I was recently told that the hair of migrant women crossing the borders of South America has become an object of trade and extortion. It makes me shudder to imagine that they can assault you and steal your hair taking advantage of vulnerable situations, and that they also force you to receive derisory sums of money as payment. It also happens, in more violent situations, that they simply cut it off and run away with it.
The beauty products industry invoices approximately 53.6 billion dollars per year in the United States. Only the trade related to hair in Mexico is around 2,000 million. One line of this business is natural hair extensions, those that allow you to show off a long and voluminous mane like that of a Barbie. In certain hairdressers in Ecuador, these can cost up to 1,200 dollars, they are possibly the same ones for which the hair traffickers paid five dollars and now have a bitter history in their DNA.
For some years now, I have been interested in stories about the bond that women have with our hair, since I immersed myself in my own: I have such curly hair that it resembles an Afro. I rejected her for almost my entire life. She considered it messy and unfunny. To hide it, I smoothed it with chemicals that gradually destroyed it.
More than 20 years later and after having used liters and liters of straightening products, I wanted to give my natural hair a second chance. The arrival of the internet in my life helped and with it the circulation of more information, in addition to the deconstruction of various stereotypes about the prevailing aesthetics. Now my hair is sovereign, an essential part of my identity, harmonious with my general appearance, and an element that has allowed me to connect with women with similar experiences, to be able to tell their stories from my work as a photojournalist.
unleashed is the project that, through photographic portraits and testimonials, allows me to tell stories of women who connect the aesthetics of their hair with their identities, emotions, representations, and traumas.
This approach has become an exercise close to that performed on a couch. There the women are photographed in their intimate spaces, they release, reaffirm and externalize some fears. Furthermore, without even imagining it, it is also becoming a large listening circle, and at the same time a safe space to speak, where the narratives of the participants arouse the empathy of others.
The success could be due to the call on the networks, but I want to think that wanting to be heard had a lot to do with it. The response was massive even though they didn’t know me. This is an ongoing project that remains open to testimonials and believes that all stories deserve to be told. To date, Desatadas has photographed 60 women and has a database of almost 200 people who want to participate.
I found stories where their hair is a symbol of social resistance and an element of discussion about beauty, others where family tissues and a historical memory reside in them, and some where diseases have left their marks. I also learned about long hair that carried emotional pain and that was cut so that it weighed less. There were also attractive hair as an expression of overflowing femininity, and the multicolored ones, and those who feared getting old. They all wove a huge braid of secrets, disagreements and love.
It was in those meetings where we became brothers, where we understood how important it is to tell what we feel and heal through words and portraits. Other eyes looked at them, but they understood them.
However, there are also people who are afraid to give their testimonies because they believe that their lives could be in danger. This is the case of a young Venezuelan who, on the border between Ecuador and Peru, was surrounded by three women who cut off her long blonde hair and left her a few cents. She generated a wound in her security and femininity that she has not yet finished healing. Her hair continues to grow, but without a circle of women to support her.
* Ana Maria Buitron She is an Ecuadorian photographer and audiovisual narrator. Her projects talk about the search for identity, human rights and the environment. In 2020, she won a National Geographic Society Creation Grant. She has published her work with humanitarian organizations and international media. Instagram: @lachuros
📷 The photo of the week: The last time Perla was in front of the Mexican Prosecutor’s Office, she was already dead
By Almudena Barragan
The image is brutal and tears the soul. The family and friends of Perla Cristal, 19, carry the young woman’s coffin in front of the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office while demanding justice. The image perfectly illustrates the drama of femicides that the country is experiencing. Thousands of deaths that every year accumulate before the doors of justice without their cases being resolved, without the guilty being punished, without the disappeared being found. How cheap it is for murderers to kill women in Mexico.
Perla Cristal Gaviña went out with some friends and never came back. Her body was found on a highway in the State of Guanajuato, 300 kilometers from where she lived. So far there are no detainees; the main suspects in her femicide, two acquaintances of a friend, are on the run. Finally, the demands for justice of Perla’s relatives in front of the Prosecutor’s Office were met with pushback by the police who tried to break up the demonstration. Her parents and her friends are still waiting for justice to be done. The image of the photographer Sashenka Martínez perfectly portrays the despair of families, the frustration of society and the inaction of the authorities.
Our recommendations of the week:
- “Identity is always linked to power”: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie opens the Bogotá Book Fair. The Nigerian writer was in charge of the speech to inaugurate the 35th edition of the event, in an act in which she was accompanied by one of her admirers: the Vice President of Colombia, Francia Márquez
- Debanhi Escobar: a year of impunity for the symbol of femicides in Mexico. The 18-year-old girl disappeared in Monterrey and was found 13 days later in a hotel cistern. There are still no detainees or answers about who killed her. Her case illustrates the state’s failure to achieve justice for murdered women.
- The ‘girls’ revolution’ at an elite school in Santiago de Chile. A case of group aggression in the San Ignacio El Bosque Jesuit establishment led to 12 complaints of sexual abuse against students, two of them expelled from school. “What we did in coeducation was insufficient,” acknowledges the chaplain
- María José Pizarro: “I never felt machismo as much as in the Congress of the Republic.” The senator, daughter of Carlos Pizarro, the murdered head of the M-19 who signed the peace, launches her autobiography ‘El camino hacia mi nombre’
- The children of the victims of femicide in Chile will have a permanent pension until they are 18 years old. Congress approves comprehensive legislation by a large majority, which will also cover surviving women with labor privileges for one year
- The resurgence of Jacqueline Nova, the visionary who wrote the future of electronic music half a century ago. The reissue of a double album by the Colombian composer illuminates a transgressive work that she experimented with at the end of the 60s with machines and incorporated sounds from indigenous communities in a country that is as macho as it is conservative
- ‘Artemis 2’: a big step for women. Readers write about Christina Koch, the first astronaut to travel to the Moon, surrogacy carried out by Ana Obregón, mathematics and gender, and about the discovery of five Tartessian sculptures in Guareña
- Cooking so as not to forget: Guanajuato’s ‘Recipes for Memory’ caresses the memory of the disappeared with their favorite dishes. Tracker mothers and wives collect favorite recipes from their children and husbands in a book whose proceeds help fund the searches
subscribe here to the newsletter from EL PAÍS México and receive all the key information on current affairs in this country
#hair #identity