Gertrude Duby Blom

Gertrude "Trudi" Duby Blom (born Gertrude Elisabeth Lörtscher; July 7, 1901 – December 23, 1993)  was a Swiss journalist, social anthropologist, and documentary photographer who spent five decades chronicling the Mayan cultures of Chiapas, Mexico, particularly the culture of the Lacandon Maya. In later life, she also became an environmental activist. Blom's former home Casa Na Bolom is a research and cultural center devoted to the protection and preservation of the Lacandon Maya and La Selva Lacandona rain forest.

Gertrude Blom was born in the Swiss Alps, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. She grew up in the village of Wimmis, where her father Otto Lörtscher was a minister and much of her childhood play was influenced by the wild west tales of Carl May. After completing a horticulture degree in 1918, Blom attended a school for social work in Zurich. There she became a member of the Socialist Party and developed an interest in journalism and politics. She left school and traveled throughout Europe, speaking and organizing on behalf of the Socialist Party. In 1925 she married Kurt Düby (1900–1951). Her marriage ended a few years later when Blom moved to Germany to report on Adolf Hitler and growing Nazi brutality for Swiss newspapers. Working as an anti-fascist organizer, speaker, and journalist led Blom to Paris, where she joined the international movement against Hitler's Germany. In 1939, after Blom was arrested and deported back to Switzerland, she planned to travel to New York and raise funds for war refugees, but a sudden change of heart led her to join the mass emigration of pacifists, communists, labor leaders, artists and Jews welcomed to Mexico by President Lázaro Cárdenas.

In Mexico City, Blom was hired as a government social worker to study and report on the working conditions of Mexican women. Later, while researching women who had fought as zapatistas with Emiliano Zapata's revolutionary army, Blom bought her first camera to help document her work. In 1943, influenced by the adventures of French anthropologist Jacques Soustelle, whose book on jungle exploration she had read on the boat to Mexico, Blom convinced a government minister to let her join a Chiapas expedition going in search of the legendary and rarely photographed Lacandon Maya. Blom later credited her attractive appearance and the camera she wore around her neck for her place on this first official Lacandon expedition, which was to be conducted on horseback. Blom had never ridden a horse before.

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