Mev Puleo makes a video for the long haul

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 27, 1995 by Michael J. Farrell

Few can say with such poignant accuracy what Mev Puleo said about her work in progress: "This video is my life's work." And seldom has a video been invested with such a mandate by its maker: to carry on her cause when she is dead.

Puleo, who is 32 and has a malignant brain tumor, is in a race with time. This is who I am, she wants her video to say, and this is my wish for the world.

Puleo's photos have often appeared in the pages of NCR. A few years ago, she coauthored a book with Jesuit Fr. John Kavanaugh: Faces of Poverty, Faces of Christ (someone has called her, not too surprisingly, "a theological photo-journalist").

In 1994, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation was published by the State University of New York Press. She interviewed 16 Brazilians, from slum dwellers to bishops, and interspersed their stories with her pictures. Wrote the usually restrained Gary MacEoin in a review: "It is devastating, it is sad, it is triumphant, it is frightening. After you read it, you will never be the same."

Puleo, it soon becomes clear, is, and always has been, a woman on a mission.

She grew up thoroughly Catholic in St. Louis: Our Lady of the Pillar Grade School, Visitation High School, the Jesuit St. Louis University. She taught religion for a couple of years, doing campus ministry on the side. During vacations she would take students to such places as Haiti.

Why would she do that?

At age 14, Puleo had unwittingly set out on her own road to Damascus. Her parents, who could afford it, believed in the educational value of travel. They took her, among other places, to Brazil. They rode a bus to the famous, towering statue of Christ the Redeemer looking down on Rio's teeming population. "That day, as images of opulence and misery rocked my world, a crisis of conscience took root in me."

Conscience led her not only to Third World poverty but across the tracks in St. Louis. "In high school I always wanted to do something for the poor, so I started to work at the Catholic Worker house ... anything for the poor."

Was this religion, or just a humanitarian person doing good?

"It's religion. I was religious from day one." She tells how, "when I was really young," she had an epiphany that left its mark. Arriving home, her attention was drawn to the trees near her house. "I was so amazed, you know, that we can't make a tree. ... The thing of God took form in me, I think, mostly through nature."

She went off to Weston School of Theology. While there, she met Mark Chmiel, who would later become her husband. Since high school she had taken her camera everywhere. She seems to have been more impressed by what she saw through the lens than what she saw in books. "I believe less in theology and more in God, because I believe that in theology there's only so much you can say about God."

People are another matter, individually and collectively. "I feel I enter into relations with people." This is an understatement of the main thrust of her life of reaching out. She is precise and protective of what is involved: "It's not like trying to fix anything for anybody." The relationship itself is the thing. She worried lest her photography exploit the poor. She wrote in Praying magazine:

"At times I ask:

Dare I invade their lives, steal this moment?

Yet, how can I not

Share these children with the world?"

Someone described her as a "solidarity" photographer, and she seems proud of the description.

The book was meant to deliver a one-two punch, words and images. Not so much liberation theology as liberation spirituality. She knows the dirty politics and greed that have crippled so many lives in Latin America. She knows all the martyrs. She knows where the church has gone to bed with the oligarchies and where it has stood side by side with the poor. In Brazil, she writes, "87 percent of the arable land lies idle in the hands of wealthy speculators, the Amazon rain forest is being toppled by an onslaught of cattle ranchers, two-thirds of the people are malnourished and 7 million children live in the streets."

But what the book sings about is the "followers of the way," the thousands of Christian base communities that are turning Christianity and the meaning of life on their heads.

All the usual suspects are included: the Boff brothers, Ivone Gebara, Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga. There is also Maria da Silva Miguel, born of slaves, who modestly tells Puleo, "my only achievement is the life God has given me," but the turns around and writes a poem that begins, "I am woman-mother and warrior, the stove is no longer my limit."

And there's Salome Costa, who worked the fields until she was 18 and has little formal education. Now, though, "we go out of the church and into the streets to gather families and reflect on the Bible in the light of our lives. And the situation of our lives is horrible."

Puleo took these and her other heroes on the road in the U.S.A. by means of the book brought to life by a slide show.

It sounds like a grim panorama of pain and despair.