CHOLOS, 1986 PHOTOGRAPH, 18 1/4 X 12 1/4 OAS AMA | ART MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS COLLECTION
Cholos is a photograph of the series Cerco Blanco taken on May 2, 1986 for the project A Day in the Life of America. Organized by Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen, the project sought to capture a glimpse of American life through the lens of 200 invited photojournalists from around the world. Iturbide chose to document the Chicano community of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. Iturbide was able to live with and shadow a group of women of the community for one and a half days closely detailing their activities. The image pictures Rosario, Lisa, and Cristina as members of the White Fence gang, whose origins date from the 1920s and refers to the fence surrounding La Purisima Catholic Church. The black and white print portrays and immortalizes their young expressions and their moussed hairstyles, thin eyebrows, heavy delineated eyes, deep red lips that complement white tops, dark dickie or baggy pants which defined the chola—in Mexico, a term for a female member of a street gang—fashion style in the 1980s. As a close-up take, Iturbide privileges their secret hand signs. Shot while the women stood in front of a mural with portraits of Benito Juárez, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa, she asked them to identify the figures. They could not, despite a Chicano longing nostalgia for all things Mexican. To Iturbide this signaled a subculture of double marginalization—not Mexican enough, yet existing on the fringes of a mainstream U.S. culture. But just as they did not know, the viewer is similarly confronted with not knowing that these seemingly menacing signs are those of women who are also mute and deaf trying to communicate. A loan, Cholos was included in Imágenes del Silencio: Fotografía de Latinoamérica y del Caribe organized by AMA.
One of the most important women photographers, Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City. With a keen interest in photography at an early age, thanks to a gift of a camera, she went on to study filmmaking at Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México from 1969 to 1972. While a student in 1970-1971, Iturbide became an assistant to photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo with whom she retained a few thematic affinities. However, her major influence has been the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom she met in France in the 1960s, and evident in her emphasis to capture her small-town subjects in extraordinary moments of emotional mundane activity. In fact, art critic Max Kozloff has compared the “intensity of detail” in Iturbide’s Cholos with Cartier-Bresson’s Alicante series of 1932. Focusing mostly on women, children, their bonds, and intimacy, closely observing the poetic nature of ritual and symbolism, Iturbide has captured Mexico in both its pre-Hispanic cultural tradition and its modernity often underscoring the tension of the existence of a past and present side by side. Her work focuses on gender, identity, life and death, the urban and the rural. Her photographs from Juchitán de Zaragoza in the Tehuantepec Isthmus from 1979 to 1981 yielded some of her best-known images such as Our Lady of the Iguanas. A subsequent commission to photograph the Seri Indians in Sonora and the Baja California peninsula produced Mujer Angel which helped launch her international career. Iturbide is the founder of the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía, and a recipient of various awards and prizes including the Swedish Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation Photography Award in 2008.