Contemporary pre-Columbian art: recasting artifacts through object biographies

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Content i

CONTEMPORARY PRE-COLUMBIAN ART:

RECASTING ARTIFACTS THROUGH OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES

by

Jennifer L. Reynolds-Kaye

_______________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

June 2014

Copyright 2014 Jennifer L. Reynolds-Kaye

ii
Dedication

In memory of my father, David Michael Reynolds, who always encouraged me to follow
my heart.

iii
Acknowledgements

This project sprouted from a desire to cross-fertilize a blossoming passion for pre-
Columbian artifacts with a deep grounding in contemporary art history. Despite the challenges,
naysayers, and false starts, I persevered to nurture this undertaking only with the unfailing
support of my advisor, Macarena Gomez-Barris. This project would not have been possible
without her wise guidance and commitment to academic justice. I would like to also
acknowledge the support of my committee members, Suzanne Hudson, Selma Holo, and Maria-
Elena Martinez for their advice at all stages of this dissertation. Beyond my committee, my
unofficial mentor and one of my biggest cheerleaders, John Pohl, first taught me how to read
Mixtec codices and introduced me to Oaxaca. Funding for this project was made through the
generous support of a dissertation completion fellowship from University of Southern
California’s Graduate School, research and travel funding through USC’s Department of Art
History, and summer support through USC’s Visual Studies Graduate Certificate. The USC Del
Amo Foundation Research Award supported my travel to Barcelona, Spain, where I participated
in the Decolonizing Knowledge and Power summer school program. Additional support from
USC Resisting the Path to Genocide Summer Research Fellowship and the Dean Joan Metcalf
Schaefer Scholarship enabled my frequent trips to Mexico and Europe. Without the financial
support of these grants, I would not have been able to compose such rich object biographies
using primary materials, fieldwork, and interviews.
While the grants and fellowships made the travel financially feasible, it is really the
people who made the research possible. During my time at the Smithsonian Summer Institute in
Museum Anthropology, I had the honor of learning from Nancy Parezo and Candace Greene,
who taught me everything I know about the Smithsonian and research in museum collections. I’d

iv
like to thank my colleagues Robert Kett, Gina Watkinson, Ingrid Ahlgren, Jaclyn Kuizon,
Lucero Radonic, and Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe for tolerating my obsession with casts and
expanding my understanding of anthropology. I would like to thank Colin Harris and Bruce
Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University; Michael Hironymous at the
Benson Library of U.T. Austin; and Haleh Motiey-Payandehjoo at the Sutro Library of SFSU. In
Mexico, I benefited greatly from engaging with Monica Villegas at La Curtiduría and
conversations with Demián Flores over coffee and beers. I would like to thank my host family,
led by the overwhelmingly generous Clara Hernandez Hernandez, for their amazing food,
hospitality, and interest in my research. Thank you to Alba Eugenia Vásquez Miranda for giving
me an opportunity to speak at and publish an article with the Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas at UNAM in Oaxaca. This dissertation is dedicated to the people of Teozacoalco and
Jaltepec, and I am forever indebted to the openness and honesty of Manuel Miguel Robles,
Alberto León Mendoza Cruz, and Fernando Caballero Cruz.
Closer to home, I would like to thank my colleagues at USC in Art History, Comparative
Literature, and American Studies and Ethnicity whose conversations and camaraderie enriched
my graduate experience, including Katie Kerrigan, Yael Lipschutz, Alex Castillo-Kesper, Kira
Shewfelt, Rika Hiro, Karen Huang, Ana Lee, Robert Eap, Jih-Fei Cheng, Rebekah Garrison,
Crystal Baik. I would also like to thank my colleagues at UCLA, Isabel Gomez and Yvette
Martinez-Vu, and those that I spent time with my visiting scholar year at UCSD’s Center for
U.S. Mexican Studies, including Danny Zborover, Veronica Pacheco, Morris Levy, Casey Lurtz,
Paloma Checa-Gismero, Sara Solaimani, Noni Brynjolson, and Amanda Cachia. Beyond the
academic circle, I want to thank my friends at Kaya Press, especially Sunyoung Lee, Neela
Banerjee, and Duncan Williams, and my Graduate Student Government folks, especially Ryan

v
Estes, Jaclyn Selby, Cassandra Sutton, Megan Yardley, Kara Lemma, Dee Holland, Ari
Saifhashemi, Dushyant Singh, Johannes Schmitt, Irfan Elahi, and all the other board members
and senators who always kept me on my toes.
None of this would have been possible without the support of my family, which has
remarkably expanded by two little ones in the last year. Theo and Dash, thank you for inspiring
me with your wide smiles, warm hugs, and contagious laughter. But most of all, I am indebted to
the patience and love of my husband, Al, who did all the nights and makes the fancy coffee every
morning. Clear eyes, full heart.

vi
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures viii
Abstract xvi
Introduction 19
Key Questions 20
Paradoxes and other Internal Contradictions 25
The Decolonial Project 27
Genealogy of Pre-Columbian Appropriations 36
History in Appropriation Art and the “Archaeological Imaginary” 39
The Archaeological Imaginary in Practice 46
Conclusion 50
Chapter 1. The Role of Pre-Columbian Objects in Nineteenth-Century Mexico 65
Mexican Nationalism 66
Museums and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century 68
From Artifact to Imagery: Mobilizing the Pre-Columbian Object Internationally 76
Conclusion 78
Chapter 2. Tracing the Codex Selden in Tatiana Parcero’s Cartografía Interior 87
Introduction 87
After the Bottleneck: Multiplying Pre-Columbian Images 88
Object Biographies, Reproductions, and Re-framings 92
History and Reading of the Codex Selden 92
Codex Selden in the Bodleian Library 96
Reproductions of the Codex Selden 100
Two Left Feet: The Clumsiness of Photography and Anthropometry 104
Back to the Source 107
Conclusion 109
Chapter 3. Mapping the Mapa de Teozacoalco in Tatiana Parcero’s Cartografía Interior
117
Introduction 117
History of the Mapa de Teozacoalco 119
Indigenous and European Cross-over and Selective Adoption 126
Circulation & Acquisition by Benson Latin American Collection at U.T. Austin 130
Mapa de Teozacoalco in Scholarship 138
Mapping Teozacoalco Today 139
Reading the Mapa de Teozacoalco 141
Narrative Summary of the Mapa de Teozacoalco 145
Reading the codex through photography 148
Photography through the lens of the codex 151
Conclusion 154
Chapter 4. Casting Coatlicue in Mariana Castillo Deball’s Between You and the Image of
You That Reaches Me 160

