Mickey, Marginality, and Mexico: Mariana Yampolsky’s Final Photographic Narrative
Abstract
Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky’s final photography exhibition casts aside typical visualizations of her adopted country to foreground the marginal voices that react to global forces. Yampolsky’s photographic narrative engages directly with ideas promoted in Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s key work on cultural imperialism: How to Read Donald Duck. This analysis of her photographic text will show how Yampolsky’s visual representations of the subaltern provides further and distinct evidence of Dorfman and Mattelart’s assertions regarding the introduction of foreign symbols into a Latin American context. Additionally, her work demonstrates how the popular classes appropriate these symbols, adding to them mexicanidad and additional meaning created by the subaltern.