La comunidad

"La Comunidad" is an autobiographical project that portrays the reconstruction of my community, San José, After the internal armed conflict in Guatemala.

"La Comunidad" is an autobiographical project that portrays my community, San José, located in Mixco, construed within the context of the internal armed conflict in Guatemala and in the post-war period. Several people originating from various places get organized to have access to basic living conditions and begin to inhabit this place. The majority are Mayan people who come from rural territories, forced to abandon their homes and rebuild their lives near the city.

My family is part of this forced migration and, growing up in this place, I decided to start documenting our experience. Initially, the intention was simply to create a family registry. However, the archive began to grow as other people in the community asked me to document their social events. Given that I had known most of them since I was a child, this allowed me to establish a closer and more intimate bond. The conversations I held with them were fundamental in determining what was important to record and what was not. Photography became the end result of long walks, conversations, visiting homes and participating in social events.

I belong to the generation that grew up in peace after war; I consider it important to record how communities and families rebuild after a trauma so profound that it altered our social relationships. Several of the photographs focus on celebrations of life; actions that seem like everyday actions but took generations to relive. As a K'iche' photographer, I consider that building a visual memory is an action of justice that portrays not only the trauma but what follows after having experienced it. 

Inhabiting the dreams of our ancestors is a way of doing them justice from the present; the war left invisible traces that continue to torment us, open wounds that, even if the passing years, will be difficult to heal. Anti-racist fictions throughout history have liberated us as a society, because they allowed our ancestors to find escape routes from coloniality and invasion.

Imagination and knowledge have been central to existing in the present, however, these forms of survival have been relegated to categories that subordinate their potential and invisiblize the collective transformation they have achieved. 

My practice as a photographer has been to stand from this place and reconstruct the narratives with which I want my people to be portrayed, through the awareness that photography plays with time; it has the ability to record the past but also be an image for the future. I want to record not only the trauma but also the reparation.