‘They emanate light’: Illuminating the lives of Mexico’s Indigenous people

The people he photographed for this project, even those now relocated to new surroundings, have legal citizenship in Mexico but ancestral citizenship in ancient states that exist today in language, food, faith, stories passed down over the centuries, and collective understandings of the boundaries that define the world. Meeting originarias like Prudente, Martínez says, forced him to reconsider his ideas about himself: the Indigenous part, the European part, the African part. Sometimes he thinks of Guerrero, deep in Mexico’s south, as a tapestry into which all of Latin America’s complexity has been woven.