Artist Statement
Cholo. This loaded term is first recorded in the 17th century in the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Commentarios Reales de los Incas and is used to identify the offspring of native and black parents. The original meaning signifies a dog of disreputable origin, and was used by the colonial Spaniards as an insult. Today in Peru cholo, or its masculine or feminine diminutive (cholito/cholita) is a common phrase with positive and negative connotations depending on the context, and reflects the complex, unstated socio-economic rules by which modern day Peru continues to abide.
Peruvian by birth and father, I left the country at the age of three when my parents divorced. Estranged from my father for nearly all my life, Peru has always been a sort of enigmatic talisman for me, a key piece of a fractured identity. When I first started visiting the country about ten years ago, I was surprised to find myself nicknamed cholita gringa by my friends and acquaintances. Surprised because cholo was a word that I heard used with hate and disgust as often as with affection.
“We are two Perus,” a friend of mine often says. My face is white, but I often feel more comfortable around the cholos sin plata, who can be more open and embracing of me. As a cholita gringa I cannot reconcile myself to the two Perus. We are all cholita, half-breeds sprung from an original Ur-mother.
Process Statement
I began this project as an anthropological look at Peru, focusing on the coast, to dispel the common stereotype of the country as a quaint locale filled with poncho-wearing natives leading llamas down mountain paths and to find my own place within it. I want to represent this Peruvian under-class - the cholos sin plata, whose representation in modern society is often portrayed as dirty and disreputable, and to broaden my own understanding of the country – to find how, if at all, I relate to this master puzzle
Susana Raab was born in Lima, Peru and raised throughout the United States. She is a fine-art and documentary photographer working in Washington, DC, creating personal work in addition to working as the photographer of the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, documenting the East of the River communities in DC.
The heart of her work is a search for the quotidian, archetypical and ordinary: man’s relationship with his environment, identity within that construct, and transcendence or evolution. Susana’s work has been exhibited internationally and nationally, at venues including: the Corcoran Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Madrid, the Pingyao Photo Festival, Noorderlicht Fotofestival in the Netherlands, and the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC.
Susana has been the recipient of the White House News Photographers’ Project Grant, a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship, Honorable Mentions in Center’s Project Competition and Curator’s Choice Awards, and a Puffin Grant, among others. Her work is held in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History, The Library of Congress, Division of Prints & Photographs, The Art Museum of the Americas, The EnFoco Collection, and the DC Public Art Bank.
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