For 15 years, Cindy Muñoz Sanchez (Kali, 35 years old) has been following in the footsteps of her ancestors through the eastern plains of Colombia. He separated from his mother Estela, an Indigenous woman, at the age of four after she decided to hand over custody to her father, who lived across the country. He learned of her death when he was six years old, without specifying how or why. In his youth he was overcome by an incomprehensible malaise and began to search for answers in his mother’s inhospitable origins. In addition, she always felt like a foreigner in the city where she was born and where her paternal family comes from. These concerns prompted her to begin Altares for Estela, a photographic essay titled in honor of her mother, in 2009. This project led her to travel the eastern part of the country, following in her mother’s footsteps. It was on this transfer that he met the cruellest face of misogyny and racism in society. What began as the conclusion of an unfinished duel eventually became an allegory of the cruel reality of many indigenous women in Colombia.
Cindy Muñoz describes herself as an indigenous, peripheral and proudly autonomous mother of an adolescent and a young child. “This job has allowed me to connect with the world that has been closed to me. Growing up in a multiracial household, I did not feel like I was being taught that I was a racialized woman, and even later I recognized many micro-racisms in my family life. The few years he spent with his mother were far from what he would spend most of his adult life. Between comings and goings, he spent a few years hand in hand with Estela through various departments far from his native Valle del Cauca. He was in eastern Colombia, an area historically plagued by violence and where there was minimal state presence. But after becoming estranged from her mother, she grew up in a mestizo family in Cali, where her ethnicity has long been taboo.
The genesis of Altares for Estela was to use augmented photography to reinvigorate the places her mother had traversed in life. “They taught me to erase everything that was original in me, but the simple fact of seeing my mother in a photograph encouraged and strengthened the continuity of the project,” she says. Over time, the work took more ambitious directions while simultaneously encountering enormous challenges, most of which were specific to the story it told, such as the struggle of the indigenous diaspora against the ingrained racism in Colombian society. This is no small dilemma, as living from photography has become a privilege, even more so for a racialized photographer. Unfortunately, it is an unusual picture in the halls of the big media or big academies. The work required constant travel, a significant amount of photographic archives and extensive availability of time: it seemed like an odyssey in the artist’s precarious context.
However, the obstacles that seemed insurmountable did not stop them. In 2015, after saving for several years, he managed to travel for the first time to the city where his mother died, Yopal, in the department of Casanare. For the artist, this was the opportunity to end their duel. However, he was surprised that Estela’s grave did not exist and there was no further information on the whereabouts of her body. This was the first of many twists and turns in the history of his project. At that point, the idea that her mother was among the more than 80,000 disappeared in Colombia made sense to her. This, in turn, prompted her to intensify her search for the body and hold talks with families of those who had disappeared. “The experience I had in developing the work of a disappeared person helped me to pass on methods and other ways of acting, transforming and representing. This enabled me to pass this knowledge on to women affected by violence and conflict,” she tells Americanas.
Six years later he was able to undertake another journey. This time to Granada, in the Meta department, the city where his mother was born. But before the trip, another important piece of information emerged that shaped her story and the further course of the play: Her father told her that Estela was a sex worker. A fact she had never known before.
Cindy traveled there with her son, who was barely two at the time, and together they toured the small community looking for information about the women who did the work, such as Estela: “Being there I was able to do something learn about the dynamics of If you are familiar with the field of sex work, talk to those who have done the job. It was also very beautiful because my son accompanied me and it was like seeing a mirror of it when my mother walked me through these areas as a baby, connecting me to the river, the landscape and the water,” says she.
For Muñoz, the story of her forced uprooting and that of her mother is circular for many women and indigenous peoples. “I feel that racial and patriarchal violence doesn’t allow us to grow in our territories because growing up there means being exposed to different types of violence, especially for girls. “My mother tried to protect me, and paradoxically, the best way to do that was to give up motherhood,” she says. These reflections have been extended throughout her career to other local women with whom she has developed relationships and joined because, like her, they struggle to keep their peoples’ connection and culture alive.
Convinced that uniting and sharing knowledge can be very effective, today she directs the poetry group at the Universidad del Valle and the Laboratory of Photography and Decoloniality, where she shares the knowledge she has acquired over the years through her project has. And when she was convinced a few weeks ago that nobody else was interested in this work, except for those who have experienced sexist or racial violence, her essay was awarded the prestigious POYLATAM competition in the Resignify Archives category. For Muñoz, this award is a motivation to continue his work, which still has much to explore and tell about the lives of indigenous women in Colombia. This is another step for her in her fight to save her memory. “I want to keep working on all these issues. Now I have more questions than certainties about what it means to live in the indigenous diaspora, what it means to live in a migrant community,” he claims.
Our recommendations of the week:
- Leaders of Latin America is born, an information project to promote more inclusive democracy in the region. EL PAÍS and Luminate, a non-profit foundation, are sponsoring a project that promotes democracy empowerment and women’s leadership.
- The United Nations condemns Peru for violating the rights of a girl who was raped for having an abortion. The 13-year-old girl became pregnant after four years of abuse from her father
- A ruling by the Colombian Constitutional Court threatens the right to abortion. The May 15 ruling, recently released, says there is no such right. In itself it does not change the case law that has existed for more than 15 years, but it does open this door
- Laura Garzón: “We haven’t thought about how transcendental parenting is”. The winner of the María Mercedes Carranza Poetry Prize 2022 publishes the winning collection of poems: “Pan Piedra”, a book about the traces left by leaving one’s father
- Paola Tapia: “We must guarantee that women’s mobility in cities is safe”. The former prime minister of transport in Chile, who now manages the city buses of Santiago de Chile, promotes the gender perspective in transport with “Mujeres en Movimiento”.
- The Mexicans Gaxiola, Salazar and Verdugo take the gold medal in the Pan American Cycling Championship. The women’s team wins the tournament in San Juan, Argentina, maintaining its good pace ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games
Something we’ve been talking about these days: “Stealthing”
John Slater (Getty Images)
From Almudena Barragán
The concept of stealthing may be unfamiliar to many people, but it is a type of sexual violence that is punished in some countries. In English, it means “secretly” or “secretly” and occurs when a man removes the condom without warning during intercourse, even though he has agreed with his partner to use it. This week, the Mexican media spoke about the issue after saxophonist María Elena Ríos filed a complaint against actor Tenoch Huerta. Although this type of violence is not criminalized in Mexico, other countries such as Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Spain or Canada have legislation that considers this behavior a sex crime. Most do not claim that removing the condom is a crime per se, but instead use the lack of consent as an argument against the accused.
In Canada, for example, the Supreme Court of that country ruled in 2022 that a person could be guilty of sexual assault if they require another person to use a condom during intercourse and that person takes it off or does not use it. This was also determined by the Berlin Higher Regional Court in 2020. Spain is another country that has incorporated it into its legislation with the “Only Yes is Yes” law.
A project that will follow: Foto Féminas
Women during a feminist demonstration in Mexico City. Nayeli Cruz
By Nayeli Cruz
Venezuelan photographer and curator Verónica Sanchís Becomo is the founder of Foto Féminas (I share it on Instagram), a community dedicated to promoting diversity of perspectives among female photographers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through its publications, the digital platform dedicates space to different colleagues every month. And on that occasion I was honored with an invitation to publish a report that we made in EL PAÍS, in which we reported on the drama experienced by Central American migrants who lost a limb during their journey by train, known as “The Beast” is known to be attacked or have an accident on board. I have also shared some of my work from the last few years on the Foto Féminas Instagram account. I invite you to get to know this space where the many concerns that concern us photographers on the continent converge.
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