SÍIHIL — the Mayan word for “birth” or “to give life” — is an autobiographical photographic project exploring menstruation as origin, transformation, preservation, and emotional memory. Rooted in my experience as a Mexican-Caribbean woman from Cozumel, an island that is mayan land, historically connected to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of the moon and fertility, the work moves between documentary observation, symbolism, and poetic visual language to examine the relationship between body, identity, healing, and vulnerability.
At the core of the project are the words of my late friend Paola Reyes Zepeda: “No one would be anything without the reproductive health of a woman, it is important to take care of it, it is preservation, it is transcendence.” This reflection became one of the emotional and conceptual foundations of SÍIHIL. The project understands reproductive health not as a marginal or private issue, but as the very condition that makes human life possible. Through this perspective, menstruation becomes a claim and recognition of life itself: of origin, continuity, care, and the cyclical transformation that sustains human existence.
I began developing this project in 2019 after losing my period due to an alternative treatment to fix a hormonal imbalance. I never imagined the repercussion that losing my period was going to be, both physical and mentally. When my menstruation returned, it felt like a rebirth. What initially emerged from a deeply personal experience gradually expanded into a broader reflection on reproductive health, depression, body reconciliation, psychological processes, and the inherited shame and silence surrounding the female body. Revisiting memories from my adolescence, I encountered years of rejection toward my own menstruation and femininity. Through SÍIHIL, I began questioning how disconnection from our bodies can shape both emotional and physical realities, and how tenderness, visibility, and self-understanding can become forms of healing.
The project approaches photography first as a raw documentation and then as an emotional exploration. Through fragments of everyday life, symbolic imagery, intimate self-representation, and visual metaphors drawn from nature, cycles, blood, and transformation, the work attempts to translate an interior process into a collective and sensory experience. The images inhabit a space between the crude and the poetic, the intimate and the universal, where emotional resonance becomes more important than fixed explanation.
SÍIHIL seeks to re-signify menstruation beyond taboo, discomfort, or invisibility. By making private experiences visible, the project opens a space for collective recognition and dialogue around reproductive health, mental health, womanhood, vulnerability, and embodied memory. Influenced by Latin American traditions of poetic documentary and autobiographical storytelling, the work understands the personal as inherently collective. Through vulnerability, SÍIHIL becomes both an act of reconciliation with the body and an invitation to reflect on the fragile, cyclical, and transcendent nature of life itself.
The following images are only some of the extended body of work.
