, porque era la única donde las iguanas alzaron la cabeza como si estuviesen posando. ¿Pura suerte? Digamos, una parte de suerte y otra gran parte de intuición para cifrar en una sola imagen el imaginario zapoteca, la fuerza de sus mujeres valientes y altivas, la fusión del mundo humano con el animal, en pocas palabras, la monstruosa belleza de un arquetipo tan arraigado en el subconsciente que Graciela Iturbide pudo representarlo sin falsedad ni folclorismo. La publicación de la página de los contactos de estas doce tomas atestigua los fracasos que refrendan el éxito único e irrepetible del instante preciso, el “ojo de lince y guante de seda” como lo califica Henri Cartier-Bresson. Además, doce tomas, frente a los miles de negativos disparados por algunos paparazzi en un solo día, es un número deleznable para cautivar la belleza y el misterio … [I took this photo by chance in the market: this woman showed up with iguanas on her head and I told her, “Hold on, let me take a photo.” She had taken the iguanas off and put them on the floor, and she placed them back on her head. Just one of the twelve photos I took of her came out well, because it was the only one where the iguanas lifted their heads as if they were posing. Sheer luck? I’d say it’s part luck and in large part intuition to capture in a single image the Zapotec imaginary, the power of its brave and noble women, the fusion of the human world with the animal: in short, the monstruous beauty of an archetype so deeply entrenched in the subconscious that Graciela Iturbide managed to depict it without farse or folklore. The publication of the negatives of these twelve are testaments to the failures that enable the singular and inimitable triumph of that precise instant, the “lynx eye and the silk glove,” as Henri Cartier-Bresson calls it. Moreover, twelve shots, compared to the thousands of negatives taken by some paparazzi in a single day, is a miniscule number to capture the beauty and mystery …]13 In another interview, Iturbide explained this image in terms of contact with the person.14 In her walk through Juchitán, within that somewhat random method that the artist follows, she asked the woman to put those iguanas on her head. Iturbide herself acknowledges that this photograph became “iconic”: a whole new regime to assume semantic entities that give the image great interpretive potential due to the position of the woman in the image, her features, the human–nature relationship, and the part of her dress visible within the frame. In fact, apparently in Juchitán they put the photograph at the entrance to the city and it is no coincidence that many people also use these iguanas as a symbol of roots, authenticity, or even with various social struggles such as gender claims. Some creators have reinterpreted this image, playing with intertextual variants in which they include icons such as actress Marilyn Monroe. Iturbide has explained that she never really thought that this photograph was going to become an “icon” (or more properly, a symbol) and recognizes how often unexpected things happen; she never believed that her image could become a tattoo or any other redefinition which the image has since undergone.

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other  83 At one level, we see the image of a woman with iguanas on her head: we do not know if the arrangement is some kind of outfit, or a pose with these reptiles. With this second option comes the possibility of being both terrestrial and marine within those dualities that the photographer likes so much (life-death, human being-animal, portrait-selfportrait, self-other, icon-symbol). The camera is located below the main angle, and the low angle of the shot lends the woman a strong presence, which gives an impression of a certain superiority. The unlikely image of the—outfit? hat? arrangement?—is endlessly attention-grabbing; and the monumental spectacle of posing with iguanas, the number of animals lost a bit due to their arrangement above the woman’s head, does not lose its visual appeal. This photograph can also be interpreted as a symbol of that “other” Juchitec world, so alien to the dominant and patriarchal urban center of the rest of Mexico, where these things seem impossible; with its matriarchy and the special power of its women of which this señora is undoubtedly a clear sign. The name of the image, that is Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, is pertinent to underline the image’s almost religious quality with that strength and security, where the possessive nuestra reflects an intense relationship reinforced by the slight low angle. The iguana, an arboreal lizard that connotes a prehistoric animality, is closely linked to the earth to which it is at times physically attached. Its green color allows it to be confused with vegetation and reflects the sense of the earth. Thus, the iguanas can appear to be part of the same body as the señora, making her a double human and animal deity, in the style of any old mythology as if she were a lycanthrope or a centaur. This powerful chimeric quality far exceeds the denotative and referential dimension (the fact that any woman decides to sport a hat made of iguanas), giving the image a strong symbolic content. What does the principle of credibility of the icon do for the image? The gesture of the woman, the facial features, the idea of superiority that does not come from the angle of the photograph? This image synthesizes much of the unique universe of Iturbide’s photography, referencing not only the topographic worldview of her travels but also hers: showing someone who, in a particular way, affirms the dignity of those photographed. That concept of the old post-structural perspective of Roland Barthes (1989) seems pertinent to bring it back: the punctum, that which breaks the gaze, the “puncture” that attracts the gaze, sometimes without our realizing it, launching the spectator on a path through the image. While the decisive “puncture” of these lizards (apparently five) on a person’s head is recognizable, there is also an idea of presence and stability; in the subject’s face, the incredible is made credible; the magical, real; and what in another shot could be repugnant is made aesthetic. Julia Brown also recovers the concepts of Barthes to apply them to Nuestra Señora, noting that “[…] las obras fotográficas de Graciela Iturbide se caracterizan por tener un punctum tan extraordinario que acaba desafiando—desestabilizando visualmente—el studium y, junto a él, los códigos sociales que informan las miradas de los espectadores” [Graciela Iturbide’s photographic works are characterized by the presence of a punctum so extraordinary that it ultimately challenges—and visually destabilizes—the studium and, with it, the social codes that inform the spectator’s “gaze”] (2020, 32). Brown adds that Iturbide manages to destroy the look full of expectations and once again teaches us viewers to look without intrusion or romanticism, but with admiration and curiosity. Now, we have seen how we can recognize a permanent game between the regime of representation of the “portrait” and the “snapshot” (Cf. Reséndiz, 1998); in the case of

84  Tanius Karam the first, it is when the subject being photographed is asked to settle into a pose and there is a certain amount of control over the conditions of the shot; unlike the snapshot—more journalistic, if you will, where the opportunity makes the photographer take the image without preparation and with a certain trace of something unexpected. If in the portrait, the photographer is positioned as a central actor in the process, in the snapshot we see time as a central component, a case for the unexpected as a condition for astonishment. If Nuestra Señora is perhaps the most anthological case of a portrait; Mujer Ángel may be instantaneous. Photography as Self-Exploration Photography for Iturbide has been the means to travel and interact with the cultural world; it has been the basis that has led her to explore the land and give us delicate traces, faces, and particular spaces, both from her hometown (Mexico City) and from Cuba, the former East Germany, Madagascar, Hungary, Paris and the United States, and in her own way also from India, which has generated a great fascination for her due to its terrible and compelling contrasts. But beyond these places, what gives meaning are the people; thus, between the foreseen and the casual, Iturbide’s lens does not overlook opportunity. One of the most emblematic cases—to the degree of a double condition of portrait and snapshot—is Mujer Ángel. It is a Seri woman with a recorder in her hand and that the photographer did not remember taking the photo when, when reviewing her work, “it suddenly appeared.” We can imagine the photographer walking and encountering that image, or simply having pulled the shutter when seeing that shadow walk through her field of vision and with that immense landscape, as if it were another planet. The result is a spectral beauty interpreted as a cultural interregnum of modernity, technology, the present, and the distant; the pre-modern, and isolation. The immense skirt is a powerful icon that dialogues with the flowing hair and contributes to the ghostly connotation emanating from the image. The symmetrical movement of her arms gives an internal dynamism to an image that on another level could seem like a petrified symbol: there is action between something that she seems to pull with her left arm and that recorder of the already mentioned Barthesian punctum that triggers dozens of questions. In this image, nothing seems excessive or lacking, its symmetry and balance do not cease to seduce us, as if we ourselves were those incidental photographers surprised by this fascinating and implausible landscape. This image makes us see how the phenomenon of photographic communication is clearly not reduced to capturing the image. The act of taking a photo is a decisive moment, made of many internal moments, decisions the photographer makes that may or may not be conscious. Iturbide can take a simple photo but then you—the spectator—rediscover it, look at it, and adore it for what it is. Many have been seduced by this image including Carlos Monsiváis (1996), who dedicated an extensive commentary to Mujer Ángel in his participation in the Winter Colloquium hosted by the UNAM in February 1992. The author of Días de guardar (Days to Remember) uses the snapshot Mujer Ángel as a counterpoint to critically confront the dominant images of modernity in the period of former President Salinas. The objective of his speech is to criticize the conventional idea of modernity in neo-Priism that emerges from what at that time was the signing of the now extinct NAFTA (today T-MEC). In his Winter Colloquium lecture, Monsiváis lists the problems of “Mexican culture”

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other  85 in its institutional and political dimensions. In the end, he summarizes the tensions of the modernizing process that seems to emerge from this image in terms of his idea of what it is to understand modernity that cannot be seen in a linear, progressive, and irreversible way, but as a process with ups, downs, and, folds; of entrances and exits, just as Latin American cultural scholars liked to understand the meanings of modernity in Latin America: […] la indígena seri, de espaldas, va subiendo la sierra en la mano lleva el aparato que neutralizará o vencerá a la soledad: el radio gigantesco. Los defensores de la identidad indígena la censurarán por su predilección, pero ellos no están allí en la sierra, para aliviarle la inmensa monotonía. Por razones similares a las de la mujer tarahumara, en las etnias las jóvenes abandonan los trajes típicos, y los jóvenes adoptan indumentarias punto o de chavos alivianados. Las comunidades prosiguen, afectadas o beneficiadas (según se juzgue) por la necesidad de acercarse a los núcleos de la modernidad, y todo sigue igual salvo que es muy distinto. (1992, 162–163) … the indigenous Seri woman, her back to the camera, makes her way up the mountain. In her hand, she carries the contraption that will neutralize or defeat loneliness: a gigantic radio. Defenders of indigenous identity will criticize her for her predilection, but they aren’t there on the mountain to lessen the profound boredom. For similar reasons to those of the Tarahumara woman, young women in these ethnic groups abandon their traditional clothes, and young men adopt a modern or carefree look. The communities soldier on, impacted or bettered (depending on one’s perspective) by the need to connect with nuclei of modernity, and everything stays the same except it’s quite different. The final quote of the text summarizes what it somehow interprets: “En la era de la importancia, de las privatizaciones a ultranza, del mundo unipolar, una predicción es posible: en su gran mayoría, ante el impulso de la americanización, los mexicanos, cada uno a su manera, harán caso de lo que Sedar Senghor dice: asimilar sin asimilarse.” [“In the age of importance, of privatization to the extreme, of a unipolar world, a prediction is possible: a vast majority of Mexicans, facing pressure to Americanize, will take to heart in their own way what Sedar Senghor calls assimilation without assimilating.”] Although the new political class wishes to ratify this idea of a modernity, it cannot be imposed. In this way, there will always be internal resistance processes unforeseen and impossible to manipulate through power or the neoliberal and globalizing paradigm. This image precisely reflects the tensions of a traditional concept of modernity amid technological changes, the paradoxes of the neoliberal period (apparently characterized by more development and trade with the United States, but less inequality and social welfare for most of the population.) The photographer meets the person who appears in the middle of a desert landscape with a recorder in hand, a contrast between the desolate landscape and the artifact; the attire of someone who appears and lives in the enunciative moment of photographic production. Yet the scene could be dated from any other time precisely because of the ghostly condition of the long mane, seemingly extended down

86  Tanius Karam the woman’s arms and to the recorder, and because of the same wild path that she walks that suggests insecurity on the road; a place of difficult access; remote. How, then, to apply the concept of “alternative modernity?” Precisely by examining those boundaries of the unexpected of this image, in the condensing power of technology as an omniscient reality, and in the apparently improbable of an image that seems to have no time and where past and present meet and coexist. The “alternative” is to see how technology adapts and can coexist in a way that is perhaps difficult for the modern, urban, mestizo inhabitant to imagine. Beuchot’s “analogue” are the signs that, even as an image seems improbable, it does not feel it completely foreign: on the contrary, the image attracts us and, like many other images by Iturbide, invites us to see it over and over again. In doing so, we come to understand that the image conveys something very different from any urban reality, but that this too, is Mexico—as we know of its vast desert in Sonora—and those in their fifties likely used a similar recorder. Revisiting In the text we understand Iturbide’s photographic exercise as an example of an alternative understanding of “Mexican modernity;” Iturbide’s art invites those of us who are its recipients to approach the daily life of the people (female, indigenous, rural) photographed through new eyes. We have tried to adapt an idea of photographic communication as a type of aesthetic relationship between the people photographed and the photographer and the effect that she can generate on her recipients (for example, those of us who have studied her work). The photographic “I” (the self) of the Mexican woman—middle-class, mixed-race, heterosexual, urban, and associated with a particular idea of her country—is one facet of that alternative modernity: an intimate, social, cultural, and aesthetic exploration of that “post-Mexican condition” based on a different understanding of the otherness that inhabits this country, and that in addition can motivate the recipient to reflect on herself. Photography is expression, information system, and sign system, but it can be communication in the artistic intention, in the image as a meeting place for culture and redefinitions, and for direct and indirect effects. We have conceptualized Iturbide as a respectful enunciator who reveals an honest dialogue, the result of which is perceived as authentic, and where a community of recipients grant her that status and attribute values to her work such as beauty, autonomy, originality, and honesty. A part of the artistic analysis of Iturbide’s work has highlighted the handling of the basic components of the image: light, shape, shadow, line, contrast that play a fundamental role in the presentation of iconic statements. Her images are not isolated: they work within their own narrative, which helps us confront the representations of otherness typical of the dominant modernity with a rigid idea of what it means to be a woman-man, nature-society. In the links to her exhibitions, the reader will be able to see a dozen more images by the author in which they will recognize the play of light, the immense chromatic range of black and white, the luminosity, the texture, and the figures returned to a particular ontic status. The images feature characters (especially women), animals (especially birds), and that duality in the idea of nature (botanical gardens), a hybrid of human intervention and natural beauty, the dead as paradoxically alive as among other images in the series “La Muerte” that we can see on the artist’s webpage.15 All these formal elements (light, texture, shape, line, point, etc.) are part of materiality in photographic communication: of

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other  87 “primaryness” (according to Peirce’s semiotics), which in all case “prepares” and primes the receiver, but it is also a constitutive element of the photographic message that creates an internal atmosphere and facilitates the attribution of certain meanings. While perhaps the urban spectator could perceive these as distant, these images analogically brings her or him closer to different realities, helping to resignify them, to overcome exoticism, and the distant “tourist gaze.” We are talking about Mujer Ángel, which we remotely associate with another of Iturbide’s passions: her travels, and where any seemingly inconsequential object (light poles, flying birds, a discarded bicycle) can acquire a new iconic status. In Iturbide’s art, the photographic image is not associated with the metaphor of the mirror, but with that of dreams, desires, and spectrality. Thus, we find a particular representation of the world that reminds us of the limitation of the physical-objective world and the necessary role of the symbol to guarantee an authentic encounter with ourselves and the other, and thus achieve a more complete and rich vision of the world and the people than those who give us our eyes.

Notes 1 Conceptualized by the French linguist Michel Pecheux (1969), imaginary relationships refer to the imaginary formations that the sender and the receiver make of themselves, their interlocutor, and the object of their speech. For Pecheux, the actors are not just people but places within the social structure (director, worker, artist, etc.) that are represented in the discursive processes, but are transformed into imaginary formations. Instead of message, Pecheux uses the category of discursive, since it is not only the transmission of information, but also an effect of meaning between the subjects. Haidar and Rodríguez (1996) as well as Matamoros (2000) expand on this concept by formulating questions that can help identify said training (who am I to talk like that?; who is he for me to talk to him?; like this?; who am I for him to talk to me like that?). Thanks to the image that the subjects of the discourse have, they can anticipate strategies. The imaginary formation depends on previous learning that the subjects assume as “taking a position.” Applied to artistic communication, we can infer the presence of the actors (artist, spectator) as places within the social structure. Although in this work we do not emphasize the material dimension much, we want to do so of the symbolic implication in this description, applied here to our idea of photographic ​​ enunciation. 2 For now, we will not address the fact that each medium offers a unique experience, or that there is a sensorial and perceptive distance between seeing an imagen in person in an exhibit versus reproduced digitally. With a mode of access differing from the message, the attribution of meaning often shifts. 3 Mediation is a concept in communication studies that certainly has a long tradition (see Martin Serrano M [1977] and Martin Barbero [1987]. As Abril [1997, p. 109] points out, mediating means relating different orders of meaning or experience, for example, the immediate local experience (the reality of some aspects of those groups or people photographed by Iturbide) and the representation of the social totality (an idea of youth, of women, etc.). between aspect of culture, technology and social change, and the representations that individuals make. There is a macro system and a cognitive one that media accounts, or Iturbide's photographs allow a type of relationship between the cultural context and social, and the representations that people make. 4 We continue to rely on an idea of interpretation that with Mauricio Beuchot (1998) we call iconic-analogical. In an interview by Karam (2002) with the Mexican philosopher, the author explains and defines his concepts and what we mean. 5 It is important to remember that “communication” comes from the Latin communis which means “to share.” In principle, the characteristic of communication is being able to share a series of elements that facilitate either the coordination of actions in social life, or the shared evocation of some ideas, where not everything has to be symmetrical, agreed upon, equidistant, and they can fit differences, asymmetries without losing the condition of communication.

88  Tanius Karam 6 The concept of oneself (self) is one of the most important in George Herbert Mead’s social pragmatism or symbolic interactionism (Mind, Self and Society, 1934), and who assumes that the self has an eminently social dimension that comes from interaction, language, and its symbolic value. That self internalizes aspects of reality from interactions where the person learns who and what is expected of them and others, what social life is, and how it works. The self as such does not arise at birth but is built and rebuilt through experience and social activity. We adapt this notion to the idea that the lessons Iturbide has learned and re-learned are reflected through her photography. 7 At all times it must be kept in mind that these receivers can be either imaginary (people imagined by Iturbide who are able to decode everything that Iturbide wants to say) or empirical (those who actually see the images on a blog or in a gallery and when seeing them attribute meanings to them and relate them in some way to their own reality in the place of reception). 8 It is worth noting the careful warning of Beuchot (1998) regarding not absolutizing the “other,” as the dominant modernity did with the “I” of reason, hence the importance of a communicative balance, where the receiver does not see indigenous people, women, transgender people, etc., as distant, and to whom we give an “alternative” value. 9 The term comes from Roger Bartra’s nineties essay. It is an attempt to conceptualize the cultural challenges in the process of dismantling the revolutionary national state that the Partido Revolucionario Institucional represented. It is also about changes in different orders that are grouped in some texts of the well-known essayist as “post-Mexican condition” and that include a greater participation of civil society, weakening of the presidential institution, and increase in violence in the country, among other phenomena. 10 Among her multiple collections the botanical gardens are an important series. Google Images offers dozens of examples. Notably, they appeared in MOMA’s exhibition in New York about botanical gardens. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/202045 11 For example, Autorretrato como Seri, Desierto de Sonora (1979), accessible at https://www. moma.org/collection/works/202039 12 Cf. John Berger, Modos de ver, 2000. 13 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Monsiváis are by Julia R. Brown. 14 Interview from 2017 and re-released by “Canal 22,” CONACULTA, México, December 26, 2019. 15 One may view the images at http://www.gracielaiturbide.org/category/muerte/, along like El viaje (Tlaxcala, 1995) in which we see chickens hanging from a bicycle leaning against a wall.

Works Cited Abril, Gonzalo. Teoría General de la Información. Datos, relatos y ritos. Madrid, Cátedra (Col. Signo e imagen/Manuales N° 44), 1997. Barthes, Roland. La cámara lúcida. Notas sobre fotografía, 8th ed. Barcelona: Paidós Comunicación, 1989. Bartra, Roger. Oficio mexicano. Mexico: Grijalbo, 1993. ———. La sangre y la tinta. Ensayos sobre la condición postmexicana. Mexico: OCÉANO, 1999. Berger, John. Modos de ver. Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 2000. Beuchot, Mauricio. “Interpretación, analogía e iconicidad” in Beuchot, Mauricio (coord.) La voz del texto. Polisemia en interpretación. Memoria. Primera Jornada de Hermenéutica, IIF-UNAM, 1998, pp. 25–37. Brown, Julia. “Aún maravillada: La fotografía de Graciela Iturbide con Carlos Monsiváis,” in Inundación Castálida, 5, 15, 2020, pp. 29–33. Available at http://www.revistaselclaustro.mx/ index.php/inundacion_castalida/article/view/540/987 Bradu, Fabienne. “Entrevista con Graciela Iturbide” in Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to fly with/Ojos para volar. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Buber, Martín. Yo-tú, translated by Carlos Díaz. Barcelona: Herder, 2017 [1st ed. 1923]. Colorado Nates, Óscar. Graciela Iturbide: Señora de los símbolos, 2012. Accessed November 11, 2019. https://oscarenfotos.com/2012/04/07/graciela-iturbide-senora-de-los-simbolos/

Gaze as Mirror/Encountering the Other  89 Cuevas, Fernando. Artista invitada, Graciela Iturbide. Acontecimiento hecho imagen, en Nómadas No. 48, Abril, Bogotá, Universidad Central, 2018, pp. 215–227. Artículo en línea, 20 de diciembre de 2019, disponible en http://docplayer.es/95915828-Artista-invitada-gracielaiturbide-el-acontecimiento-hecho-imagen-nuestra-senora-de-las-iguanas-serie-juchitan-mexico1979-plata-sobre-gelatina.html Eco, Umberto Lector in fábula. La cooperación interpretativa en el texto narrativo. 3rd ed. Barcelona: Lumen, 1993. Haidar, Julieta and Lidia Rodríguez Alfaro, “Funcionamientos del poder y de la ideología en las prácticas discursivas,” in Dimensión Antropológica, vol. 7, May–August 1996, pp. 73–111. https://www.dimensionantropologica.inah.gob.mx/wp-content/uploads/DA7_cita04.pdf Iturbide, Graciela. Juchitán de las Mujeres. Text by Elena Poniatowska. Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1989. ———. Graciela Iturbide: La forma y la memoria. Text by Carlos Monsiváis. Monterrey: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, MARCO, 1996. ———. Naturata. Text by Fabio Morábito. Mexico City/Paris: Galería López Quiroga and Toluca Editions, 2004 ———. Graciela Iturbide: Eyes to fly with/Ojos para volar. Texts by Fabienne Bradu and Alejandro Castellanos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. ———. Juchitán. Essay by Judith Keller. Los Angeles: The Paul Getty Museum, 2007. Karam, Tanius “Entrevista a Mauricio Beuchot sobre hermenéutica analógica y la fundamentación filosófica de los derechos humanos” in Aná-Mnesis. Revista de Teología. Dominicos, México. Año XII, Num 1, January–June 2002, pp. 173–188. Martín Barbero, Jesús. “Comunicación popular y modelos transnacionales” in Seminario. Movimiento popular y modelos transnacionales. Alajuela (España): CSUCA, 1984. ———. De los medios a las mediaciones. Mexico: Gustavo Gilli, 1987. Martín Serrano, Manuel. La mediación social. Madrid: AKAL, 1977. Matamoros, Nora María. “Hermenéutica Analógica. Comunicación y empatía” in Analogía Filosófica Número Especial 7, Mexico, 2000. Medina, Cuauhtémoc and Graciela Iturbide. Graciela Iturbide. Paris: Phaidon, 2001. Monsiváis, Carlos. “México. Cultura: tradición y modernidad” in VV.AA. Coloquio de Invierno, III México y los cambios de nuestro tiempo. México: FCE-CONACULTA-UNAM, 1992, pp. 139–163. ———. “Untitled” in Graciela Iturbide: La forma y la memoria. Monterrey: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, MARCO, 1996. Pecheux, Michel. Hacia el análisis automático del discurso. Madrid: Gredos, 1969. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 5: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. Charles Hartshorne, ed. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974. Reséndiz, Rafael. “Hacia una lectura semiótica y la poética de la fotografía” in Revista Mexicana de Comunicación No. 51. Mexico: Fundación Manuel Buendía, 1998, pp. 32–35.

