Can the Subaltern Be Seen? Photography and the Affects of Nationalism

Abstract

Day of the Dead, 1900: a day to venerate the past by honoring the deceased, a year to herald the excitements and fears of a new century, and a fitting date for K’iche’ Mayans from the Guatemalan highland city of Quetzaltenango to begin a half-century professional relationship with portrait photographer Tomás Zanotti. Born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and an Italian father, Zanotti made his way to Quetzaltenango, roughly two day’s journey from Guatemala’s northern border.1 Shortly after he arrived in 1898, Zanotti apprenticed with the Englishman James Piggot, who operated the city’s first portrait studio, and then took over the trade. At the time, K’iche’s comprised an overwhelming majority of Quetzaltenango’s population. Yet during those early years only a handful showed up to have their pictures taken. The low prices charged in the few anonymous account book entries—“dos indios,” “grupo indios”—suggest that bureaucratic compulsion drove them into the studio to obtain passport-sized images for official documents. From 1897 to 1900, the majority of Piggot’s clients were wealthy ladinos (non-Maya) or foreigners, their names recorded in mixed Spanish and English.On the Day of the Dead, things changed. Between October 30 and November 2, 1900, Piggot shot 23 portraits. Of these, 17 had K’iche’ surnames: Sac, Racancoj, Xicará, Coyoy, and so on. Only 6, however, according to surviving records, returned to pay their balance and claim their mementos. Following this cautious beginning, K’iche’s increasingly sought out the services of Zanotti, as well as other Quetzalteco photographers. Throughout 1901, picking up during the Easter and Christmas seasons, more K’iche’s arrived to commission portraits, a practice that steadily increased throughout the first half of the century, until tapering off with the advent of personal cameras. Perhaps anticipating growing indigenous interest, Tomás Zanotti actively cultivated a K’iche’ clientele. He charged less than his competitors and set up shop on the top floor of a two-story house located just off the city’s main plaza, on the street leading to the public cemetery. As K’iche’ funeral processions left the cathedral and made their way to the cemetery, they passed under Zanotti’s window. It was a prime location that linked new practices surrounding the staging of portraits to established rituals governing death and mourning.Over the last 20 years, scholars have afforded photography, as both art and technique, considerable power to structure the subjectivities, hierarchies, and experiences of modern life.2 Its spectral and quicksilver, yet durable, nature is often taken as both the instrument and mirror of hegemonic power, capable of classifying, disciplining, fixing, and coding. The stilling of radiant energy— like the minting of coins or the printing of bills—abstracted, congealed, and affirmed an array of social relations. It produced a benchmark of homogenized, if continually bartered, value, making possible the impersonal transactions, methods of social control, and affective identifications central to the growth of a bureaucratic state, the expansion of capitalist relations, and the elaboration of nationalism. Photography filed and tracked criminals and cataloged citizens. Photogrammetry—the use of cameras for surveying—defined property boundaries and publicized the contours of national territories. Similar to money, the circulation of customized portraits in the form of postcards through a state bureaucracy (post offices) not only helped individuals dislocated by capitalism, urbanization, and migration to maintain increasingly distant family relations but also created an assumed correspondence between those sentimental ties and the administrative functioning of the nation-state (figure 1). Portraits— particularly those of individuals set in seeming suspension—helped produce the fiction of personal sovereignty and contributed to the construction of liberal, rights-bearing national subjects. Photography’s close association with travel writing, naturalism, medicine, and anthropology coincided with the extension of nineteenth-century European imperialism, providing visual confirmation of ascendant pseudoscientific and rationalized discourses of civilization, nation, and race.3Deborah Poole’s important work explores how, in Peru, photography “played a crucial role in producing the truth of ‘race’” by creating “a format through which each individual could change his or her racial identity by recording it in the concrete, realistic, technologically based, and hence scientific medium of the photographic print.”4 The creation and circulation of these images formed a “visual economy” that situated landscapes and peoples into modernist discourses of race, family, status, and nation.Yet little research has been conducted in Latin America on how popular groups themselves engaged the new medium.5 Zanotti’s portraits stand in sharp contrast to the photographs of random “natives” sold throughout Europe and North America (figure 2). Some of these photographers, such as Edward Curtis, went so far as to touch out the accoutrements of modern life—erasing clocks, cars, and umbrellas from the negatives—so as to ossify Indians as relics.6 In contrast, K’iche’s themselves solicited and consumed the images shot by Zanotti. These photographs stand in contrast to the Cusqueño working- class and peasant portraits that Poole examined, which tended to be of life- cycle events: marriages, deaths, communions, and so on. While wedding pictures and mortuary photographs exist in the Zanotti collection (figures 3 and 4), it is the studio portraits—extravagances usually reserved for Latin America’s dominant and aspiring classes—that are most striking. The conscious presentation of self and family for use as an “icon of remembrance” is intimately familiar and immediately comforting.7 Yet the images remain unknowable in their anonymity. There exists no information about the sitters—no names, no dates—except what is contained within the image and what we know about the photographer, the place and years he worked, and the community he serviced.8 The weight of such anonymity forces the viewer to look deeper to discover a world of indigenous hierarchy and authority that is not so immediately recognizable, one that uncannily upsets the aesthetic assumptions that underpin understandings of race, class, gender, and culture.9When Tomás Zanotti arrived in Quetzaltenango at the end of the nineteenth century, the city was at the center of far-reaching economic, cultural, and political upheavals that