Originarios

Mexican Indigenist Photography through Luis Mrquezs lens

The Originarios exhibition shows a small set of 40 black and white images belonging to
one of the rich collections housed in the Manuel Toussaint Photographic Archive of the
Institute of Aesthetic Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Luis
Mrquez Romay took the selected photographs between 1926 and 1934.
Since joining the Ministry of Education in 1922, this Mexican artist became part
in his dual nature of photographer and cameramanof a number of scientific expeditions
organized by the Department of Fine Arts of the SEP in coordination with the National
Museum of Archaeology, History and Ethnology.
These expeditions followed precise routes through various regions of the country, in
order to study in situ the cultural and artistic richness of the main indigenous communities.
Multidisciplinary teams were formed, in which anthropologists, ethnologists, historians,
archaeologists, artists, musicians, filmmakers and photographers amounted efforts to get to
know and subsequently disclose the ancestral traditions of indigenous Mexicans.
For the same years that these photographs were taken, the debate on integrating
indigenous communities to civilized worldi.e. urban and Westernwas still very much
alive, looking to rescue them from backwardness, poverty and marginalization. In parallel
there was a need to rethink the Mexican being as a new identity, result of the changes
brought by the 1910 Revolution, in which the contribution of indigenous traditions was
fundamental.
Social scientists such as Manuel Gamio, Miguel Othn de Mendizbal or Canuto
Flores; politicians and intellectuals like Jos Vasconcelos, Moiss Senz or Narciso
Bassols, and artists such as Diego Rivera, Carlos E. Gonzlez, Francisco Domnguez,
Rubn M. Campos or Adolfo Best Maugard, to name a few, discuss, claim, appreciate and
reinterpret the ancient and current indigenous heritage.
In Mrquezs photographs we can see different aspects of daily life and folklore of
communities in Puebla, Michoacn, Chiapas, Hidalgo, the State of Mexico and Oaxaca. We
can also appreciate religious rituals and festive celebrations, where music and dance had a

crucial role. Some of the selected images are documentary in the line of anthropological
records, but others were prepared with a clear aesthetic intention.
The exhibition also includes the screening of a silent documentary film called Trip
to Oaxaca (ca. 1929), which was recently donated by the Mrquez Velasco family to the
Universitys Film Archive, and in which Marquez himself participated as photographer and
cameraman.
Ernesto Pealoza Mndez