vii
Introduction 160
Literature Review 162
History of Coatlicue 164
Original Meaning and Context 164
Multiplicity and Mass Production 166
A Vicious Cycle: Burial, Unearthing, Casting, and Reinterment 169
Casts as Portable Conveyors of Mexican Identity 176
From Place to Place: Tracking the Coatlicue in the Smithsonian 180
Appropriations by Modern and Contemporary Artists 185
The Coatlicue in Modern Mexican Art 185
Between You and the Image of You That Reaches Me 187
Conclusion 189
Chapter 5. Critical Juxtapositions in Demián Flores’ De/construcción de una nación 204
Introduction 204
Importance of Exhibition within Demián Flores's Oeuvre 208
Visual Analysis of Paintings 210
Escenas de la conquista (La matanza de Cholula) (1877) 221
Obregón’s El descubrimiento del pulque 226
Demián Flores’s sculptures 229
Museum 239
Picturing a National Mexican Identity 240
What is History Painting? 241
Academia de San Carlos 242
Possession and Dispossession of the “Indian" 247
Historiography of West Mexican Sculptures 250
History of Forgeries 253
Connection to Demián’s work 260
Institutional Critique 261
Fred Wilson Mining the Museum (1992) 262
Fred Wilson Addiction Display (part of The Other Museum) (1990-91) 263
Pedro Lasch Espejo negro 265
Demián Flores 266
Conclusion 279
Bibliography 284

viii
List of Figures

Fig. 0.1. Annie Leibovitz, Mexico86 series, 1986. Teresa Eckmann, Neo-Mexicanism: Mexican
figurative painting and patronage in the 1980s, Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New
Mexico Press, 2010. Figure 82. .............................................................................................. 53
Fig. 0.2. Tatiana Parcero, Cartografía Interior #38, 1996, acetate and color print. .................... 53
Fig. 0.3. Tatiana Parcero, Cartografía Interior #40, 1995, acetate and color print, 52 in. x 40 in.
................................................................................................................................................ 54
Fig. 0.4. Tatiana Parcero, Cartografía Interior #36, 1996, Acetate and color photo, 70 x 100 cm.
................................................................................................................................................ 54
Fig. 0.5. Codex Selden, 1560s, Jaltepec, Mexico, Coated (deer?) skin. Bodleian Library, Oxford
University, MS. Arch. Selden. A.2. Photograph by author during Children of the Plumed
Serpent: The Legend of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico (April 1, 2012-July 1, 2012) at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. .................................................................................... 55
Fig. 0.6. Mapa de Teozacoalco, 1580, Teozacoalco, Mexico, 23 sheets of European paper pasted
together, 142 x 177 cm. Benson Library at the University of Texas, Austin. ........................ 55
Fig. 0.7. Mariana Castillo Deball, Between you and the image of you that reaches me, 2010.
Photograph by author from Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 (March 9, 2012-July 8,
2012) at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, France. ............................................................. 56
Fig. 0.8. Coatlicue Statue, Andesite, 2.7 m. tall, in Museo Nacional de Antropología. .............. 56
Fig. 0.9. Demián Flores De/construcción de una nación, 2012. Photograph by author at the
Museo Nacional de Arte. ........................................................................................................ 57
Fig. 0.10. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) ................................................ 57
Fig. 0.11. Kia Optima Super Bowl Ad, 2011 ............................................................................... 58

ix
Fig. 0.12. Rodrigo Gutiérrez, El senado de Tlaxcala, 1875. ....................................................... 58
Fig. 0.13. José María Obregón, El Descubrimiento del pulque, 1869. Photograph by the author.
................................................................................................................................................ 59
Fig. 0.14. Mariana Castillo Deball, Estas ruinas que ves, 2008. ................................................. 59
Fig. 0.15. Gabriel Orozco, Photogravity, 1999. ............................................................................ 60
Fig. 0.16. Einar and Jamez de la Torre, Colonial Atmosphere, 2002. .......................................... 60
Fig. 0.17. Keith Arnatt, Self-Burial (Television Interface Project), 1969. ................................... 61
Fig. 0.18. Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970. .................................................. 61
Fig. 0.19. Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995. ....................................................... 62
Fig. 0.20. Rubén Ortiz-Torres, The Past Is Not What It Used To Be, 2008. ................................ 62
Fig. 0.21. Leandro Katz, Catherwood Project, (1985-1995, reopened 2001) .............................. 63
Fig. 0.22. Silvia Gruner, The Middle of the Road/ La mitad del camino, 1994. ........................... 63
Fig. 0.23. Nadín Ospina, Bizarros y criticos, 1993. ...................................................................... 64
Fig. 1.1. Representation of the foundation of Tenochtitlán. Folio 2R of the Codex Mendoza,
mid-16th century Aztec document. ........................................................................................ 84
Fig. 1.2. Mexican flag. ................................................................................................................. 84
Fig. 1.3. Cabinet of curiosity depicted as frontispiece for the Museum Wormianum. ................ 85
Fig. 1.4. Porfirio Diáz in front of Calendar Stone before its relocation to the Gallery of
Monoliths. .............................................................................................................................. 85
Fig. 1.5. Salon de Monolitos in old Museo Nacional from Enrique Florescano, “The Creation of
the Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico and its Scientific, Educational, and Political
Purposes,” Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993.
Page 95. .................................................................................................................................. 86

