Week 7: Delilah Montoya

Born in Texas but ultimately spending her life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Delilah Montoya became widely known for her photography that helped to identify her own definitions of the Chicano community and become an artist primarily for that community. As she defies normal ways of western visual ethnographic documentation, her photos transcend and challenge traditional forms of representation. For my presentation and paper, I want to look a lot at how she depicts confrontations of power, gender, biculturalism, intersectionality, etc. in her photographs and installations and have chosen three images that I think do so very powerfully. 

One of my favorite of her images/photo mural installation, La Guadalupana, shows an incarcerated man in handcuffs facing away from the camera. The top of his jumpsuit is unbuttoned showing the viewer the large tattoo of La Virgen on his back. Surrounding the main image are other identifying prison tattoos or pintos of La Virgen and a small offerings to the man in the main photo who had been murdered shortly after the photo was taken. The perspective of the camera dismantles the US prison system’s efforts to subordinate and control by opposing traditional mug shot portraits while also submitting the man’s power to the bars around him and the vulnerability of his arrested and exposed body. Simultaneously, the highlighted Virgen pinto on the back of the man defies the masculine brutality and protects him with her empowered feminine energy. Surrounded by thorny roses, protruding spikes, and manifested by painful needling, La Virgen powerfully looms over the sense of masculinity in the setting and reclaims the power to protect her community with her mystic energy.