FEATURES
| A Profile of Photographer Graciela Iturbide
Myth and Matriarchy in Mexico
El Paseante*. March 1990.
By Jordan Elgrably
Graciela Iturbide
is a small woman with a dreamy disposition and soft, searching
eyes that seem to reflect the photographer’s natural desire
to see and record things unknown. A student and disciple of the
Mexican master Manuel Alvarez Bravo, she came to photography after
marriage at nineteen and two children. Iturbide enrolled at Mexico
City’s Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos,
when she was twenty-six, then settled on photography upon realizing
that “the kinds of movies I would’ve wanted to make
wouldn’t have been possible within the confines of commercial
Mexican cinema.” Her first exposition came seven years later.
'"After
the Rapture" 1986
|
Though she
began taking pictures as a child, Iturbide had no idea where her
persistent fascination with Mexican culture would lead her. Deeply
inspired by the photography of Josef Koudelka, Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Sebastiao Salgado and her mentor, Manual Alvarez Bravo, Iturbide’s
photographs of indigenous Mexican cultures have been exposed throughout
Europe and the United States, and led to invitations to shoot
for A Day in the Life of America in 1986, and both A
Day in the Life of the Soviet Union and A Day in the Life
of Spain in 1987 (published in three volumes by Collins, London).
Internationally recognized for her work on the Zapotec people
of Juchitan, Graciela Iturbide has taken, among other awards,
both the W. Eugene Smith prize for photography and a Guggenheim
Fellowship, honors which enable her to continue her study of Juchitan
during a period in Mexican history when economic crisis has crippled
creative production and narrowed opportunity in the print media.
Julie Margaret Cameron suggested that photography can, like painting,
qualify as art because it aims for the beautiful. Iturbide’s
images of Juchitan, however, are not overworked; there are no
technical tricks nor heavy-handed aesthestic manipulation of her
subjects. “My intention, certainly, is to create something
which is aesthetic,” she said during a recent conversation
we had together in Paris (where she had just won the Grand Jury
Prize in the 5th annual Mois de la Photo), “but many things
are implicit in the work that I do. For me photography is writing,
it is history; it can be aesthetic, it can be many things though
it does not have to be art.”
True, whether or not photography is art is no longer a useful
question because we do live in such a self-conscious era; much
of what we think we know derives from what we see on still and
moving film rather than our own experience. Whereas the ancient
Greeks believed that things without a name had no soul, today
we consider that what hasn’t been recorded on film cannot
be said to exist; in the news media there is no news without images,
and artists rely as much on photographic images for their work
as traditional plastic materials. “The need to bring things
spatially and humanly ‘nearer’,” Walter Benjamin
wrote as far back as the ‘30s, “is almost an obsession
today.” In photography this would be the obsession of the
“humanist school” to which Iturbide, along with Cartier-Bresson,
Koudelka and Salgado, belongs.
"Through the people and culture of Mexico I find myself,”
said Iturbide, “and at the same time I leave a sort of testament
of what I've seen. But all this is very personal; what interests
me in photography is the point of view or poesy of man, and yet
I wouldn’t say my work is mainly ethnological.” Thus,
Iturbide considers photography as self-expression, or subjective
visual writing; she perceives her pictures as a mirror of herself.
"I think you can see Graciela Iturbide in all of my photographs,"
she remarked. "I feel that photography is a regard within
a regard—between the gaze of the photographer and the gaze
of the subject the image becomes a reflection of the person taking
the picture."
Complicity between photographer and subject, she feels, is implicit.
Yet don’t photographs hide more than they reveal?
“Yes, certainly, but I think that that which is hidden in
the picture is a revelation of what is hidden in the photographer."
Juchitan
"Our
Lady of the Iguanas" 1979
|
There is little
similarity between the person of Graciela Iturbide, a native of
Mexico City of distant Spanish descent, and the intense Zapotec
faces encountered in her Juchitan photographs. For Iturbide, as
for us, a journey to Juchitan is a journey to another world, albeit
one which the photographer has made her own. She has been returning
there regularly since 1980.