x
Fig. 1.6 Replica of the “Mexican Temple” at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle from Hugh
Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the
Present Time, New York: Pantheon Books, 1975. Page 184. ................................................ 86
Fig. 2.1. Reading pattern for Codex Selden from Herbert J. Spinden, “Indian Manuscripts of
Southern Mexico,” Annual Report Smithsonian Institution,1993. P. 420. .......................... 111
Fig. 2.2. Codex Selden from John Pohl, “Ancient Books: Mixtec Group Codices.”
http://www.famsi.org/research/pohl/jpcodices/selden/selden07.jpg .................................... 111
Fig. 2.3. Portrait of John Selden from Bodleian Library at Oxford University. ........................ 112
Fig. 2.4. John Selden’s Will, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 110 Folio 26 Full. ............. 112
Fig. 2.5. Cover page for Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea, Bodleian Library. .................... 113
Fig. 2.6. Page 7 of Codex Selden from Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Schrift und Buch
im Alten Mexico, Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1988. ................. 113
Fig. 2.7. Magic lantern from Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 1671. ............ 114
Fig. 2.8. Alphonse Bertillon, Measurement Room of the Service Anthropometrique, 1887. ... 114
Fig. 2.9. Tracing of Andamanese hand and foot in M.V. Portman and W. Molesworth’s
Observations on External Characteristics, 1894, from Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and
Photography, 1860-1920, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Fig. 50i. .................. 115
Fig. 2.10. Map of Yanhuitlan. Photograph by the author. ......................................................... 116
Fig. 3.1. Mapa de Teozacoalco line drawing from Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Schrift
und Buch im Alten Mexico, Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1988.
Page 137. .............................................................................................................................. 156
Fig. 3.2. Mapa de Teozacoalco from Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Schrift und Buch im
Alten Mexico, Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1988. Plate 135. ..... 156

xi
Fig. 3.3. Title Page for Mapa de Teozacoalco Relación Geográfica. Benson Library at
University of Texas, Austin. ................................................................................................ 157
Fig. 3.4. Reproduction of the Mapa de Teozacoalco displayed in the Palacio Municipal in
Teozacoalco. ......................................................................................................................... 157
Fig. 3.5. Hand gestures from Nancy Troike, “The Interpretation of Postures and Gestures in the
Mixtec Codices,” The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico: A
Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 22nd and 23rd, 1977, Washington, D.C.:
Dumbarton Oaks, 1982. Page 194. ....................................................................................... 158
Fig. 3.6. Four views of a South Australian aboriginal female according to Huxley’s
“photometric instructions,” c. 1879, from Frank Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt to
Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century" in
Anthropology and Photography 1860 to 1920, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Page 101. .............................................................................................................................. 158
Fig. 3.7. David Lewis, photograph from the Impossible Science of Being commission, 1995,
from Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, London: Reaktion Books, 2011.
Page 136. .............................................................................................................................. 159
Fig. 3.8. Pushpamala N. and Claire Arni, The Ethnographic Series, 2000-2004. From
Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Page
138. ....................................................................................................................................... 159
Fig. 4.1. Model of the Templo Mayor; http://www.johnpedroza.com/blog1/wp-
content/uploads/2011/08/mayorscalemodel.jpg ................................................................... 191
Fig. 4.2. Yolotlicue from Elizabeth H. Boone, “The Coatlicues At Templo Mayor,” Ancient
Mesoamerica, 10.2, 1999. Page 192. ................................................................................... 191

xii
Fig. 4.3. Manuel Buenabad, photograph of Sculpture Gallery in Escula Nacional de Artes
Plasticas, 1897. From Elizabeth Fuentas Rojas, “Art and Pedagogy of the Plaster Cast
Collection of the Academia de San Carlos,” Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and
Displaying from Classic Antiquity to the Present, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Page 232. .... 192
Fig. 4.4. Drawing of William Bullock from Edward P. Alexander, “William Bullock: Little
Remembered Museologist and Showman,” Curator, 28.2, 1985. ....................................... 192
Fig. 4.5. Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London, in 1815. From Edward P. Alexander, “William
Bullock: Little Remembered Museologist and Showman,” Curator, 28.2, 1985. ............... 193
Fig. 4.6. Drawing of the exhibition in the catalogue by William Bullock, A Description of the
Unique Exhibition Called Ancient Mexico, London, 1824. ................................................. 193
Fig. 4.7. “Modern Mexico,” 1824. Drawn and printed by A. Aglio from Edward P. Alexander,
“William Bullock: Little Remembered Museologist and Showman,” Curator, 28.2, 1985. 194
Fig. 4.8. Ancient sculptures and objects gathered in Museo Nacional by mid-nineteenth century
(after J.F. Ramírez 1855-56: pl. 37) from Nationalism: Critical Concepts in Political
Science, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, Volume IV, Routledge: New York,
2000. Figure 54.2. ................................................................................................................ 194
Fig. 4.9. Auction notice for Abadiano’s Ancient Book-Store from the Sutro Library at San
Francisco State University. .................................................................................................. 195
Fig. 4.10. Photograph of Aldoph Sutro from the Sutro Library at SFSU. ................................. 195
Fig. 4.11. Books purchased by Adolph Sutro from Abadiano’s Ancient Book-Store at the Sutro
Library at SFSU. Photograph by the author. ........................................................................ 196
Fig. 4.12. Eufémio Abadiano, Descriptive Catalogue of the Archaeological, Historical, and
Artistic Collections of Eufémio Abadiano, New Orleans: Franco-American Print, 1885. ... 196

xiii
Fig. 4.13. Letter from G. Brown Goode regarding payment for Eufémio Abadiano and his
translator Wendell McLaughlin. Source: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Accession File 16185. .......................................................................................................... 197
Fig. 4.14. Photograph of rotunda of the U.S. National Museum with cast of the Coatlicue in the
right hand corner. ................................................................................................................. 197
Fig. 4.15. Thomas Crawford, Statue of Freedom. ..................................................................... 198
Fig. 4.16. Hall 23: Hall of Latin American Archaeology, 1911. Photograph from Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History, Hall 21, 22, 23 Exhibition Photos. .......................... 198
Fig. 4.17. Maya carving glyphs in a stone monument, after 1952 reinstallation of Hall of Latin
American Archaeology. Photograph from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
Hall 21, 22, 23 Exhibition Photos. ....................................................................................... 199
Fig. 4.18. Coatlicue Cast next to Mayan hieroglyphs, after 1952 reinstallation of Hall of Latin
American Archaeology. Photograph from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
Hall 21, 22, 23 Exhibition Photos. ....................................................................................... 199
Fig. 4.19. Workers reassemble Coatlicue for "Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art" at the Museum
of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in the 1940s. .......................................................... 200
Fig. 4.20. Eufémio Abadiano, Xochipilli Statue cast, Accession number AT13263 in the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Off-site storage pods. Photograph by the
author. ................................................................................................................................... 200
Fig. 4.21. Eufémio Abadiano, Uxmal rain deity cast, Accession number AT16733 in the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Off-site storage pods. Photograph by the
author. ................................................................................................................................... 201

