A Shining Light

Jasmin Lopez is tiny, really tiny. She’s twenty-eight, but at barely five feet, wearing jeans and a pink Puma sweatshirt and sandals, she could pass for twenty. She has hair that tumbles over her shoulders in long black curls, and eyes that often seem to be smiling, even when she’s panicking. “I can be kind of a control freak,” says the creator of Project Luz, a photojournalism workshop for marginalised youth in Mexico.

Image:Project Luz

Jasmin Lopez's photography workshops helped inspire this photo by student Víctor.

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Photo: Lilian, a participant in Project Luz

Get the insider look into Neza with photos taken by kids involved with Project Luz. View Slideshow >>

“Photography helps the kids to see things they usually just pass by—the clown that does tricks at the traffic lights, the old lady heating seeds on a comal. It’s about their community, their life,” says Jasmin. “The opportunity to share this with outsiders empowers them.”

A chicana from LA, Jasmin worked as a waitress, catering bar mitzvahs and corporate events to save money to come down to Mexico, which she did in a beatup yellow vocho dubbed “La Pulgita” (little flea), with three photographers, a dog called Oscar, and a cat that slept in a hammock made from a scarf strung between the dashboard and door. She receives no salary, and yet with a budget of just $7,000 USD managed to organise ten international photojournalists to volunteer a week of afternoons to come and run a workshop for twenty teenagers in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. She also managed to get hold of twenty digital cameras, begged and borrowed. The money for the kids’ lunches she scrounged together in a last minute email call for donations.

She started the project a year ago in Ejido Hermosillo, a tiny border town in the Baja California-Sonora desert, where her father was born and where she spent much of her childhood. When a family rift blew her life apart at age fifteen, she went from spending every summer in Ejido to not going at all. She lost touch with all the cousins, aunts, and uncles she’d grown up with. Ten years later, she decided to go back, and was shocked by what she saw “They were all struggling, living in poverty. I thought something like [Project Luz] could maybe help them to see things differently.”

It challenged her, she says, to see all that privation, the rubbish, the drug and alcohol problems, in her family’s town. When one of the photojournalists took a photo of her own grandmother sitting in her backyard surrounded by rubbish—and won a prize for it—she didn’t know what to think. She burned with shame for her family, who would think it crazy to publish such a photo, let alone give it a prize. But she could see the value in having people see the picture, and maybe broaden their view of how other people live. So she said nothing. When the project was over and they exhibited the photos in San Francisco, she decided to do it again. This time she chose a bigger, more ambitious project, in Nezahualcoyotl.

Sixteen-year-old Pamela Gonzalez moved to Neza from neighbouring Ixtapalapa three years ago, when her lawyer father bought a house there. “The people here are corrietones,” she says, disapprovingly—loudmouths. We’re bouncing around the back of a white combi van on our way to the Talleres Communitarios cultural centre, where Project Luz is held: a cavernous tin shed with a Che Guevera mural, rows of school desks, boxes of Polveron biscuits for sale, and a stage for community performances. The surrounding streets look like many working-class colonias in Mexico City: potholed roads and painted, flat-roofed houses; graffiti, street stalls, and tangled ribbons of cars and peseros (microbuses) puffing black smoke into the air.

When she leaves school, Pamela plans to study journalism. She’s one of a generation of Neza kids whose parents have surpassed the immigrant dreams of the city’s founders, who started arriving in the 1950s and set up makeshift homes on the dry salt bed that was once part of Lake Texcoco. From a notorious shantytown of ten thousand souls to over three million inhabitants today, Neza is now a fully-fledged city with running water, hospitals, a university and schools, and all the challenges and problems associated with a society that’s yanking itself out of one social and economic class into another. For example, Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim, is building a $150 million USD commercial centre on top of one of Neza’s notorious open-air rubbish dumps, with a 178-store shopping mall (to be finished by 2010), causing the garbage piles—which you can smell from all over Neza—to be moved further out toward the edges of the city.

As part of the workshop, Pamela and her group take photos at the dump, where hundreds of people work and live, scavenging for recyclable goods. Mule-drawn carriages offload piles of rubbish while small grey doves and blowflies swarm around the flattened mountain of waste. A heavy wind sweeps toxic dust into the eyes and nose. On the ground are limbless dolls, old magazines, and crushed juice boxes. Coloured plastic bags sprout like moss from the caked piles of decomposing waste. Dogs roam, patches of raw skin glowing through their fur. This is the bottom of the food chain; where the city’s old and unwanted find a home. At first the kids seem nervous, but as they walk around become more confident and start snapping away. “I knew this was here,” Pamela says, afterwards. “But I had no idea the people inside were living like that. I’m learning things about my city I never knew. I’m seeing the raw side of my own colonia.” 

For more information on how you can get involved in Project Luz, visit projectuz.org, or email Jasmin@ProjectLuz.org.