Images of missing victims still haunt S.A. artist
Like so many of us, George Cisneros was home on the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, getting ready for work. He and his wife, Catherine, and their son, Antonio, then 15, were only halflistening to NBC’S “Today” show.
Then host Katie Couric said an airliner had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was too soon to know what it meant — whether it was an accident or something more sinister. Both towers were still standing.
But Antonio, now a filmmaker in Los Angeles, had the foresight to pop a tape into the VCR and hit “record.”
Seventeen minutes later, while Cisneros was driving his son to North East School of the Arts, they heard on the radio that a second plane had hit the South Tower.
At that moment, all of us understood the United States was under attack.
The suicide hijackings caused the deaths of almost 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pa., where passengers forced a plane to crash into an open field rather than into its potential targets, the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
About two weeks later, Cisneros, a photographer, digital artist and composer, was in New York to document the aftermath.
He really had no business
being there, but the quirky intellectual, armed with a digital camera, had airline points to spare.
He took photos of the flyers that had been plastered on bulletin boards and utility poles all over lower Manhattan. They bore names and pictures of the missing, posted by family members seeking to find their loved ones — hoping against hope that they had somehow survived the catastrophe.
Cisneros, now 69, is the younger brother of Henry Cisneros, a former mayor of San Antonio and former U.S. secretary of housing and urban development.
Both are grandsons of Rómulo Munguía, a Mexican revolutionary, journalist and printer who moved to San Antonio in 1926. Munguía worked for La Prensa newspaper as a typesetter and Linotype operator. Later, his shop, Munguía Printers, became a bastion of Mexican American political activism on the West Side.
After 9/11, the connection to La Prensa came in handy for George Cisneros. The paper anointed him a stringer and gave him press credentials. Not that they did him much good with the officials who controlled access to Ground Zero. They gave priority to major news organizations, Cisneros recalled.
Still, he managed to get within a few blocks of the massive hole, known as the Pit, where the towers had collapsed in a vast pile of charred, twisted steel, and where first responders searched in vain for survivors.
He took thousands of images over several days, creating a visual record of the destruction and suffering.
He spent time at the nonprofit Asociación Tepeyac de New York, which advocates for Latino immigrants and where families sought assistance throughout the crisis.
He walked the streets near the World Trade Center and saw the faces of the fallen on those plaintive flyers, some of which had Polaroid images attached.
The faces looked familiar, as did many of the last names.
“They looked like my neighbors, the kid I went to school with and the guy who works in a parking garage downtown,” Cisneros said.
They became the focus of his self-assigned photo project. On the first anniversary of 9/11, La Prensa published some of the images. Others were exhibited at a local gallery.
Cisneros remains struck by those images, moved by the details they contained. The flyers described the clothes and jewelry loved ones were wearing that day, the scars and tattoos on their bodies. Anything that could distinguish them and — potentially — reunite them with their families. It was not to be.
That's what haunts Cisneros. That's what haunts all of us.
Cisneros talks about the workers at Windows on the World, a restaurant on the 106th floor of the Trade Center's North Tower. Many of those workers were immigrants, and their families' handwritten notes were prevalent among the prayerful appeals.
He remembers the flyer plastered near an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, with a Mexican flag at her side. It ached with hope.
For a short time, he recalls, a nation was united.
But not for long. Cisneros had been in New York during an earlier terrorist attack at the World Trade Center. On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in the basement of the North Tower, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.
After the 2001 catastrophe, Cisneros filled 100 disks with images. They're now part of his extensive archive.
They're a tribute to the thousands whose lives were extinguished that morning, he said.
He left New York several days after the attacks. By then, many of the flyers had been battered by wind and had faded from the sun.
But Cisneros remembers something else from that time: He saw New Yorkers united in mourning and in strength.