Luis González Palma

In his photographs of the Maya people of Guatemala, Luis González Palma uses symbolic iconography to shed light on this group’s social, political, and personal plights. Recasting the Virgin Mary as a veiled Maya woman, Palma imbues El Silencio with all of the connotations of the life of the Virgin as he brings a figure traditionally depicted as a woman of European descent into a Latin American context. The title of the work perhaps refers to the suffering, discrimination, and genocide the Maya often silently have endured for centuries.