Héctor García:
The Imaginary Construction of Social Reality
by Alejandro Castellanos

The idea of Mexico as a modern nation was created in the nineteenth century, but it was not until the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century when it became grounded and articulated in the daily life of several regions of the country. The basis for this was the construction and reproduction of a series of myths identifying a variety of scattered localities whose habits and ideologies were far from being uniform.

Héctor García grew up during those decades in Mexico City, the pole that concentrated the power of an authoritarian regime that entered the decade of the fifties with increased strength thanks to the almost absolute control it wielded over society. This situation led to a perverse relationship between media and power in which criticism was substituted by a trivial complacency.

Héctor García’s work as a photojournalist acquired great significance at the time because of his unwavering desire to express his ideology through images. Unlike the majority of his colleagues, García managed to combine a feel for information with the distinctive thought of an age where the identity of Mexican culture was a constant preoccupation of writers and artist.

The post-revolutionary narrative had great contradictions that could be perceived in its characters: as the image of the peasant was being repeatedly used as an idealized representation of the people, the imprint of urban culture was becoming more pronounced in the country's way of life. The account that made the collectivity into the center of social life was given substance by figures whose singularity made them stand out form the crowd and be regarded as extravagant personalities by their contemporaries. This occurred with David Alfaro Siqueiros, Dr. Atl and Frida Kahlo, three of the artists portrayed by García.

The paradoxes of a society in process of affirming its political independence as the world struggled with the Cold War were based on an extremely complex model. Its strength depended on the articulation between the State and the ruling party, an effective formula for collusion that survived for seven decades. In a situation where corruption, hypocrisy and lack of flexibility were the mechanisms for the government’s reproduction, Héctor García’s ironic gaze opposed the festivities and celebrations of power to the events where the social and labor conflicts raised by workers and students met with the repression of the regime, particularly in 1958 and 1968. This reflected yet another of the system's incongruities as it favored the growth of those sectors in the cities, while having its main power bases in rural communities held down by ignorance and poverty.

Beyond the arrogance of power, and following the route traced out by journalists and writers such as Fernando Benitez, Elena Garro and Elena Poniatowska (all of whom he collaborated with in various articles), Héctor García documented the festivities that endorsed collective memory through complex rituals, accentuated by an imagination capable of relating various situations or objects by means of visual composition. Death, religion, politics and art were located as regions of identity by García’s gaze, always careful of extracting allegories out of everyday facts, out of the reality that is evident to the eye, both in urban areas and in Indian communities.

Héctor García once quoted a fortunate idea of Leon Felipe’s that summed up his understanding of the documentary image: photography as the imprint of society, a social sudarium, as it were, a testimony that preserves the most heterogeneous situations conferring them an aura of eternity that goes beyond the instant where they functioned as the register of a specific process. An image in the last section of the portfolio expresses this idea fully: “Between Progress and Development”, a metaphor for the emergence of a fragile society in the midst of powerful forces that are beyond the capacities of that collectivity. A critical portrait of the modernist utopia of the twentieth century set in a country that was starting the new era bearing the heavy burden of inequality: a population capable of developing one of the largest economies of the world, while having an index of human development located in the range of mediocrity.