2 minute read
Looking at Conflict
from BIPOC Lenses Issue 2
by bipoclenses
Sandra De La O
Becky Trigo
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“In 1986, the guerilla had attacked a quartel in La Palma, Chalatenango. Sandra volunteered to go and take photos as part of her student job. The military had said that the guerilla had come to take over the quartel, and that all of the dead bodies surrounding the area were guerrilleros. However, Sandra recounts seeing soldiers take off the military uniforms of the dead bodies and replace them with guerrillero clothes. Sandra describes the amount of bodies she saw as “multitudes” . She reflects on how hard it was to witness since she could recognize these people as part of the pueblo, the citizens. Sandra retells the interaction between her and a military officer after he had seen her take a roll of film out of her camera. The man almost hit her and threatened the people accompanying her. They would often have to hide film they had taken so as to not have it ruined. The men would take rolls and pull out the film, destroying any images on it in the process. Sandra would use those same ruined rolls to show to the men, pretending to "surrender" their images by giving them blank rolls. The soldiers were ignorant. Sometimes, Sandra remembers, the men would ask for proof of identity and they would hold the identification cards upside down. If it weren't for images on the cards, they probably would never have noticed. Sandra mentioned they most likely didn't know how to read. ”
This past year I recorded and wrote down my mothers testimonio of the events that lead up to her emigrating from El Salvador in the late 1980s. Through this process, we also went through boxes of photographs in order to find pictures of our family in order for me to contextualize her narrative. We found images she took from her visit to El Salvador after the 7.6 earthquake that occurred in January of 2001. With her help, I scanned these images and created collages that would reflect the destruction and reconstruction of El Salvador as a nation. In my opinion it is filled with hypocrisy and misidentity. I wanted to highlight the people in the photos rather than the debris. I think some people might be wary of treating images of destruction as something that can only exist within themselves due to the emotional weight they hold. I find these collages to explore these histories through an intimate perspective rather than as a spectator decades later. I hesitated putting direct images of myself into the colleges since my place as the first generation born in America inherently distances me from what happened, but I think that my place in its creation reflects the undoing of trauma that has followed us since. I also reflect on both my mother and I being connected through photography.
The context of the final image has been changed; the destruction of war is different from that of natural disasters. My mom tells me that people from the countryside came to towns to offer help after the earthquake. The soldiers in the image are receiving tomatoes to distribute while two old men are fixing something up that was left.
Sandra De La O, my mother.
Observation
Reconstruction
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