“When I find myself facing the Juchitan culture which is
so different from mine, obviously, I question myself: who am I?
why am I a photographer? When in front of the people who are my
subjects I wonder: is photography aggressive? in what way can
I learn from these people?” Her pictures are a voyage of
discovery both of herself and the area in Mexico most removed
from Hispanic culture, a visual ethnography of one of the country's
56 indigenous Indian populations and a society where myth and
matriarchal customs resist outside pressures to change.
Found at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Juchitan is a town of 100,000
inhabitants off the Trans-Isthmian Highway between Coatzacoalcos
and Salina Cruz, terminal cities between the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans. As a stronghold of Zapotec culture it has attracted such
eminent visitors as Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Cartier-Bresson
and Sergei Eisenstein, who shot part of “Viva Mexico”
there. While Mexico may be the only Latin American country where
Indian cultures are looked upon with such zealous national pride
(indeed, Mexicans of Spanish descent sometimes use Indian names
rather than Spanish ones, and Moctezuma and Cuauhtémoc,
the last of the Aztec emperors—not Cortés—are
national heroes), the Zapotecs of Juchitan, according to Iturbide,
represent "an apartheid from the rest of Mexico."
"Juchitan women run the economy, and they know how to manage
their finances. Men, whether they are farm hands or factory workers,
hand their earnings over to the women so that they can distribute
money in the home. If a man wants to buy cigarettes or go out
and get drunk, he gets money from the woman of the household.
Women decide everything in Juchitan. Even physically," Iturbide
mused with a smile, "the Juchitan men are often smaller and
skinnier than their women, who are taller and wider than they
are."
"Magnolia"
1986 |
Iturbide's
view of Juchitan as a matriarchy comes after repeated visits in
which she has lived with the town's women, documenting their dominance
in the marketplace—where none but homosexual men are normally
allowed—and taking part in many local celebrations. "These
fiestas are frequent and fervent. The women dance and recite to
each other the erotic songs and poems of Juchitan; the men drink
and only observe for a wedding, for a political reunion, for a
quince años—a birthday celebration."
The traditional marriage rites continue to maintain their pre-Hispanic
character, and involve nocturnal dances such as the Dance of the
Tiger, the Frog, the Monkey and the Alligator. Iturbide observed
two types of Zapotec betrothal, one in which the bride is requested
formally and the other when she is abducted. In both cases, she
pointed out, "women drink a great deal, sing, cry, and celebrate
the loss of [the bride's] virginity, dancing with bottles of wine
in their hands." As Iturbide quotes from one marriage song,
"'Raise your skirt now/so we can see how you awakened/there
will be a wedding if you are a virgin/if you aren't, let's go
home.'"
Animals are an important part of Zapotec culture, as witnessed
in many of Iturbide's photographs. Referring to themselves as
Vinigulasa—"the people of the clouds"—Zapotec
legend has it that man descended from the heavens in the shape
of birds of incredible beauty. Another beloved symbol and source
of poetical inspiration is the iguana, a common sight in the heavily-jungled
Tehuantepec isthmus. "Let's go and sit on the terrace,”
say the people of Juchitan, “and like the iguana swallow
the night and eat flowers.”
There is also the ancient Zapotec custom of finding a unborn child's
nahual, or alter ego, which consists of assigning he or
she with an animal representation. "When a woman is pregnant
and about to give birth," Iturbide explained, "people
come to her home and draw animals in the dirt, which they continually
erase. The animal drawing left in the dirt at the time of the
infant's birth will be his nahual."
Originally documented in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough,
the practice of finding the nahual persists even today,
despite the disapprobation of the Catholic church. Noted Frazer
in 1922, "When the child grew old enough, he procured the
animal that represented him and took care of it, as it was believed
that his health and existence were bound up with that of the animal's...the
weal and woe of the man depend on the fate of the nahual."
Graciela Iturbide linked the tradition of the nahual with
"the Legend of the Black Dog, which must accompany one in
death to the banks of the river, so that one may fair well in
the other life."
As elsewhere in Latin America, death is a highly-touted event.
