The title Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas can make a photograph sound like an icon before it is understood as a portrait. Graciela Iturbide made the image in Juchitán, Oaxaca, in 1979. The Library of Congress catalog identifies the sitter as a Zapotec woman named Zobeida, with iguanas on her head. A Library of Congress curator’s account gives her full name, Zobeida Díaz, and says she was selling iguanas to cook and eat. The detail reorients the portrait: the animals were not brought into the frame solely as an artist’s symbols. They were part of a woman’s work.
The curator says Iturbide requested permission to photograph Díaz and that the moving iguanas made the moment difficult, prompting laughter. Those facts describe an encounter, not a claim that the photograph is transparent evidence of everything Díaz thought. Permission to make a portrait does not transfer ownership of its meaning to later viewers. It does, however, remind us that a celebrated image began with a named person whose labor, humor and consent matter to how it is described. When the headdress-like arrangement becomes the whole story, Díaz risks being reduced to an emblem while her market activity disappears.
Local and international circulation have given the image further lives. The same Library of Congress account says people in Juchitán reproduced it on posters and honored Díaz and her iguanas with a statue. It also notes that the portrait has inspired feminist and gender-equality readings beyond Mexico. Those responses need not cancel each other. A community’s claim on an image of one of its merchants and a wider audience’s symbolic reading arise from different relationships to the photograph. The responsibility of a retrospective is to name both without using the second to replace the first.
Iturbide is a Mexican photographer, and the image has become one of her best-known works. Yet the form of the picture alone should not be used to make sweeping claims about all Zapotec women or about Juchitán as a timeless matriarchy. A single portrait cannot carry an entire social system. The title’s religious echo and the iguanas’ striking arrangement can invite interpretation, but the documented setting is specific: a woman selling food animals in a particular town in 1979. The specificity makes the photograph more interesting than a generalized claim of female power.
Keeping Díaz’s name attached to the image is more than a courtesy. It interrupts a familiar exchange in which a working woman supplies the appearance of power while later audiences supply all its meaning. The local statue and posters described by the curator return the portrait to a community that knew the setting differently from distant museum visitors. Neither circulation fixes the image forever. But both are easier to understand when the woman selling iguanas remains present in the account, alongside the photographer and the icon they helped bring into being.