Gertrude Duby Blom: The Swiss “Queen of the Mexican Jungle”
Photographs From Two Centuries
A photography project by Gerardo Garciacano and Gregorio Vázquez
UPCOMMING EXHIBITIONS:
OPENING: March 14th, 2024 at the Mexican Embassy in Switzerland, Bern.
Click HERE to see photos and videos from the opening event.
June 6th, 2024 at the Museum Kleines Klingental, in cooperation with Expolat
July 5th, 2024 at the Asociación Cultural Na Bolom, San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico
In cooperation with Swiss Cultural Association Na Bolom.ch, Asociación Cultural Na Bolom in Mexico, and The Mexican Embassy in Switzerland.
This project is made possible with the support of Kanton Bern, Burgergemeinde Bern and the Temperatio Stiftung.
The introductory text by Meike Powroznik, curator for the Americas at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich, in German, is HERE.
“Hachakyum, god of gods, created the heavens and the jungles. In the sky, he sowed the stars, and in the jungle, he planted the large trees. The roots of all things are intertwined with each other.
When a tree is cut in the jungle, a star falls from the sky.”
Chan k’in Viejo (1900-1996)
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
The project is a photographic dialogue between two centuries and two photographers. By juxtaposing the images captured by Gertrude Duby Blom in the remote Lacandon village of Nahá in the second half of the twentieth century with my own photographs of the same location from the twenty-first century, a narrative unfolds revealing a delicate interplay between traditions, globalization, and survival.
BACKGROUND
This project has been inspired by the photographic work of Gertrude “Trudi” Duby Blom (1901-1993), spanning her time in Mexico between the 1940s until her death in 1993. Trudi devoted the last 50 years of her life to preserving the landscape and cultures of the Southern state of Chiapas, establishing herself as one of the earliest environmental activists of the twentieth century. Trudi was a temperamental and indomitable Swiss Mexican journalist, social anthropologist, and activist known in Chiapas as “la reina de la selva” – “the Queen of the Jungle.” The name, coined in the 1989 documentary film by Robert S. Cozen’s Reina de la Selva, Gertrude Blom: a Portrait, carries some of the ambivalence of Trudi’s role as seen in hindsight from a post-colonial narrative.
When Trudi first encountered the Lacandons in 1943, they were highly isolated from the broader concept of civilization. Their way of life bore more similarities to indigenous groups in the Amazon basin than to the rest of Mexico. Starting from the mid-1940s, Trudi actively raised awareness about deforestation caused by loggers, immigrant settlers, commonly known as “Ladinos,” the petroleum industry, and the actions of the Mexican government. Through her photographic work, she brought attention to the detrimental impact of deforestation, highlighting not only the harm to our planet but also the immediate threat it posed to the Lacandon way of life.
My portraits aim to build on Trudi’s documentary legacy by capturing the current generation and circumstances of the Lacandon people of the remote Nahá-Metzabok region. They illustrate how this community has been dealing with the impact of modernization and the influence of an increasingly globalized world.
“Not only do they speak ill of me: they hate me. They are my enemies. Like the foresters, the people from the Rural Bank who destroy the jungles with credits for cattle; the Ladinos who do not like the indigenous people….Only those who do nothing have no enemies… Let the myth of Gertrude Duby Blom grow. Later, when I am not here, the truth of things will be seen, and my existence in this magical area can be understood.”
Gertrude Duby Blom
Trudi y Gerardo
Los paralelismos entre la vida de Gertrude y la mía han desempeñado un papel fundamental en la catalización de este proyecto. Mientras que Trudi era una mujer del Oberland bernés que emigró a México, donde pasó la última parte de su vida, yo crecí en México y luego me mudé a Europa en busca de mi carrera como cantante clásico, y he vivido en Berna desde 2008. Además, tanto Trudi como yo nos adentramos en la fotografía más tarde en nuestras vidas. La fotografía de Trudi tenía principalmente el propósito de documentar y crear conciencia sobre la destrucción de la selva y sus culturas. Mi interés principal en la fotografía es artístico. En mis retratos experimento con la yuxtaposición del retrato posado e iluminado en estudio, con el flujo y la naturaleza aleatoria del retrato callejero. Mientras Trudi era una mujer suiza documentando grupos étnicos en México, yo soy un hombre mexicano documentando grupos sociales en Suiza en mi serie de Retratos Callejeros. Trudi y yo también compartimos el hecho de que, para los lacandones, ambos somos ladinos o extranjeros. Mi ciudad natal de Nuevo Laredo, en el norte de México, debe parecerles tan lejana como Berna en su percepción.
“Mi fama de cantante corrió rápidamente por toda la selva. Siempre que llegaba a los diferentes
caribales, una de mis principales obligaciones era cantar. Una vez para disipar el enojo de Mateo,
al que no habíamos llevado la vitrola deseada, no encontramos otro medio que mi canto.”
Gertrude Duby Blom
ABOUT NAHÁ
“Hach Winik”, the “true men” and the guardians of the biosphere
The Lacandons are believed to have inhabited the region between Yucatan, Chiapas and the Peten in Guatemala since ancestral times. During the Spanish colonization, when other ethnic groups were being converted to catholicism or annihilated, they fled to remote places of the jungle to preserve their traditions. Many anthropologists believe that they were one of the purest indigenous people of Mexico until the second half of the 20th century when roads for timber companies made the jungle more accessible. That coincides with the time that Trudi Blom first arrived in Chiapas and her photos bear witness to the destruction of the jungle. About 80% of the Lacandon jungle, the only rainforest in North America, is believed to have been lost to deforestation.
