This is America, Too

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Thursday, August 5, 2010 | 6 photos

It was only fitting that my parents, as the chromosomal bestowers of my every biological appendage, bestowed upon me my first accessorial limb -- my Canon model-number-not-important, my loyal pocket companion. My index-finger initiation into photography coincided with touchdown in Mexico, and a few thousand clicks and digital memories later I'm still learning the features on my comparatively featureless camera. My photographic expertise is encompassed by the phrase point-and-click. Yet I'll have to agree with my many indigenous friends, those who'll never appear in my albums for this very reason: photography captures the soul.

La vida in Latin America is dynamic and dichotomic, the range of natural wonder matched and mirrored by the diversity of daily life. Moonlit fishing forays into Lake Titicaca eke out livings for Bolivian indios, while Arequipa, Peru's horn-blasted, taxi-clogged arteries seem to defy the logic of the profession. The ready smiles of children incite us to replace connotively confrontational words like "barrier" as qualifiers in describing our language differences.

We strain for differences in the face of so many similarities -- but our cultural ignorance perverts into burden what should be interpreted as disparate beauty. Gray and stained and broken down can be as vibrant and illustrative and grandiose as a shimmering skyscraper backgrounded by a heavens--descending rainbow.

So we heave heavy packs onto our shoulders, sweat and stumble through the dust, all the while gaining the fortitude to hurdle mountains, learning to first see, then embrace, the splendor of every step -- paso a paso.

(Or, in fewer words: Here I sit cubicle-encircled, my leather-bound feet begging for blisters and ground to pound.)