6

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity Lourdes Grobet’s Family Portraits David William Foster

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Within the putative heterosexual enactment of Mexican wrestling—despite the unmanly display of the body and garish ostentation of costume, not to mention the intricacies of near-naked body-to-body engagement—the perception of wrestling as a family affair is particularly remarkable. Playing off of the double helix of the family in Mexico as the nexus of heterosexual hegemony and as a protecting institution of social survival (“la familia lo es todo”), the importance of family in lucha libre is not so much a quality of spectatorship as it is of the identity politics of the wrestlers themselves: one must be part of a family, both in a conventional sense and in a tribal sense as defined by the world of wrestling as a privileged institution of individuals with an affinity of interests and collectively enforced sociocultural values. In her extraordinary collection, Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits (2009), Lourdes Grobet captures this heightened significance of family while also engaging viewers with a series of images—bold, nuanced, and intimate—that invite consideration of what it means to be a family in Mexico, generally, and a male luchador in a lucha libre family, more specifically. Grobet’s upbringing, education, and evolution as a photographer within the tumultuous social and aesthetic context of Mexico following the Massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968 shaped her decades-long interest in documenting the many facets of Mexican lucha libre. Born in 1940 to a Swiss father and a Mexican mother, she grew up in gymnasiums (see Forbes) and was nurtured in a family that, in her words, were “sports fanatics and body worshipers” (see Sandomir). With respect to wrestling, she recalls her father barring her from attending matches with her family as they were deemed inappropriate for young girls but relished watching them once they became televised by Canal 2 beginning in the early 1950s (see Forbes). Her father was an Olympic cyclist and she herself trained as a dancer and gymnast as a young age but after falling ill for several months with hepatitis took up painting (see Sandomir). Grobet would go on to study Visual Arts at the Universidad Iberoamericana under the tutelage of Gilberto Aceves Navarro, the German Mexican sculptor and precursor of minimalism, Mathias Goeritz, and the Hungarian Mexican surrealist photographer, Kati Horna, all of whom, along with El Santo (“The Saint”)—the most iconic of Mexican wrestlers—she would later consider to be her greatest teachers. As Shifra M. Goldman has stated, it was during her stay in Paris in 1968, specifically after seeing an exhibit of objects and environment at the Musée D’Art Moderne, that she decided to pursue photography instead of painting. Once back in Mexico, Grobet pursued work in conceptual/

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This chapter was edited and revised posthumously by Tamara R. Williams.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-9

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity 91 environmental art with increased political intentions. In 1973 and 1974, she participated in the Grupo Nuevisión in a series of collectively created environments focused on the topic of metamorphosis with a Mexican surrealist inflected contribution. Simultaneously, and often in collaboration with other artists, Goldman documents that she began producing installations that sought to confront viewing audiences with multi-media experiences intended to engage with salient issues of the day. These included the brutal repression during and following the massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968 and later, in the 1970s, the torture and disappearances associated with the military regimes throughout Latin America. By way of example, she became a member of the group Proceso Pentágono (Pentagon Process), a leftist-leaning collective of Mexican artists that was active between 1976 and 1985, which placed an emphasis on experimentation and social critique (see MUAC). This group, in turn affiliated with the Frente Mexicano de Grupos de Trabajadores de la Cultura (Mexican Front of Cultural Workers Groups), which redefined the artist as a “cultural worker” committed to producing art in service to the working class (see Goldman 8–9). Below, Grobet’s mention of the year 1977 is significant as it marks an important turning point for photography in Mexico. Organized by the Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer and the Argentine-Mexican art critic, Raquel Tibol, the First Latin American Colloquium on Photography sought to elevate photography to the level of other visual arts while initiating “a broad renewal of the historical imagination of Mexicans” (Debroise 7); an imagination informed by exploration and vigorous debate related to form and function as it related to the ongoing sociopolitical realities of Mexico, Central and South America. A second colloquium on photography would be held a year later in which Grobet’s summarizes her position within the debate: As a language, photography is employed to inform, to deceive, to make propaganda, to amuse, and even to make art. It’s importance rests in the manner in which it is used, and its application … My intention since returning to Mexico (1977) has been to utilize photography in a social sense and make my work a service. (Goldman 9) That Grobet opts to return to the wrestling ring from which she had been barred as a child is consistent with both her aesthetic and social commitments. She had always been drawn to its iconography (see Forbes) but was equally interested in it as a social phenomenon. As a national pastime wildly popular among the working class that had been sensationalized in the media, she believed it deserved more thoughtful attention as a manifestation of Mexico profundo1 (deep Mexico), one that had antecedents in the Mexican indigenous warrior culture as much as it did the Greco-Roman sport. It was beginning in the 1980s that she began to photograph these many facets—the wrestlers, their families and fans, the matches, the public. Moreover, as she returned to the ring week after week, she built sufficient trust among her primary subjects, the luchadores and luchadoras (male and female wrestlers) that, eventually, she was able to photograph them away from the performative spectacle of the ring capturing images of them in their day jobs and in their homes and engaged in domestic activities or in family portraits surrounded by loved ones (see Forbes). Subsequently, the latter would be compiled in Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits. Overall, Grobet’s work is characterized by its singular dedication to legitimating lucha libre as a paradigmatic cultural institution in Mexico (something intellectuals like Carlos Monsiváis have also undertaken to underscore), and it is unquestionable that her success

92  David William Foster in this regard resides with her ability to endow the institution with an archive of artistic photographic documentalism. This may sound like an oxymoron, but it is meant to capture that, by contrast with a criterion of raw a documentalist, much in evidence in Mexican photography, Grobet foregrounds the artistic potential of her subject matter, which includes the presence of high-density color and the figure of corporeal geometry. More importantly, and for the purposes of this essay, her lens draws attention to the tension between the ostentatiousness or flamboyance of the wrestler and the heteronormative conventions defining masculinity, including conventions and expectations related to the all-important concept of “family.” As a unique kind of performance, Mexican wrestling thrives on the joy of the spectacle, a spectacle that lies not with the fair sport of the physical engagement, but with the dramatic ingenuity of the performers in executing fully the pretense of having engaged in a fair, competitive sport. Wrestling, then, under such circumstances, is a category of skilled theatrics and not the metaphor of the high pathos of the down-and-dirty but valiant struggle for survival against daunting odds that it is in the Greco-Roman tradition.2 Its status as spectacle notwithstanding, wrestling in Mexican society is subject to all the mythification associated with any sport, with an infrastructure based on heroes, personalities, rituals, fandom, rankings, prize cups, and heroic stature. A defining feature of the spectacle of lucha libre, and one that serves to construct the mythic status of its heroes, is the flamboyant performance of hypermasculinity. While disdained as Mexican machismo, it is inherent to a society in which, as Octavio Paz argued in his Labyrinth of Solitude, the sense of performance and the imperative to perform the mask are an integral part of social and, therefore, physical survival. Lucha libre becomes, then, a fascinating conjugation of elements perceived to be quintessential to Mexican life. The elements include the very visible enactment of masculine prowess, defined in terms of the imperative to be “feo, fuerte y formal” (ugly, strong, and formal), and the participation in an organized public spectacle that enacts sanctioned masculinity and derides apparent physical and emotional weakness, including the feigning, often vociferously articulated, of the pain and humiliation of loss. Another dimension of the lucha libre spectacle are the rituals associated with it such as the unmasking and the shoring of one’s hair as metaphorized castration as a consequence of inadequate masculinity3 and the suspension of restrictions on the display of the masculine body and the ostentatious display of its adornment. In other words, the adorned physique of the luchador is even more eloquent, not only for what it represents, which is a paradigm of spectacularly enacted {MANHOOD}, but also for what it takes exception to, which is the so(m)ber discretion of corporeal enactment of the Mexican male body in conventional daily life outside the wrestling ring/stage. It is, therefore, curiously, ironically, that the marked performance within the ring is designed to speak so eloquently for the prevailing societal standards of masculinity outside the ring. Grobet’s family portraits of male luchadores capture a variant of this enacted manhood, albeit a more subdued, intimate, and personalized one, that takes place outside the ring in the private space of the home. As portraits, moreover, they engage the viewer in an interplay of gazing—of looking and being looked at—that, in turn, activates a discreet assessment of luchadores inscribed in a practice of hegemonic masculinity—in this case, the family—as well as their variegated and complex performance of, and resistance to, that masculinity. This performance includes welcoming the gaze of women and, indeed, the gaze of other men, characteristically in the conviction that the former appreciates their manifest performance of masculinity, while the latter confirms it— perhaps enviously. Moreover, the “peek from the closet” (the way gay men allegedly

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity 93 scrutinize other men as desiring/desirable erotic subjects) is not always an unwelcome occurrence on the part of men presumably secure in their performance of heterosexual masculinity.4 Yet, the gaze upon the male body is certainly problematic in Mexican society, with the imperative of furtiveness pretending to prevail against the possibility of the angry and defiant challenge from the scrutinized, “¿Qué me ves?” (literally, “What do you see in me?” and by implication, “What are you looking at?”). Queer flamboyance—or sartorial and kinetic overstatement seeming to resonate with queerness—would, on the other hand, constitute a provocative invitation to gaze and to scrutinize. To be sure, one would expect the flamboyant subject to be disappointed at being ignored, even if being recognized in a negative fashion would, in a complex psychological process, serve to reinforce the sense of superiority of flamboyant subject (while also obliquely affirming the hegemonic superiority of the one expressing disapproval). Women may engage in the disapproving contemplation of the flamboyant subject, but as much from a position within hegemonic conformity as from a stance that implicitly recognizes (perhaps mistakenly) the nonhegemonic male to be proportionately nonthreatening physically. Queer men do not usually affirm their masculinity in public by proffering catcalls to women. That is, unless they are performing the closet, which brings us to the matter of the flamboyant Mexican wrestlers in Grobet’s text. At first glance, the cover image of The Family Portraits (see Figure 6.1) appears to be a typical family assemblage, and yet immediately one is presented with the issue of

Figure 6.1 Lourdes Grobet. Cover Image of Grobet, Lourdes and Rafael Tonatiuh. Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits. RM, 2009. Source: Courtesy of Lourdes Grobet, SC.

94  David William Foster paradigmatic family roles. While the image has no explanatory note, two of the same figures—the central male figure and the young woman to his left—reappear in a subsequent image, identified as “Mr X e hija/and daughter” (pp. 14–15). Because of the buffed and always oiled presentation of the masculine torso and the covering of lower extremities in costume that might display signs of age in feet and legs, along with the perennial, extravagant mask that is the primary identifying marker of the Mexican wrestler, it is difficult to estimate the age of Mr. X such that the woman on his left might reasonably be his daughter and the woman on his right might reasonably be either his wife or his mother (her exposed face and legs allow us to put her age close to 60). From a queer perspective, families are, to be sure, the ones we make and not necessarily the ones that are either registered in the civil record or sanctioned by heteronormative society and images of wrestlers and their consorts are often delightfully eccentric. This would not be of any moment, were it not for the insistence on “the family portrait,” which evokes a conventional bourgeois paradigm: the lone singular noun suggests a singular semantic referent rather than, say, might be the reference to plural “families” signaling both multiple instances of a singular model as well as multiple instantiations of a variable concept of family. To be sure, the setting for this portrait is echt Mexican mid- to lower middle class: the centrality of the family sofa, the backdrop of the fussy decorative drapes, the imposing presence of the set of plastic sunflowers, the glimpse of other matched furniture, the imperfectly laid decorative floorcovering, whose clash in pattern and color with furniture and drapes is a very specific and sought-after aesthetic conjugation: matching colors and design would be considered dull and unimaginative, and the purposeful jarring conjugation is consonant with the ostentatious costumes of the wrestlers themselves. Yet it is interesting to note that the principle of décor at issue here, so well captured by Grobet’s use of enriched coloring, is nevertheless at odds with the more harmonious patterns of the wrestler’s costumes, where there is a sense of geometric and tonal balance that, in turn, clashes with the discontinuous patterns of the principled décor of the social class that is the dominant sponsoring milieu for Mexico’s lucha libre. There can be, then, little doubt that this is a prime example of a family portrait, even if there is no immediate resolution as to the genealogical constituents involved. The fact that both women rest a hand on the upper leg of Mr. X, with the older woman’s hand in a more intimate position than that of the younger who we later learn is her daughter (her hand is lighter and is more toward his knee than his thigh) and that both of his hands hug the women’s shoulders indicate unquestionable familial intimacy of the sort that “consolidates” the human group here. There is a satisfying intimacy in the wrestler being pictured in easy physical contact with his daughter and his mother (if that is who she, indeed, is), but it does leave open the question of the absence of the father. If the purpose of the portrait is to affirm the heteronormative hegemony of the family, as a counterbalance to the loosening of the bounds of conventional heterosexuality that occurs in the ring, the presence of the father is the one most anchoring constituent of that family. Yet, fathers are curiously absent from many of these portraits. The wrestlers may be shown in the company of other men, some of whom are older and therefore may be taken as their models or mentors in the fashion of symbolic paternity, but actual fathers are notably absent. This is not because Grobet may have chosen to exclude them from the family portraits, but because they appear to be statistically in short supply in the universe photographed. Given the reverence

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity 95 for the mother in popular Mexican culture, these women, so proud of their sons’ accomplishment do very well to serve as an implied feminist commentary of Grobet’s part: the role of the mother in providing the nation with the model of the luchador and the extensive sociocultural implications of that role, which are carried to apotheotic heights in the case of the film hero, El Santo, and the prized role of justiciero (justicer) that he plays in his many films, always dressed in his fighting costume. Thus, as much as the Mexican wrestler is also the son of a dominant masculinist lineage to which his triumphant conduct will always return, no matter how much his ostentatious display of the body is an exception to the so(m)berness of that lineage, he is also the son of the adoring Mexican mother, whose son she has “given” to the nation for the salvation, in the theatrics of the ring, of its hegemonic masculinity. In this regard, it is worth noting that the subsequent image of Mr. X, in the company of only his daughter, is staged before an imposing altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico and the founding unquestionably feminine myth of the Mexican nation. Although not exclusively patron saint of the people, the accrued imaginary of the Virgen de Guadalupe is first and foremost popular (the official Mexican Church dominated by the oligarchy, was notably slow to accept her saintly stature and even slower in the case of peasant to whom she reputedly appeared in 1536), and she is today very much of a feminist icon on both sides of the border. By contrast to the more conventional appearance of Mr. X, one finds among the family portraits that of Negro Casas and his family, in which there is no ostensible display of his status as a wrestler: we would not know it if we were unaware of his reputation or saw the image outside Grobet’s collection (56–57) (see Figure 6.2). In this case, Negro Casas appears as a “regular” family man, unadorned by costume. To be sure, were it not his buffed imposing body, although he wears no mask, and his face bears a relaxed smile of a man who is happy to be in a conventional photograph with his family. The family is unquestionably casting-office basic heteronormative: Mother and father bookend three (pre)teenage children, either all girls or, in the case of the child standing closest to the father, perhaps a somewhat androgynous son (and discreet earring is in evidence). The two children closest to their father are wearing athletic suits, while the oldest daughter, next to the mother, is wearing a sort of teenage uniform in the manner of a short jean skirt and cotton top. The mother also sports a cotton top, but she too is wearing a partial athletic suit. The fact that the child closest to the father is wearing a black suit with a single white stripe that matches the father’s may indicate that he is, in fact, his son, since such echoing of clothing choices is not uncommon within genders. One detail of this photograph that I find quite intriguing is that first we see little of the family décor, except for the orientalist motif of the huge wall fan and the small banner with an iconic orientalist ideogram—it is immaterial whether it is Japanese or Chinese and whether it actually is a signifying character, since the artistry rather than the meaning of such a décor item is what is of paramount importance. But rather quite significant is the presence of a small stack of books on the table behind the father. There are some electronic devices in evidence, but this is not unusual for a Mexican middle-class household. What is rather unusual are the books. I don’t mean to imply that these individuals are illiterate (they are hardly likely to be), but one does not customarily associate a culture of book reading with this social class, and one wonders whether the books are more decorative (a sign of “culture” like the wall hangings) or whether they point to a

96  David William Foster

Figure 6.2 Lourdes Grobet. Negro Casas. Grobet, Lourdes and Rafael Tonatiuh. Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits. RM, 2009, pp. 56–57. Source: Courtesy of Lourdes Grobet, SC.

level of intellectual pursuits rarely incorporated into these portraits, as centered as they are on the physicality of that universe and the preeminence of bodily materiality rather than abstract cultural pursuits. By contrast to the more sedate portrait of Negro Casas, one is drawn to the portrait of Máximo e/and India Sioux (38–39) (see Figure 6.3). It is here where we find an unabashed queering of the heterosexual couple as part of the persona of the luchador. The title of the photograph makes it quite clear that this is a male/female couple, and the woman presumably identified as Indiana Sioux is conventionally feminine in her clothes and in her pose. She is wearing a mask that, while it may not fit her name (i.e., the absence of any apparent indigenous tribal marker), the stylized bow that crowns her mask is an identifiable feminine marker. India Sioux’s carefully structured seated pose is particularly relevant, as it matches a certain conception of easy formality for cultivated Mexican women, most specifically in the way in which her right forearm and hand rest along and over her knee in geometric symmetry. This is a very loud marker for refined femininity in Mexican culture. By contrast, the other subject of the photograph, Máximo, the wrestling star, white displaying an appropriately male stocky body, pudgy but in line with the manifest toned muscularity that is the stamp of the wrestler (note also the hyper masculine commando haircut and the goatee), strikes unabashedly in a fairy-like pose. Standing such that we

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity 97

Figure 6.3 Lourdes Grobet. Máximo e/and India Sioux. Grobet, Lourdes and Rafael Tonatiuh. Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits. RM, 2009, pp. 38–39. Source: Courtesy of Lourdes Grobet, SC.

can take in fully his costume and his gender enactment, Máximo is dressed from head to toe in the pink tones associated, in terms of the aforementioned category of third-level gender characteristics, with a feminine persona: gold-trimmed pink tunic with a goldtrimmed pink sash, gold-trimmed pink high-ankle boots, a pink boa, pink head bow, a pink-stone amazon-warrior bracelet. The tunic is short enough to reveal any matching pink underwear, but this is lacking. Rather we just might see the wisp of genitalia in front, although not as clearly as the smooth curve of buttocks in back. One wonders if this is Máximo’s actual fighting uniform and if, indeed, he performs without underwear in true Greco-Roman warrior style. Finally, Máximo’s bodily pose reinforces the fairylike nature of his costume, with the hands and arms flung out as fairy wings and his left leg curbed to indicate a stylized grace of feminine movement. It is immaterial whether India Sioux and Máximo constitute a conventional heterosexual couple in so-called real life, as would be of course suggested by their inclusion here in a collection of family portraits. They appear photographed against the backdrop of the sort of lower or mid-level middle-class domestic setting typical of the social class of the Mexican wrestlers. There is a high degree of what can be called recognizable kitsch that is so important for affording such domestic spaces a sense of comfort and continuity with the tastes of a particular social class. It is easy to underestimate the importance of kitsch and the sort of identity recognizability it affords social groups: one knows it is one’s

98  David William Foster own world because of the repeated patterns of artist recognition, no matter how trivial or even jarring it may be to the observer from another social universe. For example, the stylized artificial Christmas tree, accompanied by a display that mixes some of the traditional motifs of Christmas, such as the creche and palm trees of the Palestine setting of the Christmas narrative, interspersed with what appear to be sectarian popular culture figures that are not part of the specifically religious narrative. The bookcase behind the India Sioux is chock-full of popular culture figurines, a blend of Mexican and foreign motifs (to whatever extent such a distinction can validly be maintained since kitsch is so often affirmatively internationalist in nature). All these elements of décor emphatically proclaim conventional domesticity of the sort that would comfortably “cradle” an equally conventional heterosexual couple. Yet Máximo’s persona hardly evokes what is taken for conventional masculinity in Mexico: he is what, in the parlance of lucha libre culture called an exótico.5 While his body is unquestionably that of a man, his get-up and pose serve to conjugate all that is stridently repugnant for that conventional masculinity: the male who, supposedly, chooses to enact femininity, a decision that must be understood to not necessarily in any way be linked unequivocally to so-called real-life sexual preferences. We are, after all, speaking about the creation of an enacted persona, and not of essential personalities. It is the purpose of the camera here to survey the masked embodiment of a performance mask. Moreover, Máximo engages with another femininity that is a mockery of the discreet femininity displayed by India Sioux: indeed, so much so that one could almost envision the latter as somehow insufficiently feminine alongside her partner. This sort of genderbending should not surprise one in terms of the theatrics of Mexican wrestling. Various processes of what we might call semantic chaining attribute to the display of effeminacy a range of derived behavioral and existential characteristics. For example, on the one hand, semantic chaining allows one to postulate that such a human subject will always take the so-called passive role in sexual activity, “like a woman” (we need not inquire too seriously as what all this is supposed to mean).6 It also assumes that such a subject is lacking in any of the spectrum of manly virtues that in Mexico are encapsulated in the formula of being “feo, fuerte y formal:” such a subject cannot be depended on to defend goodness and righteousness because of inherent existential deficiencies. And, finally, such a subject cannot be depended on to have the coordinated or effective fighting capacity necessary to vanquish evil and impose good in the world. However, when in fact the Mexican Máximo, like the American Gorgeous George, can in fact vanquish in the exemplary contest of the ring the “rudos y crudos” (rough and rowdy men) of conventional thuggish masculinity, the dramatic quality of “his” (because he is now fully entitled to the masculine pronominal) pink-swathed triumph against his adversary is all that much more performatively dramatic, startlingly awesome, and delightfully defiant of prevailing social gender logic. Here, then, the Máximo’s queer enactment and its accompanying in-action performance are first and foremost part of the fictional narrative of lucha libre. One may not want to avow that popular culture purposefully queers the social record. But it is undeniable that the dynamics of popular culture, as a phenomenon counter to the official, establishment imaginary, involve significant tropes of human relationships, motivations, and behavioral practices that constitute an open domain of the queer. That is, such a domain affords the queering of the imaginary as process and the queered imaginary as consequence (see Alexander Doty on the inevitable queering of popular culture). India Sioux and Máximo may, indeed, be a queer couple in any one of a series of configurations

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity 99 that challenge hegemonic heterosexuality. But what is of consequence is the deployment of the tropes of gender queering as part of wrestling-ring theatrics. If, in the end, such queering contributes to the spectators’ willingness to acknowledge the validity/viability of a queered conduct of real life, such is the siren song of the permissible extravaganzas of popular culture in its perennial quest for dramatic innovation. Here, this means the selling of ever-more outrageously done up candidate for wrestling heroics, and the sort of ostentatious display permitted by the universe of Mexican wrestling never fails to satisfy in this regard, as is so amply demonstrated by the full range of family portraits Grobet has assembled. Bearing in mind that we are dealing here with “family” portraits that presumably go beyond isolated announcement posters that, rather than promote a singular identity, speak to the constituency of a family understood on various levels of social embodiment, we turn to the image of Rigo Cisneros y/and Caballero de la Muerte (51–52) (see Figure 6.4). Two stocky middle-aged men, projecting an image of being somewhat past their prime, wear identical costumes that suggest they may wrestle together in something like the tag-team variation of the sport. Again, any question of sexuality is, if not irrelevant, not immediately pertinent. They constitute a homosocial group that is bonded based on shared values of masculinity, rather than being unquestionably bound by a union of sexual exchange. Certainly, the implication that

Figure 6.4 Lourdes Grobet. Rigo Cisneros y/and Caballero de la Muerte. Grobet, Lourdes and Rafael Tonatiuh. Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits. RM, 2009, pp. 51–52. Source: Courtesy of Lourdes Grobet, SC.

100  David William Foster any same-sex bond for commercial, artistic, performative purposes may as part of its backstory constitute a sexual union of some sort adds to the intrigue of the kind that is essential to any spectacle of note: physicality sells, and if it has a glimmer of a sexual component it’s more intriguingly saleable, which is why even in big-time highly administered and stylized sports, like Latin American soccer (see Juan José Sebreli’s legendary comments on football and homosexuality) or American football, sexuality is always a present specter and may always be decoded in the putatively manly exchange of physical gestures that may, in a bar, be taken as sexual advances (hugging, butt patting, crotch grouping, “pantsing” and the like). Indeed, wrestling involves same-sex physical contact in a way that is so over-the-top that merely dropping (literally) the pretense of the sports trunks is enough to making a fully inscribed queer sport between same-sex partners of either conventional gender (little imagination is needed to envision what “losing” such a match entails, especially among male contestants). Rigo Cisneros and Caballero de la Muerte do not wear standard Mexican wrestling masks to matches—indeed, only an even percentage of the men appearing in Grobet’s photographs do. However, their so-called natural faces effect a mask-like texture, as they glower, arms tightly crossed to feature their strong arms, at the camera, face scrunched up in a defiant fashion of the “don’t mess with me” variety. Their stance is rigorously compliant with the statuesque imperative of Mexican masculinity, so that their homosocial partnership serves to consulate the injunction to be “feo, fuerte y formal:” the formidability of their united façade evokes the ideologeme of the family so close-knit that they can stand up successfully to any adversity, and it is thus in this way that what for some might be a dicey understanding of homosocial solidarity becomes a bulwark of Mexican masculinity aligned and arrayed against the enemy. The films of the Mexican ur-wrestler, El Santo, constitute full narrative elaborations of the enemies of these men of exemplary social virtue whose struggle is the very essence of Good versus Evil in a genealogy of masked warriors, as their masks always remind us, back to pre-Columbian Aztec and other indigenous roots.7 As stylized as it has all become, with the multiple proliferations engendered by commercialism, that transcendent signifier is always present to legitimate, ennoble, and embed the sport in deep recesses of the Mexican imaginary. Thus, we close with an image in which this sort of imagined genealogy is especially crucial, the image of Hijo del Santo e hijos/and Sons (28–29) (see Figure 6.5). If El Santo (Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, 1917–1984) is the paradigm of the Mexican wrestler, so successful that he had a spin-off career as an actor in several dozen very bad films (usually referred to as cult classics) featuring his persona, films in which all sorts of queer variations of Mexican masculinity bubble to the surface (Baeza Lope), El Santo nevertheless is successful as a historical figure of Mexican popular culture in anchoring all the necessary qualities of noble Mexican masculinity in service of the nation-family.8 Concomitantly, Grobet’s family portrait of his son and grandchildren seated on a couch before and beneath what looks like it may well be an altar to the paterfamilias, is particularly eloquent in consecrating El Santo’s central character in this family romance. Seated between a granddaughter and a grandson, the son, as well as the grandson sport their own simple silver masks in the tradition of El Santo, who was, as anyone familiar with his extensive iconography well knows, one of the legendary luchadores virtually never to be seen without his mask on—indeed El Santo was buried wearing his

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity 101

Figure 6.5 Lourdes Grobet. Hijo del Santo e Hijos/and Sons. Grobet, Lourdes and Rafael Tonatiuh. Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits. RM, 2009, pp. 28–29. Source: Courtesy of Lourdes Grobet, SC.

mask, presumably ready for all eternity to fight the good battle whenever and wherever the call occurs ….9 Unsurprisingly, the grandson appears ready to assume the mantle of service to the cause of Good when it arrives. While his studly black leather jacket is not yet a full uniform, it is suggestive of whereof he might elaborate one, while the only suggestion of a uniform for the father, who is dressed in apparently expensive somber sports clothes, in addition to the mask only betrays some sort of fancy silver-clasp casual shoes, the only gesture toward the wide latitude of sartorial ostentation available to the luchador. While the granddaughter, who assumes almost a patrician pose in the proceedings, could well have suggested in their presence that she is inclined to go the route of the many luchadoras that Grobet features in this album.10 Yet, the only evocation of the “family brand” is evidence in her case are the silver slip-ons she is wearing. One unifying detail of the photograph is quite noticeable. Hijo del Santo has strong very attractively shaped hands, and he has each one of them resting in an easy generosity, so to speak, on the closest leg of each of his children (although, in the case of his daughter, her hand intervenes to prevent his hand from resting fully on her thigh, as it does in the case of the son). This sort of familiarity (in the root sense of the word) is more possible in Mexican body language than it would be in American society, and, concomitantly, it serves that much more emphatically to confirm the vital genealogy

102  David William Foster that is involved here, a laying on of the authoritative hands of the patriarch to confirm his offspring and to endow them with a synapse-like burst of mesmerizing power. From a queer perspective, families are, to be sure, the ones we make and not necessarily the ones that are either registered in the civil record or sanctioned by heteronormative society. While it has been tempting to view Grobet’s portraits of wrestlers and their chosen families as delightful and eccentric, the images examined here reveal a more substantive story. Anticipating the legalization of gay marriage in Mexico in 2010, Grobet’s Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits not only redefines the limits of the heteronormative paradigm of family, it also upends preconceived notions of the hypermasculinity ascribed to the luchador. Notes 1 See Abelleyra 487: “[El] ambiente de mi casa era de afición al deporte y de culto al cuerpo. Eso me remitió al luchador que no me habían dejado ver en vivo por problemas de género. Yo me había prometido no hacer fotos de indios ni con sesgo folclórico, pero cuando empecé a retratar luchadores me di cuenta que ellos son el indio proyectado en la ciudad; entonces ese México profundo que me interesa.” 2 For lucha libre as a uniquely key concept of Latino/a culture, see Allatson. Levi provides an authoritative recent assessment on the role of lucha libre in Mexican society and Mexican popular culture, and she discusses performance theatrics specifically in her second chapter: “[There is a secret] that every likely reader probably already knows: professional wrestling matches are fixed” (27). 3 See Lourdes Grobet, Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars, especially pp. 110–117, and the images in the “Lucha libre” section of Grobet, Lourdes Grobet. 4 Guillermo Núñez Noriega has executed some of the best theoretical and ethnographic writing in Mexico on the variegated faces of national masculinities. 5 Levi discusses the spectacle of feigned queerness in the lucha libre, while also recognizing that there is now a strand of queer wrestling in Mexico (152–158). 6 See my essay on the topic of homophobic semantic chaining in a textual analysis of a novel by the Chicano writer Pedro Nava in El ambiente nuestro (84–89). 7 Cordry provides an authoritative analysis of anthropological and current uses of the mask in Mexican culture. Although writing at a time before contemporary queer theory, it is significant to note his reference to the androgynous possibilities of the ritual mask (161–162). 8 See Gobet’s dossier of photographs of El Santo in her Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars 280– 295, followed by a dossier on the son (296–303). 9 Many notable luchadores always insisted on appearing in public, and not just in the ring, wearing their mask. Grobet evokes this lineage with her image of Villano (10–11), who is pictured engaged in his professional activity as a dentist, hovering over the open mouth of his patient, diligently at work with his instruments—and appropriately hooded with his mask, good advertisement if a poor substitute for the hygienically recommended face mask in contemporary dentists’ office. As for the abiding mythology of El Santo, see Carlos Monsiváis, an intellectual who understood Mexican culture with exemplary acuity (“La hora de la máscara protagónica”). See also Jezreel Salazar regarding El Santo’s movement from marginal popular culture to merchandizing icon. 10 I have not focused on any of these personalities because my interest here has been questions of masculinity, its embodiment, impersonation, and critical variabilities. Women in wrestling constitute other and hardly necessarily parallel gender questions, since the “masculinization” of Mexican women has, in addition to being part of the striving for gender balance in many occupations (i.e., women police agents), but also the often-questioned freedom given to women to be assertive self-spokespersons. The bottom line is that there is a more naturalized or accepted gender continuity for women in Mexico City today that does not betray the high stakes crisis of masculinity that any similar continuum constitutes for men. Thus, Grobet’s photographs for luchadoras may be more interesting for reasons other than those of fragile masculinity that is more operant in the case of men.