"In Juchitan," she affirmed, "funeral rites are
celebrated with loud, melancholy music, and traditionally the
women weep and wail in the streets. Deaths are announced in the
marketplace since Juchitan does not have its own newspaper, and
when during a burial there has been a lot of weeping, people say
it was a good death because everyone wept so. It's a time when
women faint, when people sing and cry and get drunk, all very
colorful and theatrical."
“Another lasting tradition,” Iturbide recalled, “is
that of the ‘Powerful Hands’, in which the branches
or roots of a tree shaped like hands are considered to have religious
value; when found they are carved and placed in their altars for
worship.”
While Iturbide is of Spanish ancestry, she finds many facets of
herself in Juchitan women, and professes, "I'm troubled by
the Spanish conquest; being at once Spanish and yet removed from
those roots I am critical of them. The Conquest bothers me because
I feel that it destroyed much of what was a very rich culture."
When the Conquistadores reached the Isthmus of Tehuantepec they
condemned the Zapotecs for being idol worshippers, for besides
their devotion to animals they had a tradition of thirteen gods
who went by both masculine and feminine names. Today, though their
hermaphrodite gods have been replaced by Catholicism, Zapotec
myth and legend contrast sharply with the rituals of the Catholic
church, and in Juchitan this strange mixture of religious beliefs
and practices, Iturbide pointed out, "has produced a syncretism
which even the people themselves do not really understand."
She cites as an example the Fiesta of las Vellas (Veils),
a thanksgiving celebration dating from pre-Hispanic times in which
Juchitanos go to harvest fruit trees and then bring the fruit
to the church to make sacerdotal offerings. "There are even
patron saints of the trees," Iturbide shrugged, "but
everything here, as elsewhere in Mexico, is fused, con-fused,
as it's very difficult to find any cultural traditions which have
remained pure from outside influences."
Writing of the Mexican peasantry, Octavio Paz would corroborate
Iturbide’s findings: “They are…the authors of a
strange and fascinating creation, Mexican Catholicism, that imaginative
synthesis of 16th-century Christianity and the pre-Columbian ritualistic
religions.”
In viewing Graciela Iturbide’s images of the Juchitanos as
instant history, one wants to ask: are they self-conscious? Do
they venture much beyond the Isthmus of Tehuantepec?
"I found that some of these people had traveled abroad, to
Europe and the United States," Iturbide said, "but they
are so proud of their culture that they travel in traditional
dress, and often go bare-footed."
While it is a microcosm of the national mestizo culture, the area
of life in Juchitan which perhaps strays most from Mexican norms
is sexuality, for here young men lose their virginity with older
women or men, and homosexuality is quite open and even accepted
with alacrity. "The Juchitanos," Iturbide related, "are
a free people, and in this freedom you find a very sensual, very
erotic and very political character—politicized in what concerns
their sexual freedoms."
As deeply rooted in traditions of myth and matriarchy as it is,
Juchitano society hasn't been ignored by the federal government
or caciques, the local political bosses. To struggle against
outside interference the Zapotecs of Juchitan and elsewhere in
the isthmus have formed a coalition, comprised of workers, farm
hands and students, known as COCEI (Coalición Obrero,
Campesina y Estudiantíl del Istmo). Juchitan women,
of course, figure prominently among COCEI's most staunch supporters
and leaders, and the interests of their coalition regularly defy
government policies. "They have risked their lives in the
process," noted Iturbide. "They have experienced repression
and seen members of their families become desaparecidos—the
so-called 'disappeared'—an all too familiar fate of those
who oppose authoritarian governments.
“Nowhere else in Mexico do you find the expression of women
as open and forceful as in Juchitan, and in the Zapotec culture.
Elsewhere women are more often in the home, do not make economic
or political decisions, don’t get involved the way men do.
Outside of Zapotec culture the Mexican woman is resigned to her
lesser role.”
"Juchitan," Graciela Iturbide said with the sparkle
of a dream in her eye, "is a country of people who cannot
accept submission. So, in a way the story of Juchitan is also
the history of losers who refuse to be losers."
*This profile was commissioned by the Madrid
art magazine, El Paseante
for a
special
issue on Mexico, but editors cut it for space reasons at the last
minute.
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