profoundly reconfigured the country’s ethnic and class relations. In 1871, liberal ladino planters from Guatemala’s western highlands took over the state, and for the next 70 years they legislated, in effect, a sort of primitive capital accumulation: using their political and military power to break the subsistence base of communities and make indigenous land and labor available to the rapacious needs of coffee planters. Historians have recently pointed out that many of the economic and political reforms promoted by the new liberal state had been long underway—namely, the commodification of property and labor and the secularization of state institutions.10 Nevertheless, if liberals did not conceive the new nation, they did induce a hurried birth of the values, identities, and assumptions associated with plantation capitalism and ladino nationalism.The coming of coffee devastated many indigenous communities. The cumulative effects of decades of forced labor and debt peonage, land loss, and militarization have been well documented. Quetzaltenango itself, however, was located at too high an altitude for coffee growing, and urban K’iche’s largely escaped ruin. Planters did not covet their land, and they were able to hold on to a good part of their property, which in turn allowed many to benefit from an expanding market economy. Likewise, Quetzaltenango was too politically important for the kind of wholesale expropriation of land which took place in other nearby highland towns. Local and national elites needed K’iche’s to administer the city and to procure labor and revenue for public-works projects. Further, the building boom that took place in the city following the coffee revolution produced an economically powerful class of skilled indigenous masons, carpenters, quarrymen, and contractors.Quetzalteco exceptionalism, however, entailed more than the consolidation under liberal rule of an urban, economically stratified K’iche’ community. By the end of the nineteenth century, Quetzalteco K’iche’s fashioned an alternative nationalist discourse that both drew from and challenged the assumptions that underpinned ascendant ladino nationalism.Following independence from Spain in 1821 and intensifying after 1871, ladino politicians, reformers, and nationalists promoted a fungible understanding of racial identity based on cultural and behavioral traits.11 The shift to coffee cultivation and the construction of a militarized state dramatically transformed relations between Guatemala’s ruling class and its majority indigenous population. More than ever before in the history of the colony or the nation, elites viewed Mayans as a labor force to be mobilized. In their debates on nearly all aspects of public policy—forced labor, debt peonage, education, suffrage, municipal administration, commerce, public health—reformers and nationalists often used “race” and “class” interchangeably (race understood as indigenous culture and class understood as poverty), with the assumption that both were destined to disappear with national fulfillment. They sought to turn Indians into ladinos, at least in rhetoric, if not always in policy, by encouraging them to speak Spanish, wear Western clothes, and interact with ladino society. To be sure, obsessions with skin and blood still held. But across the nineteenth century, ladino intellectual and political elites (at least publicly) increasingly described “race” in social and cultural terms.12 The weaving together of class and race into a national narrative of development led many reformers to stress environmental modification—as opposed to the hereditary and biological eugenics views popular in the United States and Europe—as the route toward permanent “racial improvement.”13 The government needed “to give Indians the means to leave their communal system; their common and unchanging dress, their barbaric diet,” wrote Antonio Batres Jáuregui, Guatemala’s preeminent fin de siècle intellectual, in an 1894 prizewinning essay on how best to resolve the Indian problem. Indians had to shed their “their antediluvian languages; their rural, primitive, and rustic homes It not be the of but the new and who to the of the new Quetzaltenango, to indigenous into had political and economic as throughout the nineteenth ladinos used the of to the power of K’iche’ In indigenous to in their political and an alternative understanding of the relationship of race to nation, one which from of yet on the nature of tended to and indigenous as of the on of the K’iche’ however, the the the Indian could the In their of the Indian to and political which was the of a of race and in in and national public Quetzaltenango’s as a one by liberals throughout the was as a of indigenous as it was of ladino K’iche’ elites helped to the to Quetzaltenango, public and established and nationalists By national to cultural K’iche’s their of community authority to the and national ladino by ethnic to the of the nation, they to other Mayans their political K’iche’s of the of ladino their that the Indian was and needed to be and political that one could as many ladino as possible and still remain in which photography K’iche’ to their understanding of race and are best by ladino images of Indians with K’iche’ is a studio taken by Zanotti, of two using to is Zanotti image of a ladino in indigenous taken on the day of these images with the portrait of Coyoy, one of Quetzaltenango’s and most important K’iche’ political (figure first two images the and of indigenous in to class and racial within a narrative of national the of coffee plantation of it through be an Indian no community but at least in public an or a of The of the ladino the of a the of the two a of discourse common to the nineteenth and early many ladino nationalist the image of the Indian to all that needed to if it were to passed that sought to reformers the practice as a particularly to in to these visual of national the social of the in from the and relations that afforded a relationship with of the the the of the portraits K’iche’ within a of social relations. In the in the is the center of an the as well as the transformed of the K’iche’ While ties to this day their in the K’iche’ a shift of did As Quetzaltenango transformed into a more urban the family by a father, and a of in The center of this more than the in the portrait of the family, is the father, by both his and of relations. that the is an urban both and As community relations and with the of relations, the form of ethnic than in indigenous to hold increased family portraits the of indigenous to off from They a image of the K’iche’ family in which in Western clothes, were the of in or often the of They to