Oscar Castillo, 1972.
In 2019 Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies Department at University of Minnesota, Town Cities Karen Mary Davalos posed the following question: “Under what context were Castillo’s images of the Rarámuris exhibited?” The primary reason for Tarahumaras/ Rarámuris: Life, Culture and Challenges as well as a second exhibition 1519: Una Respuesta (A Response) did not derive from an opportunity but from a moment; 2019 marked the beginning of an antagonistic 500 year relation between two diametrically different cultures/civilizations: Mexico and Spain/Europe. Spain’s main colonizer Hernan Cortez first set foot on Mexican soil in 1519. The 500 anniversary of this event surged a debate. Was Cortez a conqueror or a man of his times?
Mexico’s academia debated the significance of this so called encounter and the meaning of conquest. Although the Rarámuris are north (the high Sierra of Chihuahua) of Tenochtitlan nevertheless they would face the same colonial enemy. Since the formation of Mexico’s modern state 200 years ago Indigenous communities all across its territory continue to be a point of contention. Whether Cortez was a victim of his era or not is besides the point? Why shield Europe and Cortez’s colonizing crimes with doubt?
Two art exhibitions were curated on the 500 anniversary of pillage and death. With the support of Artfully Space Gallery, an African American owned and operated gallery located in South Los Angeles. 1519: Una Respuesta’s opening was made possible in October 2019. Tarahumaras/ Rarámuris: Life, Culture and Challenges opened in September of 2019 at Casa 0101 Theater’s Jean Deleage Art Gallery in Boyle Heights, California. With 25 never exhibited images by Chicano photographer Oscar Castillo the exhibition magnified a contested beauty. The call for artists was well received by those who participated in these exhibits. Both collaborations allowed for an intercultural cross reference dialogue between the African American community, Latin@s, friends and the working class of our local neighborhoods.
Under this context and departing from a decolonial turn both exhibitions were a response/respuesta to the colloquial foggy quest taking place in 2019 of Cortez’s impact in Mexico’s Indigenous history by Mexican academic circles. This essay is a reply to that foggy conversation.
Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras: Life, Culture and Challenges acknowledges yet moves away from what is most associated with the Raramuris; as long distance runners. It differs from the visual culture of suffering and destitution often associated with Indigenous peoples. An exhibit of the Rarámuris community could not be without the presence of retos (challenges). The struggles and forms of resistance by Indigenous communities were not absent in the conversations that took place during the opening reception. The Rarámuris indigenous community face multiple obstacles: the Mexican state, cartels, racism, environmental poachers, land thieves, violence, displacement and death.
1519: Una Respuesta was political and social. It consisted of powerful linocuts and graphic artwork by Yaneli Delgado, Pedro Rios Martinez and Ernesto Vasquez. Yaneli Delgado found inspiration in the linocut artwork from Guadalupe Posada, Elizabeth Catlett and Leopoldo Martinez. The same could be said of Ernesto Vazquez and Pedro Rios Martinez.
Process:
Upon conversing with Castillo and the significance of the 500 year anniversary of contact in 1519 between Abya Yala and Europe, It would be no coincidence that Oscar Castillo would reveal his tucked away images of the Tarahumara Sierra in Chihuahua, Mexico and the Rarámuris people. As he opened up his portfolio with images of his visit to the Rarámuris village the aura of a narrative community took hold. I was dumbfounded! Castillo is known to be one the premiere Latino photographers in the United States with an extensive body of images of the Latino community archived at the UCLA Chicano Resource Center.
Rarámuris is one word composed of two meanings, rara means feet and muris translates to run. Together it signifies runners and Tarahumara means ‘the light footed’. Rarámuris is how the indigenous community identifies themselves and Tarahumara is how they are mostly known outside Mexico. The Rarámuris live in the western part of the Sierra Madre which crosses the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango. According to a United Nations article Protecting the Sierra Tarahumara, A Biodiversity hotspot, “The longest mountain range in Mexico, harbors some of the richest biodiversity in North America. Around two-thirds of the standing timber in the country are in the Sierra.”
Early in his career in 1972, Castillo was commissioned to photograph British runner Bruce Tulloh competing in the Rarámuris/Tarahumaras yearly running event. Running for the Rarámuris is spiritual and the competition amongst the villages is a collective and an entertaining ritual. This circumstance came to Castillo after Chicano professor Ricardo Romo from California State University, Northridge could not attend the documentation of Tulloh due to an illness. For Castillo this opportunity would become a fortunate stroke of serendipity.