xiv
Fig. 4.22. Xochipilli Fountain in front of the Pan-American Union Building in Washington, D.C.
Photograph by the author. .................................................................................................... 201
Fig. 4.23. Loggia featuring representation of the Uxmal rain deity. Located in the Pan-American
Union Building, now Art Museum of the Americas, in Washington, D.C. Photograph by the
author. ................................................................................................................................... 202
Fig. 4.24. Saturino Herrán, Coatlicue Transformed, 1918. ....................................................... 202
Fig. 4.25. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry South Wall, 1932-1933. .......................................... 203
Fig. 4.26. Diego Rivera, Pan-American Unity, 1940. ................................................................ 203
Fig. 4.27. Coatlicue Fresco at Museo Anahuacalli. Photograph by author. .............................. 203
Fig. 5.1. Demián Flores, Arbol de la vida, 2012. Photograph by the author. ............................ 269
Fig. 5.2. Demián Flores, Santa Sangre, 2012. Photograph by the author. ................................. 269
Fig. 5.3. Félix Parra, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 1875. ........................................................ 270
Fig. 5.4. Félix Parra, Escenas de la Conquista (La matanza de Cholula), 1877. Photograph by
the author. ............................................................................................................................. 270
Fig. 5.5. Pedro Lasch, Incest, Narcissism & Melancholy / Incesto, Narcisismo y Melancolía
[S3BM6A] from Black Mirror / Espejo Negro: The Photographic Suites (2007-2008) .... 271
Fig. 5.6. Demián Flores, Defensa Personal, 2005. .................................................................... 271
Fig. 5.7. Entrance to La Curtiduría http://www.arquine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/AEM_3.jpg .................................................................................. 272
Fig. 5.8. Metropolitan Museum of Art Chalchiutlicue, Aztec, 15th-early 16th century. .......... 272
Fig. 5.9. Eufémio Abadiano, Cast - Section of a Column, 1884. Accession number A77237-0 in
the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Photograph by the author. ............ 273
Fig. 5.10. Example of Frieze at Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico. ........................................................... 273

xv
Fig. 5.11. Eufémio Abadiano, Cast of Kneeling Nun, 1885 in the Smithsonian National Museum
of Natural History. Photograph by the author. .................................................................... 274
Fig. 5.12. Model of the Great Pyramid of Cholula. ................................................................... 274
Fig. 5.13. Detail, Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Xochicalco. .............................................. 275
Fig. 5.14. Motecuhzoma II Throne (also known as Teocalli Stone or Monument of Sacred War)
1507 CE. ............................................................................................................................... 275
Fig. 5.15. Image of yucu (hill in Mixtec) from John Pohl “Ancient Books: Mixtec Group
Codices” http://www.famsi.org/research/pohl/jpcodices/pohlmixtec8.html ....................... 275
Fig. 5.16. Example of macuahuitl from Book IX of the Florentine Codex, 16th century. ........ 276
Fig. 5.17. Casa de Cacica in Teposcolula, Oaxaca, Mexico. .................................................... 276
Fig. 5.18. Chinesca figures from Jack Gallagher, Companions of the Dead: Ceramic Tomb
Sculptures from Ancient West Mexico, Los Angeles, Museum of Cultural History UCLA,
1983. Figure 150 and 151. .................................................................................................... 277
Fig. 5.19. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992. .................................................................. 277
Fig. 5.20. Fred Wilson, The Other Museum, 1991. ................................................................... 278

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Abstract

Unburied from layers of dirt, recovered from subterranean tombs, or stumbled upon
during a traipse in the jungle, pre-Columbian artifacts have sparked a curiosity in their
discoverers since before the Spanish Conquest. Their strange appearance, masterful execution,
and illegible hieroglyphs have confounded explorers and archaeologists avant la lettre. Though
scholars have resolved many of the mysteries of pre-Columbian objects, the artifacts continue to
perform a representational duty that exceeds an intellectual interest. Beginning in the seventeenth
century, but reaching an apex in the nineteenth century, certain Aztec images and objects were
marshaled around a Mexican national identity with its epicenter in Mexico City, previously the
Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán. The Calendar Stone, Coatlicue Statue, and image of the eagle
atop a prickly pear cactus were heralded as central iconic figures that could unite a fragmented
Mexican population after Independence. Museums collected and consolidated the artifacts
recovered both from government-sponsored archaeological excavations and informal digs in
peripheral communities. Though this Aztec-centric national identity was intended to corral the
citizens around a common set of mutually agreed upon images, the government practices
continued to disenfranchise the outlaying communities most heavily impacted by the policies of
colonization and coloniality.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mexican artists have grappled with this
representational legacy. This dissertation examines three contemporary artists who reinterpret
pre-Columbian visual culture to challenge the Aztec-centric national identity promulgated in the
nineteenth-century. The three artists under consideration are Tatiana Parcero, Mariana Castillo
Deball, and Demián Flores. I analyze a few key works by each artist through an object biography
methodology that traces the pre-Columbian object from its original manufacture to its acquisition

xvii
in a U.S. or European institution to its most recent iteration in contemporary art. Through the
object biography approach, I can more fully unpack the different circumstances of these objects’
existence, and their corresponding ontological and epistemological changes over time. I argue
that these artists employ the materials and technologies of archaeological representation,
including black-and-white photography, plaster casts, and oil painting, to critically examine the
role of archaeology in underwriting an Aztec-centric national identity. Structuring the
dissertation is the theoretical framework of decoloniality, which insists on the continued
repercussion of historical colonialism for source communities and pre-Columbian objects.

19
Introduction

Floating preternaturally upon the flexed palms of a stone Chacmool, a soccer ball replaces
a more typical sacrificial offering of blood or pulque to the gods of Tula [Fig. 0.1]. Perfectly
centered in the middle of the photograph, the black-and-white ball punctuates the middle of the
page and its modern manufacture, geometric lines, and stark contrasting colors feels out of place
against the architectural ruins. A caption in the lower right-hand corner reads "MEXICO86" and
suddenly the image is linked with the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City. This photograph is one in
a series of at least twelve advertising campaigns for the World Cup created by famed U.S.
photographer, Annie Leibovitz. According to art historian Teresa Eckmann, "A paradox
emerges: Leibovitz, a prominent artist who is known for having captured some of the most
intimately sensual images of Hollywood America (John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed, or a
pregnant, nude Demi Moore, for example) is hired by corporate Mexico to construct an image of
the national that meets foreign, or first world, expectations."
1

Although Leibovitz’s commission by corporate Mexico is rather unexpected given her
characteristic repertoire, perhaps more of a paradox is the quotidian, vacuous, modern soccer ball
in a venerable, sacred, ancient landscape. How does the viewer account for the appearance of the
contemporary object in a pre-Columbian archaeological site? Or inversely, but just as
importantly, how does the viewer interpret the appearance of pre-Columbian ruins in a World
Cup advertising campaign? What role does the Chacmool and serpent-headed columns play in
defining “MEXICO86,” and how can we reconcile ancient and contemporary in this image?