of the of Indian nationalism. that the of by the took place in the in the of military and and in an identity in an a that to be by not by the of As for the of the of not a of but an to to its that at the on its and family, the of than through the views of its photographic as Poole the in both and and travel often the and in out the indigenous to their and a and a few indigenous for the of the European how in the Mayans he in Quetzaltenango were in by the indigenous they be available and for the next day’s In in Quetzaltenango, the K’iche’ and indigenous to have their portrait The has not but an made of the portrait the municipal on a city street (figure the of photography, the a of in with and the K’iche’ formed a of and authority that in sharp contrast to the of Mayans that the ladino in to the with a Indian to his to the next how photography a of stratified and by political of Quetzalteco K’iche’ is not just in a of but by a of and identity was not just on the in the form of but in the way a the way he or and what they did with their that in the United States in the nineteenth century, of the the which not or or with formed the of an To the of or the of a look into the were at a distant The of surviving nineteenth-century images in the United also of anonymous a new way of themselves in the of as an little of what took place between Zanotti and his the of of a It is to know what was at in each studio yet from of the ladinos to the and the K’iche’s more often than not look into the and are nearly and of individual Yet from her dress, the from her by her with from the K’iche’s on the did Zanotti, after to set the and the not to turn the to and K’iche’s on the presentation of the did to the from the structure to the urban, family, a that the of the modern While portraits of urban as or the family in an of the in the are The the with no on her only is their but is also in their to with was of early Yet the this that the family had from the of its the two of a the and a the used in the of at the the portrait was taken and was a new only to a The is at least and a and in of Guatemalan of social power and through these portraits. They are Yet they are not all of a The of across class and in the K’iche’ community. urban and individual and of and in of Zanotti’s with the new new and new of them their and as far as and as far as before it was the highland coffee Quetzaltenango as the of a and an important on the route Mexico to Throughout the century, Quetzalteco K’iche’s in of of this as in the city and The Zanotti photographs a of as it in the early use of or made from and and In the years to K’iche’ building on established throughout Mexico in of new they on in the used in to the and available and increasingly used by in the the of visual and in the presentation of self that place with 17 what to be an economically from The is and a from also has on a de than a The is in both a and a made in to and with associated with with a made from coins or with or The over the is to an this her or also that the of the into the or with is by the of Mayans to and from other communities. The family in to in a K’iche’ city about 30 to the of were in from and from yet is particularly the way they or to this at and The of the in shift to the to after his toward the and more than or in their assumptions of national and of social As K’iche’s at least many of the racial assumptions that underpinned of national In they did a good of in their the first decades of this century, indigenous and over a and of a national in Spanish, and situated K’iche’ and their and their within a political in which was increasingly In indigenous wrote the to for one K’iche’ that with education, their no be to as of and and the blood in the national and with the de was the K’iche’ in the by be and In the portrait of the wealthy family (figure such to national are not only in the but also in the of his and in the of his In the to his social not only with a and but with and an and on the other to the weight of a of and and as the of community across In many of the Zanotti of (figures their as if they were on of they presentation mother staging the within a presentation the that place not just through the as but through the as their the to be the how to what to how to how to be in the The not only of these but also across their to national of race and according to their Quetzalteco K’iche’s in a that was at indigenous and and to turn into a ladino nation, and the of labor community and how this building on the in have out across By her dress, the in the center of the portrait is from a K’iche’ or few of To her left to be her dress, and that was not in her community but had to Quetzaltenango, the portrait was or to In Quetzaltenango, were often by their to wear and indigenous who in and usually were to had to the family had taken of a to the highlands to have their portrait taken. The little be the or her the and that not have the on her but in her community. The for a the close between culture and social with photography on two associated that the first to and the to of and At least the of scholars have to the economic and political that produced modern to the or of national through writing, national and photography, and other Yet a of has recently the of too far in of the between of a associated with and capital and the that a and between the the and the The images in this essay contributed to such a and on a national a of (at at gender, and class But these on and and the social upheavals and political that an coffee capitalism, into a world The of the Zanotti of photography by a politically and a into this an into how and social relations governing and and urban and rural, ladino and into a visual that not just hierarchy and but also the that of and these images a more we in the Zanotti photographs the of to and maintain power, what we about the that not them to the of to a that is always from the with other of K’iche’ how we not that the visual of and class discourses on in these images did not to dominant on the a that to While with the of Indian to the for the of social and individuals could themselves in that dominant or national the in a of at least in that that they between and Indian of the not into a but into a which is the of the world between and a as many have pointed the of with the of which did so to has most to increasingly on the of and to the power of the as capitalism, the more is no Antonio with his on engaged but with his of the of the Yet has pointed out that the that has led to this turn is not an of history but a of the nature of capitalist which at the of in to the

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