The Lacandons call themselves “Hach Winik” which translates as “true men” and they have been designated as guardians of the Nahá–Metzabok Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO site since 1998. Since 2004, Nahá has also been a RAMSER protected site. The reason for these designations is that some 40,000 species of fauna and flora exist in these habitats, and the area is considered the most important site for biodiversity in North America. The Nahá and neighboring Metzabok (another Lacandon community) regions represent only 0.4% of Mexico’s surface, but it contains 48% of the bird species, 33% of the bats, 11% of the reptiles and 25% of the mammals in the country. Nahá now has a population of about 270 inhabitants, around 60 families. They belong to the Mayan indigenous group and speak the Lacandon language.
Culturally, most of the Lacandons have become alienated from their own traditions. One group converted to the Southern Baptist religion, while another embraced Seventh-Day Adventism. However, the community at Nahá, led by its charismatic chieftain and spiritual leader, Chan K’in Viejo, remained steadfast in preserving the flame of traditional Mayan religion and culture. Trudi developed a close friendship with Chan K’in, holding deep respect for his knowledge of Mayan oral traditions and its intricate moral and cosmological aspects [4]. The current spiritual leader (Ut’ohir) of Nahá is Don Antonio, son of Chan K’in Viejo. With two new evangelical churches in the small community Don Antonio, now over 90 years old, unfortunately has only very few followers and no one has been trained to replace him.
“They came from the other side of the sea and found us living here. And these people brought their own god: Akiantó. That’s why now there are many people and missionaries who worship the god of foreigners. They often built churches with the stones from the houses of our gods and in the ruins of our temples. They took many beautiful sacred objects that we never saw again. So many sacred things that our gods left us were burned and destroyed, and they are lost forever.”
Chan k’in Viejo (1900-1996)
“My bitter experience from all the fights for many years is: the forest will go, the planet will go, and, what I don’t care about, humanity will go. We deserve to disappear.”
Gertrude Duby Blom
Gertrude Duby Blom
Gertrude Elisabeth Loertscher was born in Innertkirchen and grew up as the daughter of a religious minister in the small village of Wimmis near the Swiss alps. She led an extraordinary life that diverged radically from the norms of her rural Swiss background. In her twenties, she joined the Socialist Party and became a fierce journalist who wrote against fascism in 1930s not only in Germany but also in Switzerland, Italy and France. Due to her political activism, she was arrested five times, incarcerated three times, and sent to a camp for undesirable foreigners in France before eventually moving to Mexico.
In 1943, she volunteered to join an exploration expedition led by the government to the southern state of Chiapas. The expedition was the first of its kind in one hundred years and it was mainly on horseback. This presented a challenge for Trudi, who had never ridden a horse before. In the Lacandon jungle, she encountered Frans Blom, a well-known Danish archaeologist and cartographer, whom she later married. It was during this time that she started her socio-political work, advocating for the environment and the communities of the Chiapas jungle.
Initially, her interest in the group, much like her husband’s, was primarily anthropological and sociological. They collected artifacts to prevent their loss, vaccinated the Lacandons to protect them from devastating diseases from the outside world, and, in general, sought to shield them from the destructive influences of that same outside world. Within a few years, however, it became evident that, even if Lacandon culture might be defended in the abstract, the relentless forces of economic change were condemning these gentle people to extinction [4]. Trudi began then to see herself as the protector and saviour of the Lacandon.
In 1951, Trudi and Frans Blom purchased a house in San Cristobal, which they named Na Bolom (“house of the jaguar” in Lacandon). The 22-room house, originally built in 1891 as a seminary, transformed into a research center with an extensive library containing specialized works on Chiapas, Mexico, and Mesoamerica. Trudi managed the day-to-day operations, and after Frans passed away in 1964, she established the Asociación Cultural Na Bolom to ensure the protection of Lacandon culture and provide them with a home away from home when they visited San Cristobal for personal or professional matters. Trudi passed away on Christmas Eve in 1993 and was laid to rest in the San Cristobal cemetery. In 2010, the remains of both Frans Blom and Trudi Duby were moved to the sacred cemetery of the Lacandon people in Naha. This emotional journey marked the final expedition to the jungle, fulfilling Trudi’s last wish.
“We must return. I believe, as the hunters believe, that people who have entered that jungle are lost; they must return, leave, but always come back until their bones remain there, trapped in the bosom of Mother Earth, under the emerald roof of its giant trees…”
Gertrude Duby Blom
Special thanks to Kyra Nuñez de León-Johnsson for providing invaluable information and her help editing the text in this website.
SOURCES AND EXTERNAL LINKS
[1] Rostros y rastros de una leyenda: Gertrude Duby Blom by Kyra Nuñez de León-Johnsson. Consejo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Chiapas. publicaciones@concecultachiapas.gob.mx
[2] Gertrude Blom Bearing Witness by Alex Harris
[3] Gertrude Duby Blom. Alias Trudi Lörtscher, Pfarrerstochter zu Wimmis
[4] Encyclopedia.com Duby-Blom, Gertrude (1901–1993)
[6] Karussel -Xunan-The Lady SRF Interview
[7] Garrick Wilkie: Chan K’in Viejo: El Sabio de la Selva Lacandona. Prof Mex Films