1
Teresa Eckmann, Neo-Mexicanism: Mexican Figurative Painting and Patronage in the 1980s
(Albuquerque, N.M: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 180–181.

20
While not the focus of the current project, Leibovitz’s photograph introduces the question
at the core of this dissertation, namely, “What is contemporary pre-Columbian art?” I define
contemporary pre-Columbian art as artistic production that reinterprets pre-Columbian visual
images and material culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I throw the term
“contemporary pre-Columbian art” into the mix of other expressions that scholars have recently
tested, including “neo-pre-Hispanic,”
2
“precolombino posmoderno,”
3
“Post-Columbian Art,”
4

and “post-pre-Columbian.”
5
Each of these terms attempts to reconcile the appearance of pre-
Columbian images in postmodern art, and struggles to work through the complications of
temporal and geographic dissonance, the art and artifact debate, and the array of iconographic
systems.

Key Questions

The term “contemporary pre-Columbian art” contains an inherent paradox: How can pre-
Columbian art, a conglomeration of objects from an “ancient” past, be “contemporary”? As
stated above, pre-Columbian art is contemporary when it appears in recent artistic output. If we
take this premise as valid, then a series of other questions emerges. Where do these pre-

2
MUNAL, “De/construcción de Una Nación ”, Intervención de Demián Flores En Diálogo Con
La Pintura Del XIX Del Munal,” Artes e Historia México, May 25, 2012, http://www.arts-
history.mx/semanario/index.php?id_nota=24052012133450.
3
Carolina Ponce de Leon, “Nadín Ospina: Precolombino Posmoderno,” Poliester 11 (November
1995).
4
Jaime Cerón, “A Post-Columbian Art,” Enrique Chagoya et al., Pre-Columbian Remix: The Art
of Enrique Chagoya, Demián Flores, Rubén Ortiz-Torres and Nadín Ospina, 2013.
5
Jesse Lerner, The Maya of Modernism : Art, Architecture, and Film (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 2011), 24.

21
Columbian images and objects come from? Why do artists incorporate them in their work? What
tools do we need to analyze pre-Columbian images and objects in contemporary art? In sum,
how do we untangle the strands of time, feel our way through conflicting materialities, and
decode the iconographic incongruities in a single work?
The key to answering the first question about the provenance of pre-Columbian objects
requires a methodology that equally accounts for the pre-Columbian object as much as the
contemporary intervention. Previous scholarship on the appropriation of pre-Columbian images,
even by noted scholars like Barbara Braun,
6
Jesse Lerner,
7
and James Oles,
8
foregoes an in-depth
analysis of the original meaning, function, and location of the pre-Columbian source object. I
propose the methodology of the object biography as a potential corrective to this oversight. In
Chapter One, I set the stage for this intervention by providing an overview of the nineteenth-
century institutions that defined the role of pre-Columbian objects in visualizing the past. In each
subsequent chapter, I compose an object biography for each pre-Columbian image that traces the
lifecycle of the object from its creation to acquisition to its latest appearance in contemporary art.
This approach evolved from Igor Kopytoff’s seminal text, “The Cultural Biography of Things:
Commoditization as Process,”
9
in which he explains the different processes by which
biographies are written, elaborates upon the different types of biographies using specific

6
Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources
of Modern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993).
7
Lerner, The Maya of Modernism.
8
James Oles et al., South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1917-1947
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).
9
Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91.

22
examples from the field, and differentiates between the process of commoditization and
singularization in “small-scale” versus “complex” societies.
10

In Chapters Two and Three, I examine three works by Tatiana Parcero in her suite,
Cartografía Interior (1996), in which she overlays a black-and-white photographs of her body
over reproductions of two sixteenth-century Mixtec documents [Fig. 0.2, Fig. 0.3, Fig. 0.4]. To
fully unpack the relationship between the photograph and the document, I compose object
biographies for the Codex Selden (c. 1560) [Fig. 0.5] and the Mapa de Teozacoalco (c. 1577)
[Fig. 0.6], and I track the history of their creation, acquisition, and continued impact on their
source community. In Chapter Four, I look at the fragmented Coatlicue mold in Mariana Castillo
Deball’s installation Between You and the Image of You that Reaches Me (2010) [Fig. 0.7], and
trace the history of reproductions of the Coatlicue Statue [Fig. 0.8]. As an entryway into this
longer history, I investigate casts of pre-Columbian objects made by a heretofore-unknown
Mexican cultural broker, Eufémio Abadiano, and the itinerary of his casts from Mexico City to
the Smithsonian National Museum in Washington, D.C. Chapter Five centers around a recent
exhibition by Demián Flores, De/construcción de una nación (2013) at the Museo Nacional del
Arte (MUNAL) in Mexico City in which he juxtaposed manipulated forgeries of West Mexican
sculptures and nineteenth-century oil paintings [Fig. 0.9]. To understand the history of fake

10
For another approach to object biographies, see Peter Mason, The Lives of Images (London:
Reaktion, 2001); Silvia Spitta, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in
Europe and the Americas (University of Texas Press, 2009). The main premise of the book is
that images circulate within a variety of cultural contexts independent of the maker’s intent, and
he emphasizes in particular the dynamic movement and interaction of images through time and
space. His most relevant case study is tracing Franciscan friar André Thevet’s sixteenth-century
engraving of Motecuhzoma in English Civil War propaganda and the eighteenth-century Andean
dynastic controversy. Another recent publication on the benefit of the object biography approach
is Silvia Spitta, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the
Americas (University of Texas Press, 2009).

