Zapotec visual artist Citlali Fabián grew up in an apartment above her father’s photo printing shop in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca. He taught her how to handle a camera as a child, and she would go on to complete a photography degree from the Universidad Veracruzana in 2011 and an internship in museum collections management in 2016, which inspired her to pursue documentary photography.
The project dearest to her heart began in 2018 when she photographed a family member for her grandmother. Her warm response sparked Fabián’s interest in photographing her large extended family and others from the village of Yalálag, many of whom were among the Indigenous Zapotec people who migrated from the Mexican state of Oaxaca across Mexico and to Los Angeles since the 1980s. Fabián said she is not only documenting her family but also creating a record for “future generations to look at us and our approach to this life in this particular time and space.”
Roma Alberto wears her mother’s traditional Yalálag blouse and skirt in Vista Hermosa Natural Park with the Los Angeles cityscape sprawling behind her.
Photo by Citlali Fabián
Many Oaxacan people traveled to California to work in agricultural fields or for other opportunities for a time and then returned to Mexico. But border policies became stricter and some of these workers were forced or decided to stay in California. This state’s estimated population of former Oaxacan residents has grown to more than 150,000, the largest outside of Mexico. The actual number is unknown because some are undocumented residents, including “dreamers,” so-called after the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. The act was first introduced in 2001 to help undocumented migrants who came to the United States as children become U.S. citizens, and although the bill has been revised, it has yet to pass into law.
When Fabián received a National Geographic grant to document the lives of Yalálag residents in Mexico and Los Angeles in 2019, she captured dozens of scenes of people who had rebuilt their Yalálag culture in the busy U.S. city. She found that they had replicated their former community’s social networks and counsel structures and were teaching their Indigenous culture and language to their children. For example, in her portrait, Fabián’s niece and U.S. citizen Roma Alberto wears her mother’s Yalálag “huipil” (blouse) hand-embroidered with flowers and a “refajo” (skirt) while sitting in front of Los Angeles’s vast cityscape. Yet sometimes celebrations that would have spilled into the village’s streets in Yalálag were held indoors in Los Angeles. Fabián said she could feel the migrants’ caution, that they were “moving between the shadows.”
Fabián hopes to return to Los Angeles to continue the photo series in the near future. She said the project “is so embedded in my soul, it is entangled with me.”