Magnolia, Juchitán

In 1979, Graciela Iturbide began photographing in Juchitán, a Zapotec town in the southern state of Oaxaca whose distinctive social structure and strong communal traditions have captured the attention of artists since the early twentieth century. Over time, Iturbide's engagement with the community deepened, resulting in a celebrated series of photographs that capture daily life with intimacy, humor, and symbolic power. Juchitán is often described as a society in which women hold significant social and economic authority, a dynamic Iturbide explored in her 1989 book, Juchitán de las mujeres (Juchitán: a town of women), coauthored with the Mexican feminist writer Elena Poniatowska.



Magnolia, the subject of this portrait, is a muxe, a Zapotec term referring to people assigned male at birth who live and present themselves as both masculine and feminine. In Iturbide’s portrait, Magnolia appears poised and self-possessed in a white flowered floor-length dress. She holds a small mirror up to her face, evoking the both multiplicity of gender identity and the function of the photographic portrait as a reflection of the self.