23
objects in the museum and reimagined artifacts in the painting, I track the biography of
sculptural replicas in Mexico. By using this object biography approach, I can account for the
provenance of these pre-Columbian objects in a more rigorous way than previous scholars, and
use this information in my analysis of the art works.
This approach of tracing a life cycle from its creation to assimilation and reappropriation
in contemporary art, in Kopytoff’s words, “can make salient what might otherwise remain
obscure.”
11
By bringing together first-hand accounts from the archives of the Bodleian Library
and the University of Texas, Austin, I make apparent the transactional details of the Codex
Selden and Mapa de Teozacoalco, respectively. Returning to the contemporary source
community, I explore the flipside of the Mixtec documents’ removal and their continued impact
on the community. To my knowledge, no one has compiled thorough object biographies for these
documents nor considered them in relation to contemporary art. The object biography I compose
for the cast of the Coatlicue Statue in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
opens up onto an entire history of the inextricability of the Coatlicue from its cast form, and
introduces the nineteenth-century Mexican cultural broker, Eufémio Abadiano. The fifth chapter
continues on the themes of an emic proto-industrial system of mass-production in Mesoamerica
and charts the movement of pre-Columbian ceramics in nineteenth-century oil painting and
twenty-first century replicas. Though I only hint at the commoditization of pre-Columbian
objects after their transcultural exchange, I still find Kopytoff’s object biography approach
essential in defining the boundaries of the study, examining how exchange changes the ontology
of objects, and pointing to the complexity of defining art as both tradable commodity and
priceless singularized thing.

11
Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” 67.

24
To address the second question about artistic intent, I rely upon artist interviews, artist
statements, promotional texts, and a formal interpretation of their work. In uniting these three
strategies in an analysis of these four case studies, a common purpose for appropriating the pre-
Columbian past emerges. Though previous generations of Mexican artists appropriated the pre-
Columbian past, bookended by the Mexican Muralists of the 1920s and by neo-Mexicanism in
the 1980s, I argue that Parcero, Castillo Deball, and Flores engage with the materiality of the
past in a much more hands-on and direct manner, thereby conjuring the processes of
archaeological extraction, artifact displacement, and museological display. This physical
engagement with pre-Columbian objects calls forth a longer strategy of constructing a cohesive
national identity around the ancient past – a past specifically coded as a glorious Aztec empire.
By manipulating pre-Columbian images manifested in the same material of oil paintings, casts,
and black-and-white photography, which were central to the consolidation and dissemination of
the pre-Columbian past, I argue that these artists activate these archaeological tools of
representation only to undermine their effectiveness as instruments of ideological control.
The third question centers on the analytical tools that are required to explore the multiple
dimension of contemporary pre-Columbian art. Not only do we have to contend with the flurry
of pre-Columbian images (i.e., Mixtec pictographic systems, the Coatlicue Statue, and West
Mexican sculptures), but also navigate their postmodern manipulations through layered
photography, installation art, and assemblage. Clearly, training in both pre-Columbian and
contemporary art, as well as the history of collecting and display, archaeology, and museum
studies, would be helpful to fully unpack the work. However, the traditional disciplinary
boundaries that delimit the areas of specialization in art history do not encourage such a vast
training. While such temporal-geographic delineations give a necessary structure to the field, it

25
also limits the objects, theories, methodologies, and interlocutors available to the individual
scholar. Perhaps an early modernist would benefit from theories of globalization familiar to
contemporary art historians (and vice versa), or a scholar of public art could learn from an expert
on ancient Chinese wall painting. The art history department at the University of Pittsburgh
offers an experimental model of organizing its faculty according to six shared thematic interests
or “constellations,” such as “Visual Knowledge,” “Mobility/Exchange,” and
“Contemporaneity.”
12
While this working model has yet to be fully tested, I suspect that this
structure may be more amenable towards interpreting art works such as those discussed in this
dissertation under the rubric of “contemporary pre-Columbian art.”

Paradoxes and other Internal Contradictions

The inherent paradox of contemporary pre-Columbian art penetrates each of the case
studies, which are wrapped up in their own internal contradictions or tensions. The glut of
images of the pre-Columbian past fill our everyday lives, from the Tlazolteotl statue in Indiana
Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) [Fig. 0.10], to the Mayan pyramids in the Kia Optima car
commercial of Super Bowl XLV (2011) [Fig. 0.11]. This excess of Aztec and Mayan imagery
leads to a sense of familiarity of the pre-Columbian past, but, in fact, entire systems of image-
making remain completely obscure to the general public. In Chapter Two, I explain the
development of the imbalanced iconographic canon since the eighteenth century, and argue that
Parcero’s Cartografía Interior series rebalances the scales by highlighting Mixtec image
systems.

12
For more information on the history and composition of the research clusters, see the
department website: www.haa.pitt.edu/research/constellations-foundations

26
The Egyptian Rosetta Stone (196 BC) is one of the most famous and important objects in
the world, so well known that it idiomatically refers to a crucial key in deciphering a code. If the
most important Mexican archaeologist heralded a document as a “Rosetta Stone,” one would
assume that people would have familiarity with it.
13
However, the Mixtec “Rosetta Stone,” the
Mapa de Teozacoalco, remains unknown to pretty much everyone, including the source
community of Teozacoalco itself. This unknown famous document is the centerpiece of Chapter
Three, as it appears in two of Parcero’s works in the Cartografía Interior series.
Casts and other replicas of pre-Columbian objects are perceived as less important knock-
offs compared to the original. Very little attention has been given to casts in general,
14
and
virtually none to casts of pre-Columbian objects.
15
However, casts, molds, and ceramic replicas
form the central object biographies of Chapters Four and Five. Chapter Five is also the scene of
the final paradox, in which elements of the pre-Columbian past intended to lend veracity to the
artistic imaginings of the past in fact undermine the legitimacy of the painting. I reveal this
phenomenon through a close analysis of pre-Columbian sculptures represented in nineteenth-
century oil paintings at MUNAL.
Each of these paradoxes or contradictions pivots around general assumptions about the
pre-Columbian past as determined by its images, objects, and representational strategies. One

13
Alfonso Caso, El Mapa de Teozacoalco (México: Editorial Cultura, 1949).
14
One major exception is this recent tome on plaster casts: Rune Frederiksen, Plaster Casts :
Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin ;;New York:
De Gruyter, 2010).
15
The major exceptions are two volumes: Elizabeth Hill Boone, Falsifications and
Misreconstructions of Pre-Columbian Art: A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 14th and
15th, 1978 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 1982);
Dumbarton Oaks, Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th
and 7th October 1990, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, 1993).

