The following images of Mixteca captured in July of 2011, photographed by Matt Black and posted by The Big Picture. These pictures have been extracted from an ongoing long-term documentary project on the region of Mixteca and its people.
When the link was included by Lane Turner to Black’s Kickstarter campaign, Big Picture readers replied by funding another trip to Mixteca. Some of the following pictures were taken during that second trip. While clicking these pictures, Black concentrated on farmers tackling their farms suffering due to severe soil erosion.
Matt Black writes that, Southern Mexico’s Mixteca region is one of the most heavily eroded landscapes on earth: up to five meters of topsoil have been lost. In the town of Santiago Mitlatongo, soil loss triggered a geological phenomenon called “slumping.”
Like a slow-motion landslide, the town is sliding downhill at the rate of one meter per day, destroying homes and livelihoods as houses and farmland slip into the valley below.” Interested readers can join Black in a web conference hosted by Orion Magazine tomorrow.
- Women are reaping wheat from a cracked field for eating and selling it to earn daily wages.
- This picture is showing a ruined corn-field to which a woman is surveying as if any crops enough to eat have been remained undestroyed.
- A farm-field which has been fully eroded by land-slide bedded by rocks slipped down hills during it.
- A shepherd’s dog starving of hunger, facing the danger of land-slide in the hills above the town.
- A boy with pet going home by crossing the collapsing hillside.
- People collecting building materials from destroyed houses to build a new shelter to live in.
- A family which has lost its shelter in land-slide taking rest alongside road.
- A poor and ill lady resting at her home tired of all these continuous accidents of land-slide and then rain-storm.
- This is the picture of a poor lad, sitting inside tin house and searching food for him.
- The family has not yet recovered from the losses caused due to land-slide, and the rain-storm weakens the newly shift house.
- A boy climbs on his collapsed house in search of his possessions and valuables.
- Family carrying wheat for food from smashed land.
- This is the picture of a poor farmer reaping his destroyed corn-field.
- After this land-slide the village has destroyed completely, this picture is of the villagers taking away their possessions from their destroyed houses.
- Due to the force of the moving rocks in land-slide house drifting downhill causing loss of life and property.
This is the picture of the rocks moving towards a village from a collapsing mountain, destroying the properties of villagers.
