Graciela Iturbide: Normalizing Juchitán

Abstract

Abstract Graciela Iturbide's photographs of Zapotec women from Juchitán, Oaxaca (Mexico) enjoy a wide audience. They have been displayed at major international photography exhibitions in Paris, New York and elsewhere, as well as via a travelling exhibit that has toured the university and museum circuit. Of equal importance as regards exposure and financial return, some of the photographs in the collection circulate on postcards, sold at a dollar each or more by up-market booksellers as well as in chain stores. Many people who know nothing of the photographer or the larger body of her work are familiar with Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), the Iturbide portrait of the proudJuchiteca in the flowered huipil whose head is adorned with live iguanas. Despite Iturbide's growing reputation and receipt of prestigious awards (European Prize for Photography in Paris and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others), her work has been subjected to little sustained critique. That is, I believe, because it portrays indigenous Mexicans in a way that reaffirms rather than challenges western liberal discourses about them. My reading of Iturbide is informed by a politics critical of that discourse, and of the social relationships that it enables.1 I will focus exclusively on Juchitám de las Mujeres (1989), a collaborative work between Iturbide (photographs) and Elena Poniatowska (text). I will argue that contrary to its indigenista and feminist pretensions, Juchitán de las Mujeres does a disservice both to Juchitecos in general and to Juchiteca women in particular.