Mujer Ángel

Mujer ángel, meaning ‘Angel Woman’ in English, is able to capture and showcase the identities of indigenous peoples. The woman dressed in indigenous clothes, with her back away from the camera and a tape recorder in her right hand, produces an effect of surprise by her use of a technological device one might not expect indigenous people to have. Iturbide is able to break down the stereotype that the indigenous world is virginal, protected from civilization and its dangers. At the same time, it disrupts the stubbornly held idea that the indigenous world and technological progress are incompatible. 

The subject of this photograph, shot in the Mexican state of Sonora, had exchanged goods with Americans across the border to obtain items such as radios and tape recorders that they did not have access to to. We also know that the Seri people were in the process of becoming entirely sedentary and moving away from their nomadic lifestyle. Here a single image is able to attach modernity to indigenous peoples. It particularly sheds light on the growing division between an ancestral past and the new customs brought on by modernization.