Unsettling Hyper-Heteronormative Masculinity 103 Works Cited Abelleyra, Angélica. “Una vida sin máscaras: entrevista con Lourdes Grobet.” Lourdes Grobet, Lourdes Grobet. México, D.F.: Turner Publicaciones; Concultura/Cenart et al., 2005. 478–501. Allatson, Paul. “Lucha libre.” Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 143–145. Baeza Lope, Ileana. “Santo vs. Las Vampiras y la hija de Frankenstein: queerización del machismo institucionalizado en el Cine de Luchadores.” In Ensayos sobre las maravillosas hazañas y extrañas aventuras de un superhéroe mexicano” Santo, el enmascarado de plata. Ed. Antonio Moreno. Puebla: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, forthcoming. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs Vol. 1, No. 4 (1976), 875–893. Multiple alternative sources. Cordry, Donald. Mexican Masks. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Forbes, Ted. “Lourdes Grobet”. The Artist Series. July 12, 2017. https://youtu.be/rElpkvx244Y Foster, David William. El ambiente nuestro: Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Writing. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2006. Gallo, Rubén. Mexican Modernity; The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2005. Goldman, Shifra. “Six Women Artists of Mexico.” Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Autumn, 1982–Winter, 1983), 1–9. Grobet, Lourdes. “Sobre mi labor fotográfica.” Los Universitarios, No. 111–112, (January 1978), 18–19. Grobet, Lourdes. Lourdes Grobet. México, D.F.: Turner Publicaciones; Concultura • Cenart et al., 2005. Grobet, Lourdes. Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling. México, D.F.: Trilce Ediciones, 2008, c2005. Grobet, Lourdes. Lucha Libre: The Family Portraits. México, D.F.: Editorial RM, 2009. “Grupo Proceso Pentágono: 26.09.2015–21.02.2016.” Exhibition in the MUAC, CDMX https:// muac.unam.mx/exposicion/grupo-proceso-pentagono?lang=en Levi, Heather. The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Monsiváis, Carlos. “La hora de la máscara protagónica: El Santo contra los escépticos en materia de mitos.” En Los rituales del caos. México, D.F.: Biblioteca Era, 1995. 125–133. Monsiváis, Carlos. Maravillas que son, sombras que fueron: La fotografía en México. México, D.F.: Ediciones ERA, 2012. Monsiváis, Carlos, and Carlos Bonfil. A través del espejo: el cine mexicano y su público. México, D.F.: Ediciones el Milagro, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 1994. Muñoz, Victor. “Lourdes Grobet: Photography and Environment.” INBA/FONCA https://lourdesgrobet.com/en/biography/ Núñez Noreiga, Guillermo. Just between Us: An Ethnography of Male Identity and Intimacy in Rural Communities of Northern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Orig. Masculinidad e intimidad: identidad, sexualidad y sida. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género; El Colegio de Sonora; Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2007. Núñez Noriega, Guillermo. Sexo entre varones: poder y resistencia en el campo sexual. 2a ed. Hermosillo, Méx., El Colegio de Sonora; Coordinación de Humanidades, UNAM; Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM; Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1999. Ortíz Torres, Rubén. “El Santo’s Daughter.” INBA/FONCA https://lourdesgrobet.com/en/ biography/

104  David William Foster Salazar, Jezreel. “El Santo: el mito como status.” Confabulario, un producto de El universal. Internet. Accessed 12.23.2019. Sandomir, Richard. “Lourdes Grobet, Photographer of Mexico’s Masked Wrestlers, Dies at 81.” New York Times. July 22, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/arts/lourdes-grobetdead.html Sebreli, Juan José. La era del fútbol. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998.

Part III

Re-Presenting Gender and Race

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

7

Solidarity and Witnessing in the Photographs of Marta Zarak Viviane Mahieux

An indigenous woman in traditional dress is standing on the balcony of Mexico’s chamber of deputies. Her body is partially turned toward the camera, though she gazes away from the lens, looking down at what we can imagine is the political theater below. Her hands are clasped together at the waist, a slim watch on her left wrist. The political stage is discernable in the background: the actors, politicians in formal suits, sit at the podium. Part of the Mexican national flag can be glimpsed hanging behind them. The woman doesn’t look directly at the stage, in fact, she doesn’t seem to focus on anything in particular, appearing both present by standing firm and somewhat aloof from the happenings below. If she is there waiting for something to happen, there is little urgency to be felt—or rather, there is little expectation that anything that will impact her life will happen anytime soon. A toddler, also in indigenous dress, sits next to her, gazing wide eyed and solemn at the camera from the lower right corner of the photograph (Figure 7.1). The photo is unusual in many ways. It made the front page of the Mexico City daily unomásuno on August 29, 1979, giving unprecedented visibility to an indigenous woman and her child as witnesses of political decision-making in the nation’s capital. Mexican indigeneity is represented here without recurring to the tropes that had dominated Mexican photography during decades. The woman and child are not photographed through an anthropological gaze that aims to highlight their role as representatives of a given cultural tradition. The woman is not framed as a symbol of suffering, poverty or anguish, on the contrary, she is dignified and calm. Neither is she aestheticized as a national symbol, frozen in time, at odds with any signs of modernity.1 Rather, this is an image of a mother and her child who are exercising a political right to be represented. They have a stake in the political future of a country that should, by all regards, include them. This front-page photograph stands alone, without illustrating an accompanying article, wielding editorial power to advocate for the right of Mexico’s indigenous people to participate in politics through institutional means.2 But while the photograph upholds the importance of that inclusion, it also highlights the fragility of the woman’s position. She is in the chamber of deputies, and yet she stands apart, on the side. The caption, which credits the photographer Marta Zarak, strives to explain the image: “una indígena tlacuate de Oaxaca en la porra del parmista Jesús Guzmán Rubio” [an indigenous tlacuate woman from Oaxaca in support of the parmista Jesús Guzmán Rubio]. The woman is at the chamber of deputies to support a local Oaxacan politician who was a part of the PARM (Partido Auténtico de la Revolución Mexicana), a party affiliated to the official PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).3 But the gesture of inclusion from unomásuno is inadvertently flawed. A simple typo, probably explainable by the hurried DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-11

108  Viviane Mahieux

Figure 7.1  Front Page of unomásuno, August 29, 1979. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Museo Nacional de Antropología and Marta Zarak.

pace that marks the publication of the daily press, misattributes the indigenous community as “Tlacuate,” when the correct name should read “Tacuate.” A small mistake, for sure, but one that reinstates the distance between indigenous communities and the metropolitan cultural spheres where the newspaper is created and printed. I chose this image to begin my essay on the work of photojournalist Marta Zarak because it illustrates many of the recurring elements of her early contributions to unomásuno in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as selected and presented by Manuel Becerra Acosta, the founding editor of the newspaper. Zarak’s photography often focused on the everyday, highlighting intimate moments in the lives of women and families from marginalized communities or in situations of precariousness. While her images gave visibility to individuals and social groups who were rarely seen in mainstream media of the period, most striking was the agency she imbued in her subjects. Those she photographed tended to be fully active and present, and regardless of what they were doing while photographed, a quality of resilience and strength persistently comes through. My approach to Zarak’s work takes cues from the ideas developed by Ariella Azoulay regarding the ethical status of photography, primarily as outlined in her book The Civil Contract of Photography (2008). Azoulay draws a parallel between citizenship, which she defines as “as a partnership of governed persons taking up their duty as citizens and utilizing their positions for one another” (104), and what she calls the photographic situation, which brings together “a camera, a photographer, a photographed

Solidarity and Witnessing in the Photographs of Marta Zarak 109 environment, object, person or spectator” (85). In response to the line of thought that considers photographs of violence, pain and war as facilitators of voyeurism and eventual apathy, a position that critic Susan Sontag developed in her book On Photography (1977), and later revisited in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Azoulay highlights what the photographic subject, the photographer, and the spectator all share. They are all participant citizens, who co-exist within “a framework of partnership and solidarity” (23). Thus, being photographed (the subject), like taking the photograph (the photographer) and viewing it (the spectator) are all forms of active engagement. The horizontality brought forth in Azoulay’s conception of photography lies at the heart of much of Zarak’s early work. Let us briefly return to this fist image. The photograph condenses multiple acts of witnessing. As the woman looks at the workings of a political institution, the chamber of deputies, the toddler looks at the camera, and by extension, at another institution, the press. Their gazes, oriented in almost opposing directions, seem to ask for accountability from both the political and the public spheres. The newspaper readers (and us, the spectators who access a reproduction of the newspaper decades after it first appeared) look back at them, noting the forms of inclusion and exclusion that coexist in the image. In what Azoulay calls the plural relationality of photography, we (the photographed subjects, the photographer, and the spectators) are all bound by the act of witnessing. This solidarity between the participants in the photographic situation, which is especially tangible in Zarak’s photograph above, also lies at the basis of the movement known as nuevo fotoperiodismo mexicano (new Mexican photojournalism), which began in the late 1970s precisely with the founding of the daily unomásuno. The decade of the 1970s marked a turning point for journalism in Mexico. The 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco galvanized left-wing intellectuals and artists, who searched for new and consistent ways to document social injustices and critique repressive political structures. In the literary sphere, which bordered with and overflowed into journalistic practices, the genre of the testimonio gathered force in Latin America, while in the United States, New Journalism blurred the limits between fiction and reporting with growing urgency. This set the scene for cronistas (“chroniclers”) such as Elena Poniatowska, José Emilio Pacheco, Carlos Monsiváis, and Ricardo Garibay, who spearheaded a renewed politicization of this hybrid genre, which takes from both journalism and literature. Tensions between Mexico’s critical press and the government culminated in June 1976, with what became known as the “coup” against the daily newspaper Excélsior,4 when President Luis Echeverría orchestrated the dismissal of the editor in chief, Julio Scherer García, who had been critical of his rule. Scherer went on to establish the weekly magazine Proceso in 1976, primarily focused on investigative journalism. Manuel Becerra Acosta, who had been second in command at Excélsior, opted to spearhead his own project, the daily unomásuno, which published its first issue on November 14, 1977.5 From its inception, unomásuno innovated in its contents—both textually and visually. It presented itself as a critical, anti-official daily, where voices from diverse cultural spheres could co-exist. Some of the most important and up and coming writers of the period penned regular columns: Margo Glantz, Ida Vitale, José Joaquín Blanco, Iván Restrepo, Héctor Aguilar, as well as José Emilio Pacheco, who was one of the newspaper’s founding members. The daily not only covered important national and international news, but it also opened space to document the everyday difficulties that affected life in the capital and in marginalized sectors, taking up causes such as indigenous rights, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, as well as the rights of domestic workers (Monsiváis 106).

110  Viviane Mahieux unomásuno was printed in a smaller tabloid size, though it pointedly stayed away from sensationalism and the nota roja (crime stories),6 cultivating an informal, modern tone as highlighted by the graphics of its title (“unomásuno” with no capital letters), and by the fact that it printed the occasional swearword, something previously unheard of in the mainstream press (Monsiváis 106). The paper’s founding coincided with the Lopez Portillo electoral reform of 1977, which created aperture for political parties other than the PRI to gain representation in the Chamber of Deputies, and ostensibly fomented greater freedom of the press. unomásuno received support from the government, especially from Jesus Reyes Heroles, the Secretary of Government who spearheaded the reform (Morales Flores 213–214). As a self-defined diverse and plural left-wing publication, unomásuno would give credibility to this newfound political openness. Paradoxically, the newspaper was able to establish itself as a critical publication precisely because it counted with the tacit support of the state. unomásuno notably differed from Proceso in its willingness to take visual risks and give prominence to photography. Personal accounts of the early days of the newspaper coincide in recognizing the importance of Becerra Acosta’s work as an editor who enabled photography to thrive and develop a particular style, inaugurating what some consider to be Mexican photojournalism’s golden age.7 Gradually, Becerra Acosta granted photographers the same rights as reporters. Most of the photographs (though not all) are attributed, and images are often given prominent editorial spaces on the front page, as well as independence from articles: they do not necessarily illustrate a story but rather provide additional information and points of view, sometimes with humor, and often hinting at what the surrounding texts do not or cannot say. Another gesture favoring the development of a photographic movement at unomásuno included providing financial independence to photojournalists, who when on assignment did not have to rely for funds on the reporter who was sent to cover the same story, and thus could move around more freely.8 Perhaps most importantly, photographers were able to request ownership of their negatives, which enabled them to build a portfolio of their own work. This was not, however, always the case, as it was often impossible to recuperate the negatives of the photos that made the front page (Zarak). Photojournalists were also granted the unprecedented freedom to devote themselves for days at a time to a single assignment and develop fotoreportajes (photo news stories), a series of images on a given topic, a bit like a visual crónica (chronicle). All of these factors enabled unomásuno to develop a distinct photographic style, recognized both for its visual innovation and its political commitment to representing people in marginalized situations. In his work on Mexican photojournalism, John Mraz notes that women’s “inclusion in this ‘macho guild’ is one of New Photojournalism’s defining characteristics” (358). While Mraz’s statement is certainly true, as evidenced by the important work done throughout the 1980s and beyond by photographers such as Angeles Torrejón, Lucero González, Elsa Medina, and Frida Hartz (who are featured in the chapters by Ryan Long and Tamara R. Williams, respectively) one can go further and argue that Mexico’s New Photojournalism has its foundations in the work of the women who held important positions at unomásuno since its beginning, helping create the opportunities for other young photographers in the following years. In this regard, the contributions of German-born photographer Christa Cowrie are especially notable. She first joined unomásuno as an investor and as the first director of photography, a post that she held for a year and a half, until May 1979, though she would remain at this newspaper for 25 years (McPhail Fanger 54). Cowrie’s work was multifaceted and she covered a variety of assignments

Solidarity and Witnessing in the Photographs of Marta Zarak 111 for unomásuno, including documenting indigenous life in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, as well as problems with trash disposal and food scarcity in Mexico City, to give just a few examples. She is best known, however, for covering presidential figures, primarily José López Portillo (1976–1982), as well as Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988), and Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994). Cowrie developed a particularly close relationship with Lopez Portillo and his entourage, eventually doing double duty as both official photographer for the presidency and press photographer for unomásuno (McPhail Fanger, 73–74). While this closeness with political power illustrates the delicate balancing act that a daily had to follow in order to succeed in Mexico, it also granted Cowrie unprecedented access and enabled her to bring new life into the country’s established iconography of power. Cowrie’s images of López Portillo were often close-ups in active poses: smiling, greeting people, gesturing in mid-speech, walking among crowds. Her photographs highlighted the very human traits that usually were excluded from solemn representations of power, but while they somewhat desacralized the presidency, they stopped short of any pointed denunciation.9 Marta Zarak would also break new ground at unomásuno, becoming the first Mexican female photojournalist to cover a war zone when she was sent to Nicaragua alongside reporter Marco Aurelio Carballo in 1978. Zarak had trained in photography at the Club Fotográfico de México, where she studied under Manuel Álvarez Bravo. She began working as a photographer for the union of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). When in August 1977 the union leaders were arrested and jailed, she lost her job and was promptly hired by Manuel Becerra Acosta to work full time for unomásuno. At first, Zarak considered this a temporary position, that she would keep only while UNAM’s union regrouped, but she was quickly seduced by the fast pace of reporting and by the public aspect that her photographs could acquire in the press. While at unomásuno, she also embarked in independent group projects with other photographers, such as José Ángel Rodíguez and Antonio Turok. These were conceived as collective projects that would cover a single topic in depth, following the example of Eugene Smith’s photo-essay Minamata (published as a book in 1975), which documented the effects of mercury poisoning in a population of Japanese fishermen.10 Two collective projects in which Zarak participated stand out: a series of photographs taken and the Hospital Infantil de México, that were never published, and another on Guatemalan refugees at the Mexican border in Chiapas.11 In 1981, Zarak convinced Becerra Acosta to create a photographic supplement to unomásuno, entitled Cámara Uno. It aimed to provide a space for those worthwhile images that could not appear in the daily due to lack of space (Morales Flores 228). The experiment was short-lived (only one issue was published on November 14th) but the project confirms the importance that Becerra Acosta gave to photography, as well as his support of projects initiated by photojournalists. As the first photographer from unomásuno to cover the war in Nicaragua, Zarak initiated the visual representation of the Central American conflict, which would later be extensively photographed for this same daily by Pedro Valtierra. In sending first Zarak and then Valtierra to Nicaragua, Becerra Acosta chose to not depend on stock photos from international agencies, as did many other Mexican dailies; for this reason, unomásuno’s coverage of the war is exceptional among Mexico’s mainstream press. Becerra Acosta’s decision to report on the war directly and not outsource its coverage aimed to privilege a Latin American perspective over a North American or a European one (Mraz 317). It also confirmed the importance that the daily gave to the conflict, in an implicit stance of support for the Sandinistas. The photograph that prominently appeared on the front

112  Viviane Mahieux

Figure 7.2  Front Page of unomásuno, September 28, 1978. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Museo Nacional de Antropología and Marta Zarak.

page of unomásuno on September 28, 1978 visually confirms the newspaper’s position (see Figure 7.2). It is a close-up portrait of a young woman whose face is partially covered by a two-toned kerchief, only her eyes and forehead are apparent. Her fair skin is sprinkled with a few freckles. Her wavy hair is cut short, her wide eyes are framed by perfectly made-up eyelashes and finely arched brows. The caption confirms what the kerchief already indicates visually: this is a portrait of a Sandinista fighter. It reads: “Sofía. Nada más. Es su nombre de guerra. Combatiente sandinista que participó en la lucha en la frontera. ‘La guerrilla es la única opción política’ en Nicaragua, afirma. (Foto: Marta Zarak, enviada).” The photograph is striking, and not just because of the woman’s beauty. The dissonance between the upper part of the woman’s face (her polished femininity) and the bottom part (the symbol of guerrilla warfare) brings the conflict closer to the reading public of unomásuno. Sofía might very well be one of them: a woman from a Caucasian or mestizoeducated middle class, who became politicized and took up arms to fight for her beliefs. She gazes straight at the camera, at the readers holding the paper, at the public. Although the photograph accompanies an article entitled “Guevara Silva: una familia de sandinistas en combate” [Guevara Silva: a family of Sandinistas in combat], more noticeable is another article right next to the image, headlined in large print: “Petición a la ONU: pacificar Nicaragua” [Petition to the UN: Pacify Nicaragua]. The petition expressed by this title informs how we interpret the gaze from the guerrillera: as a demand for intervention to

Solidarity and Witnessing in the Photographs of Marta Zarak 113 halt the genocide that was taking place in Nicaragua. The two-toned kerchief masking the woman’s face (presumably red and black, though appearing as light gray and black in print) reflects the graphics of the newspaper’s title at the top of the page: the words “uno” appear darker in bold, framing the lighter middle word “más.” The visual symmetry between the kerchief and the paper’s title works to express solidarity with the Sandinistas and demand accountability. The woman’s gaze at the camera confirms her willingness to be photographed. As a present, engaged participant in what Azoulay calls the “civil contract of photography.” this photographic subject reminds us of the ethics of the spectator, that is, “an ethics that begins to sketch the contours of the spectator’s responsibility toward what is visible (130). In this respect, the photograph’s call for engagement from the public aims to deterritorialize the Central American conflict: the Mexican public is interpellated in this call for solidarity, giving the conflict a broader Latin American dimension. Zarak’s photographs of Nicaragua often focus on women, depicting the various ways in which the conflict affected their lives, yet not all of her subjects took up arms, as did Sofía, the guerrillera pictured above. On the contrary, most of her photographs represent women experiencing the war and its effects from the margins of battle. In a series of images taken in Estelí, Nicaragua, and kept in her private archive, Zarak documents the burning of bodies by the Red Cross.12 Such was the extent of the ongoing warfare in the city that it was difficult for the dead to be recovered and buried. Instead, they were burned in the streets, often after laying there for many days, as part of a public health strategy to prevent future epidemics. One image taken by Zarak captures, not the burning of a body itself, but four women as they watch a body being burnt in the middle of their street (see Figure 7.3). Their collective reaction vividly transmits the experience of

Figure 7.3 Marta Zarak. Ante la quema de cuerpos (Watching the Bodies Burn). Estelí, Nicaragua. 1978. Source: Reproduced with permission of the artist.

114  Viviane Mahieux witnessing horror. The woman on the right has her face completely covered, as though she could no longer bear to see what was happening before her. To the left of her, a young woman stares determinedly, as if willing herself not to look away. The other two, a young woman and a girl, cover their noses as they look on. This image does not draw attention to the central event, the burning of the deceased, but rather to how it affects the four women who watch from the sidelines. As with the first photograph discussed in this essay (see Figure 7.1), this image documents an act of witnessing. More notably in this case, it points to the emotional and physical toll of bearing witness, transmitting a register not just of visual horror, but also of the effects the act of witnessing has on the bodies that partake in it. These effects are apparent in the range of complex expressions of the photographed subjects (anguish and pain, certainly, but also strength and determination), as well as in how other physical senses are represented. The women’s gestures react to the smell of burning bodies, the heat from the fire, the harsh light of the sun. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag points out that as a sense, sight provides the possibility of taking distance. One can choose not to look: a gaze can be averted; eyelids can be shut (Chapter 8). Other senses, however, do not provide this possibility. One cannot, for instance, choose not to smell. This picture points to an experience that goes beyond sight and thus cannot be fully captured visually in a photograph. As viewers of the image, we can confirm that witnessing is an action that has effects on those who exercise it, and we are reminded that our own act of witnessing through photography does not imply the same form of physical engagement. This image thus leaves us with haunting questions. What are the limits of our engagement as photographic spectators? What are the possible fissures in Azoulay’s notion of the civil contract of photography, and can they be overcome? Many photographs from Zarak’s assignment to Nicaragua document the exodus from Estelí, with entire families, mostly women and children, hurrying away on foot, carrying whatever belongings they could hastily gather: sacks, boxes, pots, pans, dishware, food. Especially striking is a series of photographs of a woman on a desolate road, tying to carry an enormous sack as well as her small child, a naked squirming boy who is slipping from her grasp. A series of three images of this mother and child appeared in unomásuno on September 22, 1978 (see Figure 7.4).13 The first image, on the left, is a full body shot of the woman struggling to carry her toddler. The second image, in the middle, is shot from a closer distance. It shows a man in a white visor taking the boy while the woman holds the large sac on her left arm. The third, on the far right, shows a close-up of her face, the enormous sack now mounted on her back, her hands clasped together as she seems to address someone outside the frame. The caption describing this series of images reads: “Una mujer que huye del terror somocista en Estelí es ayudada por un fotógrafo a cargar un bebé. Acto seguido, pregunta a los periodistas si saben algo de sus otros dos hijos, quienes se encuentran perdidos. Nadie puede informar de nada. (Secuencia: Marta Zarak)” [A woman fleeing the Somoza terror in Esteli is aided by a photographer in carrying an infant. Next, she asks the journalists if they know anything of her two other children, who are missing. Nobody can tell her anything. (Sequence: Marta Zarak)]. This sequence documents not just the movement of the woman as she approaches the camera but also the evolving levels of engagement between the subject and the photographers. The woman directly addresses photographers for help, calling for action. This is an image not only of suffering and anguish but also of agency. She obtains help carrying the child, and even though the caption lets us know that she does not receive a reply regarding her other children, she nonetheless has made her plight known, not just to the group of journalists present but also internationally, to the readers of unomásuno in

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Figure 7.4  Front Page of unomásuno, September 22, 1978. Source: Reproduced with permission of the Museo Nacional de Antropología and Marta Zarak.

