The words of Subcomandante Marcos resounded forcefully in the hearts of the hundreds of people gathered that night in Nurio, Michoacan, during the National Indigenous Congress of 2001. That cold and windy night, the leader of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) paid timely homage to forty indigenous peoples of Mexico, recalling to each listener “the suffering that unites us and makes us one, despite our being many.”

Regarding the Raramuri or Tarahumara, Marcos mentioned the exploitation of their forests and mines for mestizo consumption, for the enrichment of ”foreigners.” At the heart of his comments, like everything in the Zapatista discourse, were political motivation and social protest against marginalization and abuse.

Such are the words of Marcos: strong, cutting, moving. Almost any adjective can be applied to them. And with the same intention, photographer Kitty Alice Snead lodges a protest pertaining to a people: the dissection of a culture that, beyond syncretism, has survived and maintained its traditions and ancestral rites.

In Retratos de la Tarahumara (Portraits of the Tarahumara), this U.S. photographer presents aspects of daily life of a people dedicated to farming for local consumption and celebrations of Holy Week, when the participants decorate their bodies and acquire the name of “Pintos.” Here are chance moments of a culture embedded in the southern part of the state of Chihuahua, mainly in the area known as Barrancas del Cobre (Copper Canyon) in the Sierra Madre.

The artist explains, “I’m interested in the Tarahumara of Mexico because they offer one of the last visions of the indigenous peoples of North America. …On one hand, I took a series of intimate portraits of individuals whom I met going about their daily lives: on the other I studied and photographed the Tarahumara as they appear costumed and painted for the Holy Week festivities.” Snead, after twenty years as a bilingual teacher in the Dallas schools, retired to dedicate herself to photography and her interest in ancient cultures and ceremonial rites.

Her images show men with feathered plums, women with faces withered by time, and young men proud of their coming of age. These pictures basically portray the conservation of a culture with its own language removed from the mestizo world, sheltered amid crags, canyons and mountains. She shows the settlers in localities like Batopilas, Yerbaniz, Astillero, Satevo, and Guachochi in a landscape that is unusual and wooded, wild and given to extremes. In the summer, temperatures exceed 40 degrees centigrade; on winter mornings, they drop as low as 20 degrees centigrade. A barelegged man wearing huaraches and a long-sleeved shirt poses for Snead’s camera in front of a curio shop, whose windows display what must be a pendulum clock, a knapsack resembling Winnie the Pooh, tortilla makers, and artificial flowers. Thus within this indigenous portrait, the photographer recalls the urban elements of consumer societies and thus reveals part of Mexico’s essence of many cultures. In 1999, during a trip through the Tarahumara Sierra, journalist Pim Schalkwijk of Mexico Desconocido ran across the story of Ramon, who had been imvited to work in an audiovisual production on the condition that he not speak in Spanish. Ramon accepted the challenge but never told his employers that in addition to Raramuri and Spanish, he had also mastered some words in English.

Thus Snead’s portraits and Marcos’ words, as secular icons of the indigenous struggle, can be linked in the same text by the subtext of both discourses: political recovery through a space in history and the documentation of a people who, in the heart of the Sierra, resist mestizo expansionism. An indigenous cultural oasis in the avalanche of Western culture.

Jose Soto

Jose Soto is a photographer and freelance writer living and working in Guadalajara, Mexico. This review was written for CUARTOSCURO, photographic magazine, as a result of an exhibition of Snead’s work in Guadalajara during May – June of 2005.

Translation by Sharon Kellum

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