Upon arriving in the small village of Sisoguichi, Chihuahua Castillo would no longer meet the Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras at the edge of town as he did as a child. He now found himself ‘being in the world‘ with and where the Rarámuris dwell.
In the process of viewing Castillo’s 35mm color slide film and his black and white contact sheets, what came forward were life, children, families, milpas, women, men, pristine landscapes and a way of life contested since the arrival of Europeans to Las Americas. This body of work contrasts Castillo’s images of the 1970s Chicano Movement and Moratorium. The Raramuri photographs by Castillo were taken a few years after the National Chicano Moratorium. Meaning as a young emerging photographer some 48 years ago since 2019. His subtle low key approach and emotional sensitivity would carry over when he first visited the Raramuris.
Images of the National Chicano Moratorium are political civil rights and anti-Vietnam war manifestations during the 1970s the majority were from the working class barrios of East Los Angeles. The Rarámuris series are not. It has a different glow. Castillo pivots his camera and enters history without words but with images. This series of unexamined images interrogates the present. The fragility of life as a quotation is caught in each of Castillo’s photographs. There’s a quiet and a stealthiness in his approach to photography. Castillo’s unconventional method, the family-like snapshot moment, becomes an extended admiration that allows Castillo to carry his childhood sentiment into each frame.
It is a childhood sentiment nurtured by his visits from El Paso, Texas with his mother and grandmother to the local market to buy goods and handmade corn tortillas from Rarámuris vendors across the bordertown in Juarez, Mexico. In Several interviews Castillo attributes his interest in photography early in his youth when he’d pick up the family photo albums and browse through the thick pages with wonder.
Decolonial and Dialectic Turn:
Art critic and writer John Berger once said “The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.” Tarahumaras/ Rarámuris: Life, Culture and Challenges, celebrates the life of the Rarámuris while at the same time unveils the invisible difficulties faced by the Rarámuris Indigenous community.
The second and most poignant reason for a decolonial turn is advocacy, visibility and awareness vs. like/don’t like dichotomy of documentation described by Roland Barthes as studium. If any documentary approach comes about, it was second to feelings, emotions and dignity that first led to the curating of Castillo’s tucked away 48 years old photography of the Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras. We could say that the technique and instrument used by Castillo’s are western while the gaze is not. It is a Chicano aesthetic inspired by the Chicano renaissance which emphasized community and collectivism. By Chicano aesthetics I refer to an elastic aesthetic conceived in the early 60s as Carnalismo ( brother/sisterhood). It is best described by scholar Colin Gunkel in The Oscar Castillo Papers and Photography 2011 catalog as one of “activism, community and participation.” Whether this aesthetic is still in practice today is a question which is up for debate.
For Roland Barthe the punctum is somewhat of a pinch or sting caused when viewing a photograph and the power of expansion. Upon experiencing Castillo’s Rarámuris images, the pinch/ punctum is the simplicity and tranquility in many of the portraits. There is a feeling of quietness. Especially for those living in a fast paced society, who are in a constant rush, constantly planning and constantly maximizing one’s output. This series seems to have an effect of serenity and reflects the power of silence in many indigenous communities as a form of rebellion.
Described from an aesthetics of liberation point of view, the visual conversation in this exhibition can become the potencia which can address the separation between sensibility and indifference when discussing diverse cultural practices. This approach carries the possibility of agency in the arena of representation to the unversed eye both in academia and for the general public. In other words the aesthetic of liberation leans towards a humanistic socially conscious approach rather than a scientific or darwinistic method of learning. This body of work could be described as images that question and interrogate us, the viewer, the non indigenous,the city person, the western gaze we’ve inherited. When engaging with the Rarámuris series we could ask ourselves, What are we thinking (feeling) and why?
The Rarámuris/ Tarahumaras exhibition under a different context/gaze reinscribe a possible new way/dialogue of perceiving not only the emanating serenity in Castillo’s photography but a closer understanding of what it means to befall under a colonial/ western eye for Indigenous people. In curating this exhibit the direction is to move away from a one way perception of non euro peoples. Chicano Studies Professor Al Chavez from Los Angeles Mission College recalls the exhibition as “ an extraordinary exhibition in which Castillo’s not only captures the beauty of the Rarámuris culture and the world they live in. Castillo’s Images advocate for the wellbeing and protection of the Rarámuris.”