27
main question is how these assumptions developed, and what contribution the artists’ work is
making to exposing and ultimately challenging these assumptions. I argue that these assumptions
stem from the manipulation of the pre-Columbian past to reflect a specifically Aztec imperial
past beginning in the nineteenth century – a phenomenon I discuss further in the next chapter.
This recuperation of the Aztec past after Mexican Independence had major ramifications for the
practices of collecting and display in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, which transforms
into a showcase of Aztec-centric national pride and a black hole that swallowed objects from all
over the country.
16
I describe this phenomenon more extensively in Chapter One, but for now, I
suggest that the paradoxes and contradictions in each work counteract or undermine the
assumptions of an Aztec-centric national identity. Parcero brings the unknown “Rosetta Stone”
that is the Mapa de Teozacoalco to the foreground, while Castillo Deball disassembles one of the
major icons of Aztec imagery. Parcero and Flores recuperate the replica, and Flores pokes holes
in the veracity of academic oil paintings. Each of these acts destabilizes the foundational
premises of this Aztec-centric identity construction and proposes alternative visions of the
country’s past and future.

The Decolonial Project

The object biography methodology that undergirds this project is limited by the fact that
these case studies cannot capture the broad flow of historical change that they are caught in.

16
Robert D. Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (U of
Minnesota Press, 2005); Shelley E Garrigan, Collecting Mexico : Museums, Monuments, and the
Creation of National Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Magali Marie
Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico
(Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2011); Dumbarton Oaks, Collecting the Pre-Columbian
Past.

28
Rather, the Codex Selden, Mapa de Teozacoalco, casts of the Coatlicue, and academic oil
paintings are individual points within a spatio-temporal matrix that covers over five hundred
years and thousands of miles. To consider this larger history, I like to take a moment to zoom out
and think about the large sociopolitical forces that governed the ontological and epistemological
significance of these objects over time and through space. Rather than a conventional description
of the Conquest and colonization of the Americas, I propose that these critical artistic
interventions demand an equally critical historical framework that reconceptualizes this time
period. For this broader perspective, I engage the expansive project of decoloniality, which
designates a political, ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic imperative to actively push back
against the Eurocentric global world-system set into motion in 1492 with Christopher
Columbus’s “Discovery” of the Americas.
This Eurocentric global world-system pivots around the central pillar of modernity,
which is defined as “progress, development, [and] growth” within a European capitalist system
that fuels the “triumphant march of history toward a better future for humanity.”
17
While some
theorists, including Immanuel Wallerstein and post-colonial scholars, locate the foundation of
modernity in the French Revolution, practitioners in the decolonial movement root modernity in
1492. According to Argentine-Mexican philosopher, Enrique Dussel,

While modernity is undoubtedly a European occurrence, it also originates in a dialectic
relation with non-Europe. Modernity appears when Europe organizes the initial world-
system and places itself at the center of world history over a periphery equally
constitutive of modernity. The forgetting of the periphery, which took place from the end
of the fifteenth, Hispanic-Lusitanian century to the beginning of the seventeenth century,

17
Walter D. Mignolo, “Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining
the Museum (1992),” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader (London; Santa Monica, Calif.:
Ridinghouse ; distributed in the US by RAM Publications, 2011), 73.

29
has led great thinkers of the center to commit the Eurocentric fallacy in understanding
modernity.
18

Not only does Dussel place the emergence of modernity earlier than the French Revolution, but
he also describes the “Eurocentric fallacy in understanding modernity” as the disregard of the
importance of peripheral non-Europe in the establishment of modernity. To counteract this
fallacy, Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo binds modernity to its “darker side,” which is
coloniality. In his construction “modernity/coloniality,” he underscores the fact that modernity
and coloniality are mutually constitutive and inseparable from one another.
To unpack this term further, we have to backtrack to the historical fact of colonialism,
which was the dominant social structure in Mexico and the Americas between the sixteenth- and
early nineteenth centuries. Rather than rehearse the narrative of these three hundred years of
Spanish rule, what is important for our purposes is to differentiate between colonialism and
coloniality. Colonialism denotes a historical period of time marked by specific events.
Coloniality, on the other hand, is a theoretical construct that refers to the pernicious, racially-
motivated justification for colonialism, and is an ongoing process that continues to impact
previous colonies. According to Mignolo, the term “points toward and intends to unveil an
embedded logic that enforces control, domination, and exploitation disguised in the language of
salvation, progress, modernization, and being good for every one.”
19
This logic of “control,
domination, and exploitation” is built on a racial hierarchy that the Spaniards and Portuguese
enforced during historical colonialism. The stated goal of colonialism as justified through the

18
Enrique D Dussel and Michael D Barber, The Invention of the Americas : Eclipse of “the
Other” and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995), 9–10.
19
Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA ; Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2005), 6.

30
logic of coloniality was to modernize (as a form of saving) the immoral and “savage” indigenous
population.
Having established the basic contours of the decolonial project, I now apply its rubric to
the main objects of this dissertation, and in particular note the way that historical colonialism and
modernity/coloniality impacted pre-Columbian material culture. First of all, and most obviously,
the Spanish Conquest majorly disrupted the status of pre-Columbian objects. Most objects and
sites were destroyed because of their pagan roots, though some, like the Codex Selden, survived
because they were exported to Europe. The removal of the Codex Selden denied the source
community of Jaltepec access to its recorded history, and benefited its holder, the Bodleian
Library at Oxford University, by granting the latter ownership over the object and the
information contained within. This discrepancy in access and ownership suggests the continued
impact of coloniality – a phenomenon that we also find in the Mapa de Teozacoalco. One of the
main differences between the Codex Selden and the Mapa de Teozacoalco is that the latter was
explicitly made for export as part of the relación geográfica sent by the Spanish Crown. This
demand for information about the economy, social structure, land boundaries, and natural
resources in the New World corresponds with the logic of “control, domination, and
exploitation” that undergirded historical colonialism and guided by modernity/coloniality.
While the Codex Selden and Mapa de Teozacoalco were directly impacted by historical
colonialism, the Coatlicue Statue and the oil paintings of the Conquest and Aztec narratives
entered the matrix of modernity/coloniality through the institutional framing of the museum,
World’s Fair, and Academia de San Carlos. Each of these institutions played a role in the
presentation of pre-Columbian objects and the visualization of the “ancient” past. The museum
and the World’s Fair, in particular, were deeply engrained in the logic of modernity/coloniality,

