Pedro Valtierra won the prestigious Rey
de Espana Award in 1998 for his picture of the Indian women pushing a
soldier in Chiapas, Mexico. Valtierra remembered his heart beating fast
and his hands shaking when he saw the moment and took about two minutes
to steady his camera and took the photo. The picture was the most famous
picture to come out of the Chiapas Rebellion, and considered one of the
most iconic images of modern Latin America.
The Zapatista uprising which began in
1994 and lasted until the 2000s was the backlash against North American
Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA. It challenged an image of Mexico as a
modern nation, recently freed from poverty and oppression, an image
cultivated by Mexican lobbyists in the U.S. Congress to pass NAFTA. On
the day the trade agreement came into existence, three thousand
insurgents seized towns and cities in Chiapas, freeing prisoners and
setting fire to government building.
“In Valtierra’s image, the Indians rise
up against the impositions to which they have been subject in reality
and, as well, in the systems of representation with which the State has
legitimized itself. They push back, and seem to be winning the age-old
struggle to define their culture in ways that differ sharply from the
picturesque terms in which they have too often been depicted.”
