Listen to My Pictures – Foto Class – Guadalajara, Mexico from Josh Meltzer on Vimeo.

Just finished putting together this video story about the kids that are in my photo class.  We have our final show opening at the Museo Regional tomorrow, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. in Guadalajara, México.

After nearly seven months of teaching a weekly photo class to a group adolescents here in Guadalajara, the students turned in their Canon cameras and we had our final edit for an upcoming show.  We narrowed down 16,803 images shot by 19 students ages 11-16 to a small group of 50 photographs that are being printed and framed as I write.

I’m currently editing a video about the class and our experiences, that will be posted on the class’ website www.joshmeltzer.com/ltmp/ltmp.html soon as well as projected at the museum.

I would like to make an open invitation to attend the show, June 24 2009 at the Museo Regional in Guadalajara’s historic downtown at 7:30 p.m.  The U.S. consulate is coming on board as a sponsor, and the kids and I are really excited to show our work to the city.  We have promises from a newspaper and main television station here to make interviews with the kids to help promote the show.

I have been working in a community of migrants from a neighboring state of Zacatecas just outside of the Guadalajara community of San Martin de los Flores since January.  The 140 families make bricks by hand and live in extreme poverty.  That story is still in progress….however, last week, Rosa, the family matriarch told me that for more than 200 years this week during Semana Santa (Holy week) there is a huge festival in San Martin de los Flores, where the crucifixion of Christ is reenacted.

So, I went, spent a full day in the full sun, and watched a play which felt as though it were acted out in real time as actors used the entire center of town in front of thousands of people throughout most of the day.  Around 6:30 the actors follow as Christ and his followers carry a huge wooden cross about a kilometer up a small hill where they are crucified.  When Mexicans perform a reenactment, they take it to the nth degree.  In a procession of the Virgin of Guadalalupe last September, reenactors whipped each other with full force.  In this reenactment, the crowd was the factor, with thousands of people packed on a dusty-footing hillside, all trying to get a glimpse of Christ.  Pushing, shoving and yelling all around!  Media included.

Just a few pictures from Fiesta de la Musica which took up four plazas downtown Guadalajara on Saturday night.  The last concert, La Mala Rodriguez, was supposed to start at midnight, but didn’t get off (in true Mexican fashion) until nearly 2 a.m. but was worth the wait.  Very impressive opening by local band Radaid.

While waiting for the set to get some audio fixed, Danielle, Gustavo and Manzano went into a nearby bar which was about to close, except that Gustavo knew the owner.  We walked into a closing bar only to be followed by half a dozen drunk people who cranked up the Karaoke machine and danced away for another hour.  A crazy series of events….

My good friend Evelio Contreras, whom I worked with in Roanoke (now he’s at Las Vegas Sun), is visiting for the week, and we’re working hard.  Sunday afternoon we went to Parque Agua Azul, a city park, looking for a group of guys I photographed back in September who play Fronton  (handball).  I told him that day there was a man with only one arm, and somehow, he was there Sunday too, so we made a little video story about him and the game in the park.  Afterwards he challenged us to a game, which we oblidged.  It wasn’t as hard as I first thought, but my hand was sore the next day.

Yesterday, before shooting some interviews for my projects, we spent about an hour at the Lucha Libre office begging for press passes to today’s matches.  I think we’re 85% there…still have to write a formal letter of request and drop it off later today before the fight.  Should be fun if we can work it out.  Stay tuned.

Missy and I went to a great show last night of a band/circus called Zaico Circo.  They came highly recommended and we were treated to an amazing show of music and antics including people on stilts, a trumbonist standing on a table speaking in his own language, and incredible energy.  This video below is from another performance, but at least you can see and hear them in action.

Just wanted to show off Missy’s completed painting. She has been taking a oil painting course and recently finished this one, which is based from a photograph I took of Maria, a Huichol woman, in Guadalajara one day after taking her sick daughter to the hospital.

Today was the posada (holiday party) for CODENI, where nearly all of the kids and their families gathered at a restaurant downtown to celebrate the end of the year, receive certificates and finally break down a piñata.

We have one more week in Mexico before returning to “middle North America” for a few week vacation to see family and friends, and have a lot to do before heading home.

So, while here we worked for two very long days and evenings on a short story about Fabiola Ruvalcaba, a partially blind Judo star, who won the silver medal at the 2008 Paraolympic Games in Beijing this past summer.  We shot a short interview and photographed her at the gym and at home to quickly put together this video story.

It was a great experience for both Miguel, who returned I think feeling very encouraged to try more multimedia at his paper, and for me, getting another opportunity to edit and work in Spanish more.  We basically ran out of time to edit the video shorter, which it needs to be, but it was an experiment and a great start for Miguel.

