Photojournalism Project -Plan De Ayala

Plan de Ayala, is adobe houses and thatched roofs, hand-hewn boards, blood feuds, red corn, and family ties. It is the story of a small Mexican Indian village where I lived for four months and spent every penny I had to complete the work I had dreamed of doing since I was a boy. To live in a Mexican pueblo where the old ways of my great-grandparents still predominated.

Plan de Ayala is in the Mexican state of Chiapas and had been part of a feudal agricultural system until 1959 when its feudal landowner was shot dead by angry villagers. Until then the reforms of the Mexican revolution were largely ignored in Chiapas because of the state's remoteness.

The church there was owned and built by the hacendero (feudal land baron), all the land was owned by the hacendero, the stores were owned by the hacendero, if you sold your corn it was to the hacendero, and if you worked, it was on the hacendero's land and for him.

What is left is a growing population trying to make a living on subsistence family farms that cannot support large families any longer. I arrived as the population was only just beginning to realize this and the economics of unsustainable land use, degraded environment, and depleted resources had not yet rendered the paradigms of the past irrelevant. Communal land use, community, and family ties still held the community together, although almost all of the region's forests had been clear-cut and the wild game had vanished. It was before the Zapatista uprising took hold.

This story largely reflects boyhood notions I held since listening to my mother and grandmother's stories of Mexico once upon a time. I stumbled onto the opportunity of living in Plan de Ayala quite suddenly and had no time to research but only to see and work from my first impressions.

Therefore I photographed its beauty and traditional ways before I learned of the strains that history and the world were placing on Plan de Ayala. I photographed people farming, celebrating, worshiping, fighting, and mourning their dead. I photographed their day-to-day life.