ustxtxb_obs_1998_05_08_50_00022-00000_000.pdf

Tarahumara Governor, Norogcichic, Mexico. Flor Garduiio. Employee Photographs #7255 and #6745, Cerro de Pasco Corporation, Morococha. Sebastian Rodriguez. puerta namero 12,” a short story in which a father leads his young son into a mine, then ties him to a door where he is to begin a life of work. The story of a brutal working-class rite of passage and a metaphor for the colonial experience ends with the child betrayed by his father and screaming for his mother. Jorge Obando’ s panoramic photo of protesters gathered in a Colombian plaza in 1946 could illustrate the gathering of banana plantation workers who fall under the machine guns of the government and plantation owners in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The photo of a starkly empty plaza, which shares the page with the image of the plaza packed with workers, suggests what a public square looks like when it is swept clean of humanity. And it anticipates the juxtaposed photos that appear fifty images and fifty years later: anonymous prints of the Plaza Civica in San Salvador. In one image, the plaza is filled with mourners attending the funeral of Archbishop Oscar Romero; in the next, the plaza is littered with bodies and trash that remain after the National Guard opened fire on the mourners. Another image, of an old woman walking in front of a line of musicians in military dress, could be an ironic scene drawn from one of a dozen modern Latin American novels through which an army in European-style uniforms will inevitably march \(One Hundred Years of Solitude or Francisco Herrera Luque’ s En la casa del pez que escupe el agua, tion of Rulfo’s Pedro Pciramo will remind some readers of a novel that is, in part, a series of searing images. The long and informative essay both helps the viewer through the work of fifty photographers included in the collection and encourages the reader to incorporate photography into the larger context of Latin American literature. Placed at the end 22 THE TEXAS OBSERVER MAY 8, 1998