Mexico. This sequence stands out because it documents the presence of photojournalists, who usually function as invisible mediators between what and who is photographed, and the viewers who then access the published images. Rarely do they appear in photographs. By showing the intervention of the man beyond his role as photographer (he had to put aside his camera to carry the child) as well as transcribing the ensuing dialogue, this sequence documents how in a war, journalists and photographers can be called to act in the moment, as more than just witnesses documenting the plights of citizens for the far away readers of the international press. In this case, the civil contract of photography is shown to be a starting point for other more tangible and immediate expressions of solidarity. As indicated by the presence of the photographer in the frame, Zarak was not the only one to document this woman and her child. Apart from the man who helped carry the boy, the American photographer Susan Meiselas and the Dutch photographer Koen Wessing also were there, and their archives of the Sandinista war in Nicaragua include similar photos of this woman shot from slightly different angles, though none including other photographers.14 Zarak traveled through Estelí in a small group that included Meiselas and Wessing, which explains the similarities in their photographic archives. She recalls the strong mutual support among photographers, noting that Wessing, an experienced war photographer, pulled her out of a dangerous situation and lent her his bullet-proof vest (Zarak). That support, however, did not always extend to the people photographed, as it appeared in the sequence. In an image from her personal archive that was not published by unomásuno, Zarak captures a young boy leaving Estelí on foot, struggling to carry an enormous bag along a rural road, while a young girl carrying a baby waits for him ahead (see Figure 7.5). The boy is surrounded by six photographers (five men and one woman, probably Susan Meiselas), who tower above him, blocking his

116  Viviane Mahieux

Figure 7.5  Marta Zarak. Fotógrafos y niño (Photographers and Boy). Estelí, Nicaragua. 1978. Source: Reproduced with permission of the artist.

path. According to Zarak, no one helped the boy carry the bag, not even her, an absent gesture that still haunts her. The image generates discomfort because it points to fissures in the civil contract of photography. It is doubtful that a child this young willingly agreed to being photographed, nor that he grasped the implications of the process. This does not imply that children should not be the subjects of photojournalists, but rather that in this particular case, the image draws attention to the intimidating presence of the photographers who crowd around the boy, rather than to the forms of solidarity that can develop from photographic encounters. In this sense, the image serves as a metareflection on the pitfalls of photographing pain and suffering. It points to the inherent tension between immediate solidarity, which in this case implies setting the camera aside and stepping in to help, and the distance needed to create an esthetically compelling image that can serve as a lasting testimony of the Nicaraguan conflict. Like the photo of the indigenous woman with which this essay began (see Figure 7.1), whose photograph made the front page but whose ethnic group was erroneously identified, this image of the young boy surrounded by photographers marks both an act of inclusion (this boy matters and should be photographed) and exclusion (he is to be photographed but not helped). While the photograph serves as a rebuke of photojournalism’s potential shortcomings, the self-critique it engages in paves the way to imagine other, more empathetic photographic situations. The forms of witnessing and solidarity that consistently come through in the photographs taken by Marta Zarak during the late 1970s and the early 1980s set the scene

Solidarity and Witnessing in the Photographs of Marta Zarak 117 for the photographers who began their professional lives soon after. It is not coincidental that the aesthetic visions and political commitment that came to characterize New Photojournalism established its foundations on the work of female photographers such as Zarak and Cowrie. Being a woman in a male-dominated profession, especially in difficult contexts such as war-torn Nicaragua, helped create situations that led to more intimate photographs that indicated not just the immediate effects of conflict, marginality, and injustice, but also the impact these situations would have on families and on future generations. When reflecting on the work of Mexican female photographers, feminist philosopher Eli Bartra notes that their images often transmit a certain ease, a feeling of informality that is apparent in the posture and expression of the subjects photographed (107). As one of the few women photojournalists in 1970s Mexico, it makes sense that Zarak, who was in her mid-twenties when she began working at unomásuno, would be an unexpected presence and less intimidating than her often older male colleagues. In their article on female war photographers, Westcott Campbell and Critcher point out that the work of women in a field which, even well into the 21st century, is still overwhelmingly male, is associated with a focus that goes beyond the immediacy of conflict, such as: attention to emotions, the aftermath of wars, behind the scenes visual narratives and the lives of women and non-elites (1542). These approaches, linked to the growing, although still limited, presence of female photographers in the field, are also some of the characteristics that would come to define Mexico’s New Photojournalism. Undoubtedly, Marta Zarak’s early work played a key role in determining the aesthetic and political focus of this photographic movement. Her photographs reveal a nuanced stance regarding the ethical responsibilities of photography, and at the same time, they highlight expressions of agency and solidarity that promote collective forms of political change. Notes 1 If anything, the juxtaposition of the wristwatch worn by the woman and her indigenous dress illustrates anthropologist Néstor García Canclini’s notion of hybrid modernity. 2 Although this photo stands alone, below it, in relatively small print, is an article from the column “Diputados en exámen” titled “Triques y grises”, signed by Juan Garzón Bates, that regularly comments happenings at the chamber. While it does not illustrate the article, the photograph nonetheless does dialogue with the text on the front page, adding visual details that are omitted from the article. 3 It is unclear if the woman came because of her own political conviction, or if she came as an “acarreada,” that is, as part of a group of people paid to support a given candidate. 4 This coup has been extensively documented. For more on this episode, see Flores Quintero, Mc Phail Fanger, and Mraz. Also worth consulting is Vicente Leñero’s novel Los periodistas, based on this episode. 5 Another shakeup would occur in 1983, when a sizeable group of journalists parted ways with Becerra Acosta, and eventually established the daily La Jornada, which would become one of the leading left-wing newspapers in Latin America, and where New Mexican Photojournalism would live its second and most lasting period. The 1983 rupture is extensively documented by Flores Quintero. La Jornada would come to publish some of the most iconic photographs of the 1994 Zapatista conflict in Chiapas. For more on this later period of New Photojournalism, see Alberto del Castillo. 6 According to Flores Quintero, unomásuno avoided graphic photographs because Becerra Acosta purposefully refused to associate visual representations of the pueblo with violence and death. 7 Various photographers who worked at unomásuno during its early period share this perspective, as mentioned in interviews quoted by Morales Flores, Mc Phail Fanger and Mraz. The importance of Becerra Acosta for the development of Mexican photojournalism also coincides Marta Zarak’s experience, as shared in our interview.

118  Viviane Mahieux 8 According to Mraz, the financial independence of photojournalists came about after Pedro Valtierra, on photographic assignment to Nicaragua, complained to Becerra Acosta (317). 9 For a detailed overview of Cowrie’s trajectory and her impact in Mexican photojournalism, as well as for an analysis of her presidential portraits, see McPhail Fanger. 10 Eugene Smith’s trip to Japan and the photojournalistic project he conducted has recently been the subject of a feature film, Minamata (2020). 11 Some of Zarak’s photographs were published in a special issue of Le Magazine OVO (Vol. 13, no. 52) on Guatemalan refugees in Mexico, along with photos by Pedro Valtierra, Christa Cowrie and others. 12 I have not yet been able to determine if this image was published in unomásuno. Although I was able to consult the dates when many Zarak’s photographs of Nicaragua were published (late September 1978), there are some issues of the newspaper that were not available for consultation. Zarak believes that this photograph was published, yet she does not recall the exact date (interview). 13 The quality of these images as they were published in unomásuno is quite low. This is partly the result of the texture of the paper on which they are printed, but also of how the images were sent to press. Zarak developed the photos in the bathroom of her hotel room in Nicaragua and sent them to the newspaper via fax (Zarak). 14 Meiselas also photographed the women witnessing the burning of the bodies in Estelí [seen here in Figure 3], although from a slightly different angle that reveals two other people who were left outside of the frame of Zarak’s image (see Teju Cole’s article, “What Does It Mean to Look at This?”, where he analyzes this image). Interestingly, Meiselas shot in color, while Koen Wessing, like Zarak, shot in black and white. This is possibly due to the medium their photographs were destined for (color magazines versus newspapers), although all of Zarak’s early photographs are shot in black and white, and she explains this aesthetic choice as a result of Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s influence (Zarak). On a side note, two of Wessing’s photos from the war in Nicaragua and taken in Estelí are analyzed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.

Works Cited Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Bartra, Eli. “Por las inmediaciones de la mujer y el retrato fotográfico: Natalia Baquedano y Lucero González”. Política y cultura, núm. 6., primavera 1996. 85–109. Alex Westcott Campbell & Charles Critcher. “The Bigger Picture: Gender and the Visual Rhetoric of Conflict”. Journalism Studies, 19:11, 1541–1561. Cole, Teju. “What Does It Mean to Look at This?”. New York Times Magazine. May 24, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/magazine/what-does-it-mean-to-look-at-this.html. Accessed April 1, 2023. Del Castillo, Alberto. Las mujeres de X’Oyep. México: Centro de la Imagen, 2013. https://issuu. com/c_imagen/docs/mujeres-de-xoyep. Accessed April 11, 2023. Flores-Quintero, Genoveva. Unomásuno: victorias perdidas del periodismo mexicano (1977– 1989). México: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2014. Mc Phail Ganger. Elsie Marguerite. La solemnidad del poder y sus fisuras en el fotoperiodismo de Christa Cowrie. México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2020. Monsiváis, Carlos. A ustedes les consta. Antología de la crónica en México. México: Ediciones Era, 2006. Morales Flores, Mónica. “El Unomásuno y el nuevo fotoperiodismo mexicano”. Comunicación y sociedad, Núm 32., mayo-agosto 2018, 211–237. Mraz, John, “The New Photojournalism of Mexico: 1976–1998”. History of Photography, 22:4, 313–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.1998.10443899. Accessed March 30, 2023. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Zarak, Marta. Interview. Conducted by Viviane Mahieux. November 1, 2022.

8

A Record of Things Seen The Photographs of Frida Hartz in Irma Pineda’s Guie’ni Zebe/La flor que se llevó Tamara R. Williams

In his 1972 essay, “Understanding a Photograph,” the English critic, novelist, painter, and poet, John Berger, describes a photograph as “bearing witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.” The human choice he is referring to “is not between photographing x and y: but between photographing at x moment or at y moment ….” “A photograph is effective,” he continues, “when the chosen moment which it records contains a quantum of truth which is generally applicable, which is as revealing about what is absent from the photograph as about what is present in it. The nature of this quantum of truth, and the ways in which it can be discerned, vary greatly. It may be found in an expression, an action, a juxtaposition, a visual ambiguity, a configuration …” “Every photograph,” he concludes, “is in fact a means of testing, confirming, and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle. Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use, and which can be used against us” (2–3). Grounded in Berger’s understanding of photography, below I examine the black and white photographs by Mexican photojournalist, Frida Hartz, featured in the 2013 edition of the book-length poem, Guie’ni zinebe/La flor que se llevó (Stolen Flower), by the Zapotec activist and poet, Irma Pineda. Specifically, I engage the works as a series of discrete choices in which the photographer records moments that speak to a specific social reality, mainly the impact of militarization on women and men in indigenous regions of southern Mexico. Moreover, having been hitherto absent from Mexican journalism, these photos constitute a repository of a specific world view that is ideologically driven. Published by Pluralia Ediciones as a part of the extraordinary book series, Voces nuevas de raíz Antigua: Poesía indígena contemporánea en México (New Voices from Ancient Roots: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry in Mexico), Pineda’s text might best be described as a book object due to several aspects of its design. It is a hardcover book arranged to include two versions—one in Diidxazá, the language of the Isthmus Zapotec, and one in Spanish—of an extended poem of approximately 460 lines divided into twenty-five parts. It includes a CD recording of the bilingual text read by the author and, most relevant for the purposes of this study, twenty-five carefully selected photographs by Frida Hartz placed throughout. As I argue elsewhere, supported by Hartz’s photographs and the bilingual audio-recordings, Pineda’s poem is an extended elegy that explores the neglected histories, the overwhelming loss, and the rage, but also the agency and collective resistance, of women from rural indigenous communities in Southern Mexico that have been victims of multiple kinds of violence. To the extent that the text gives voice to DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-12

120  Tamara R. Williams their mourning and loss, it calls to mind Judith Butler’s notion of a “tool of insurgency,” which she defines as poems that offer: a different kind of moral responsiveness, a kind of interpretation that may, under certain conditions, contest and explode the dominant schisms running through the national and military ideology. The poems both constitute and convey a moral responsiveness to a military rationale that has restricted moral responsiveness to violence in incoherent and unjust ways. (Butler, Frames 58) Pineda’s Guie’ni zinebe/La flor que se llevó thus unsettles the dominant rationale and justification for the so-called Mexican War on Drugs by shifting the frame to women who suffer disproportionately because of hyper-masculine military war-making. The text’s assembly of a poetic, visual, and auditory record, moreover, makes visible the complex identity rubric of indigenous women as it intersects with the biopolitical consequences of state-sponsored repression and violence for both indigenous women and men, for their communities, and for the vulnerability of, and hope for, a shared future. The inclusion of Hartz’s visual texts supports, broadens, and complicates the range and implications of Pineda’s poetic project in several ways.1 First, the images visually record indigenous women as neither static nor exotic, but as agents actively participating in a range of activities related to the political struggles for cultural freedoms, land, and survival in the still highly contested regions of Southern Mexico, generally, and Chiapas and Oaxaca, specifically. Second, viewed collectively, the photographs constitute an independent yet complementary visual commentary on the core affect of Pineda’s extended elegy, which is the alienation, fear, and grief experienced by indigenous women—the feminine body—as a consequence of the history of recruitment of indigenous men as soldiers, that is, as tools or weapons in the “war machine” assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 513); a recruitment that includes their education and training for, and assimilation to, a work regime that transforms them physically and mentally into an “hombre de traje verde” [a man in green] (Pineda 85). Their enlistment, finally, turns them into de facto transient agents of a state that inflict widespread physical and psychic damage on their communities of origin through the conjoined war strategies of rape of women and the destruction and deterritorialization of what were once indigenous lands. Pineda’s poem expresses the consequences of these strategies for women and the earth as follows: Mujer tierra soy Tierra abierta Tierra rasgada Tierra lastimada Tierra violentada (Pineda 67) [Earth mother am I Earth opened Earth torn Earth wounded Earth violated]2 The twenty carefully selected and placed black and white photos by Hartz in Guie’ni zinebe/La flor que se llevó thus project a visual chronicle of communities that inhabit

A Record of Things Seen 121 a shared space but that are split between indigenous civilians, on the one hand, and occupying soldiers—many of them indigenous—on the other. The formal and expressive elements—mainly the angles, composition lines, shapes, use of light, contrast, and texture—of her images, as well as implicit or explicit references to the broader geopolitical context, underscore this schism. Indeed, they reveal a photojournalist’s gaze keen on recording the pervasive tensions that continue to unsettle this contested region and the moments of resistance, particularly by indigenous women, against military occupation. Favoring the visual representation of this split, Hartz’s lens produces dynamic dialectical images that underscore the ongoing conflict, the fear, and alienation, as well as the agency and resistance of women within occupied communities that are the focal point of the Pineda poem. These images also challenge the reader to reflect upon the circumstances portrayed in both the visual and verbal texts to consider the external contextual factors that drive them. More significantly, while Hartz’s photojournalistic images introduce an eloquent visual intervention that complements Pineda’s text, they also go against the grain of the highly aestheticized, exoticized, or victimizing portraiture of indigenous communities, in general, and of indigenous women, in particular; images made popular by twentieth-century post-revolutionary modernists such as the now canonical photographers Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Tina Modotti, and more recently, Graciela Iturbide. By way of illustration is Woman from Tehuantepec (see Figure 8.1), a black and white image Modotti from 1929. In it, the woman carries a large painted gourd that

Figure 8.1 Tina Modotti. Woman from Tehuantepec. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Zigrosser, 1968, 1968-162-40.

122  Tamara R. Williams draws the eye and dominates the frame. The women subject, on the other hand, yields and poses—static and statuesque—to the photographer’s compositional techniques and representational predilections aligned with the aesthetics of the modernist movement in post-revolutionary Mexico (see Lowe 9). To understand the emergence of Hartz’s signature contestatory lens as represented in the photos selected for Pineda’s text, as well as the content and composition of her oeuvre, more generally, it is important to situate her work within the context of the emergence of the left-leaning nuevo fotoperiodismo (“new photojournalism”) movement in Mexico as well as from the related mission-driven labor practices of a daily, La Jornada, where she began working as a founding member in 1984 and where later she would be Head of Photography between 1988 and 2001 and establish a record of distinction for her coverage of women and indigenous rights in Southern Mexico and Central America. During this period, moreover, other broader societal changes in Mexico would inform her approach to human subjects, generally, and to women, in particular. These societal shifts include the strengthening of the feminist movement in Mexico, heightened global attention to human and civil rights violations, especially toward indigenous communities, due to repressive dictatorial regimes in the Latin American region, subsequent civil wars, and the increased militarization in Mexico and Central America in the last decades of the twentieth century. For the purposes of this essay, a key event in Mexico that Hartz would cover extensively was the 1994 uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which for many sectors in Mexican society, in the words of social justice and community organizer Hilary Klein, “represented the voice of the voiceless, and inspired a new sense of hope for Mexico’s poor and Indigenous citizens after decades of desperation.” Regarding Zapatista women, in particular, she continues: “In spite of very different contexts, what they [sic] accomplished—and how they accomplished it—offers women around the world an array of insights about how to achieve transformations on gender issues” (see Klein). Hartz emerges in, and is nurtured by, a context of significant and tumultuous transition in Mexican journalism. This period begins with the founding of El Excélsior by Julio Scherer García in 1976. It continues with subsequent upheavals driven by leftist dissent and protest that led first to the founding of the daily, Unomásuno, and then of La Jornada, in a sequence of events that John Mraz, in his La mirada inquieta: nuevo fotoperiodismo mexicano 1976–1996 (The Troubled Gaze: New Photojournalism in Mexico 1976–1996), characterizes as the first sustained and significant challenge from the left against what had been, in effect, a PRI-informed, supported, and controlled press that had dominated the culture and society of Mexico since 1940. This transition, he argues, is accompanied by ethically informed and ideologically driven shifts in the practice, purpose, and form of photojournalism that begins with Unomásuno under the leadership of Manuel Becerra Acosta. It is then augmented and enhanced in La Jornada, which, from its founding in 1984 and under the leadership of Carlos Payán3 and the photojournalist, Rogelio Cuéllar, would include, in the daily’s initial layout by Vicente Rojo, an unprecedented large front-page space for a prominent graphic image (see Mraz 31). Additionally, in what at the time was a departure from common practice, photojournalists, including Hartz, were included in daily production meetings and gradually gained substantial independence from reporters, most notably by being encouraged to pursue their own news stories for which they received their own per diems. La Jornada, moreover, is the first daily newspaper to credit photojournalists for published work and to grant them authorship rights (see Mraz 26–31). Overall, these shifts in journalistic labor practices

A Record of Things Seen 123 effectively elevated the status of the photojournalist craft and stimulated a healthy balance of collaboration and competition, which in turn, facilitated a visible increase in the quality in photojournalistic production. As noted by journalism ethicist, Wendy Wyatt, these shifts also contributed to the professionalization of journalists, generally, and of photojournalists, in particular. This, in turn, mitigated the incentives for participating in the systemic practices of the chayote— one-off payment—or the embute—a regular pay-off—by government agents in exchange for planting stories or pictures, twisting stories or altering photos, or spiking “shaming” pieces designed to suppress both social and political dissent (see Wyatt 56). Instead, photojournalists at La Jornada, for example, were encouraged to travel and pursue stories with a focus on investigation or analysis and effectively expand the paper’s geographical range and content to include and make visible that which had historically been excluded by the Mexican press. Rather than depend on international agencies for news from conflict-impacted regions in Mexico and Central America in the 1980s and 1990s, which at the time were viewed as complicit with U.S. interests in the area, both Unomásuno and La Jornada deployed photographers and reporters with the explicit intention of privileging “the Mexican lens” as first-line witnesses. Within this context, the photojournalism of this period would take an active role in representing current events impacting the region and in shaping the public’s understanding of them. Hartz cut her teeth during these transitions in Mexican journalistic practices, which, in turn, created a space and supported her vision for an alternative photojournalism that would directly challenge the official PRI discourse best exemplified by the newsreel. Based on interviews with key photojournalists of the period, Mraz outlines some of the key characteristics of the nuevo fotoperiodismo (new photojournalism) movement. These include a commitment to inclusivity made evident not only by a marked increase in the participation of women photojournalists but also in the inclusion of stories about people and places that hitherto had been excluded from the Mexican press. Images from this period focus on ordinary people and daily life in a manner representing a clear departure from the picturesque over-aestheticized and often exoticized representations associated with the post-revolutionary modernist photography. Instead, they reflect the progressive leftist ideological positions of the dailies by drawing attention to social inequality, rural poverty, urban challenges (public transportation, labor and industry, internal migration), as well as women and indigenous communities in action. There is also an intentional departure from yellow journalism, sensationalist reporting, as well as from the related postrevolutionary practice of photographing “misery”—that is, infrahuman conditions—as a form of social critique. Regarding formal features, the nuevo fotoperiodismo image sought an aesthetic that eschewed classical forms in favor of dramatic intensity generated through experimentation with angles that enhanced the subject and the composition, suggestive juxtapositions, dynamic figures in action, all of which activated a dialectic of solidarity and resistance both within and outside the frame.4 These characteristics are present in the images by Hartz selected for the Pineda text. Most are from her archive related to coverage of armed conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s in the Huasteca area of Veracruz and in Chiapas, among other places; armed conflicts that pitted state sponsored forces against indigenous civilians seeking cultural, territorial, legal (human and civil) rights. The corpus of her work from this period is distinctive in two interrelated ways. First, her photographs strive to record the tension and volatility that result from increased militarization in these regions. Additionally, they are

124  Tamara R. Williams intentional in making visible women’s participation and agency in a range of activities related to the area’s political struggles. Hartz underscores this commitment in an interview with Marcela Quiñones Martínez, where she states: No voy a buscar a la mujer remota, aislada, la que está haciendo sólo sus deberes. No es en el sentido antropológico en el que hago esta búsqueda. Es en el contexto social, en el momento histórico que se está viviendo; y cómo esas mujeres que están afuera, que están en el mercado, que trabajan en el campo y en la lucha social, salen a denunciar. Me interesa dejar testimonio de lo que hace la mujer, de cómo lucha y cómo lleva un gran peso, primero en la vida cotidiana y no se diga en lo que va más allá. (Quiñones Martínez 20) [I am not going to look for the remote, isolated woman, the one that is only doing her tasks. It is not in the anthropological sense that I engage in this search. It is in the social context, in the historical moment that they are living; and how it is that those women are outside, in the market, that they work in the fields and in the social struggle, they go out to denounce. I am interested in leaving a testimony of what the woman does, of how she fights and carries a great weight, first in daily life and I can’t even say beyond that.] By way of illustration, in Barricada (Barricade) (see Figure 8.2), Hartz captures the impact of occupation on daily village life in the Municipality of Venustiano Carranza,

Figure 8.2 Frida Hartz. Barricada (Barricade). Municipality of Venustiano Carranza, Chiapas, Mexico, April 1997. Digital Monochrome Negative. Source: Courtesy of Frida Hartz.

A Record of Things Seen 125 Chiapas, Mexico, in the wake of the Zapatista uprising in 1997.5 Foregrounded and dominating the frame on the left is the vertical figure of a soldier standing in front of sandbag barricade, beside a cement pillar, and staring impassively at the camera; his right hand on the trigger while his left relaxes over the barrel as if at the ready. Two other soldiers—one positioned behind the aforementioned soldier on the left side of the frame, and another across the road on a diagonal to the right—mirror his stance. The diagonal lines that connect the three draw a triangle that emphasizes the cyborg-like uniformity, dominance, and omnipresence of the military in the community. The tension of this photo, however, is enhanced by the presence of a woman and child walking along the street through the occupied space from the right side of the frame toward the center. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the pair, and ultimately to the woman’s white umbrella. Opened and held sideways to protect the child from the sun, the precarious shield also evokes the image of a white flag, the internationally recognized sign that signals a ceasefire or surrender and used to allow safe passage. Adding to the composition of the photo are the cluster of manhole covers in the lower right frame that together resemble an amulet-like face with eyes giving protection against evil and danger. The striking juxtaposition of the assemblage of soldiers in full gear, on the one hand, and the fragile strength of the woman and child as they move through the contested shared space, produces a dynamic image that is a quintessential quality of Hartz photography. As in Barricada, Hartz’s Retén Militar (Military Checkpoint) (see Figure 8.3) captures a dynamic image that records indigenous civilians navigating a military checkpoint on the road to San Andrés Larrainzar in Chiapas in 1998. The photo’s composition traces a

Figure 8.3 Frida Hartz. Retén Militar (Military Checkpoint). Three Indigenous Civilians (Two Women, One Man) Walking Past a Military Checkpoint on the Road to San Andrés Larrainzar, Chiapas, Mexico. 1998. Digital Monochrome Negative. Source: Courtesy of Frida Hartz.

