La Boquilla Article

La Boquilla is a community of 14,000 Afro-Colombians located 7 kilometers north of Cartagena, Colombia, on its Caribbean coast. I first visited La Boquilla in the spring of 2005 with my husband, Roger, after a friend in Bogotá told us that some local people offer tours through its mangrove swamp for a small fee. The day before we found our way there, Roger and I met a woman on the street in a neighborhood outside of Cartagena, she introduced us to Edgar, who lived in La Boquilla and worked selling minutes on cell phone close by her house. We worked out a deal with him and his friend German, and they took us to La Boquilla where we spent the next two or three hours winding through its back canals.
La Boquilla has been an active and thriving community for over 150 years. Its first residents, as locals tell it, were three emancipated slaves who came to the area while one of them recovered from an illness. At that time, the land belonged to the Paz family. For the last 150 years Afro-Colombians and European descended Colombians have come to this beach community, and have intermarried and lived. Today it is a simple place, with houses made of concrete block or dismantled wooden palettes, with people selling mangos and bananas to each other from small wooden tables, and children playing in the dirt streets. Our time with Edgar and German passed quickly. We quizzed each other about our lives, and did our best to communicate through the language barrier between us (though Roger was living in Colombia at the time and speaks fluent Spanish).
At the end of our afternoon together, Edgar offered me a piece of paper with his phone number and email address. “If you need anything, just give me a call,” he said to me through Roger. I thought that to be a very generous, but also slightly odd offer, because Roger and I were only in Cartagena for a three-day trip that his mother had given us as a honeymoon, and we were staying at one of the resort hotels in Boca Grande. We had no connection to the place, and certainly no impetus for returning.
I flew back to the US, and thought about creating another reason to have to return. I thought about our experience in La Boquilla. I thought about how, as someone from a privileged experience in the US, La Boquilla was simultaneously thrilling and shocking – impoverished and dirty; clearly there was disease and starvation. But it was also home to these extremely interesting people (Edgar and German) who met me with as much interest and intrigue as I met them, who told me about their lives openly, and inquired about mine. (I asked Edgar if he had ever been to Canada, he said,”I have not yet had that opportunity.” The implication being that he would someday go.)
Then I thought about the slip of paper Edgar had given me with his phone number on it. I had a connection back to La Boquilla, but didn’t know what to say about it beyond the fact that it exists and it’s a pretty cool place. Slowly, the pieces of the project came together in my head. The objective became to let the people (and that time it was just Edgar and German) be the ones to say that La Boquilla exists, and to step away from the typical imagery of third world documentary photographs. Roger and I are both photographers (he is a photojournalist, while I design documentary projects), and it was very clear to me even at that point in the development of the idea, that it would complicate the project to have me, as someone from the United States, photographing an impoverished community without imposing my first world values and perspective on poverty. It was clear, even in my brief amount of time in La Boquilla, that they didn’t see themselves as I saw them. With the help of Roger’s sister in the US, I called and asked Edgar and German if we could send them cameras so they could photograph their village.
They said yes.
Roger and I returned to La Boquilla in May, August, and December of 2005 to give out cameras to seven more people. We collected them, developed the film, and talked to people about their photos. They gasped when saw themselves and their friends in picture form, we stood back while they pointed, laughed and traded photos, we asked which ones they liked and why. To watch people see themselves through a photograph is one of great joys in life.
However, the project is not all fun and games, and certainly La Boquilla is not without its difficult political issues – fishing which has been the mainstay of the economy since the 1850s is on the decline, the boom in Caribbean development and tourism threatens the very existence of the community, and the corruption of department make the future look very grim. The importance to “La Boquilla” lies in Colombia’s history. I have only recently become aware of the racism that exists in Colombia against Afro-Colombians, and coming from a country (the US) where racism is a topic of everyday discussion, I am shocked more by the lack of discussion of racial inequality than I am by seeing evidence of it. This project seeks to create a space for this discussion to start by looking at race as the cornerstone of the political issues that are affecting the community of La Boquilla.
If La Boquilla had evolved as a community of people other than those of African descent would the Colombian government have built a road dividing it in half and endangering the local fishing economy, making way for fish from Brazil and Argentina to be sold at Cartagena’s markets? Would they be so willing to make deals with developers to build condos and resorts that will force the Boquilleros off of their land with no plan for re-establishing the community elsewhere? And would corruption in the department of Bolívar be so widespread if the Afro-Colombians (which consist of 30% of Colombia’s total population) had a single representative for them in the national senate?
Of the 250 or so photos created by the nine people we worked with on the project, I selected 35 of the strongest images. These photos, along with of the participants as well as other Boquilleros, are included in the exhibition. What photography does best, when it has the most power, is when it is illustrating the things that we cannot put into words. Each and every photograph taken by the people participating in this project expresses the desires and aspirations, loves and appreciations of all of the people living in La Boquilla. Whether the impetus to photograph these things was conscious or not is irrelevant; the act of taking a picture is itself, one of the greatest forms of affection for the subject matter, and photographing these subjects that embody and represent our desires, aspirations, loves and appreciations is one of the ways humans have inherently adapted photography into everyday life.
“La Boquilla” goes beyond the typical documentary project, and it may go even beyond other Self-representation photo doc projects, too. The reason – because it has the potential to open doors that will create a cultural and political presence for Afro-Colombians. Certainly Afro-Colombians have somewhat of a cultural presence in their country, but why political? Because this project presents Afro-Colombians not as the backdrop to your Caribbean or Pacific coast vacation - dancing in the streets, serving you food - but as real people, with real desires, real intelligence and humor, and a very real need to have a future.

