© Las Mexicanas Pablo Ortiz Monasterio & Ramón Reverté

Written by Trip Avis

Las Mexicanas greets readers with a mystifying quotation: “All photographs give way to fiction.” This intriguing suggestion tugs at the edge of your consciousness as you observe the succeeding photographs featured in the forthcoming book edited by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio and Ramón Reverté, with a foreword by Brenda Navarro. “Fiction” seems a contentious word choice when one considers the fact that the book maps a historical overview of women’s empowerment in Mexico between the mid-1800s and 1960s. However, its usage makes us question whether it is fiction because the time and circumstances separate us from the subjects within. This degree of separation forces us to compensate with our interpretations of the women and their experiences. Their stories become fiction supplied by our imaginations, but this does not diminish the power of the photographs. Las Mexicanas tells us: “The printed image of a person is not immortal, but it is eternal [...].” Despite the passage of time, the stories etched on the faces of these women remain as potent and readable as ever.

While human life is finite, photography—like painting and sculpture before it—equipped us with a means of bottling that ephemerality to be enjoyed, studied, and critiqued later by posterity. The forward states: “There is something obsessive in the impulse to capture a moment [...] to condense a person [...] to recreate her before our eyes; something of an insistence on the eternity we have been told is desirable.” The idea of living forever—fragmented, aestheticized— may have crossed the minds of these female portrait-sitters. Or perhaps they sought to portray themselves as they were or strove to be. We see it in the portrait on page seventeen: a slender, elegant young woman bent forward in contemplation, recalling Rodin’s Le Penseur. Was she thoughtful, brimming with insight? Or did the portraitist suggest this pose, a romantic scene pondering a fantasy love letter? The woman on page twenty-nine, smiling from behind a carnival cutout, is captured in a moment of carefree whimsy. Maybe she enjoyed a laugh; she didn’t take things too seriously. These frozen moments lead us to assumptions about the subjects. Is this something they prepared for, or was their place in history decided without a second thought?

Reflecting on a sense of shared cultural identity throughout history, Las Mexicanas posits that “[sometimes], leaving wounds open is what truly repairs the damage [...] it suffices to see the gaze of Mexican women who — even in their finest clothing, posed seriously and serenely, sometimes even haughtily — cannot hide that they were born in Mexico and have suffered from it.” How does a shared cultural identity—the pain, pleasure, pride, and shame that comes with citizenship—shape the connection between these women? Time, class and cultural division, geography, and other circumstances may create a sense of othering or disconnect, but what is more intriguing is trying to imagine their shared experiences. How did the life experiences of the nun on page fifty-six compare with those of the topless woman on page fifty-eight or the prim dancer in pointe shoes on sixty-nine? What secret alignments did these women share—perhaps overlapping hopes and fears, favorite songs, flowers, or books? How did their experience of being Mexican women of their respective eras make them irrevocably intertwined?

Las Mexicanas leaves one with more questions than answers, and therein lies its strength. These women's lives last far longer than they could have imagined by capturing our imaginations with their sepia-toned visages and secret, complex inner worlds.