126  Tamara R. Williams diagonal line between the cluster of two indigenous women and a man near the left edge of the frame, who walk away from the three foregrounded soldiers facing the opposite direction on the right of the frame. Both groups share a road in a rural mountainous area but do not interact. Rather, the clusters of figures look away from each other except for the woman wearing the striped shawl who appears to look back cautiously toward the camera. The uniformity, size, and proportion of the frame dominated by the soldiers represent the weaponized component of the state’s war machine. While both groups share a road, the distance between them, as well as the contrast between the relaxed stance of the soldiers, on the one hand, and the hurried gate and averted gaze of the three indigenous figures, give expression to the sense of fear and alienation in the occupied territory. Besides Hartz and her camera, the only witness to the scene, to the repression and violence it expresses and the fear it promotes, is the tree at the center of the photo, which arches attentively toward the swiftly moving party as if to protect them. The image of the tree, as well as the compositional and affective qualities of this image by Hartz, is echoed in the verses of Pineda’s poem that share the same page with the photo: No mires hacia atrás que hasta los árboles callan Es el silencio que impone el miedo mudos testigos son de las visceras derramadas (53) [Don’t look back that even the trees hush It is the silence that fear imposes mute witnesses are they of the scattered viscera] Besides documenting the alienation and fear of indigenous women within communities occupied by the state, Hartz’s photos also feature them as collective agents defiantly participating in a range of activities related to the region’s political struggles for cultural autonomy, land, and survival. These include non-violent protests staged to resist military incursions into resource-rich territories, including national parks and preservation areas, considered sacred and/or vital to the livelihood of indigenous communities. In Fila india (Single File) (see Figure 8.4), for example, her camera bears witness to a highly organized mobilization of women from Zapatista base communities in Chiapas walking single file to provide support at a main highway blocked and occupied by troops of the federal army in Camino Real San Quintín—Amador Hernández, in the area of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, a protected natural area in Chiapas, Mexico. The endless line of women curves along the contours of the land flanked by trees as if to suggest an organic connection with it. The camera angle guides the reader to an appreciation, both aesthetic and semantic, of the coordination, strength, and determination of the women. It also invites the viewer to ask: where the women are coming from? Where are they going? And what is their common purpose? Is the masked man on the sidelines leading them or protecting them, or both? Taken from above, moreover, the image draws the viewer in and into close proximity to the sinuous line and the collective action from where we can observe the unique details of several of the women next in line: the black mask, the thick walking stick, the water bottle without a cap, the flowered blouses with embroidery, the bare feet, and the infant child strapped on one women’s hip, etc. This proximity and

A Record of Things Seen 127

Figure 8.4 Frida Hartz. Fila india (Single File). Women from Zapatista Base Communities Walking Single File to Provide Support at a Main Highway Blocked and Occupied by Troops of the Federal Army in Camino Real San Quintín—Amador Hernández, in the Area of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, a Protected Natural Area in Chiapas, Mexico. September 1999. Digital Monochrome Negative. Source: Courtesy of Frida Hartz.

perspective, finally, indicate the trust the photographer enjoys in the community, her solidarity with the women’s action, and her commitment to give their struggle dignity and visibility. Hartz’s commitment to capture the courage of women to resist and oppose is also evident in Resisten con flores (They Resist with Flowers) (see Figure 8.5). Taken in the same area as the aforementioned Fila india, this image captures women of Zapatista base communities blocking the advance of the military by placing white flowers on barbed wire. Donning indigenous dress and bandanas as face masks to protect their identities, the women are foregrounded in front of a tangled barbed wire barrier behind which stands a line of uniformed military police whom they confront. The soldiers appear motionless and barely visible in the photo as their figures blend imperceptibly with the barbed wire mesh. The exception is the crestfallen profile of the one soldier second from the right possibly suggesting an unsettledness, or shame, or sadness upon having to participate in the standoff. The vertical uniformity of, and the repetition of the word policía on the shields in the upper right hand of the frame reiterate the men’s affiliation with the state. The three women, who foreground and dominate the image, are on the

128  Tamara R. Williams

Figure 8.5 Frida Hartz. Resisten con flores (They Resist with Flowers). Women from Zapatista Base Communities Block the Advance of the Military by Placing White Flowers on Barbed-Wire in Camino Real San Quintín—Amador Hernández, in the Area of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, a Protected Natural Area in Chiapas, Mexico. September 1999. Digital Monochrome Negative. Source: Courtesy of Frida Hartz.

offensive in an act of peaceful civil disobedience. Their eyes are focused and intent, and their hands and arms actively engaged in placing flowers on the barbed wire mesh. In what appears to be a pattern in Hartz’s compositions, the division of men and women is marked by clear lines, in this case a diagonal running from the left lower corner to the right upper corner. The diagonal is accentuated by the mess of barbed wire softened by randomly placed flowers and underscores the photographer’s sensitivity to the intractable split of a community divided against itself. The grief, anger, and defiance of indigenous women are best observed in Huelga de los machetes (Strike of the Machetes) (see Figure 8.6), which documents a strike and sit-in before the government palace of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico, involving women from the communities of Tila, Taniperla, Tumbalá, Flores Magón, El Bosque, and San Juan de la Libertad, among other communities from the northern zone of Chiapas. Two women, each holding a child, stare ahead and beyond the camera with expressions of both sadness and dignity. The photo is taken from below, augmenting their stature and enhancing their aura of strength and forbearance. The focal point, however, is the child in the center left holding a piece of wood shaped like a machete that is inscribed with the name of a deceased, possibly a father or a brother. He places the handle of the “toy” machete upon his cheek as if to protect it, or himself, while staring with tender defiance directly at the camera. The roughly hewn non-functional wooden machetes signify the absence of the men—of fathers and brothers—while also

A Record of Things Seen 129

Figure 8.6 Frida Hartz. Huelga de los machetes (Strike of the Machetes). Strike and Sit-in Before the Government Palace of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico, Involving Women from the Communities of Tila, Taniperla, Tumbalá, Flores Magón, El Bosque, and San Juan de la Libertad, among other Communities from the Northern Zone of Chiapas. August 1998. Digital Monochrome Negative. Source: Courtesy of Frida Hartz.

evoking the male indigenous campesinos strong identification with, and connection to the land. Underscoring a dominant theme both of Pineda’s Guie’ni zinebe/La Flor que se llevó and Hartz’s photojournalism, the image invites the viewer to reflect on the absence of the deceased men, victims of state-sponsored military violence either as an outcome of their military service or as casualties of the ongoing aggression and occupation of contested territories. Drawn in to lock eyes with both children, the viewer cannot help but consider the precarity of a community facing an uncertain future on two accounts. On the one hand is the inevitability of future confrontations with a formidable state military apparatus and its far more sophisticated weapons of war. On the other is the loss of the men from the community and its existential and biopolitical implications in terms of the communities’ future survival and/or possible extinction. As demonstrated above, most of Hartz’s photographs of men selected for inclusion in Guie’ni zinebe/La Flor que se llevó feature indigenous military enlistees engaged in a number of occupation-related activities including active combat. It is to these transformed men that the aggrieved poetic subject addresses her grief and rage asking them directly: ¿Aún eres un hombre? Permanece algo de humanidad en ti? ¿Quién eres ahora después de calzar esas rígidas botas con sus puntas de metal? (Pineda 17)

130  Tamara R. Williams [Are you still a man? Does anything human remain in you? ¿Who are you since you wear those rigid boots with steel toes?] In a distinct departure from the critique of indigenous military or “men in green,” however, is the inclusion of Hartz’s Cinturón de Paz (Peace Chain) (see Figure 8.7), which features civilian men in a human peace chain guarding the installations for the Dialogue for Peace and Reconciliation in Chiapas in 1996 along with members of the Red Cross and federal army. The image represents men in an alternative—i.e., non-military—role in the community and provides a visual echo of the gestures of the elusive reconciliation that conclude Pineda’s elegy and which includes members of the armed forces and others forging vision for peace and a hope-filled future. Pineda’s vision for peace and reconciliation notwithstanding, the narrative dynamism and complex compositional lines in Cinturón de Paz persist in documenting the underlying tensions in the region. On the vertical plain are two rows of men moving in opposite directions on one horizontal plain. One row of men is of military police—two facing each other and two facing away from the camera. All stand tall, donning black capes and helmets, resembling a quartet of onerous crows in hazy crepuscular light. A second row of three indigenous men, shorter in stature and heads hanging down, walk in single file parallel to, in front of, and toward the left of

Figure 8.7 Frida Hartz. Cinturón de Paz (Peace Chain). Human Peace Chains of Civil Society, Red Cross, and Federal Army for the Dialogue for Peace and Reconciliation in Chiapas, Mexico. Digital Monochrome Negative. March 1996. Source: Courtesy of Frida Hartz.

A Record of Things Seen 131 the frame. The focal point of the image, however, is at the center where the Hartz’s lens frames an indigenous man in a dimmed rectangular archway flanked on either side by a member of the Military Police (PM), which suggests a threshold between the present and an uncertain future. That the two rows of men walk in opposite directions and appear separated from each other by wide empty vertical gray spaces draws attention to their divisions from the standpoint of their, size, ethnicity, class, military rank, and power, producing a sense of tension and alienation. This tension is augmented, finally, by the overall penumbral gloom and grainy texture of the image that projects the suspended moment as eerie and liminal and still threatened by unknown forces. If the bilingualism—Diidxazá and Spanish—shapes and strengthens the uniquely Zapotec poetic space of Guie’ni zinebe/La flor que se llevó, the inclusion of Hartz’s photographs also augments Pineda’s poetic project in numerous ways. First, the twenty black and white photos primarily of indigenous women, or of indigenous women sharing spaces with occupying forces, produce a visual dimension that reflects and supports the primary social, political, and culturally specific concerns of the text. In addition to documenting women as actors and agents of resistance, the photos capture the disproportionate biopolitical impact of state-sponsored war on their daily lives, their bodies, and the bodies of the men from their communities. Second, and more important, is that Hartz’s photos put into play an inter-medial dynamic that fortifies the poem’s message inscribing it with the weight, authority, and legitimacy of the archive of photojournalistic documentation. And third, the images correspond to the photographer’s coverage of the armed conflict in Chiapas in a text written by Pineda, a Zapotec activist from the Isthmus region of Oaxaca, thereby broadening the text’s scope and implications. Indeed, combined, the verbal and visual dimensions of Guie’ni zinebe/La flor que se llevó produce a unified, poignant, and compelling story that makes visible the geographical range, the complex cultural implications, as well as the traumatic impact of the volume’s core concern, which is state-sponsored gendered violence against indigenous women and their communities perpetrated by indigenous men enlisted by the military. By extension, the volume summons readers to examine this schismatic issue, and its biopolitical implications multi-regional social, political, and economic phenomenon with ongoing devastating consequences for the survivability of the areas indigenous communities that have struggled for centuries. Extraordinary in terms of quantity, quality, and diversity, Mexican photography in general, and Mexican photojournalism, in particular, has received limited critical attention even while, as a visual discourse, it has played a significant role in shaping the post-revolutionary nationalist imaginary. More specifically, as a field of cultural production, the emergence of nuevo fotoperiodismo in the nineteen seventies exposed viewers to ways of seeing that countered repetitive nationalist dominant tropes by making visible the strategies being deployed by the State apparatus to divide, conquer, displace, and eliminate—through cultural assimilation or annihilation—its subaltern communities, as well as the resistance to these strategies in a struggle for collective survival. The work of Frida Hartz as well as the nature, purpose, and production of the nuevo fotoperiodismo project more generally, understood the crucial role of photography as a weapon in an ideological struggle for and against repression that needed to be understood, dismantled, and transformed into a tool for insurgency, collective resistance, and cultural resilience. Much remains to be done to tend to and understand the workings of this rich photo archive and its role in shaping modern Mexico’s culture and society.

132  Tamara R. Williams Notes 1 I use “visual text” here intentionally to underscore the degree to which Hartz’s photographs produce what Alexander Gallway, in his examination of new media, refers to a as “the interface effect.” In this conceptualization, the photograph is understood not as an artifact. Rather, it is a mode of mediation, an archive that, when activated, “appears instantly within its own illumination; the mode of transmitting returns from a far-off place; the mode of processing wells up like a flood of pure energy” (see: Galloway, The Interface Effect 18). 2 This and all other translations of Pineda’s text are mine. 3 Payán was formerly a journalist for El machete, associated with the Mexican communist party, and for the journal Memoria published by the Centro de Estudios Para el Movimiento Obrero Socialista. 4 These characteristics constitute a summary of characteristics identified by Mraz, John, as part of his La mirada inquieta: Nuevo fotoperiodismo mexicano, pages 29–103. 5 Details—location, participants, date—related to Figures 2–7 were provided by Frida Hartz.

Works Cited Berger, John. “Understanding a Photograph.” Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things, 1972. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54c6a9dde4b0908825a17018/t/5b8c0f71cd8366d 4a0168eb7/1535905649559/JohnBerger-Understanding±a±photograph.pdf. Accessed May 30, 2022. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Life is Grievable. New York: Verso, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Klein, Hilary. “A Spark of Hope: The Ongoing Lesson of the Zapatista Revolution 25 Years On.” NACLA, January 18, 2019. https://nacla.org/news/2019/01/18/spark-hope-ongoing-lessons-zapatista-revolution-25-years. Accessed June 5, 2022. Lowe, Sarah M. Tina Modotti: Photographs. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995. Mraz, John. La mirada inquieta: Nuevo fotoperiodismo mexicano: 1976–1996. México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1996. Pineda, Irma. Guie’ni zinebe/La flor que se llevó. Mexico: Pluralia Editores, 2013. Quiñones Martínez, Marcela. “Mujeres indígenas a través de la lente de Frida Hartz.” Cuicuilco. Núm. 59, enero-abril, 2014. 9–39. Williams, Tamara R. “Gender, Indigeneity, and the Biopolitics of War: Irma Pineda’s Guie’ni Zinebe/La flor que se llevó.” Peterson, Amanda and Cheyla Samuelson, Eds. Beyond the Narconovela: Alternative Narratives of Violence in Contemporary Mexico. Forthcoming. Wyatt, Wendy D. Ed. “Professionalism and Journalism Ethics in Post-Authoritarian Mexico: Perceptions of News for Cash, Gifts, and Perks.” The Ethics of Journalism Individual, Institutional, and Cultural Influences. New York: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2014.

9

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s Phototextual Explorations by Maruch Sántiz Gómez and Xunka’ López Díaz1 Julia R. Brown

1992 agrarian laws legalized the privatization of ejidos, or territories owned and governed collectively by mestizo and Indigenous small-scale farming communities. National and multinational corporations could now buy up ejidos for industrial projects like mining, logging, or large-scale agricultural operations (Harvey 101; Teatrault et al. 311; Stephen 104). Two years later, Canada, the United States, and Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Association agreement, which allowed the United States to import its subsidized agricultural products—like corn—to Mexico, without the burden of tariffs. Thus emerged a “a paradigmatic case of neoliberal extractivism” (Veltmeyer et al. 10), and the consequences for farmers, their livelihoods, and their communities were grave enough to bring Maya and mestizo activists in Chiapas to declare a revolution against the Mexican government—that is, to organize as the Ejército Nacional de Liberación Zapatista (hereafter EZLN), also commonly known as Zapatistas. Photographers from within Mexico and from abroad flocked to Chiapas to document the Zapatista rebellion. Working on behalf of the press or governmental organizations these photographers were expected to shoot images that would visually index the Zapatistas as a global spectacle of subaltern communities in the Global South becoming politically engaged. Consequently, most of the images shot during the 1990s in Chiapas focused on Zapatistas activities but paid less attention to the day-to-day life of rural mestizo and Indigenous farmers in the region experiencing the same displacement, food insecurity, and discrimination that had catalyzed the organization’s formation.2 Unlike many foreign-born photographers active in Chiapas during the 1990s, Carlota Duarte— Mexican-American and Catholic sister of the Society of the Sacred Heart—was there to put Tsotsil and Tseltal Maya locals behind the lens rather than in front of it. In 1992, she established the Chiapas Photography Project (CPP) in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a city that would be occupied by the Zapatistas two years later. In Duarte’s own words, “since 1992, the CPP has provided Indigenous Maya peoples of Chiapas with opportunities for cultural and artistic self-expression through photography,” helping them develop skills in camera use and darkroom procedures and to encourage the use of photography for their own purposes.3 The CPP’s imperative for deploying photography in Indigenous communities was drastically different from that of other photography initiatives or projects. Throughout the twentieth century, most photographs taken in and of Indigenous communities within Mexico were the work of anthropologists (Manuel Gamio, Getrude Duby Blom, Julio de la Fuente) or professional photographers (Mariana Yampolsky, Nacho López, Graciela Iturbide). These photographers frequently collaborated with Mexican governmental DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-13

134  Julia R. Brown organizations such as the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenista Institute) or the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Department of Public Education) and they held a tacit or explicit understanding of the kinds of photographs that the institutions sought. In particular, both of the aforementioned institutions were interested in images that would provide anthropologists, educators, public school students, and a broad non-Indigenous public with a visual index of Indigenous material cultures, activities related to daily life, and bodies. These photographs would, in turn, contribute to the production of knowledge that could help shape the field of anthropology along with education policy, social services, and assimilationist strategies employed by the State. Duarte, by contrast, wanted workshop participants to use photography for their own purposes, and to choose and portray their own subjects in ways that made sense to them (Duarte “Las fotografías” 8).4 The result of the CPP’s groundbreaking mission was the emergence onto the national and global photography scene of artists like Maruch Santíz Gómez and Xunka’ López Díaz, as well as the publication of their globally circulating photo-textual books, respectively titled Creencias de nuestros antepasados (Beliefs of Our Ancestors) (Sántiz Gómez, 1998), and mi hermanita Cristina, una niña Chamula (my little sister Cristina, a Chamula girl) (López Díaz, 2000). Indeed, by the time Sántiz Gómez’ book was published in 1998, some of its images it had already gained a national audience through Luna Córnea’s fifth issue in 1994, a publication indicating mutual recognition between the magazine and the artist as determinants of the direction of photography in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century.5 Maruch Sántiz Gomez and Xunka López Diaz’s entrance into the CPP came on the heels of decades of political and industrial change for Mexico broadly and especially for Chiapas. These changes, exacerbated by neoliberal economic reforms during the 1980s and early 1990s, impacted Indigenous communities in and around San Juan Chamula, as well as those in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Both Sántiz Gómez and López Díaz were young when they began working with the CPP, and each had a full command of the Spanish language as well as their native Bats’il k’op (Tsotsil). Maruch was a young mother living in Cruzton and commuting to San Cristóbal de las Casas to participate in CPP, while Xunka’ was the eldest of a large family based in San Cristóbal. Both women turned the camera on their surroundings: particularly on family, acquaintances, and familiar objects, and in doing so bore witness to the subtle and overt ways their communities had been impacted by Mexican economic and political shifts. Moreover, the product of their respective photographic forays would be two of the first books of photography by Indigenous women ever to be published, making Creencias and mi hermanita Cristina twentieth-century benchmarks for cultural production. Each book features photographs of combs, plastic sandals, sleeping children, and baskets of chiles, presented opposite captions describing a belief or use for the object. The textual captions presented in each book narrativize the images in a way that allows them to be interpreted, though the images themselves can also be “read” as Sántiz Gómez herself suggests (13). Photojournalistic production in Chiapas during the 1990s largely captured the most hyper-visible consequences of the economic, social, and cultural shifts mentioned at the start of this chapter. By contrast, in their books Sántiz Gómez and López Díaz reflect on and represent the intimate and ongoing shifts in their own lives along with those of their families and communities. The books allude to changing economic conditions, attitudes toward everyday objects, intergenerational knowledge, and embodied practice—changes underlying the scenes captured by photojournalists and critiqued by the Zapatista’s media face. These are consequences of the neoliberal moment, described

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s 135 elsewhere as shifting divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, ways of life and thought, attachments to the land and habits of the heart (Harvey 3). Still, both maintain their distance from a totalizing discourse aiming to claim some universal reality of a revolutionized and Marxist global south in opposition to neoliberal policies. Instead, both books invite readers to contemplate the significance of the 1990s for Indigenous Maya communities as reflected in everyday material life, as well as the implications of this moment for the relationship between past, present, and future generations of Tsotsil communities. The centrality of material objects rather than the human form in both women’s works is significant not only because it constitutes a rupture with photography used for institutional knowledge production: it also acknowledges the affective power the artists, their families, their communities, and their cultural traditions ascribe to such objects. An object cannot hold affect, but in its circulation and in the meaning assigned to that object, the object accumulates what Sarah Ahmed calls “affective value” (“Affective Economies” 120). A sash, a pair of shoes, a comb, a comal, a stick, or even a woven basket filled with vegetables gain affective power by virtue of its location in a space where a person experiences a particular affect, or by virtue of the timing at which that object appears. “To experience an object as being affective or sensational,” Ahmed observes, “is to be directed not only toward an object but to what is around that object, which includes what is behind the object, the conditions of its arrival” (The Promise 25). On the other hand, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari remind us, art—paintings, literature, or a photograph—is a being of sensation; the piece of art is a representation of affect independent of how the spectator perceives it (465). In other words, a photography book indexing a series of material objects is imbued with and contains its own affect. Ahmed, Deleuze, and Guattari, all emphasis the affective power of objects, and the intensity of the photobooks by Sántiz Gómez and López Díaz is undeniable. As with the photographs, the books have circulated across time and space, and within and across communities, and across cultures. The photographs capture a single moment in time—a time of great upheaval for Maya communities in Chiapas to be sure—but also transcend the eventhood of a singular point in time because of the objects they depict. As Elizabeth Edwards argues, the photographic object, along with whatever objects they might represent, are best understood “through successive moments of consumption across space and time” (“Objects of Affect” 222). The photography discussed in this chapter deals with the material objects of daily life, and its textual referents and its affective power gesture to the conditions of arrival both for the photographs themselves and their material subjects. In other words, the material objects subjected in the photographs may shed, acquire, and accumulate new uses or significances with time, and as such can serve as reminders that rural agricultural communities, especially Indigenous ones, continue to experience major social, economic, and cultural shifts because of neoliberalism’s afterlives and of the emergent consequences and opportunities of globalization. Creencias de nuestros antepasados: Feeling Household Objects Maruch Sántiz Gómez’ monochromatic photography book indexes the immaterial, intergenerational knowledge associated with daily material life in her home village of Cruzton. Subtitled, “de nuestros antepasados” (“of our ancestors”), the book associates itself both with the 1990s as with an earlier time. Creencias considers beliefs associated with older generations, and Sántiz Gómez, active as an artist in the 1990s, conveys the reality

136  Julia R. Brown of a changing community and culture in linking the past and present through material objects. Even as her photographs evoke the past while also transmitting knowledge and affective relationships to everyday objects across generations, the book’s introduction, and the ways in which the objects are photographed gesture to changing perceptions and intensities related to household objects, in addition to changing beliefs and knowledge. While Sántiz Gómez’ photographs acknowledge these changes, they carefully distinguish themselves from the visual economies of salvage ethnography photography, used by visual anthropologists since the early twentieth century to document the lifeways of colonized Indigenous peoples whose disappearance was assumed to be immanent in the face of Western modernization.6 Pushing back against this legacy, Sántiz Gomez´ images prove that economic and cultural changes related to modernity are not synonymous with cultural erasure. Indeed, her photographs become the mechanism through which ancestral knowledge will transmit to future generations. In Gabriela Vargas Cetina’s preface to the book, she clarifies that “some creencias have been recounted by [Sántiz Gómez’] mother, her father, her grandparents, and great grandparents. Others she has gathered from elders in her birthplace, Cruzton and in other nearby Chamula hamlets” (13). The Chamula elders whose lives likely pre-date the creation of color photography, are an absent presence in the book. Their faces and voices are unidentified, yet the objects of their daily lives and knowledges evoke them. Said objects both demonstrate or relate to the beliefs described in text on the page face and link the impermanence of Chamula material life to the impermanence of the generation of elders from whom Sántiz Gómez has collected the beliefs. As Vargas Cetina also notes, “Maruch wants the new Chamula generations to know the cultural legacy of the elders, so that they learn and remember” (13). Pairing elder knowledge with photographs of everyday objects, anonymous children, or animals makes the book didactic for learners. It also acknowledges the fact that free-market capitalism, large-scale migrations, and the loss of heritage language may alter the kinds of knowledge available to young Chamulans and may change their relationships—affective and experiential—to their material world. In Sántiz Gómez’ book, spectators re-encounter—and reconsider—familiar objects, tools, and spaces. To a young person born and raised in Cruzton, the photographic subject on page forty-nine would likely be recognized as a basket of chiles de árbol (Figure 9.1), the undulating skin and spindly bodies evincing the identity of the chiles. Still, the photo is in grayscale and thus the intense reds, greens, and browns of the chile, the basket colors, and the earth colors are absent. The elder wisdom presented on page forty-eight—the opposite side of the spread—may or may not be familiar to a spectator: Ich/Es malo sonar las semillas del chile./It is bad to shake chile seeds./Mu xtun jchijolantik bek’ich, mi la jchijolantike mu la xch’anij ku’untik olol./No se deben sonar las semillas de chile, porque al abrazar a un niño llora mucho/Chile seeds should not be shaked because when hugging a child he will cry a lot. (48) In the absence of a child or adult in the image, the basket of chiles acquires its color and with it, its referent. Since the four lines of text take up less space on the page than the basket of chiles, the spectator’s eye is invited to first travel over the photograph and then left to the text. For distinct generations of Cruzton inhabitants, interactions with the book will differ: Sántiz Gómez explains that “the photographs can be read, and it is easier than understanding the texts because many people do not know how to read words”

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s 137

Figure 9.1 Maruch Sántiz Gómez. “Ich/Es malo sonar las semillas del chile./It is bad to shake chile seeds.” Cruzton, Chiapas. 1992–1998. In Sántiz Gómez, Maruch. Creencias de nuestros antepasados. Chiapas Photography Project, 1998. 49. Source: Courtesy of the Artist.

(qtd. Vargas Cetina, 13). Though the text may not be read by the older generations, it is likely accessible to younger generations who have grown up in the context of migration and increased bilingualism or monolingualism in Spanish, and indeed, “the text is not a title but integral to the concept of the creencias.”7 Presenting the elders’ wisdom in Maya Tsotsil, Spanish, and English acknowledges a reality in which younger generations of Chamulans, bilingual or perhaps trilingual, will learn from elders through written word, books, or even social media. However generational differences might manifest in spectator approaches to the photographs and the text in the book, Sántiz Gómez’ book insists on the continuities between generations of Tsotsil families. Dried chiles, a distinctive and time-honored ingredient in Mesoamerican cuisine, are an inheritance unto themselves and link contemporary Chamula recipes with those eaten by the ancestors dating back centuries—if not millennia. The sensorial experience of cooking and eating chiles may be an affective one. Chiles can be smelled touched, tasted, and even heard. Chiles de árbol, which tend to be spicy, can elicit a strong physical reaction. Experiences in the fields, the kitchen, the market, or at mealtime can also be associated with these physical sensations. The photograph, along with the child-rearing wisdom it connotes, alludes to the plethora of physical sensations or even feelings and emotional memories tied to preparing and cooking chiles in the presence of family. Sántiz Gómez, learning from elders while raising a small child herself, emphasizes the transcendence of certain sensorial and affective experience across time and

138  Julia R. Brown even space. In the 1990s, elders in Cruzton may prepare a salsa alongside their children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. At the same time, those with access to exported goods from Mexico in places as far from Chamula as Lagos, Nigeria; Seoul, South Korea; or Toronto, Canada might be doing the same. Though distinct generations may hold different kinds of knowledge or may acquire knowledge distinctly, Sántiz Gómez’ image of chiles and shared wisdom about small children is presented with the tacit understanding that younger generations of Chamulans still enjoy the taste of chile de árbol and still strive to care for their children. The comb, like chiles in a basket, is equally to be expected in the domestic sphere. As with the chiles, the comb is associated with care for the self or another: a person might use the comb to detangle or braid their own hair, as they might the hair of the young or the elderly. The light gray comb, lying on cracked earth and photographed in a close-up shot, marks a contrast with the dark gray of the cracked soil upon which the comb rests (Figure 9.2). The comb’s three smooth sides run in perfect parallel to the edges of the photographic frame, lending the comb the appearance of being carefully staged. The deliberateness of the image removes the otherwise innocuous appearance of the comb—lying on the ground rather than a table or chair, the comb, like the basket of chiles, appears at once familiar and foreign. Rendered in black and white, it is impossible for the unfamiliar spectator to discern the comb’s material: it may be bone, wood, or plastic.

Figure 9.2 Maruch Sántiz Gómez. “Jach’ubil/El peine/The Comb.” Cruzton, Chiapas. 1992–1998. Santiz Gomez, Maruch. Creencias de nuestros antepasados. Chiapas Photography Project, 1998. 75. Source: Courtesy of the Artist.