I know that two wrongs don’t make a right, but after living here for three months, and using our bicycles to get around most of the time, we were seeking some sweet revenge on the buses, cars and even pedestrians.  Every first Thursday of the month, over 3000 cyclists gather at Parque Revoluncion to ride about an hour on some of Guadalajara’s busiest and largest roads, blocking traffic, frustrating buses and cars and making a lot of noise.  Perhaps the best was going through the tunnels that bypass certain neighborhoods and getting passed in the tunnel by a double-decker bike ridden by a guy in a gorilla suit.  Ah Mexico.

We traveled to Patzcuaro in the heart of the state of Michoacan for a long weekend of camping with our good friends Naomi and Jose, Fulbrighters from Queretaro, and Annie, Super, Panzon and baby Elena.  Thanks to a gracious invitation from Octavio, a Spanish tutor of Missy’s we had the luck to camp in Quercus, a wonderful little community outside of Patzcuaro, where we were treated to cool evenings, a wonderful campfire, and the lovely sounds of three collies howling through the night, roosters starting at 4 a.m. and a party up on a hill.

On the Day of the Dead, we traveled by boat to the small island Janitzio, on Lake Patzcuaro, where tens of thousands of people came to eat, drink and visit the communities on the island.  Simply amazing amounts of delicious food and drink on the streets, as we climbed up a very steet set of steps to the top.  We headed in for the night a bit before the huge crowds began to gather on the island.

The next day we saw Annie and Super and family off from the small community of Tzintzuntzan, a P’urépecha town which has the most beautifully decorated cemeteries.  I shot very few photos because I felt that flying in and out of cemeteries and shooting on the fly was disrespectful for the families who had spent the entire night by the graves of their family members.

We tried to visit the archeological sites at Tzintzuntzan, but were greeted by a sign at the door that said it was free entry on Sundays, but only for Mexicans…so not wanting to take part in their racist rule of the day, (can you imagine such a sign in the U.S. “free only to Americans today”) we didn’t pay their entry fee.

The 25th Guadalajara Marathon was today and we just missed the leaders, but got to watch the next few hundred finishers.  The weather was perfect but there were hardly any fans in the final kilometers, so we made sure to make the athletes feel good in their final strides.

Most interesting to us, was the use of bags of water for the racers, rather than cups, which seemed easier to drink from.

And as usual, there is always one guy who needs to smoke at the finish line of a race.

Portraits from the Procession.

Documentary photos from event here.

Every October 12, Catholics all over Mexico converge in Guadalajara for the Procession of the Virgin of Zapopan, when the 10 inch statue of the virgin is carried out of the Cathedral in Guadalajara, and leads an 8km parade with 1 million people to the community of Zapopan on the outskirts of the city where she enters the Basilica of Zapopan.

The size of this procession is indescribable.  One million people go a very very very long way, and the parade just doesn’t stop.  The celebration starts the night before when thousands of people sleep on the streets and begins with a 5 a.m. mass at the cathedral, which is nearly impossible to gain entry to.  At 6 a.m. the tiny virgin leaves the cathedral to ringing bells and applause from the waiting crowd.

What struck me most about this parade was that it so accurately symbolized the combination of Spanish and Indigenous cultures here.  For a Catholic holiday, the majority of the parade participants were made up of indigenous dance groups, wearing the most beautiful clothes of embroidery, huge feather-filled head dresses and metal or shells on their feet to make noise while dancing to the beat of a drum made from a barrel.

Towards the end of the parade I walked for a few kilometers with a group of young men dressed as savage warriors, representing the images that the Spaniard conquistadors had of the indigenous people of this region when they arrived.  With this group were two other young men dressed as Spaniards wearing velvet vests and decorative hats and carrying two-meter-long switches from branches.  Taunted by the dancing “Savages”, the two men proceeded to whip the others as hard as they could with the switches to the point at which the “Spaniards” were sweating and exhausted and the “Savages” were covered in welts and bleeding.  It was quite a site, and really was amazing to see the brutality, literally.  Each time a switch would break, a young boy would run and fetch another from a wheelbarrow being pushed from behind the group.  Afterward, I spoke with the group’s leader who explained the performance and its significance in the history of Mexico.  I was lucky to escape without being whipped myself.  It was hard to get close enough to shoot and remain out of the switch’s stroke.  Too many times I could feel the wind off the switch on my face!

I also made some portraits of many of those in the parade which can be found here.

With our new friends Annie, Super, Panzon, and Elena, we spent nearly the full day together, first joining them, or I should say, observing the whole family, in Super´s Capoeira class in the plaza.  Then they invited us to go to Lake Chapala, the biggest lake in Mexico (unfortunately too pulluted to swim in).  We stayed all afternoon at a series of pools of different temperatures heated by geothermal energy.

Finished the afternoon off with some arrachera, and corn ice cream, before the ride back, when Panzon and I took pictures of each other in the back of the family van through crazy Guadalajara traffic.  Many thanks to Tiffany Brown, a photographer at the Las Vegas Sun, for introducing us to them here.