MUJERES DE LUZ

‘Mujeres de luz’,  is a project collaborating with Tehuana women, protagonists in the economy and culture of Zapotec society in southern Mexico, where the female presence is always visible. I seek to discover the features that characterize these women in other Mexican societies. Their high degree of autonomy over the past century and a half— coupled with the knowledge that Tehuanas are self-sufficient, confident women in a country like Mexico, which is dominated by a patriarchal system—drew me toward getting to know and portraying them.

I worked with young women, with creole, mestizo, ochre, dark, white faces, stripped of any superficial trace of makeup that could be external to natural beauty, trying to deconstruct the feminine model imposed by a society. In the photographs, I portray an element of the Tehuana traditional costume, the glow, the ornamental garment that frames the woman's face, which makes her enter in a divine way, like a virgin, derived from historically syncretic forms, but transformed and adjusted to her own traditions, used in the festivities as a symbol of identity, power and social status, mainly in Las Velas, an ancestral tradition at Zapotec villages, now with a Christian touch resulting from the blend of the indigenous mysticism with the Spanish religious culture.