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La Boquilla is a community of 14,000 Afro-Colombians located 7 kilometers north of Cartagena, Colombia, on its Caribbean coast. I first visited La Boquilla in the spring of 2005 with my husband, Roger, after a friend in Bogotá told us that some local people offer tours through its mangrove swamp for a small fee. The day before we found our way there, Roger and I met a woman on the street in a neighborhood outside of Cartagena, she introduced us to Edgar, who lived in La Boquilla and worked selling minutes on cell phone close by her house. We worked out a deal with him and his friend German, and they took us to La Boquilla where we spent the next two or three hours winding through its back canals. La Boquilla has been an active and thriving community for over 150 years. Its first residents, as locals tell it, were three emancipated slaves who came to the area while one of them recovered from an illness. At that time, the land belonged to the Paz family. For the last 150 years Afro-Colombians and European descended Colombians have come to this beach community, and have intermarried and lived. Today it is a simple place, with houses made of concrete block or dismantled wooden palettes, with people selling mangos and bananas to each other from small wooden tables, and children playing in the dirt streets. Our time with Edgar and German passed quickly. We quizzed each other about our lives, and did our best to communicate through the language barrier between us (though Roger was living in Colombia at the time and speaks fluent Spanish). At the end of our afternoon together, Edgar offered me a piece of paper with his phone number and email address. “If you need anything, just give me a call,” he said to me through Roger. I thought that to be a very generous, but also slightly odd offer, because Roger and I were only in Cartagena for a three-day trip that his mother had given us as a honeymoon, and we were staying at one of the resort hotels in Boca Grande. We had no connection to the place, and certainly no impetus for returning. I flew back to the US, and thought about creating another reason to have to return. I thought about our experience in La Boquilla. I thought about how, as someone from a privileged experience in the US, La Boquilla was simultaneously thrilling and shocking – impoverished and dirty; clearly there was disease and starvation. But it was also home to these extremely interesting people (Edgar and German) who met me with as much interest and intrigue as I met them, who told me about their lives openly, and inquired about mine. (I asked Edgar if he had ever been to Canada, he said,”I have not yet had that opportunity.” The implication being that he would someday go.) Then I thought about the slip of paper Edgar had given me with his phone number on it. I had a connection back to La Boquilla, but didn’t know what to say about it beyond the fact that it exists and it’s a pretty cool place. Slowly, the pieces of the project came together in my head. The objective became to let the people (and that time it was just Edgar and German) be the ones to say that La Boquilla exists, and to step away from the typical imagery of third world documentary photographs. Roger and I are both photographers (he is a photojournalist, while I design documentary projects), and it was very clear to me even at that point in the development of the idea, that it would complicate the project to have me, as someone from the United States, photographing an impoverished community without imposing my first world values and perspective on poverty. It was clear, even in my brief amount of time in La Boquilla, that they didn’t see themselves as I saw them. With the help of Roger’s sister in the US, I called and asked Edgar and German if we could send them cameras so they could photograph their village. They said yes. Roger and I returned to La Boquilla in May, August, and December of 2005 to give out cameras to seven more people. We collected them, developed the film, and talked to people about their photos. They gasped when saw themselves and their friends in picture form, we stood back while they pointed, laughed and traded photos, we asked which ones they liked and why. To watch people see themselves through a photograph is one of great joys in life. However, the project is not all fun and games, and certainly La Boquilla is not without its difficult political issues – fishing which has been the mainstay of the economy since the 1850s is on the decline, the boom in Caribbean development and tourism threatens the very existence of the community, and the corruption of department make the future look very grim. The importance to “La Boquilla” lies in Colombia’s history. I have only recently become aware of the racism that exists in Colombia against Afro-Colombians, and coming from a country (the US) where racism is a topic of everyday discussion, I am shocked more by the lack of discussion of racial inequality than I am by seeing evidence of it. This project seeks to create a space for this discussion to start by looking at race as the cornerstone of the political issues that are affecting the community of La Boquilla. If La Boquilla had evolved as a community of people other than those of African descent would the Colombian government have built a road dividing it in half and endangering the local fishing economy, making way for fish from Brazil and Argentina to be sold at Cartagena’s markets? Would they be so willing to make deals with developers to build condos and resorts that will force the Boquilleros off of their land with no plan for re-establishing the community elsewhere? And would corruption in the department of Bolívar be so widespread if the Afro-Colombians (which consist of 30% of Colombia’s total population) had a single representative for them in the national senate? Of the 250 or so photos created by the nine people we worked with on the project, I selected 35 of the strongest images. These photos, along with of the participants as well as other Boquilleros, are included in the exhibition. What photography does best, when it has the most power, is when it is illustrating the things that we cannot put into words. Each and every photograph taken by the people participating in this project expresses the desires and aspirations, loves and appreciations of all of the people living in La Boquilla. Whether the impetus to photograph these things was conscious or not is irrelevant; the act of taking a picture is itself, one of the greatest forms of affection for the subject matter, and photographing these subjects that embody and represent our desires, aspirations, loves and appreciations is one of the ways humans have inherently adapted photography into everyday life. “La Boquilla” goes beyond the typical documentary project, and it may go even beyond other Self-representation photo doc projects, too. The reason – because it has the potential to open doors that will create a cultural and political presence for Afro-Colombians. Certainly Afro-Colombians have somewhat of a cultural presence in their country, but why political? Because this project presents Afro-Colombians not as the backdrop to your Caribbean or Pacific coast vacation - dancing in the streets, serving you food - but as real people, with real desires, real intelligence and humor, and a very real need to have a future.
Click here to view the image gallery