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s 139 The photograph itself insists upon the comb’s significance: within the larger context of the book, the comb takes on meaning as one of the many household objects used, purchased, or even handcrafted by aging relatives or ancestors who have since passed away. Grayscale photography, the mode of choice for Sántiz Gómez art, evokes early photography and with it the passage of time. The ancestor’s belief is printed on the opposite page: “Jach’ubil/El peine/The comb/Mu xtun jtus joltik ta ik’ osil, yu’un la chcham jme’tik./Es malo peinsarse en la noche, porque se dice que morirá nuestra madre./It is bad to comb your hair at night/because it is said that your mother will die.” (74). This subtly ludic threat belies a deeper, more bittersweet truth: the irony in the piece of wisdom is that no matter how much one might wish to for one’s parents to stay alive, the passing of the mother or maternal figure—the same individual who often is responsible for combing and styling a child’s hair and often for passing down knowledge to children and grandchildren—is a fact of life. The relationship between the comb and intergenerational care is implied in Sántiz Gómez’ book, but explicit in the López Díaz, which includes a photo of the nine-year-old Cristina having her hair braided by an older sister (Figure 9.3). Pairing the photograph and the piece of wisdom, Sántiz Gómez (herself a young mother at the time she was preparing the book) emphasizes the transcendence of attachment between children and their caregivers. A younger Chamulan, regardless of

Figure 9.3 Xunka’ López Díaz. “tspech’bun jol jvix/mi hermana me está trenzando/my sister is braiding my hair.” San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. 1992–2000. López Díaz, Xuna. mi hermanita Cristina, una niña chamula. Chiapas Photography Project, 2000. 62. Source: Reproduced with permission of the artist. Courtesy of the Chiapas Photography Project.

140  Julia R. Brown their estrangement from the wisdom of elders or even from Cruzton, is likely to relate to the shared wisdom and to have their own memory of having their hair combed and styled by a guardian—perhaps a mother. On the affective power of everyday objects like the comb Czikszentmihalyi et al. observe that, Even purely functional things serve to socialize a person to a certain habit or way of life and are representative signs of that way of life … The emotion that things evoke is also an interpretation or interference, a sign or symbol of one’s attitude. The development of symbols … in a cultural tradition mean[s] that people [can] compare their actions with those of their ancestors to anticipate new experiences. (21) If the comb is a symbol of the attitudes of elders and younger generations, then the comb symbolizes both the continuity of love and care between generations despite certain significant shifts in day-to-day life. The photographic subjects in Santiz Gomez’ book represent ways of life and the wisdom printed beside them imply attitudes and affective relations within those ways of life. Comparing the photographic subjects, be they baskets of chiles or combs, invites readers from everywhere but especially from Cruzton to consider how their relationships to objects compare with those of their ancestors. Ultimately, as Czikszentmihalyi et al. suggest, the differences in the ways multiple generations use—or think about—the same objects evince how day-to-day life is changing for younger generations of Cruzton residents. Santiz Gómez’ book invites the reader to consider those changes without identifying them explicitly or telling the reader how to feel about those changes. In his preface to Sántiz Gómez’ book, Hermann Bellinghausen claims that “the rural domain of the Tsotsiles still hasn’t reached the paradise of industrial waste. Here objects are not disposable. An empty can last through years of service, a plastic bag has ten lives” (18). His observation is a reference to the growing circulation of plastic products meant for single use. Bellinghausen’s comment evinces another kind of change tacitly referenced in Creencias; namely, the shifting material identity of everyday household objects that now circulate not only among Cruzton and Chamula or Cruzton and Mexico City, but now also with the maquiladora-speckled cities of Juarez or Tijuana, with Shanghai, China, or with Taiwan. Bellinghausen’s observation implies the anticipation of a changing relationship to material objects, yet Sántiz Gómez’ phototextual representations of beliefs and quotidian objects acknowledge the affective power of objects across generations, and Sántiz Gómez’ art bets on the capacity for intergenerational knowledge to inspire young people to treat material objects with the same thoughtfulness as ancestors. Mi hermanita Cristina and the Emotion of a Post-Migration Wardrobe Xunka’ López Díaz’ phototextual work, Mi hermanita Cristina, may be read as an epilogue to Sántiz Gómez’ book insofar explores the emotion and affect of material life across generations and in the context of drastic economic, religious, and cultural shifts for one family. López Díaz’ phototextual book includes a trilingual autobiography occupying nearly one fourth of the book’s page matter along with numerous photographs of her sister, Cristina, and of articles of clothing and household objects pertinent to Cristina’s

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s 141 daily life as a nine-year old girl living in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas. As Duarte notes, the photographs and their paratexts are about Cristina, López Díaz’ younger sister, but they are also inextricable from López Díaz’ own story of exile, migration, and adaptation.8 López Díaz story is part of a larger trend of traumatic displacement and migration for Chamula Indigenous families. During the later decades of the twentieth century, which saw the López Díaz family migrate to San Cristóbal de las Casas, numerous factors contributed to the migration of thousands of families like theirs. Gabriela Patricia Robledo Hernández explains: La economía campesina se monetarizó; el agotamiento de la frontera agrícola en condiciones de una ausencia de cambio tecnológico, aunada con la erosión del suelo y una fuerte presión demográfica llevaron a una integración de la economía campesina hacia la producción mercantil (Parra y Moguel, 1998; Gutiérrez, 2000). Se dio un proceso de diferenciación económica y polarización social dentro de las comunidades indígenas (Rus y Collier, 2002); la crisis agraria obligó al trabajo remunerado de las mujeres, alterando con ello los papeles de género; el trabajo asalariado dio independencia a los jóvenes y abrió una brecha generacional entre éstos y los mayores (Collier, 1998); los rituales colectivos empezaron a descentralizarse (Cancian, 1992) y a ser cuestionados por algunos sectores de la población, influidos por la actividad misionera tanto de la Iglesia católica como de las iglesias protestantes que realizaron actos de proselitismo entre la población indígena en la región (Robledo, 1997). (8) [The rural economy became monetized; the exhaustion of the agricultural border experiencing an absence of technological change, compounded by soil erosion and strong demographic pressure led to the integration of the rural economy into mercantile production (Parra and Moguel, 1998; Guttierrez, 2000). This led to a process of economic differentiation and social polarization within indigenous communities (Rus and Collier, 2002); the agrarian crisis made it necessary for women to procure wage labor, altering gender roles; salaried work gave women independence and created a generational gap between them and community elders (Collier, 1998); collective rituals started becoming decentralized (Cancian, 1992) and to be questioned by some sectors of the population, influenced by missionary activities both by the Catholic Church and by protestant churches proselytizing the indigenous population in the region (Robledo, 1997).]9 López Díaz’ book explores the impact of these hardships on her family and on her own life in an innovative way: by exploring how the objects of daily life reflect or call up feelings related to the trauma of these changes. Zofia Rosińska observes that the experience of migration is emotional: characterized by a sense of loss not of material objects but of something intangible or ideal (Rosińska 39). More still, Rosińska notes that migration forces subjectivity into dispute, and generates feelings like anxiety, uncertainty, and discomfort as the emigrant confronts the other or the self through the other (40). By training the camera on the material life of her much younger sister Xunka’ López Díaz explores the affective and emotional consequences and processes of migration on multiple generations. The phototextual representations of household objects and, more specifically, of articles of clothing presented in mi hermanita Cristina generate affects

142  Julia R. Brown capable of directing thought toward memory and identity—in this case, that of migration, childhood, and Chamula identity—across time and place. The first three photographs in López Díaz’ book invoke the frontal headshots, full body portraits, and profile shots characteristic of early twentieth-century anthropological photographs of Indigenous subjects. Such anthropological images, it has been noted, generated an economy of visibility that made Indigenous subjects seem like a knowable, classifiable—and colonizable—other.10 Dorotinsky Alperstein makes note of the connections between this series of shots and calls them troubling, but they are fascinating because they invert—and subvert—visual anthropology conventions by beginning not with a headshot but with a shot in which López Díaz’ sister stands with her back to the camera.11 The medium shot depicts Cristina standing against a light gray cement wall, her turquoise blouse, hair ribbons and matching red braid tassels and sash cutting a contrast with the neutral wall color. The punctum of the shot is not the girl’s body—which is the subject of more traditional anthropometric photography—but instead her vestments. The subsequent shots—a profile medium shot on the left page face and a frontal shot on the right page—more closely resemble traditional anthropological photography, but the profile shot also subtly subverts convention: Cristina’s left hand appears to rest on her neck, as if she were scratching an itch or perhaps adjusting her hair. There is also the slightest hint of a doorway along the left edge of the frame, and a few candy wrappers lie on the cement behind Cristina. Lourdes de León Paquel has also suggested that López Díaz takes the perspective of ethnographer in the book, since she “looks at herself and others” (15). Still, López Díaz’ ethnographic gaze and photographic techniques approach her community and culture from a more object and affect-centered perspective than images collected with the intent of institutional knowledge production.12 While Cristina is integral to the photograph series, it is her clothing items and the other objects associated with her daily life which tell a compelling story of migration, tradition, and assimilation. López Díaz photographs her sister’s articles of clothing individually, lying them carefully on a smooth, gray cement surface so that they mark a contrast of color and texture. The items are presented in the order in which they might be removed. Depicted in a photograph printed on the right side of the page, a trilingual description. The reader, moving left to right, is told by the first-person narrator what each item is. The first is a cotton-candy pink sweater, missing various buttons and frayed at the right arm sleeve. Such an item, called a koton in Tsotsil, is the kind of standard cardigan made in factories such as the ones emerging on the U.S. Mexico border at around the same time as López Díaz photographs it in San Cristóbal. The next article is a blue blouse, photographed in only partially in focus so that the patters on the fabric and the embroidery are only scrutable as splashes of color. Though we can imagine the intricacy of the design, the overall impression, fuzzy and inexact as a childhood memory, invites the spectator to focus on the idea of the blouse rather than on the unique identity of this particular blouse. Other clothing articles, like the sash and skirt, are photographed carefully arranged on the cement surface as if someone has lovingly prepared the objects for Cristina to dress herself. The woven items: particularly the sash and skirt, are contrasted by the bright green plastic sandals centered in the frame and pointing toward the right side of the image: the color strongly contrasts the gray background, yet the plastic and cement materials are an intuitive pairing of industrial materials (Figure 9.4).

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s 143

Figure 9.4 Xunka’ López Díaz. “Untitled.” San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, 1992–2000. In López Díaz, Xuna. mi hermanita Cristina, una niña chamula. Chiapas Photography Project, 2000. p 33. Source: Reproduced with permission of the artist. Courtesy of the Chiapas Photography Project.

The making of Cristina’s outfit, from the arrangement and selection of clothing items, organized separately or together, against a background of cement and later against a woven petate background, invites us to consider the texture, origin, and production of the objects which make up Cristina’s everyday life. On pages fifty-six and fifty-seven, a full spread displays a photograph of a loom depicts the creation of a rebozo like the black and white ones Cristina models in other photographs. The next page shows a woman with long braids, perhaps Cristina’s mother, sitting at the loom. We never see the mother’s face, but thanks to the section of text titled “xkuxlejal Xunka’ k’alal ch’in to’oxe/my childhood/mi infancia,” located between the photos of Cristina wearing various rebozos and the photos of the loom and the woman at the loom, we can link the photographs to López Díaz’ narrative and deduce that the woman might be López Díaz’ mother, the mother of ten who took her family out of to live in San Cristóbal de las Casas. The objects composing Cristina’s outfit tell a story and hold an affective power which allows the reader to think about the photographer’s relationship to the objects as much as

144  Julia R. Brown Cristina’s. Cristina’s clothes are free of stains, even if her pink sweater is threadbare, and they are arranged neatly against the background, as if to signal they are well cared for. Her clothes combine the traditional wardrobe of Chamula Tsotsil girls with the textures, materials, and styles of the city: plastic jelly sandals popular in the nineteen nineties, and a colorful machine-knit cardigan which contrasts with the hand-woven texture of Cristina’s skirt, sash, and rebozos. López Díaz’ text helps us understand the significance of Cristina’s clothing and how time and changes in circumstance have affected López Díaz’ clothing as well as that of her sister. She explains: “I suffered a lot when I was growing up. My little brothers and sisters do not suffer as I did … My youngest sister, Cristina, still does not work …. she is learning to wash her clothes and when she finishes, she eats … We have someone else make her clothes because my mom does not have time to sew. We also send her blouses to be embroidered or we do it ourselves” (53–54). Cristina’s clothes and the labor associated with them, such as washing and making them, evince the way the López Díaz family’s circumstances have changed since 1975, when they first arrived in San Cristóbal de las Casas, expelled from their home community, Joltzemen, a hamlet in San Juan Chamula.13 Where López Díaz’ mother, fleeing Chamula, “only wore a wool shawl and [put] it on herself like a skirt” (41), Cristina displays two wool shawls, one white and one black, as well as a skirt. Moreover, where López Díaz recalls that she had to wash the entire family’s clothes (“when I washed the clothes I didn’t know how to get the dirt out very well” [47]), Cristina is only responsible for washing her own clothes, which are now displayed in the photographs her older sister takes. What’s more, López Díaz writes that by making bracelets, she was able to “buy my clothes, my skirts, and my shoes” (49). Cristina, on the other hand, has her clothes made for her: a luxury that was impossible for her older sister. The last image is Cristina’s sweater again, with her sash tie draped over it: the sweater keeps Cristina warm, and the tie keeps her sash in place.14 Cristina’s outfit and the objects which compose it are evidence of a liberation from hardship. The punchy pink and red and black candy stripes contrasting the pavement gray evoke playfulness: the luxury of a childhood growing up in San Cristóbal de las Casas without the anxieties of the generations before her. The objects in this last image evoke the mass produced, Western fashions of the late nineteen nineties, while the sash evokes fashions of Tsotsil communities which the López Díaz family has brought with them in their departure from San Juan Chamula. The sash and sweater are simply objects, but they are also reminders of the photographer’s hardship and that of her family, as well as the ability to avoid passing that hardship to the next generation. It is indeed as de León Paquel observes: the book presents Cristina as a niña chamula, but more specifically as a “a new Chamulan girl” (15). Moreover, the material reality of new Chamulan girlhood—made visible in the book—is different from that experienced by Xunka’. Adds De León Paquel, “she was born in the city and has a house … In Cristina, Xunka’ sees a new present where it appears the scar of the expulsion and loss of the past have been cured” (15). The emotion tied to the Xunka’s traumatic family history: the loss of home, social exile, loss of childhood, and a drastic shift from rural life to the city. The book’s photographs and text attest to the healing of trauma across generations as well as a broader reality for Indigenous peoples in central Chiapas, migrating in frequently larger numbers to cities like San Cristóbal de las Casas toward the end of the twentieth century. The everyday objects and seemingly banal spaces of Xunka’s photography hold not only the affective intensity of memory and loss: they are testaments to the upheaval of the twentieth

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s 145 century and the promise of healing for future generations of Tsotsiles and other Indigenous communities. Conclusions As with so much cultural production of the 1990s, the books are a paradox: both were edited and printed, thanks to funding by the Ford Foundation, an organization no longer directly tied to the famously anti-union Ford corporation but in existence because of it. The books’ production is also a sign of the times, since it is truly a global product. I ordered my copies in Mexico City, and the CPP communicated my request to the CPP assistant in the United States who fills book orders and requests to borrow CPP exhibitions near my hometown of Boston, Massachusetts. After that, the books were shipped to my apartment in Santa Barbara, California, in an airplane assembled with parts likely manufactured halfway around the world. In other words, the books are material evidence of the facilitation of the same globalization of markets that have affected the purchase price of corn grown in Mexico and have led rural farmers to migrate away from their hometowns in hopes of finding a more stable life—and income—elsewhere. As this chapter has demonstrated, the impact of globalization, the liberalization of markets, and shifting social and ritual practice for Tsotsil communities are reflected in their material lives and in the feelings, memories, and ways of knowing embodied associated with everyday objects and their uses. Maruch Sántiz Gómez and Xunka’ López Díaz’ art demonstrates that globalization and neoliberalism have impacted their communities’ lives as well as their own and will continue to impact the knowledge and lifeways practiced within their families and communities. Lifeways are inherently dynamic, but they can also be lost either abruptly or gradually, a process which is inevitably traumatic. On the other hand, the mass production of cameras, the ability for multinational philanthropic foundations to connect to grassroots organizations, and the shifting roles available to women in Tsotsil society have all facilitated these women’s professionalization. Maruch Sántiz Gómez and Xunka’ López Díaz, then, deftly portray—embody—the paradoxes of modernity.

Notes 1 The author wishes to thank Carlota Duarte, Andrés Bustamente, Maggie Borowitz, Ian Erickson-Clery, Tamara R. Williams for their feedback on the chapter, and also Maruch Sántiz Gómez and Xunka’ López Díaz for the permission to use their photographs in this chapter. 2 In 2003, Subcomandante Marcos acknowledged almost seventy photographers—among them Frida Hartz and Lourdes Grobet who are mentioned elsewhere in this book—who had collaborated directly with the Zapatistas. Undoubtedly the number of unmentioned photographers who also came to Chiapas to photograph the Zapatistas was much higher. 3 Duarte in Sántiz Gómez, 8 and in correspondence with the author in April 2023. 4 During much of the twentieth century in Mexico, the photographic practices related to ethnography and to the broader discipline of anthropology so often focused its attention on Indigenous rural communities in the interest of engaging salvage ethnography: that is, as a means of documenting the communities before their presumed inevitable erasure through processes of assimilation (Edwards, Anthropology 10). 5 Sántiz Gómez’ photographs—including the basket of chiles—were included in Luna Cornea’s 5th issue, printed in 1994.

146  Julia R. Brown 6 See Gruber 1294–1295, and Redman 6–7. 7 Duarte en correspondence with the author, April 2023. 8 Writes Duarte, López Díaz has “juxtaposed photographs of Cristina with her own text to create a thoughtful comparison of their shared but different histories” (7). 9 Translation mine. 10 For more on the documented techniques and effects of anthropological photography see Dorotinsky Alperstein, “Photographing,” (482–483) and Lalvani 24. 11 This is an inversion of the arrangement of images seen in visual anthropology from a century prior. See for example in Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba 17. 12 Edwards 13. 13 mi hermanita, back inside flap. 14 Ibid, 76–77.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies,” Social Text, no. 22, vol. 4, 2004. pp. 117–139. ———. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, 2010. Bellinghausen, Hermann. “Caligrafía de las cosas,” in Sántiz Gómez, pp. 15–19. ———. in Luna Córnea. no. 5, 1994, 6–13. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge University Press, 1981. De León Paquel, Lourdes. “Dos hermanas, dos historias/Two sisters, two stories,” in López Díaz, pp. 12–15. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “Percept, Affect, and Concept.” What Is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 465–487. Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah. “Mirar desde los márgenes, o los márgenes de la mirada. Fotografía de dos mujeres indígenas de Chiapas.” Debate Feminista, no. 38, vol. 19, 2008. pp. 91–113. ———. “Photographing Indian Peoples: Ethnography as Kaleidoscope” in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture. William H. Beezley, ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. pp. 480–492. Duarte, Carlota. “Las fotografías de Maruch,” in Sántiz Gómez, pp. 8–11. ———. “Escribir la historia/Writing History” in Mi hermanita Cristina. pp. 6–7. Edwards, Elizabeth. Anthropology & Photography: 1860~1920. Yale University Press, 1992. ———. “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 41, 2012, pp. 221–234. Gruber, Jacob W. “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, vol 72, 1970, pp. 1289–1299. Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba, Ignacio. “El retrato fotográfico en los indicios de la antropología física mexicana.” Alquimia, no. 10, vol. 30, 2007. pp. 16–25. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2007. Lalvani, Suren. Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies. SUNY Press, 1995. Lewis, Stephen E. Rethinking Mexican Indigenismo: The INI’s Coordinating Center in Highland Chiapas and the Fate of a Utopian Project. University of New Mexico Press, 2018. López Díaz, Xunka’. mi hermanita Cristina, una niña chamula/my little sister Cristina, a chamula girl. Archivo Fotográfico Indígena/CIESAS/CONECULTA Chiapas, 2000. Marcos, Subcomandante. “Subcomandante Marcos: mensaje a la exposición fotográfica colectiva ‘69 Miradas contra Polifemo’” Enlace zapatista. November 1, 2003. https://enlacezapatista. ezln.org.mx/2003/11/01/subcomandante-marcos-mensaje-a-la-exposicion-fotografica-colectiva69-miradas-contra-polifemo/. Accessed January 27, 2023. Redman, Samuel J. Prophets and Ghosts. The Story of Salvage Anthropology. Harvard University Press, 2021. Robledo Hernández, Gabriela. Identidades femeninas en transformación: religión y género entre la población indígena urbana en el altiplano chiapaneco. CIESAS, 2009.

Seeing and Feeling the 1990s 147 Rosińska, Zofia. “Emigratory Experience: The Melancholy of No Return.” Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies. Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, eds. University of Toronto Press, 2011. Sántiz Gómez, Maruch. Creencias de nuestros antepasados. CIESAS/Centro de la Imagen/Casa de las Imágenes, 1998. Stephen, Lynn. Zapata Lives: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico. University of California Press, 2002. Teatrault, Darcy Victor. “Mexico: The Political Ecology of Mining” in Veltmeyer, et al. The New Extractivism. A Post-Neoliberal Development Modelo or Imperalism of the Twenty-First Century? Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 141–171. Vargas Cetina, Gabriela. “Creencias de Maruch Sántiz: un puente entre las épocas y las culturas,” in Sántiz Gómez, pp. 12–13. Veltmeyer, Henry, James Petras and Steve Vieux. Neoliberalism and Class Conflict in Latin America: A comparative Perspective on the Political Economy of Structural Adjustment. Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.

10 The Untold Story of Black Mexico Uncovering the Identity of the Afro-Descendant Woman in the Photography of Koral Carballo and Mara Sánchez Renero Rosita Scerbo In her photographic project titled Siempre Estuvimos Aquí (We Were Always Here, 2017–), Koral Carballo investigates the hidden identity of Afro-descendants in Mexico while criticizing the whitewashed origin of Mexicans that rejects the mixed-race identity rooted in the African Diaspora. Similarly, in the photographic project titled The Cimarrón and the Fandango: The Little-Known World of the Afro-Mexican (2014–2015) by Mara Sánchez Renero, the artist condemns the invisibility of the Afro-Mexican community and the lack of awareness surrounding this portion of the population, only recently recognized in the Mexican constitution. This chapter will show how the Black women portrayed in Carballo and Sánchez Renero’s photography resuscitate their past while reclaiming their future and their position in the Mexican national landscape. This chapter will also explore the concept of photography as a witness and as a medium to establish a counter-narrative to primordial discriminatory practices. My analysis will discuss the ways activist art responds to the need to address issues of gender and racial discrimination and empower the most marginalized groups in Latinx society, therefore recognizing and acknowledging at the forefront the conceptualization of the Black-Latina woman. Young artists like the two analyzed here are recreating and rewriting history from the point of view of the hidden Afro-Mexican woman. In the process of analyzing both artists’ activist and artistic work, I am particularly interested in identifying the commonalities between the two and the similar story they wanted to tell. Both photographic works deal with issues of identity, violence, trauma, and the concept of reclaiming the Black history of Mexico. My focus on the national territory of Mexico is intentional and significant, as Mexico is one of the only two Latin American countries that for centuries did not officially recognize Afro-Latinos or Afro-descendent individuals in its constitution and one of the Hispanic countries that has systematically erased its Black past. Carballo and Sánchez Renero finally show a hidden face of the country that is based upon the consequences of what we could call collective amnesia. In theoretical discourses, scholars have reflected on the correlation between trauma and memory and have been trying to explain the reasons behind the untold narrative of Black Mexico. The two photographers are creating an archive that forces spectators to acknowledge those excluded from dominant Mexican narratives and visual economies of modernity. The subjects’ bodies are converted in renovated undeniable historical sources. Their bodies become a visual memory and reminder of the atrocities the Afro-Latinx community has endured in Mexico. In the words of Silvia Molloy “the body is a form of memory, the unerasable reminder of past affronts (46).” It is fundamental to point out the multiple similarities and common themes that we can observe in the photographic DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-14

The Untold Story of Black Mexico 149 projects of both Mexican female artists investigated here. This chapter will analyze two particular aspects of Carballo and Sánchez Renero’s visual art with respect to the representation of Mexican Black women. The first aspect studied focuses on the implementation of the animalesque mask and how this mythical and symbolical object is included in both series with multiple significations from a reference to enslavement, the construction of Black stereotypes and animality, and the mere fact that the Black community has always existed but it remained hidden for centuries. Both artists seem to adopt this symbolic element as a means of representation of the desire by the Afro-Mexican community to be finally seen and accepted as an integral part of Mexican national history. The second feature analyzed sees the portrayal of the middle age or older Black woman at the forefront of both artistic series. Both projects also focus on the African heritage associated with the states of Guerrero and Veracruz and the Costa Chica region. This coastal area is a region encompassing part of coastal Guerrero and part of Oaxaca, and it represents an atypical location in which Afro-descendants did not disappear or at least not in the tragic way that has happened in the other regions of Mexico. Many studies tried to explore and justify this anthropological and sociological phenomenon and among all, Jorge Delgadillo’s study titled “La desaparición de los afrodescendientes de Guadalajara: cambio identitario, demografía y ciudadanía, 1793–1823” [The Disappearance of the Afrodescendants of Guadalajara: Identity Change, Demography, and Citizenship] explains that a variety of factors influenced this national erasure. Among the reasons studied, the author points out the right to citizenship after emancipation and social prejudice that motivated and encouraged Afro-Mexicans in the spirit of self-preservation to hide their racial background and consequentially self-identify themselves as mestizos. Citizenship as the relationship between an individual and a state or government to which the individual owes allegiance and in turn is entitled to its protection can also have many meanings and repercussions. Even when granted citizenship, Afro-descendant individuals have always been considered second-class citizens. This social and political status “also differentiates among citizens or creates different classes of citizens, and therefore different degrees of full inclusion in society.”1 It is presumed that the same thing happened in other Mexican regions and towns, where Black ancestry and African backgrounds were purposely concealed and restrained by many individuals. This chapter proposes an intersectional feminist reading of Carballo y Sánchez Renero’s work, employing the Intersectionality approach theorized by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) as a framework that helps us understand how being racialized as Black, being gendered as female, and being nationally Mexican play a role in the unique and specific discrimination and privilege experienced by an individual. Moreover, I argue that the Black women portrayed in Carballo and Sánchez Renero’s photography resuscitate their past while reclaiming their future and their position in the Mexican national landscape. At the same time, I will benefit from analytical perspectives such as the concept of matrix of domination or oppression within the case of how Black Latina women encounter institutional discrimination based upon their race and gender (Patricia Hill Collins 2000). This theoretical standpoint will support the intersectional analysis of the cultural representations of Black women in the Mexican context. This chapter will also explore the concept of photography as a witness and as a medium to establish a counter-narrative. My analysis will discuss the ways activist art responds to the need to address issues of gender and racial discrimination and empower the most marginalized groups in Latinx society, therefore recognizing and acknowledging at the forefront the conceptualization of the Black-Latina woman. This historical phenomenon of cancelling the past has been

