Remembering Mexican photographer Julián Cardona

"I believe that in Juárez the future of Mexico plays out to a great extent." - Julián Cardona

Last September, I ran to the Little Mulberry river in the rain, soaked to the skin, slid down a bank covered in leaves, and dove into the creek. When I surfaced, I yelled one last message to Julián, which echoed through the Ozark mountains. I had texted him on September 22 only to find out he had died the previous day at age 60.

Meeting Julián in 2010 changed the course of my life. Writer Charles Bowden recommended that I meet with him in Juárez, Mexico, during my Ph.D. research. At the time, I was on my way to becoming an academic.

Email from Charles Bowden

June 3, 2010

alice
well, you'll be fine but i think you'll need a guide given the roadblocks run by the military/federal police and the fact the city seems to be dying. Try my friend julian cardona (julian.cardona@gmail.com). he covered the murder of women from the first moment for diario and he has pretty much covered the murder of everyone. he has spent his life there and i've done three books with him. he is very intelligent and knowing about the city. use my name. i am leaving in an hour for the delta of the mississippi and will be gone until around june 20th.
chuck

I interviewed Julián for my book, and I witnessed his work as a photographer. He knew Juárez and its people and loved roaming the city in search of a story. Watching him, I realized that I didn’t want to spend my writing life in a library or contort my words to fit the straightjacket of academic journals. I didn’t own a camera, and he introduced me to photography.

And when he asked me if I would translate Abecedario de Juárez, a book he was working on in 2013, I agreed to do it in exchange for several of his photographs. To translate the glossary of words birthed from the violence in Juárez, we were in constant communication.

Email from Julián Cardona

June 10, 2015

My yesterday's interview with an ex soldier brought some accuracy to it and added some new words:

el dibujo

The pattern drawn by a sicario with bullets in the window or body of the car, in an execution.

sembrar

To bury a corpse in a clandestine grave. It's a word used by soldiers. It is not clear yet to me if its use is widespread. Sembrar is also used when authorities, police or army, plant weapons to frame innocent people, montados.

Julián

I think Julián knew that my creative life could be split into a before Juilán and an after Julián. It took me several years to figure out how to make a living from my writing. And a few more to understand what role photography would play in my life. I continued to work on translations with Julián through 2015. His book found a publisher, lost a publisher, and then I despaired that the book would never be published. When it came out in 2022, he had been dead a few months. I wish he could have seen it, that we could have met in Juárez for coffee, as we often did, and talked about the work that moved us and made our lives meaningful.

In memory of the dark humor and expansive generosity of Julián,

Alice