Retablos and Ex Votos and Bloggers
One of the projects I worked on while living in Mexico was Embroidered Retablos.
Most commonly retablos are hung in churches to give thanks for divine intervention.
“I dedicate the present retablo to the Holiest Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos for having saved me from a Texan who tried to carry me off. I hid under a tree by the side of the road with my little brother.”
The ExVoto is a public display of an answered prayer, and often the names retablo and ex votot are interchagable.
The women I worked with were mostly illiterate. They lived on outlying ranches and about 75% of the men in the community worked in the U.S. The project had started as a way to taking a traditionally male trade, retablo painting and using a female craft, textiles.
There were many bumps in the road. The issues of the narrative, since these women were for the most part, illiterate they had to tell their children the story, and the kids would write in pencil on the fabric. The issues of privacy, as soon as these women realized that they were creating a narrative record of their lives they became very bold and at times sordid.
Historically these paintings told a dramatic story, and that was that.
But with my ladies the stories were a source of income, I had a store and I sold them. I knew who sold faster, who had a better narrative sense and who was a master at needlework. The work was uneven but always entertaining.
Some of them even began to resemble the ubiquitous comic books that are read by adults all over Mexico.
When I first came to blogging Alan Gutierrez the Executive Director of Think New Orleans, a nonprofit that helps neighborhoods use the Internet to organize, seemed pretty determined to create a blog for my neighborhood and I went along with it. Whenever it would lay fallow he would call and demand that I publish.
And then like my Ranch ladies I began to understand that what I was doing was creating a historical time line, a chronicle of events as they happened. It sounds simple and obvious but for some reason I had never connected the two things.
What would those women do if they had a blog? What kinds of narrative voices are we missing for lack of, what? Not for lack of stories.
And here in New Orleans, the idea of a collective story of the city where multiple Neighbors and Neighborhood write the Recovery is a very exciting prospect. Where we could check on what other folks are doing across the City.
If anyone is interested let me know in the comments section.
I alwasys have to say thanks to the New Orleans Bloggers.
October 6th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Well I love your retablo story and I’d like to see some (especially the sordid variety). I am also intrigued by the idea of somehow getting people (non-artists, especially) to create post-K retablos here in NOLA. (Community art therapy?)
I kind of see the connection with blogging and I believe it would be an interesting and useful project for someone to assemble and edit the local bloggers responses to all that has happened since 8/29–a sort of collective diary.
This reminds me of a story in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago about blogging in Japan, which is huge. Some blogs have formed the basis for novels, movies, etc. The WSJ article focused on a guy who has been keeping a blog about his “demon wife” and the tortures she inflicts on him.