Unlike Edward Curtis’s beautiful Native American images posing for Curtis on site during the early 1900s, Castillo’s are not. He snaps at the camera like a family member photographing his relatives.The images are striking vignettes of communal culture settled away from urban life.
Challenges:
The resilient determination of the Rarámuris to defend their communal culture against an adversary as powerful as the modern Mexican state continues. Ten days after the opening, a Raramuri activist and leader Antonio Montes Enriquez from the local town of Creel, Chihuahua, who protested against the illegal cutting of forest trees and the construction of an airport four years earlier on Rarámuris territory was killed. The long historical discrimination against the Rarámuris is still prevalent today in 2025 as it was reported in the Mexican political journal Proceso back in 2018.
Two Women, Oscar Castillo, 1972.
Civilizing program:
Two Rarámuris women photographed walking along the train tracks are telling. For it is the invention and use of the train that accelerates industrial modernity and the expansion of colonization of Indigenous people and its territories. Western expansion for the most part excluded Indigenous people from modernity. It could not tolerate or make room for un-western ways and un-colonial practices that are not eurocentric. The only invitation by modern society/state is conditioned for the Rarámuris/Tarahumaras to join the fiesta no longer as Indigenous with their traditional cosmic view of the world.. They must give up their ancestral lands as subjects to colonial civilizing practices under the auspices of progress. The Rarámuris Indigenous First People have refused the invitation.
In another image we see a Rarámuris family wearing western clothing. Some are patterned with their own cultural motifs that transmit and transfer their subjective spiritual connection with earth to an un-fetishsized object; the textile. What could be considered hybrid from a non Indigenous perspective might not be for the Rarámuris. It represents their cultural autonomy. The exhibition does not address this point of view. Yet, it has the potential to be a topic for discussion. Assimilation for many Rarámuris equals erasure.
Ancestral Lands as Landscapes:
The landscapes images in this exhibit are of extraordinary beauty of ancestral territories from several indigenous communities. The topography of Tarahumara Sierra is four times larger than the Grand Canyon and twice as deep. With pristine waterfalls and biodiversity the Tarahumaras Sierras face legal and illegal deforestation by state authorization and criminal groups forcing displacement of many families and communities to seek refuge in local urban towns and cities. Almost five years later since the exhibition first took place the battle to preserve the ecological beauty and dignity by local protectors continues as reported in a recent 2024 article by La Jornada.
Was this series made from an anthropological view? I’d argue no. The making of these images is not framed with the need to document a presupposed vanishing ‘tribe’. The exhibition was initiated within the space of a local community center that serves its community. This series is from a young enthusiastic emerging Latino photographer early on in his career.
These images are personal to Castillo as is most of his photography. To a large extent Castillo’s Neltiliztli begins during his childhood examination of family portraits and the story telling that accompanied each photograph narrated by his elders and family to him.
The intentionality of any work of art is key in understanding the transparency of any artist. Castillo has dedicated his life to preserving memory and history with images. His protest and dialogue is done with images.
The exhibition did include images of the Rarámuris runners in action. The photos are stunning examples of dedication to a long ancestral relationship as runners on a coarse and rough terrain in the Tarahumaras Sierra. This terrain is understood by Rarámuris as the earth’s skin, one that breathes and feels. Indigenous memories sprout from the images of a land that belongs to them. Castillo’s emotional reading in this series of images is captivating and poetic.
In late December of 2024 Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum visited the Tarahumara Sierra to sign a presidential decree of land restoration. She met with several leaders of the Raramuri community. At the visit she states the government:
“recognizes the historical debt it owes to all of you; a debt that implies knowledge of your cultural wealth, your system of organization, beliefs, customs, your identity and the ownership of your territory.”
According to President Sheinbaum the first step to her Plan of Justice is to acknowledge the injustice experienced by the Raramuris as well as other indigenous communities throughout the state of Mexico. Sheinbaum’s visit brought forth many neglected issues to the forefront and hope as well.
The poetic sting or the punctum is best described by Emmy award winning photographer John Simmons on Oscar Castillo’s Rarámuris series:
“Oscar Castillo is a poet. His images are created with his heart and they touch the heart of the viewer. He has taken a chance and shared every bit of his love with us. We can only be grateful for what Oscar has given us. He is connected to his people in every way, their love, joy and suffering. His work speaks to the fabric of humanity.”
Castillo decides that seeing is worth recording. And his recording is filled with an aura of dignity, beauty and the reforesting of hope.
Runner, Oscar Castillo, 1972.
