How Photographer Bénédicte Desrus Built Trust With Centro Residents for Arraigo

Photojournalist Bénédicte Desrus presented her book Arraigo at Centro Cultural Hartii, unveiling an intimate portrait of downtown Mérida that few have witnessed: longtime residents photographed inside their family homes, surrounded by generations of memory.

“I dare even to say, and I say it with responsibility, that this is the only book that portrays inhabitants of downtown Mérida inside their homes, in their daily life, in their private universe,” said Dr. Eduardo Gil, whose presentation explored the book’s cultural significance. “We are privileged witnesses to a history that has been woven over generations: stories of affection, of memory, of resistance.”

The book is the fruit of an extraordinary undertaking. For two years, Desrus walked the entirety of downtown Mérida—not just the historic center, but every street, every corner of the central neighborhoods. The book’s flaps feature a map documenting her route, what Gil called “the record of the fabric that Béné wove and unwove with her feet.”

“I don’t know anyone who has walked all, absolutely all the streets of downtown,” Gil noted. “And I walk a lot, and I have friends who also walk a lot, but no one who has undertaken this lived cartography, corporal, step by step.”

Designer Josefina Larraín, who heard about Desrus’s walks during their conversations at Plaza Carmesí, recalled the photographer’s persistence. “She would tell me that she walked the streets through downtown Mérida, and in these many rounds she managed to find the owner of some house,” Larraín said. “Everything happened to her—once she arrived desperate and almost crying, and when she managed to arrange and capture what she was looking for, she arrived very excited.”

That persistence yielded something rare: access to the private worlds of families who have remained in downtown homes for generations. The book opens with a phrase that captures its essence: “I am native to this house.”

The testimonies Desrus collected reveal both profound attachment and creeping loss. Residents speak of houses that “have sentimental value because they belonged to my great-grandparents,” of being born in these homes and planning to die there. One woman told Desrus: “If I could stay after death, I would stay here.”

But other voices express a different reality. “Before, there were many families, but they all went north,” one resident observed. Another noted: “There are many empty houses here because the owners have already died and their children have gone to live in the north.” The refrain appears again and again: “The coexistence was lost. There is no longer neighborhood interaction.”

The solitude is palpable. “The few friends I had had already died. Now I only have one or two friends,” one elderly resident said. Another: “We are almost the only ones who go out at night to get some fresh air with the few neighbors that remain. There is a lot of nostalgia.”

For Gil, this makes Arraigo “an act of resistance.” He explained: “Each family portrayed preserves objects, rooms, furniture, portraits, symbols loaded with history. They preserve the memory of those who are no longer here but continue to inhabit those spaces.”

That resistance extends beyond personal memory to confront larger forces reshaping Mérida. “We are letting a city of encounter slip away, a city of neighbors who know each other and converse,” Gil said. The book documents vulnerabilities “that don’t come from life itself but from forgetting, from the incapacity to weave neighborhood, from real estate speculation that breaks social cohesion.”

Larraín’s observations underscore how Desrus chose her subjects deliberately. “Béné edits by choosing with her camera only houses and people that refer to the past and to the memory of a people that today largely no longer inhabit this place,” she noted. The book captures a generation whose intimate social dynamics are no longer what they once were in the historic center. No longer does one bring a chair to the threshold of the door to take in the fresh air and talk with neighbors.”

Yet Larraín also found notes of hope among the testimonies: “Fortunately, people who used to live here are coming back,” and “I feel good about the changes made to downtown because this area was valued.”

Arraigo offers what Gil called “another gaze: not that of empty houses that meet the standard of the aesthetically marketable, remodeled, anonymous, but the houses of living families that demand to be seen.”

It is, both speakers suggested, an invitation to witness Mérida’s living memory before it disappears—a city that, in Gil’s words, “remains in its inhabitants and that resists forgetting.”

Arraigo is available for sale at yucatanmagazine.com/shop, where you can also purchase Yucatan Magazine Issue 16, which contains a six-page review of the book.