Matt Black:

The Documentary Commitment

6. Mixteca
Contents Mixtec Workers in the Central Valley

The People of Clouds

3

After the Fall 16

Monster in the Mountains 23

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 2

Mixtec Workers Matt Black’s work has centred on the social history of the Central
Valley in California and how the area and its agricultural tradition has
been shaped by cycles of migration over time: from the Dust Bowl of

in the Central Valley the 1930s through to modern day. The Mixteca project features a series
of stories documenting the lives of the largest new group of migrants
to arrive in the Central Valley: the indigenous Mixtec communities of
Southern Mexico.

Black first encountered the Mixtec community in the late 1990s, not
far from his home. In this lesson he details how he felt “duty-bound”
to report on the lives of this new group of people arriving to work in
the fields and how it felt like “the dust bowl of our time”. Life as an
agricultural worker in the Central Valley was difficult, with extremely
low wages and poor working and living conditions. Black was curious to
know why these workers had left their homes and their families in order
to face such a challenging life in the United States.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 3

 A woman feeds her daughter
at a migrant camp. Hillsboro,
Oregon. USA. 2005. From
the story Dust to Dust.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 4

A mother does laundry.
Kerman, California. USA.
2005. From the story
Dust to Dust.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 5

 “Chances are high that the food you’ve eaten
recently was picked by a Mixtec immigrant
[...] He is probably undocumented, and he
probably earned far less than minimum
wage for that work. His community back
home is most likely in an advanced stage of
depopulation, and if the current trajectory
continues, his culture and language — among
the oldest in all of the Americas — will likely
disappear in the next generation or two.”

Source: The People of Clouds, The New Yorker

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 6

 Fetching water for bathing.
Kerman, California. 2004.
USA. From the story
Dust to Dust.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 7

Riding to work in a farm
labor bus. Fresno, California.
USA. 2004.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 8

The People of Clouds Increasingly frustrated with the discourse around immigration policy
in the United States at the time, Black decided to travel to Mexico to
chart the root causes of the Mixtec people’s migration. Although a
reluctant traveller, he felt it was important to see what life was like for
the communities they had left behind, to document the other side of
the coin. What happens to towns and villages who have lost their entire
middle generation to migration?

Upon receiving an invitation from a Mixtec translator back home in

California, Black travelled to San Miguel Cuevas: a Mixtec community
in the highlands of Oaxaca which had lost 70 percent of its population
to migration — many of whom had migrated directly to the Central
Valley: Matt’s home.

The People of Clouds documents the impact of migration on those left

behind. San Miguel Cuevas, an agricultural town, was dealing with
the effects of losing its entire labour force. The majority of its adult
population between the ages of 18 and 45 had left, leaving children and
the elderly to work the fields.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 9

 Sisters empty their family’s
corncrib. San Miguel Cuevas,
Oaxaca. Mexico. 2008.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 10

A man returns home from
his remote cornfield. San
Miguel Cuevas, Oaxaca.
Mexico. 2007.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 11

 “I felt very strongly that during this time
we were witnessing a collapse of this
thousand year old culture. There was this
urge to record it, to document it, before
it disappeared. So I often thought of the
work as part inquiry: a journalistic inquiry
meant to inform, particularly to inform my
own community as to who these people are
coming [to California] and part elegy: part
of an elegy to this life that was disappearing.
It was the mixture of those two things that
really animated that work.”

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 12

A girl works at her An elderly woman harvests
family’s farmhouse. San corn. San Miguel Cuevas,
Miguel Cuevas, Oaxaca. Oaxaca. Mexico. 2006.
Mexico. 2006.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 13

Farmers till a cornfield. San Awaiting the start of a burial
Miguel Cuevas, Oaxaca. at the cemetery. San Miguel
Mexico. 2000. Cuevas, Oaxaca. Mexico.
2000.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 14

 Fog drifts through deserted
streets. San Miguel Cuevas,
Oaxaca. Mexico. 2000.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 15

After the Fall In After the Fall, Black’s focus moved to the causes of migration: in
particular, poverty and food shortages.

In this lesson, Black outlines that in the case of the Mixtec people, a
contributing factor had been changes in agricultural production. In
the 1960’s The Green Revolution had introduced Western industrial
agriculture to Mexico by promoting the use of hybrid seeds, chemical
fertilizers and land management techniques to increase food production.

Black wanted to document the effects of this agricultural shift. Using

photography to “translate this scientific story into a human story”, he
travelled to Santiago Mitlatongo, where years of land clearance had
culminated in a large landslide, destroying much of the town and
decimating crops.

“The town was built on a hillside and the farms were down below in the
forest. As more land was cleared and as more erosion started to occur
on those farm fields, it completely undermined the town itself and the
entire town began to slide downhill... culminating in a massive slide
that occurred about six weeks before I got there. What I found to be
particularly kind of touching or moving about it is that the disaster
occurred right before harvest. So people’s crops were basically ready to
harvest. But the slide took the crops with it downhill... It was literally
all people had, those crops that were in the mud and muck. And I
followed families back and forth as they were removing this last harvest
from the land.”

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 16

 A family carries wheat
from ruined land. Santiago
Mitlatongo, Oaxaca.
Mexico. 2012.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 17

A family rests alongside a
road. Santiago Mitlatongo,
Oaxaca. Mexico. 2011.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 18

A collapsing mountain sent Harvesting a wrecked
rocks towards the community cornfield. Santiago
below. Santiago Mitlatongo, Mitlatongo, Oaxaca.
Oaxaca. Mexico. 2011. Mexico. 2011.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 19

Houses destroyed by a
slow-motion landslide.
Santiago Mitlatongo, Oaxaca.
Mexico. 2011.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 20

 Residents remove
possessions from their
destroyed homes. Santiago
Mitlatongo, Oaxaca.
Mexico. 2011.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 21

 A shepherd’s dog. Santiago
Mitlatongo, Oaxaca.
Mexico. 2011.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 22

The Monster On September 26, 2014, forty-three students were abducted in the
town of Iguala, in Guerrero, Mexico’s second poorest and most violent
state. In the indigenous regions of La Montaña and the Costa Chica,

in the Mountains where many of the students lived, the disappearances were an example
of the afflictions that plague their region: political corruption, social
marginalization, violence, and entrenched poverty.

In The Monster in the Mountains, Black sought to bring attention to these

further causes of migration. Over the years of making Mixteca, Black
recounts how he noticed a shift in the reasons for people leaving their
homes. In the beginning of the project, the main reason people gave was
poverty. Over time, his subjects cited violence and political instability as
their main deciding factor.

Watch: Watch a short film based on Black’s photography published by

The New Yorker, here.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 23

 A Day of the Dead
procession. San Miguel
Amoltepec, Guerrero.
Mexico. 2013

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 24

A self-defense group at
a checkpoint. Apantla,
Guerrero. Mexico. 2015.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 25

A child’s handprints. El
Chuparosa, Guerrero.
Mexico. 2013.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 26

Clouds drift down the
mountains. El Chuparosa,
Guerrero. Mexico. 2013.

Matt Black: The Documentary Commitment — Mixteca 27

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