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Public Project
I am black because the sun looked at me
Copyright Johis Alarcón 2024
Date of Work Jul 2018 - Ongoing
Updated Sep 2021
Location Ecuador
Topics Belief, Children, Community, Conceptual, Documentary, Education, Emotion, Faith, Family, Feminism, Gender, Hope, Human Rights, Latin America, Leadership, Love, Motherhood, Parenting & Family, Photography, Photojournalism, Portraiture, Pregnancy/Birth, Spirituality, Womens Rights

Daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of black women who survived slavery keep the African legacy in their spirituality. The diaspora’s ancestral rituals and their cultural migratory reconfiguration adapted to their new territories and have become a way to remember their origins as well as a strong link of the black people with their African original territory.The term Cimarrona refers to the wild female spirit that resistance against racism since they arrived in Ecuador in the XVI century. 
This ongoing project explores black women become visible as historical protagonists of liberation and as guardians of ancestral afro practices as a method of cultural memory preservation of the diaspora.New cultural influence and mass migration of the new generations challenge their ancestry with the risk of losing it against globalization. Nowadays, cimarronas reinvigorate their ancestry to defend their territory and lead the Afro descent continuance in Ecuador.
Published in The New York Times  
24,598

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