Maya Lolen Devereaux Haviland - Side by Side?: Community Art and the Challenge of Co-Creativity

My first knowledge of the Chiapas Photography Project (CPP) came during Christmas of 1998 when I was given the book Creencias , by Maruch Sntiz Gmez (1998). I was spending Christmas with my family in San Cristobal de Las Casas, in Chiapas, Mexico, where my father, his second wife Lourdes De Leon and my young sister were living. As a Christmas gift Lourdes gave me the book published by the sister project to the CPP, the Archivo Fotogrfico Indgena (AFI, indigenous photography archive). She told me a little about the two projects, in which indigenous people from in and around San Cristobal were supported to use photography to document their lives and cultures. I was immediately fascinated with the Creencias book, which was to become an internationally recognised work and a landmark in the emerging history of indigenous womens photography in Mexico. However it was not for this reason that I was initially intrigued by it.

I had grown up as a regular visitor to the highlands of Chiapas, the daughter of anthropologists whose work focussed on the languages, lives and cultures of people in Zinacantecan villages in that region. From when I was first beginning to walk I spent regular periods of time living with my family in the Zinacanteco (Zi) household of the Vasquezes. They live in the village of Navenchauc, about a half-hour drive from San Cristobal on the Pan American Highway. Before I was born, my father and mother had built a small cinder block house in the Vasquezes compound. As I was growing up we would live there for months at a time. Dads research, it seemed to me, involved long conversations about anything and everything: sitting by fires, in cornfields, at the market, talking, talking. Mum learned to weave, cook and pat tortillas like a Zi woman. Although I never learnt Tzotzil (the local Mayan language), I spent many hours sitting with the women of our household, Tzotzil conversation washing over me. While everyone talked I was playing with baby chickens and balls of homespun yarn or helping with chores such as moving the sheep from pasture to pen. Id help with bundling coriander for market and steal bites of uncooked maza from the corn bucket destined to become the warm tortillas I craved when we were back home in Canberra, Australia. The Zi culture I knew from my life in Navenchauc was a daily domestic one, lived on hardened mud floors. Life revolved around blackened clay pots bubbling with beans or coffee. Womens work consisted of weaving, spinning, drawing water, harvesting fruit and vegetables, grinding corn, patting tortillas, and peering from doorways to hear news passed from mouth to mouth down the narrow mud alleys of town.