150  Rosita Scerbo studied by Saidiya Hartman who in “The Time of Slavery,” argues that for enslaved people and their descendants, time cannot be viewed as continuity or progression. Her perspective demonstrates that historical accounts of Afro-descendant communities in the Americas has been interrupted through erasures and silences, while the “seemingly eternal second-class status” of Black individuals and more specifically Black women suggest that time has stalled. Historical Accounts of the Hidden Mexican Black Past According to Claude Barbre and as described in his essay The Ethics of Remembering, “there can also be a tear in the collective psyche due to cultural terrors and sufferings that incur societal patches—cultural structures that obfuscate the memory of trauma, erasing the possibility of recovery by silencing trauma narration” (Foreword I). In this context, the Black women portrayed in Carballo and Sánchez Renero’s photography become visual archives of a hidden and censored past. This concept of body as archive is connected with the notion of intergenerational trauma or as it was called in 1992 by Holocaust scholar Marianne Hirsch “postmemory.” Hirsch describes postmemory as “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right (103).” The Black women portrayed in Carballo and Sánchez Renero’s photography embody a gendered Afro-descendant identity and they are finally able to reclaim their secluded history turning their own bodies into visual archives. Numerous scholars have theorized about the relationship between visual art and anthropology (Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013, Banks and Ruby 2011, Laine 2018). Some recent anthropological studies have also explored the idea of the body or collective bodies as archives of experience and focused on the potential that these kinds of archives have for collaborative artistic and ethnographic practices (Battaglia et al. 8). Battaglia et al. in their study “Bodies of Archives/Archival Bodies: An Introduction” point out the notion of archives “as something processual, activated, and reactivated by bodies” so that this new idea would look at archives, not as something fixed “but rather as an experimental, dynamic, and performative practice” (8). This study represents then a helpful tool for understanding the artistic processes that have brought Sánchez Renero and Carballo to center the Black woman’s body in their art. Considering the primordial use of anthropological photography to disseminate and promote discriminatory conceptualizations brings to light the significance of empowering contemporary photographic practices such as the ones of Carballo and Sánchez Renero who wish to establish a counter narrative to mainstream photography projects. In Mexico, enslaved Africans began to arrive in 1519, when the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés first landed in Veracruz, and historical data demonstrate that “before 1640 more Africans than Spaniards came to New Spain”2. However, the first study on Mexico’s African ancestry was not published until the mid-20th century with Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s La población negra de México [The Black Population of Mexico], issued in 1946 and considered the foundation of Afro-Mexican studies. When we refer to Black enslaved womanhood, these relatively recent studies also show us that place of birth and language skills were elements that differentiated Black women in Colonial Mexico. This recent scholarship identified the ones born in the African continent simply by referring to their skin color or bondage status. These segregated women were called

The Untold Story of Black Mexico 151 negras or esclavas—Black women or female slaves. However, if an African enslaved woman had arrived in Mexico at an early age and became very fluent in the Spanish language, this was also classified as a ladina.3 In historical accounts, we can also find the term criolla to label Black women born in the colonies. To this respect, Herman Bennett argues in his book Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico, that “a key aspect of the term was a reference to customs” as it was assumed that “from birth, criollos were familiar with the Christian commonwealth and its customs” (105). Black cultural traditions and customs were never legitimized, as the goal has always been to work on erasing their value and identity. As Susan M. Socolow points out in The Women of Colonial Latin America, Black female enslaved individuals were completely stripped of their more basic human rights, and “slaves, in addition to their labor, were a capital asset”4 since the children of a Black enslaved woman would immediately become properties of her master. When Afro-descendant people were included in art mediums, these discriminatory representations would promote racial stereotypes and social hierarchy. A significant example of this practice can be found in Casta Paintings. Casta Paintings were first created in the late 1700s, and the scope of these creations was to educate the general public of Spain about racial diversity and the mixing of the people in the New World. In particular, Ignacio María Barreda created large panels showcasing all the twenty-two different types of mixing, with each panel including an inscription with the official name of that particular racial group (Guzauskyte, 175). Black women were then represented in these paintings but restricted to the discriminatory roles that were assigned to them by the Spanish Casta System. Although Afro-Mexicans have been tracible in Mesoamerica since the beginning of the Afro-Atlantic slave trade, this large portion of Mexican history is absent from textbooks and official discourses. Mexicans appear to have forgotten their Black past and, with it, part of their identity. The larger populations of Afro-descendants have always lived in the coastal communities of Oaxaca, as well as in the regions of Veracruz and Guerrero. From a historical standpoint, it is worth mentioning that the need to import enslaved individuals from Africa was connected to the genocide of indigenous communities after the arrival of the Spanish colonization in the first half of the sixteenth century. One of the authors who dedicated significant attention to this issue is Aguirre Beltrán (1989), who confirms the reality of about the 97% of the indigenous population been exterminated in the decades following the arrival of Spanish colonists. Some of the causes that Aguirre Beltrán identifies include diseases brought by Spanish colonists, such as smallpox and measles, and the immediate fear of what looked “different” that pushed the colonists to change and destroy every aspect of the indigenous culture, art, history, religion, and way of living. The small indigenous communities that survived the colonization process eventually ended up blending with the African communities that lived in the immediate proximity, forming the first groups of mix-raced individuals and resulting in the cultural phenomenon known as “mestizaje.” The term “Afro-mestizo” comes from this blend of different cultures and racial and ethnic identities and if a notion often used to refer to the Afro-descendants people living in the country, also known as Mexico’s third root (Aguirre Beltrán 1989). We learn from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean that Afro-Latinxs make up one-quarter of the population of Latin America and the vast majority of the most marginalized populations from an economic, political, and social point of view. According to Flores and Roman (2009), anti-Blackness still plays a vital role in Latino identity. As the authors point out “‘Hispanic’ is a construct that is decidedly non-Black – and in significant ways discursively antiBlack (325).” Peter

152  Rosita Scerbo Wade tries to identify the origin of this particular form of discrimination and explains that this is rooted in the ideology of mestizaje, or mixing races, which is still prominent in Latin America. Anti-Blackness practices are based on the ideologic principle of “bettering the race,” and its tireless effort to erase the Black identity (Hordge-Freeman and Veras 2020). Anti-Black racism constitutes a pillar of Mexicanness and it is rooted in the primordial denial of Mexican Black history. Historical processes such as slavery and the colonial era racial caste system have played an essential role in the implementation of these racist practices. In this context, Black women experienced multiple forms of discrimination as the image of Black womanhood was influenced by white, patriarchal, misogynist, and discriminatory values. Intersectionality as a critical framework provides us with the linguistic and analytical tools to interrogate the interconnections among multiple social categories that all play a role simultaneously in the discrimination that a specific individual experiences. In the case of Afro-Mexican women, this specific group suffers from different forms of discrimination based on their ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, and social location. This approach, theorized by Crenshaw in 1989, equips us with the necessary sensitivity to understand and address social justice issues portrayed in the two photographic projects analyzed here, such as sexual and structural violence, racial disparities in wealth and financial well-being, and forced displacement. In a similar way, the matrix of domination or matrix of oppression theorized by Collins helps us frame and investigate how different issues of oppression that deal with gender, race, and class are visually represented in Carballo and Mara Sánchez Renero’s photographic projects. Through the matrix of oppression, we can understand how these issues, even if classified as different social categories, work in a strict interconnected way that explains the multiple discriminations faced by Afro-Latina women. Despite the fact that Mexico, even back then, counted one of the largest afrodescendant populations in the Americas, this portion of society remains to this day almost completely invisible in cultural productions, from photography, paintings, and other forms of visual art. One historical exception can be found in the images of photographer Romualdo García, whose photographs in black and white from 1910 in Guanajuato show evident traces of people of African ancestry, including young women, children, and married couples. A more recent contribution can be observed in the photographic series titled Diaspora: Costa Chica (2018) by international French-Danish photographer Cécile Smetana Baudier. The artist took the photos of this series in a small fishing village called El Azufre, portraying Afro-Mexican communities living on the margins of society in southern Mexico’s Costa Chica. However, if we consider Mexican national photographers instead, it is important to highlight that the two female artists’ objects of my study are the only two contemporary photographers who are addressing these marginalized communities in their art. In Mexico, Afro-Latinxs have just recently been officially recognized in the constitution. 2020 marked the first year that Mexican nationals of African descent were able to self-identify and be counted in the annual census. In the results of the census, we were able to find that over 2.5 million Mexicans self-identified as either Black, Afro-Mexican, or of African descent, representing 2.2% of the country’s total population (Censo de Población y Vivienda 2020). In terms of representation in the constitution, in 2019, a decree was published finally in the Official Journal of the Federation. In this instance section C was added to Article 2° of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, “which recognizes Afro-Mexican peoples and communities as part of the pluricultural

The Untold Story of Black Mexico 153 composition of the nation in order to guarantee their self-determination, autonomy, development, and inclusion” (Aguilar Rangel). Emerging Artists Bridging Subjectivities and Black Silenced Voices Mara Sánchez Renero is one of the two emerging Mexican female photographers who center Blackness in her visual artistic work. Sánchez Renero lived in Spain for ten years, and during that timeframe, she studied photography in Barcelona. The artist is recognized for being the co-founder of the collective Malocchio and PHACTO project and being part of the collective boom of 2008 in Spain. She then returned to Mexico where, since 2012, the artist has consciously decided to put at the center of her artistic expression issues of identity tied with the racial imaginary of the Mexican national body. Sánchez Renero’s artistic career counts also numerous national and international awards, such as the first-place prize of the 2015 POY Latam in the category “Nuestra Mirada de memoria e identidad” (Our gaze of memory and identity). From the information collected on its official website, the POY Latam is the most prestigious photography context in Latin America founded by Loup Langton and Pablo Corral Vega in 2011 to celebrate excellence in the field of documentary-making and artistic photography. Moreover, in 2015 the artist was also offered the Revelation SAIF Award at the Voices Off festival in Arles, France. The Mexican artist held exhibitions in numerous countries, including Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Panama, France, Switzerland, India, and Haiti. Her work has received awards and been exhibited in several parts of the world, including France, Switzerland, India, Spain, Cuba, India, Haiti, Panama, and Mexico, and has recently received a grant from Sistema Nacional de Creadores of Mexico (FONCA 2018–2020).5 Through her art, Sánchez Renero wants to bring the spectators to unknown and unexplored places where the individual objects of her artistic creation are portrayed outside of common and familiar environments and transported to imaginary and mythical territories. The Cimarrón and the Fandango (2014–2015) is Sánchez Renero’s photographic series object of my study, where the artist introduces the spectators to the invisible world of the Afro-descendant community that has lived in Mexico since the years of the conquest. In this series, the artist allows us to reflect on the present repercussions of this untold past and the consequences of colonialism on the erased identity of the Black community in the Mexican territory. The artist portrays naturalistic landscapes and anthropological images of Afro-Mexican communities in the act of performing traditional and cultural practices such as dances and spiritual rituals. The second visual storyteller analyzed in this chapter is Koral Carballo, an Afro-mestiza Mexican photographer born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1987. Carballo’s thematic issues covered in her art overlap in most cases with the ones of Mara Sánchez Renero. Carballo visually tells stories related to social justice concerns, from identity to violence, and migration. As we can read on her official website, her artworks are “at the intersection of participatory art and journalism” and therefore are committed to documenting the reality of the most marginalized communities of Mexico. Siempre Estuvimos Aquí (We Were Always Here) by Koral Carballo is the ongoing photographic project object of my investigation, which has as its primary scope to investigate the invisible history of Afro-descendant communities in Mexico. On the official website of the photographic project, the artist explains that: “There is a historical discourse on mestizaje that has made invisible the continental origin of Mexicans, anchored in the collective memory of our indigenous and Spanish origin, hiding the African root. Little mention is made of

154  Rosita Scerbo the role that Africans played during the process of creating the nation-state that is now Mexico.” Generally speaking, the Afro-Mexican communities remain marginalized from mainstream Mexican media, culture, politics, and literary works. As previously mentioned, the two photographic projects present multiple common elements. It is of utmost importance to point out how both Carballo and Sánchez Renero portray the black individual behind animalesque masks and how this powerful emblem embodies the historical and sociological significance of what it means to be an Afro-Mexican individual while having to live in the constant obligation of masking one’s Blackness (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2). In Figure 10.1 taken from the “Mystery of the Disguised” project by Koral Carballo, we can observe an Afro-descendant individual facing away from the camera, who does not engage with the viewer, and is dressed up in a colorful costume and a mask that cover in its entirety the face. The individual stands tall in a natural landscape on top of giant tree roots and holding a fierce and proud posture. In this photograph, Mexican photographer Koral Carballo documents the ancestral Afro-Mexican traditions still surviving in a small village in her hometown of Veracruz. In the Veracruz area, there is a town called Coyolillo famous for its carnival and it is one of the few communities in Veracruz that can be considered Afro-Mestiza. Carballo explains on her official website that the tradition of the Carnival began because the town is close to the San Miguel de Almolonga sugar mill, which since the end of the sixteenth century,

Figure 10.1 Koral Carballo, Prologue: “The Mystery of the Disguised.” We Were Always Here. Source: Courtesy of the Artist.

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Figure 10.2 Mara Sánchez Renero, “Untitled.” The Cimarrón and The Fandango, The LittleKnown World of The Afro-Mexican, 2015.

benefitted from the work of enslaved people brought from Africa. On the day of the Carnival, the enslaved individuals were allowed out for a few hours for their only day of freedom. On that occasion, Afro-descendent people used masks to hide their identity and dance. In the town of Coyolillo, enslaved people were living in horrible conditions with only one day of rest per year. To celebrate this day of freedom, Afro-descendants individuals organized a feast that later was transformed into a Carnival. The protagonists of this celebration were the “disguised,” “jejes,” or “blacks,” who were covering their faces and turning themselves into animals with horns, such as the deer in Figure 10.1, or other horned animals such as bulls and cows. In Figure 10.2, taken from Mara Sánchez Renero’s series The Cimarrón and the Fandango, The Little-Known World of the Afro-Mexican, we observe a group of Afro-descendant individuals positioned in a circle and performing different dance moves. Like in the previous image by Carballo, the individuals here are wearing a costume and masks that make them unrecognizable. As for Carballo’s illustration, this one too has a natural background composed by trees. We learn from the official website of Sánchez Renero that “fandango,” a term included in the title of the series, “is a popular dance characterized by lively, passionate movement. In Mexico, it also means rumba, party, hubbub.” The Dance of the Black Devils portrayed in Figure 10.2, was a traditional ritual that enslaved people performed during colonization. Through this ritual, Afro-descendant people were honoring the Black God Ruja asking of him to free them from slavery. In the times of the conquest, finding empirical evidence of Black individuals’ inferiority was crucial in the attempt to justify slavery. In this context, Black individuals were compared and treated like animals. This discriminatory phenomenon has been recognized by historians as scientific racism (Gould 1981, Kurtz 2004, Kaldis 2013), a practice that would allow the spread of theories that would maintain the Eurocentric Caucasian man in power. Establishing social inferiority was at the core of these theories that linked

156  Rosita Scerbo Blackness to animality, especially monkeys and apes. These misguided beliefs are still present nowadays even if modern scientific methods such as DNA testing have proved that race, like gender, is no more than another example of social construction (Fanon 1952, Butler 1999). These DNA studies have demonstrated how physical characteristics, such as skin tone and hair texture, occupy a tiny portion of the human genome and therefore all human beings share almost one hundred percent of their DNA. This section of my investigation seeks to revolutionize the way we think about animality and gender, exploring how both concepts are complex and interdependent. Many studies have shown how both categories, women, and in particular women of color and animals, are treated similarly in the patriarchal system. Western Culture constructs human males, and in particular white males, as dominant in contraposition of women and animals perceived as the submissive “others.” Lori Gruen confirms us that “the role of women and animals in postindustrial society is to serve/be served up; women and animals are used. Whether created as ideological icons to justify and preserve the superiority of men or captured as servants to provide for and comfort, the connection women and animals share is present in both theory and practice (61). It is, then, imperative to initiate a dialogue that would allow us to better examine this strong connection and identify possible and reachable solutions for issues interesting to both affected parties. Animals and women, and in particular women of color, are commonly reduced to mere objects and historically served their purposes as enslaved, objectivized, and discriminated entities with no or limited value in Western society. Elizabeth Fisher, in particular, underlines how humans violate animals, making them their slaves, and this aspect draw another comparison between non-human animals and the experience of Black enslaved women. Fisher argues how men control and manipulate animals’ reproduction and make friends with animals, and then kill them. For the author, all these practices lead to the subsequential of humans and in particular, “the large-scale exploitation of women captives for breeding and labor, which is a salient feature of the developing civilizations” (197). Religion also played a fundamental role in the process of establishing this hierarchy, enabling the practice of sacrifices in order to obtain godly favors. In this respect, Gruen informs us that: In religious mythology, if not in actual practice, women often served as symbols for the uncontrollable and harmful and thus were sacrificed in order to purify the community and appease the gods. Animals too were sacrificed, and it has been suggested that many animals were first domesticated not as food sources but as sacrificial creatures. Religious belief can thus also be seen as a particularly pernicious construction of women and animals as “others” to be used. (1993, 64) The previous passage suggests how religion has been used as a framework to justify and commit atrocities toward both animals and women of color and how both these categories were widely used in religious and mythological ceremonies and domesticated/ kept prisoners for sacrifice practices (Mary Daly 1973, Marilyn French 1985). Religious sacrificial ceremonies are just one of the many examples in which these two abjected groups have been mistreated since ancient times. Scientific experiments have also contributed to the horrific conditions experienced by both women of color and animals. Photography has historically been used in conjunction with such experiments and put to the service of scientific racism. Capocci and Pogliano (2021) perfectly explain how this

The Untold Story of Black Mexico 157 racist practice emerged, pointing out that philosophers and anthropologists have always failed to serve science well. They underline how philosophers believed that the transition from ape to man could be found in the so-called “Ethiopian race.” These dangerous beliefs paved then the way for the slave trade because of the inherent exaggerated comparison between Black and European people (504). Elizabeth Edwards is one of the authors who dedicated ample attention to the use of photography for scientific racism. In 1984, the Royal Anthropological Institute in the United Kingdom was awarded a grant for a pioneering project that focused on European Encounters with the Third World to research, particularly the use of visual materials. This collaboration led to the publication of a seminal work edited by Elizabeth Edwards (1992) and then a coedited volume with Christopher Morton (2016) that confirms how anthropology remains a highly visualized practice. Edwards also explores the way in which photography, especially photography of “ethnological performances,” “drew on scientific ideas which were used to legitimate a wide range of visualizing and representational practices around race and culture” (167). Citing Poole in her work, the author states that photography “played a major role ‘in the crafting of a racial common sense which unites ‘popular’ and ‘scientific’ understandings of embodied difference” (168). Intersectional feminist accounts and non-human animal theories are movements that share numerous concerns and challenge different forms of oppression, rooted in aforementioned understandings of embodied difference. Both approaches put at the center of their conversations the ethics and respect of the fundamental rights that grant them recognition and consideration as human and non-human beings with inherent value. Both accounts call into question Western culture and more specifically the patriarchal standpoint that tends to distinguish “them” from “us,” the “others.” The Mexican artists analyzed here incorporate portraits of Afro-descendant communities in Mexico often accompanied by some animal species, numerous times in the form of masks that cover the entirety of the faces of the afro-descendent individual, who, therefore, lose again his/her/their inherent identity. Carballo and Sánchez Renero’s photography acts as a witness, highlighting the common ground that unifies animal studies approaches to gender and sexuality perspectives that distinguish “us” from “other,” whereby women and animals are identified as others (Plumwood, 1993). Through their work, we can dismantle the deep binaries among these categories that reinforce social abuse and oppression (Adams, 1994, Pagani 2000). Sexism, racism, and speciesism have been linked theoretically and promoted collaborations between animal and feminist advocates. These three groups are working together to fight against ideologies and social constructions that create separations between human/animal and man/woman. In this context, western patriarchy promoted both women’s and animals’ subordination and both categories have been seen as objects of exploitation. As Gruen points out “struggle for women’s liberation is inextricably linked to the abolition of all oppression” (1993, 82). Therefore, the indisputable protagonist of these artistic works of art is the Other deferred, excluded, and segregated. It can be affirmed that the gaze of the Afro-descendent “other” has a privileged role in the work of these two Mexican photographers whose art visibilizes the racialized and sexualized Other. In this context, the role of the spectator is also crucial in disseminating these hidden truths, as we can assume that this art is meant for an audience both inside and outside of Mexico who is unfamiliar with Afro-Mexican communities and cultures. Referring to the concept of otherness prompts us to specify the meaning of this term and therefore, I will approach some of the theoretical constructions on the subject. It is worth mentioning, for example, the theory of the otherness of Jean-Paul Sartre. Stuart Zane Charmé in an extensive reflection on Sartre’s theories about the concept of

158  Rosita Scerbo Otherness, explains that we construct a sense of self largely through “a sense of who or what we are not” (4) and that consequentially “our awareness of the Other’s “otherness” is filtered through the creation and distortion of our own consciousness” (5). Based on this account, the identity of Afro-Mexican communities emerges both from our association with the collective images of our own society and from our rejection of the “otherness,” that’s to say all the other beings, humans or not humans, who are outside of or marginal to the western idea of society. Charmé examines the discursive construction by which the concepts of vulgarity and civility have been associated with manners and appropriate appearances in our social group. Non-human animals don’t fit in the patriarchal construction of civilization and therefore are considered creatures not worthy of rights and recognition. In this context, the victims of the slave trade have been linked with notions of vulgarity, aggression, incivility, and inferiority and consequentially also the Afro-Mexican communities analyzed by Carballo and Sánchez Renero. The visual work of the two artists then contributes to the national representation and visibility of the Afro-Mexican Other expelled and renegade who, despite all the injustices suffered, carries his own identity and fight to be able to manifest it. The second shared component found in both photographic projects is the meaningful inclusion of the middle age Black woman (see Figure 10.3 and 10.4). In Figure 10.3 by Carballo, we observe an elderly Black woman from a back posture facing away from the camera. The woman is wearing a light blue polka dot shirt, blue water pants, and a pink kitchen apron while holding a chunk of her hair down with the tip of the fingers of

Figure 10.3 Koral Carballo, Chapter I, “There are no Afro people.” We Were Always Here. Source: Courtesy of the Artist.

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Figure 10.4 Mara Sánchez Renero, “Untitled.” The Cimarrón and The Fandango, The LittleKnown World of The Afro-Mexican, 2015.

her right arm. The elderly Black woman represents the guardian and preserver of black Mexican history. We learn from the artist’s official website that Coyolillo’s grandparents tell stories about how the slave owner of the San Miguel de Almolonga hacienda forced their ancestors to work as enslaved people in deplorable conditions. The elderly Black woman turns herself into this sacred custodian of the past when she engages in the role of the storyteller of the Atlantic slave trade accounts with her grandchildren n Figure 10.4 by Mara Sánchez Renero’ series The Cimarrón and the Fandango, The Little-Known World of the Afro-Mexican, we observe again a middle-aged/elderly Black woman facing towards the camera with a worried and tender expression. The woman is standing tall in a black flowered dress in a natural landscape with long tree branches in the background. The image is depicted at sunset and the woman is carrying several traditional objects on top of her head while her arms are resting down at her waist. Historically, middle-aged, and older Black women, like the ones beautifully portrayed in the images above, have been portrayed with derogatory images that promoted the construction of dangerous and damaging stereotypes as well as the propagation of discriminatory behaviors such as microaggressions and sexual objectification, as we can notice, for example, in the portrays part of the Casta paintings discussed in a previous section of this chapter. Patricia Morton is one of the scholars who dedicated a lot of attention to racial and discriminatory representation of Black womanhood. Morton was able to identify four central themes in the historical portrayal of Black women, that have its origin in the antebellum period.6 These recurring topics are the “inept domestic servant”

160  Rosita Scerbo (the mammy), the domineering matriarch, the sex object (the Jezebel), and the tragic mulatto. As Morton points out, all of these conceptualizations, with the exception of the mammy image (36), rely on discriminatory and diminishing illustrations that aimed to differentiate the pure, smart, and graceful white woman from the Black woman perceived as primitive, aggressive, dirty, uncivilized, and domineering. The domesticity aspect of this ideal enslaved woman has been used to promote the “South’s romanticization of slavery as an extended White-Black family” (Morton 10). The act of elevating the status of this elderly Black woman who wasn’t perceived in the same way as the ones working in the fields or being used as a mistress, worked in favor of the propagation of this idealized and romanticized notion of slavery and segregation that ultimately lead to the establishment of the “stamp of historical legitimation” (Morton 35). In both photographic series, the middle-aged Black woman is at the center of the visual documentary and presented in multiple images, as it can be observed in the two exemplificatory portrays shared above (Figure 10.3 and 10.4). Both approaches to the depiction of Black womanhood can be read as critiques and references to the belittling stereotype of the old, enslaved woman/mammy, also known as “Aunt Jemina,” extensively present in several pieces of scholarship about Black womanhood (Marquette 1967, Kern-Foxworth 1994, Griffin 1998, Manring 1998, Witt 2004) Deborah Gray White is another scholar who studied the figure of the older Black woman, turning her attention to some specific demeaning treats of this particular image. The author addresses the depiction of this ideal enslaved woman, obedient, loyal, and perceived as defeminized and less sexualized because of her physical strength, old age, and often obesity (60). Similarly, as in the case presented above for the employment of animalesque masks, the utilization of the older Black woman serves to reject and criticize the historical attempt to legitimize slavery. We can then conclude that the photographic focus on the older Black woman is used to directly contest narratives of Black womanhood and Black aging historically used to justify Black women’s enslavement. The activist art of Carballo and Sánchez Renero serves as a valuable political and social tool to decenter historically privileged groups while questioning cultural power structures and working to empower marginalized communities. As such, Carballo and Sánchez Renero’s artistic contributions are of the highest value in the sphere of social justice endeavors. The fact that Mexican female artists like the two analyzed here are winning prestigious artistic awards and gaining global recognition is incredibly significant. From January 23–29, 2018, Sánchez Renero’s series was able to be viewed on monitors inside the ICP Museum in New York City, while in the evening hours, images were projected onto the windows of the ICP Museum and were able to be viewed after sunset from the sidewalk outside the Museum. This series has not been staged yet in Mexico, but it has received particular attention abroad. As in the case of Sánchez Renero, Carballo is also a well-recognized emerging artist, having been awarded numerous prizes. Among the most admirable acknowledgments, we can mention the Catchlight Leadership Fellow in 2021, the POY LATAM 2nd place “Nuestra Mirada Award” in 2021, the Woman Photograph and Getty Images grantee in 2019, We Women grantee in 2019, Open Society Foundations Moving Walls 25 Fellow in 2018, and she also obtained the first place in the Latin American Photography Colloquium portfolio review in 2017. Moreover, Carballo funded, with a group of photojournalists from Veracruz, the International Festival of Journalistic and Documentary Photography in Mexico she also currently co-produces.7 This recognition demonstrates the remarkable talent, creativity, and cultural contributions that these artists bring to the world stage. It celebrates their individual achievements

The Untold Story of Black Mexico 161 and also challenges preconceived notions and stereotypes about Mexican art and female artists. It opens doors for diverse narratives and perspectives to be heard and appreciated on an international level. However, global recognition does not automatically equate to global awareness, and there can be a discrepancy between the recognition received abroad and the recognition received within Mexico. While these artists may be celebrated and respected by the international artistic community, it is crucial to foster a deeper appreciation and support for their work within their own country. This can be achieved through initiatives that promote their work locally, encourage art education, and provide platforms for dialogue and collaboration. Only by fostering internal awareness and appreciation can Mexico truly celebrate and benefit from the success of its talented female artists. Young emerging artists like Carballo and Sánchez Renero are paving the way in the Mexican territory for a new approach to photojournalism and minoritized groups visual documentation. In conclusion, the necessary work of contemporary activists and artists like Carballo and Sánchez Renero needs to address the issues and empower the most marginalized groups in our society. This approach recognizes and acknowledges the conceptualization of the Afro-Latina woman. The Afro-descendant women portrayed in both of their photographic series are building their own version of Mexican past, recovering their history, and illuminating the viewers about a secluded reality that continues to fight for visibility, awareness, and recognition. Notes 1 Jean Beaman, “Citizenship as cultural: Towards a theory of cultural citizenship.”  Sociology Compass, vol. 10, 2016, p. 850. 2 Nicole von Germeten, “Juan Roque’s Donation of a House to the Zape Confraternity, Mexico City, 1623,” Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812, Eds. Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo (Hackett Publishing Company, 2009): 83–104. 3 In other parts of New Spain, the term bozal was used to designate slaves from Guinea who did not speak Spanish or Portuguese. See: Herman Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of AfroMexico (Indiana University Press, 2009). 4 Susan M. Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 132. 5 Biographical information retrieved from ICP Projected: El Cimarrón Y Su Fandango https:// www.icp.org/events/icp-projected-el-cimarron-y-su-fandango 6 The Antebellum period went from 1832 to 1860 and is defined as the time between the formation of the U.S. government and the outbreak of the American Civil War. 7 Biographical information can be found on the artist’s official website at http://www. koralcarballo.com/semblanza-y-cv-en-espaol

Works Cited Adams, C. J. Neither man nor beast: Feminism and the defense of animals. New York: Continuum, 1994. Aguilar Rangel, Jazmin, “Infographic: Afrodescendants in Mexico”. In Infographics by the Mexican Institute, 2022. Aguirre Beltrán, G. Aguirre. La Población Negra de Mexico: Estudio ethnohistórico [The African population of Mexico: An ethnohistorical study]. Fondo de Cultura Economica S. A. de C.V, 1989. Arce, Chrissy B. “La fe disfrazada y la complicidad del deseo.” In Lección errante: Mayra SantosFebres y el Caribe contemporáneo, edited by Nadia V. Celis and Juan Pablo Rivera, 226–246. San Juan, PR: Editorial Isla Negra, 2011.

