Finca Talnamica: the land in between by Mayita Mendez

Issue 162

This project isn't about a coffee farm. I am a 5th generation coffee producer and an immigrant- born in El Salvador and raised in a bilingual home in NYC. This series of images, taken mainly on our farm, is about my return home. Through touch and texture and light, I explore what lies the beneath the surface of relationships with my birthplace, identity, my family, and the land itself.

I’ve always felt a yearning to belong, alongside a persistent feeling of being caught in-between places, languages, and even contradictory senses of self. My work focuses on documenting these states, mental and physical, as well as the transitions that take me towards them and away.

The coffee farm links me to the history of El Salvador, both troubled and abundant. What will happen to this land when it is handed over to me? Will I continue to cultivate the land? Where will I live? What will happen to the people that work this land? Themes of transience are countered by recurring engagement with the elements that ground us: earth, water, air, fire, ether, the body and, especially, light — my only constant companion. In these in-between states, these luminous transitions, my photographs are born.

Mayita Mendez (she/her) lives and works in New York City, as well as Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and El Salvador.
mayita.com | @iseeyouiloveyou