“We want to show you some petroglyphs located not far from Arandas. We’ve never seen anything like them before.” This email message immediately grabbed my attention because it had been sent by two archaeologists, Rodrigo and Cyntia Esparza. If the Esparzas considered this rock art extraordinary, I told myself, it must be extraordinary indeed. So, I made an extra effort to try to set up an expedition to Arandas—no easy task because the site was at the end of “un camino feo” (literally, an ugly road) and only high-clearance vehicles would be suitable for reaching the place.
As often happens with such excursions, potential participants signed up and then dropped out and in the end none of us had the vehicle we needed, but just seconds before midnight, so to speak, our friend Eugenio Mancera came up with a borrowed Jeep and we were in business.
Arandas is located 100 kilometers east of Guadalajara, but that’s not exactly where we were headed. Instead, we drove to the nearby and much smaller town of Jesús María, where we met our guide, a talented young photographer named Arnulfo Salazar.
Salazar has been working for years on an extraordinary publishing project. He and 12 other local people are studying photography at the Casa de Cultura in little Jesús María. The group includes housewives, painters, a secretary, a chemist and a computer expert. Their goal has been to document their home town, its people and their activities, as well as local attractions in two books of artistic, black and white photographs. A grass roots project like this, carried out entirely by people living in a small Mexican town, is not something you come across every day.
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