162  Rosita Scerbo Banks, Marcus, and Jay Ruby. Made to be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Beaman, Jean “Citizenship as cultural: Towards a theory of cultural citizenship.” Sociology Compass vol. 10, no. 1, 2016. Bennett, Herman L. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Capocci, Mauro, and Claudio Pogliano. “Science and Race”. Nuncius vol. 36, no. 3, 2021. 503–515. Charmé, Stuart. Vulgarity and Authenticity: Dimensions of Otherness in the World of Jean-Paul Sartre. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Claude Barbre, “Foreword,” in The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History, and Memory, ed. Michael O’Loughlin. Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Cohen, Theodore W. Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Gender, black feminism, and black political economy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science vol. 568, 2000. 41–53. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics”. University of Chicago Legal Forum no. 1, 1989. 139–167. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. Delgadillo, Jorge E. “La desaparición de los afrodescendientes de Guadalajara: cambio identitario, demografía y ciudadanía, 1793–1823.” (essay presented at LASA Virtual Conference 2020, May 13–16, 2020). Edwards Elizabeth, ed., Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1992. ——. “Evolving Images: Photography, Race and Popular Darwinism” in D. Donald & J. Munro (ed) Endless Forms, Darwin, Natural Sciences and the Visual Arts. Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1952. Fisher, Elizabeth. “Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society." American Anthropologist vol. 84, no. 1, 1982. 208. Flores, Juan, and Miriam Jiménez Román. “Triple-consciousness? Approaches to Afro-Latino culture in the United States.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies vol. 4, no. 3, 2009. 319–328. French, Marylin. Beyond Power. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985. Germeten, Nicole von. “Juan Roque’s Donation of a House to the Zape Confraternity, Mexico City, 1623.” Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812. Edited by Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009, pp. 83–104. Gonzalez, Anita. Afro-Mexico Dancing Between Myth and Reality 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W Norton and Co, 1981. Griffin, Johnnie. “Aunt Jemima: Another Image, Another Viewpoint”. Journal of Religious Thought vol. 54, no. 55, 1998. Gruen, Lori. Dismantling oppression: An analysis of the connection between women and animals. Ecofeminism: Women, animals, nature. Philadelphia: Tempe, 60–90, 1993. Gutiérrez Aguilera, María Selina “Mujeres esclavas bajo la autoridad femenina: entre dóciles y rebeldes (Buenos Aires, siglo XVIII),” Historia y memoria no. 12, 2016. Guynn, Beth Ann. “A Nation Emerges: 65 Years of Photography in Mexico”. In the Getty Research Institute, 2010.

The Untold Story of Black Mexico 163 Guzauskyte, Evelina. “Fragmented Borders, Fallen Men, Bestial Women: Violence in the Casta Paintings of Eighteenth-Century New Spain”. Bulletin of Spanish Studies vol. 86, no. 2, 2009. 175–204. Hartman, Saidiya. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 101, no. 4, Fall 2002. 757–777. Hirsch, Marianne “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today vol. 29, no. 1, 2008. Hordge-Freeman, Elizabeth, and Edlin Veras. “Out of the shadows, into the dark: Ethnoracial dissonance and identity formation among Afro-Latinxs.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity vol. 6, no. 2, 2020. 146–160. INEGI. “Censo de Población y Vivienda 2020”. https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/ ccpv/2020/#Resultados_generales. Kaldis, Byron, ed. Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences. SAGE, 2013. Katerí Hernández, Tanya. Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. Beacon Press, 2022. Kern-Foxworth, Marilyn. “Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Rastus: Blacks in advertising, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow”. Public Relations Review vol. 16, no. 59, 1994. Kurtz, Paul. “Can the Sciences Help Us to Make Wise Ethical Judgments?”. Skeptical Inquirer, 2004. Laine, Anna. Practicing Art and Anthropology: A Transdisciplinary Journey. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Manring, M. M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Marquette, Arthur F. Brands, Trademarks, and Good Will: The Story of the Quaker Oats Company. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Merchamt, Carolyn. Earthcare: Women and the Environment. New York: Routledge, 1995. Morton, Christopher and Edwards, Elizabeth eds., Photography, Anthropology and History. Expanding the Frame. New York: Routledge, 2016. Morton, Patricia, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991. Molloy, Silvia. At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Organista, K. C. “The social stratification of Latino ethnicity, power, and social welfare in the United States.” Solving Latino psychosocial and health problems: Theory, practice, and populations (2007): 39–63. Pagani, C. Perception of a common fate in human-animal relations and its relevance to our concern for animals. Anthrozoös vol. 13, 2000. 66–73. Plumwood, V. Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Poole, Deborah. “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies”. Annual Review of Anthropology no. 34, 2005. Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, eds. Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Berg, 2006. ——. Between Art and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, 2010. ——. Anthropology and Art Practice. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Socolow, Susan M. The Women of Colonial Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1999. Witt, Doris. Black Hunger: Soul Food and America. Minnesot: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Velázquez, María Elisa. “Experiencias de esclavitud femenina: africanas, afrodescendientes e indígenas en el México virreinal.” In Debates históricos contemporáneos: africanos y afrodescendientes en México y Centroamérica, edited by María Elisa Velázquez, 243–266. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2011.

Epilogue

With few exceptions and relative to the fields of literature and film studies, scholarship on Mexican photography has not kept apace of the extraordinary levels of productivity in the art form throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day.1 Indeed, the recognition and institutionalization of and attention to photography as a visual art within Mexico did not occur until the 1990s, despite robust photographic production during more than a century. The dearth of critical work on women photographers is even more pronounced as it has only been in the last fifteen years that genuine and sustained interest in their art has expanded to a public, transnational scale. Since 2010, several public-facing initiatives showcasing women photographers in Mexico indicate domestic and international interest and demand for access to their work. By way of example, in 2011, the Museo de Arte Moderno [Museum of Modern Art] in Mexico City offered the exhibition, “Fotógrafas en México: 1872–1960” [“Photographers in Mexico: 1872–1960”], which subsequently traveled to Madrid’s Casa de América. The comprehensive retrospective exhibit curated by José Antonio Rodríguez included 120 images, was extensively and positively reviewed, and eventually became the subject of a book by the same title published by Turner in 2013. In collaboration with Ángeles Alonso Espinosa, anthropologist and curator at the Museo Amparo, Puebla (Mexico), Rodríguez also curated a centenary retrospective of the surrealist Kati Horna’s photography, which was a co-production with the Jeu de Paume in Paris, where the exhibit traveled in 2014.2 Concurrently, in 2013, the Chiapas Photography Project organized Respect/Respeto, a traveling exhibition featuring the works of seven women photographers, including Antonia Girón Intzín, Refugia Guzmán Pérez, and Juana López López. Organized around the thematic principle of “Respect for beliefs, religions, and rituals in Chiapas Mexico,”3 the Inaugural exhibit was held in New Haven, Connecticut, in the United States from May to June of that year. From November 2018 to April 2019, the Palacio de Iturbide in Mexico City’s historic center opened a free-admission exhibition titled “Graciela Iturbide. Cuando habla la luz” [“Graciela Iturbide. When the Light Speaks”], which showcased 270 of her photographs.4 That same year Bank of America’s “Luces y sombras” collection, a travelling exhibition of forty-five photographs including some by Mariana Yampolsky, Iturbide, and photographer-sculptor Alejandra Laviada,5 began touring the continental United States. The collection has been hosted by institutions such as the North Carolina Museum of Art from October 2019 to February 2020, the Tacoma Art Museum from October 2022 to February 2023. In related developments, Mariana Yampolsky’s archives and estate were acquired by the Universidad Iberoamericana outside Mexico City in 2018, and in 2021 UNESCO DOI: 10.4324/9781003309352-15

Epilogue 165 declared her photographic archives part of Mexico’s documentary patrimony.6 In 2022 the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City—a federal institution both preserving and showcasing Mexican photography—inaugurated a two-story exhibition on Yampolsky’s photography titled “Mariana Yampolsky entre cuerpos extraños” [“Mariana Yampolsky amid strange bodies”], displaying hundreds of the artist’s photographs, correspondences, and print materials. And in March of 2023, the Centro de la Imagen offered members of the public the opportunity to peruse the contents of twenty boxes of Tina Modotti’s photographs and materials related to her career. Fewer coordinated efforts have emerged, however, that focus on Mexican women photographers beyond the 1960s and 1970s, a period that has seen both a dramatic increase in their participation and fundamental transformations in the artform, its techne, its boundaries, its applications, and its dissemination. This acceleration is especially acute with the expansion and democratic apertures of the internet and of social media platforms in the twenty-first century, which privilege visual arts and create virtual spaces for artists to share their work with a global audience while serving an increasingly vital role to archive and document artists and their art. In this context, platforms have emerged attempting to document the contemporary activities of women photographers globally. One notable example, the non-profit Women Photograph, founded in 2017, manages a comprehensive database and a series of artist grants with the objective of “elevat[ing] the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists,”7 with a section dedicated to over 200 Latin American women and nonbinary photographers, many of them from Mexico. All this to acknowledge that there is much ground to cover to grasp the dimensions of women’s photography in Mexican modernity and contemporaneity. Our aim with this collection has been to engage this growing public interest by offering a platform for feminist inquiry for examining multiple generations of women photographers, one that features varied critical frameworks and timely approaches. To that end, the chapters in this book emphasize the richness and breadth of the photographic works of women in Mexico during the twentieth century. They make evident how these works are shaped by, and give visibility to, the constraints of the machista heteropatriarchy, the context and realities of uneven industrialization, and the creative ways Mexican women choose to resist with their bodies, through communal action, and through art. Whether it is through technique, genre play, storytelling, blending photo and text, or using the medium to bear witness, the essays demonstrate that women have been pioneers of the photographic medium. From early twentieth century artists like Natalia Baquedano and Tina Modotti to those who are entering their prime in the twenty-first century, such as Koral Carballo and Mara Sánchez Renero, each has distinguished herself as an innovator, while indirectly—and at times directly—paving the way for more women in Mexico to find inspiration as photographers. That there is too much artistic activity to broach in one book is, we insist, a window of opportunity for future scholarship on women photographers—both past and present—in Mexico and, for that matter, across Latin America. It is our hope that Women Photographers will activate further exploration and dialogue on a transnational level, thereby paving the way for future research on a topic that is as necessary as it is germane to a fuller understanding of the visual arts, women’s artistic production, and Mexican cultural production.

166 Epilogue Notes 1 Namely, Elena Poniatowska (on Mariana Yampolsky and Tina Modotti), Carlos Monsivaís (Tina Modotti), Olivier Debroise (on Graciela Iturbide, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Natalia Baquedano, Yampolsky and Modotti), Eli Bartra (on Baquedano, Iturbide, Modotti, and Lucero González), Rebeca Monroy Nasr (on Catalina Guzmán, sisters Ana and Elena Arriaga, and María Santibáñez), Fiona Noble (Modotti), Esther Gabara (Modotti), José Antonio Rodríguez (the Arriaga sisters, Gertrude Duby, Modotti, Giselle Freund, Laura Gilpin, and Bernice Kolko), Leonard Folgarait (Modotti), Deborah Dorotinsky Alperstein (Maruch Sántiz Gómez, Gertrude Duby, Xunka’ López Díaz, María Santibáñez, and Lola Álvarez Bravo), and John Mraz (on Flor Garduño, Ofelia Medina, Elsa Medina, and Iturbide). 2 See: https://jeudepaume.org/en/evenement/kati-horna-4/. 3 Chiapas Photography Project. “Exhibition Prospectus.” 2013. https://chiapasphoto.org/cpprespeto-prospectus.pdf. 4 https://fomentoculturalbanamex.org/casasdeculturabanamex/palaciodeiturbide/cartelera/ graciela-iturbide-cuando-habla-la-luz/. 5 https://about.bankofamerica.com/en/making-an-impact/art-in-our-communities/luces-ysombras. 6 https://ibero.mx/prensa/unesco-declara-patrimonio-documental-de-mexico-obra-fotograficade-yampolsky. 7 “About” https://www.womenphotograph.com/about.

Index

Abelleyra, Angélica 33–34 activist 1, 9, 11, 20, 49, 52, 55, 119, 131, 133, 148–149, 160–161 affect 120, 135, 140, 142, 146 Afro-mestizo 9, 151 Afro-Mexican 9, 11–12, 148–155, 157–159, 161–163 agrarianism 47, 49 Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo 140, 151, 161 Albers, Patricia 46, 52 Altar llanero 67 alternative modernity 78 Alvarez Bravo, Lola 3, 4, 5–6, 18, 34, 60, 61, 73 Álvarez Bravo, Manuel 18, 34, 39, 70, 78, 79 ancestors 47, 134–135, 137, 139–140, 159 animality 83, 149, 156 Ante la quema de cuerpos 113 archive 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 22, 24, 45–46, 71, 73–74, 80, 92, 113, 115, 123, 131–132, 148, 150, 164–165 Archivo Etnográfico Audiovisual 80 Arenal, Luis, 66 Artaud, Antonin 4 Así la construí 33 Aubert, Francois 19 Avedon, Richard 19 Azoulay, Ariella 11, 59–60, 72–73, 108–109, 113–114 Bach, Federico 48 Baquedano, Natalia 10, 21–24 Barbero, Jesús Martín 76 Barthes, Roland 59, 83 Barricada 124–125 Bartra, Eli 10, 33 Bartra, Roger 78 Becerra Acosta, Manuel 108–111, 117–119, 122 Benjamin, Walter 8–9 Beuchot, Mauricio 76, 78 Black Mexicans 11–12

Blanco Fuentes, Lázaro 4 Boaz, Franz 33 body 20, 37, 53, 70, 74, 77, 83, 90, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 101, 107, 113–114, 120, 142, 148, 150, 153 Bradu, Fabienne 82 Brassai (Gyula Halasz) 61 Brenner, Anita 18, 34, 41 Brown, Julia 11, 83 Buñuel, Luis 4 Butler, Judith 6, 10 Caballero de la Muerte 99–100 Cacucci, Pino 46 campesino 2, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54 Caña de azúcar 52 Capa, Robert (Endre Friedmann) 33, 61 Carballo, Koral 11–12, 148–150, 152–155, 157–158, 160–161, 165 Carrington, Leonora 26, 31 Cartier Bresson, Henri 61, 82 Casanova, Rosa 2, 46 Casas, Negro 95–96 Casta Paintings 151, 159, 163 Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos (CEMCA) 20 Centro de la Imagen 4 Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinemátográficos (CUEC) 79 Chapingo 49 Chiapas 4, 11, 13, 111, 117, 120, 123–131, 133–135, 137–139, 143–146, 164, 166 Chiapas Photography Project 5, 11, 13, 133, 137–139, 143, 164, 166; see also Proyecto Fotográfico de Chiapas Chiconcuac 48 Cinturón de Paz 130 Cisneros, Rigo 99–100 Coen, Eleonor 33 Comisarenco Mirkin, Dina 5–6 Conger, Amy 40 Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía 4

168 Index Cordero Reiman, Karen 34 Costa Chica 149, 152 creation 66–69 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 149, 152, 162 Cruz, Marco Antonio 72 Cruz León, Artemio 49, 52 Cuevas, Fernando 78 Cunningham, Imogen 27 Cvetkovich, Ann 1 daguerreotype 2 de González, María Luisa 3 de Lauretis, Teresa 6 De León, Cristina L. 40 del Río, Dolores 18 Desfile de trabajadores 31 Día de la Guadalupana 68 Doy, Glen 73 Duque, Isabel Arline 46, 49, 52 El libro negro de terror nazi en Europa 33 El Machete 32 El mandil 70 El raíz y el camino 58 El retoño 65 El Santo 90, 95, 100–104 enslaved people 149–152, 155–163 Escobedo, Helen 31, 37 Escuela mazahua 31, 35–36 Estancias del olvido 59 estridentismo 47 Excélsior 56, 109, 122 Family 10–11, 22, 24, 33, 54–55, 61, 66–67, 74, 79–80, 90–97, 99–103, 112, 134, 137, 140–141, 144, 160 Family of Man 61 feminism 6, 25, 109, 161–163 Figarella, Mariana 46 Fila india 126–127 Filmer, Lady Mary Georgina 22 Flor de manita 52 Foster, David William 10 Fotografía Nacional 22 Fotógrafos y niño 116 French, Lisa 6, 8 Frente Popular 53 Gabara, Esther 40 Galeana, Benita 20 Galindo Arce, Marcelina 33 Gallo, Rubén 8, 32 Galván, Úrsulo 45, 48, 53 García, Romualdo 24 Gardner, Nathaniel 10 Garduño, Flor 73 Garro, Elena 27

gender 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13–14, 17–18, 32, 36, 41, 46, 53, 56, 76–77, 82, 95, 97–100, 102, 118, 122, 131–132, 141, 148–150, 152, 156–157, 162 Golden Age of Mexican Cinema 4 González, Lucero 9, 24–28 Grobet, Lourdes 3, 4, 10, 90–97, 99–104 Grupo Proceso Pentágono 4 Guerrero, Xavier 47–48, 49, 54 Guzmán, Catalina 3 Hartz, Frida 4, 11, 110, 119–132 Hasselbrad 26 Hijo del Santo e Hijos/and Sons 100–101 Horna, Kati 4, 9, 31, 33, 34, 37–39 Huelga de los machetes 129 humanist photography 59, 60 Ich/Chile 137 icon 45 iconic-dialogical-hermeneutics 76 Idols Behind Altars 34 indexicality 59 indigenous 11, 19, 31–32, 35, 48–49, 58, 60–62, 77–78, 80, 85–86, 88, 91, 96, 100, 107–109, 111, 116–117, 119–123, 125–131, 133–136, 141–142, 144–145, 151, 153 Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) 60, 80 interpersonality 77 Iturbide, Graciela 1, 9, 10, 18, 26, 77–87 Jach’ubi/El peine/The Comb 138 Jiménez, Luz 20 Juchitán de las mujeres 81, 83 Juchiteca con cerveza 77 Kahn, Max 33 Karam, Tanius 10 Károlyi, Michael 48 Khalo, Guillermo 24–28 Khankhoje File 46, 54 Khankhoje, Pandurang 10, 46, 48–50, 53 Koudelka, Josef 79 Krauze, Ethel 25–26 La bendición del gallo 70 La jornada 4, 34, 41, 74, 117, 122–123 La noche de Tlatelolco 4 Las lavanderas sobreentendidas 40 Leica 26 Lehtinen, Linde 34 Leistner, Rita 34 Lettered City 5 Liga de comunidades agrarias del estado de Veracruz 47 Liga Nacional Campesina 47

Index  169 Lirios 52 List Arzubide, Germán 47–48 Long, Ryan 10 López Díaz, Xunka’ 5, 11, 133–135, 139–146, 166 López, Nacho 34 Lowe, Sarah 46 Lozano Álvarez, Elisa 52 lucha libre 10, 90–94, 96–99, 101–103 Lucha Libre. The Family Portraits 10 Madre con hijo en Tehuantepec 31, 39 Mahieux, Viviane 11 maíz granada 49–50, 51 male nudes 27 Mariana y la bugambilia 59 masculinity 3, 10, 90–93, 95, 97–103 mask 19, 31, 41, 92, 94–96, 98, 100–104 Massacre of Tlatelolco 4 Massé, Patricia 46 Mastretta, Ángeles 27 Máximo 96–98 Máximo e/and India Sioux 96–97 Maya, María 3 Mazahua (1993) 10, 31, 58–73 Medina, Elsa 9, 31, 33–34, 36–37, 40 Mello, Julio 18 Méndez, Leopoldo 34, 66 mestizo 2, 8 Mexican Revolution 2–3, 48 Mexico This Month 43 Meyer, Pedro 4, 91 Michel, Concha 48, 53–54 Mignolo, Walter D. 8 Migrante 31, 34, 36–37 migration 58, 60, 62, 123, 136, 137, 140–142, 147, 153 Miguel Delgado y familia 54 military 8, 11, 91, 120–121, 125–131 Mitchell, W.J.T. 60 Modernity 1, 3, 8, 9, 12, 32–33, 34, 48, 71, 78, 84, 86 Modotti, Tina 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 18, 20, 31–32, 45–55, 78 Monroy Nasr, Rebeca 3 Monsiváis, Carlos 12–14, 31–32, 35, 40–42, 84, 88–89, 91, 102–103, 109–110, 118, 166 Mraz, John 32, 34 Mr. X 94–95 Mujer ángel 77, 84, 87 Mujer con olla 32 muralism 4 Nates, Colorado 80 nationalization 8 Nave 64

Negro Casas 96 neoliberalism 135, 145–147 Nicaragua 47, 111–118 Nieto Sotelo, Jesús 52 Nikon FM 26 Niño con sombrero o Hijo de agrarista 47 nude photography 27 Nuestra Señora de la iguanas 77, 81, 84 Nuestra Señora de las iguanas 18 Nuevas variedades de maíz 49, 52 Nuevo fotoperiodismo 4, 11, 109, 118, 122–123, 131–132 O’Higgins, Pablo 48, 54, 66 Ojos para volar 77, 81 Oldfield, Otis 46 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) 4, 8, 88, 107, 122–123 Patriarchy 32 Peirce, C. S. 78, 87 photographic portrait 18–21 photojournalist 4, 11–12, 34, 108, 110–111, 115–119, 121–123, 131, 134, 160 Pineda, Irma 11, 119–123, 126, 129–132 Pitchford, Emily H. 28 Plegaria 72 poem 11, 119–121, 126, 131 Poniatowska, Elena 4, 10, 12,14, 33–34, 41–42, 46, 56, 58–60, 62–63, 66, 68, 73–75 Porfiriato 2 postrevolutionary modernity 4, 9, 31–32, 48 Price, Derek 60 Proceso pentágono 4, 91, 103 Proyecto Fotográfico de Chiapas see Chiapas Photography Project Ramamurthy, Anandi 73 Ramírez Castro, Marcelino 49, 52 Rashkin, Elissa 10 Raymond, Claire 6–7 Resisten con flores 128 Retrato de mujer. Una Vida con Tina Modotti 46 Rigo Cisneros y/and Caballero de la Muerte 99 ritual 63–66 Rivera, Diego 19, 48–49, 54 Rosa de Juchitán 18 Rosas 45 Rosenblum, Naomi 34 Saborit, Antonio 46 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos 84 Sánchez Renero, Mara 11–12, 148–150, 152–155, 157–161, 165

170 Index Sander, August 19 Santibáñez, María 23 Sántiz Gómez, Maruch 5, 11, 133–140, 145–147, 166 Sawhney, Savitri 45 Scerbo, Rosita 11 Segre, Erica 39 self-portraits 80 Senghar, Sedar 85 Señor de Papantla, 70 Seri 79–85 Seymour, “Chim” (Dawid Szymin) 61 Sioux, India 96–98 Sontag, Susan 109, 114, 118 Sullivan, Edward 32 Taller de Gráfica Popular 33, 62, 66 Tarkovski, Andrei 80 Taylor, Diana 1 Teosinte plant 50 Tibol, Raquel 4, 91 Tina Modotti 46 Tinísima 46 Tlacotalpan 58 Toledo, Francisco 79, 80 Transgender 81 Tsotsil 133–135, 137, 140, 142, 144–145

Una mujer sin país 47 Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo 49 unomásuno 4, 107–112, 114–115, 117–118 Vander der Sluis, Arjen 58 Varo, Remedios 31 Vázquez, Anastasio D. 54 Vidali, Vittorio 46 Virgen de Guadalupe 67–68, 95 Wells, Liz 60 Weston, Edward 2, 20, 34, 73 Willams, Tamara 11 witness 47, 54, 61, 73–74, 107, 109, 114–119, 123, 126, 134, 148–149, 157, 165 Woman from Tehuantepec 121 Woman with a Flag 20 Workers Parade 52 Yampolsky, Mariana 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 31–32, 33, 35, 58–73 youth 69–72 Zapatistas 49, 117, 122, 125–128, 132–134, 146 Zapotec 11, 82, 119, 131 Zarak, Marta 4, 11, 107–118