31
as they displayed non-European objects as the curious, and rather savage, output of an
uncivilized community. They were positioned as objects of display rather than subjects of
knowledge, thereby denying any sense of autonomy or agency of the objects itself. Instead,
according to Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “In today's European and American museums,
exhibitions of Oriental, Africa, Pre-Columbian and Native American art function as permanent
triumphal processions, testifying to Western supremacy and world domination.”
20
This
“triumphal procession” was made possible by the acquisition of non-Western objects, which
built up coffers of the museum while dismantling the cultural patrimony of source communities.
World’s Fairs also had a similar undertone of a triumphal procession, but because of their
temporary nature, the underlying mode of display was driven more by spectacle and
spectatorship. The mutually constitutive paradigm of modernity/coloniality took even greater
significance in this setting, as World’s Fairs juxtaposed the latest developments in transportation,
agriculture, and technology with areas that showcased the country’s colonies and their
exploitable resources. These latter were often grouped alongside “leisure activities,” according to
James Gilbert, with the effect that, “the mutual attraction of exoticism and fantasy, the aesthetic
of difference and discovery in a special place where the planners of the fairs consigned elements
that did not fit into their celebration of high culture, European or American nationalism, and
science."
21
The organization of the World’s Fair according to such divisions reconciled the
inclusion of “low” (coloniality) and “high” (modernity) civilizations in one place, as if an
unwitting microcosm of Mignolo’s modernity/coloniality paradigm.

20
Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4
(1980): 449.
21
James Gilbert, “World’s Fairs as Historical Events,” in Fair Representations: World’s Fairs
and the Modern World (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 17.

32
So far, I have discussed these two institutional expressions of modernity/coloniality as a form
emanating from and situated in Europe and the U.S. Although the museum and World’s Fair may
have originated outside of Mexico, and therefore a form of “external colonialism,” they were
inevitably implemented inside Mexico as a type of “internal colonialism.” Internal colonialism
occurs when there is a “mutation of imperial into national management in the ex-European
colonies.”
22
The internal colonialism of Mexico found its particular expression in an Aztec-
centric nation-building practice, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter One. For now, suffice
it to say that the Coatlicue Statue played one of the most important roles in disseminating this
Aztec-centric national identity both within Mexico and beyond in World’s Fairs and museums
such as the Smithsonian. This Aztec-centric national identity was also promulgated through
paintings of Aztec narratives, including El senado de Tlaxcala (1875) by Rodrigo Gutierrez [Fig.
0.12], and El descubrimiento del pulque (1869) by José María Obregón [Fig. 0.13]. The
Mexican government purchased these paintings, which are included in Demián Flores’s
De/construcción de una nación, for the display at world’s fairs.
23
The paintings were executed at
the European-style art academy, the Academia de San Carlos, which I describe in detail in
Chapter Five. Painting a vision of the Aztec past in the style and with the materials of the
conqueror indicates the absorption of external colonialism into the state, and its later
manifestation as internal colonialism.
Internal colonialism also manifests itself in the accumulation and consolidation of pre-
Columbian artifacts from all over Mexico in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. The amassing

22
Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options
(Duke University Press, 2011), 162.
23
Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 118–119.

33
of objects combined with the dissemination of specifically imperial Aztec national identity
propagated a tightly controlled imaginary of the pre-Columbian past both within Mexico and
abroad. The contemporary Mexican artists under consideration in this dissertation work in a
decolonial vein to counter and undo the legacy of internal colonialism that generated and
sustained this Aztec-centric imaginary. In Chapters Two and Three, I argue that Tatiana Parcero
engages with specifically Mixtec imagery from Jaltepec and Teozacoalco in an intimate, physical
level rather than an externally prescribed public manner. In Chapter Four, I elaborate on the long
history of the Coatlicue Statue – one of the most iconographic works of the Aztec canon – to
undercut its importance by looking at its multiple manifestations and its dismantling by Mariana
Castillo Deball. Through the exhibition, De/construcción de una nación, Demián Flores
performs much of the decolonial critique himself by exposing the mediated imaginary of the pre-
Columbian past depicted in nineteenth-century Mexican oil paintings.
As a way of temporally framing the decolonial project as it plays out in this dissertation, I
use the terms “Discovery,” “Re-Discovery,” and “De-Discovery.” “Discovery” captures the
moment since 1492, and its placement in scare quotes highlights the fact that the Americas were
not actually discovered, but rather invented.
24
According to Enrique Dussel, Columbus invented
the Americas by “construing of the islands he encountered as Asian.”
25
Rather than a specific
geographic landmass, “Asia” according to Dussel was an imaginative construction applied to the

24
One of the first promoters of the idea that America had been invented rather than discovered is
Edmundo O’Gorman who originally published his analysis in 1951. His English-language
edition followed shortly after: Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America; an Inquiry into
the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1961).
25
Dussel The Invention of the Americas 32.

34
Americas as a convenient attribution. The moment of discovery initiated the process of Conquest
and colonization, and I assign the period of “Discovery” to historical colonialism.
After near total devastation and decimation of the indigenous population, a reclamation
of an emic Mexican past was an enterprise of the creole elite in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. This “Re-Discovery” of the pre-Columbian past aligned with the period of internal
colonialism that motivated the collecting of pre-Columbian objects and the creation of an Aztec-
centric national identity. The indiscriminate lumping of pre-Columbian objects together that was
a hallmark of exhibitions both within Mexico and abroad can be described as the tendency of
Mesoamericanidad, or “Mesoamericanness.” Playing off the idea of Mexicanidad, the term
Mesoamericanidad captures the phenomenon of consolidating pre-Columbian objects without
due credit given to the particular provenance, provenience, function, etc. Rather the pre-
Columbian object stands-in for a general idea of the “ancient” past. This amorphous “ancient”
past masks the fact that many pre-Columbian objects were made concurrently with sixteenth
European modernity, and not “ancient” at all. Concomitant with the omission of temporal
specificity is the assumption that pre-Columbian objects are unique creations from this “ancient”
time. These two attributes together form the “origin(ality) myth.” This pernicious myth
perpetuates the idea that pre-Columbian civilizations existed in “time of origin” completely
separate from Europeans and that their fabrication technologies remained equally primitive,
therefore only capable of manufacturing “original” objects.
The emergence of Mesoamericanidad and the “origin(ality) myth” paramount during the
period of “Re-Discovery” are recognized and challenged during the current period of “De-
Discovery.” “De-Discovery” is an attempt to critically undo the legacy of “Discovery”
(colonialism) and “Re-Discovery” (coloniality) guided by the following precepts: (1) A reversal

35
of the iconoclastic purge during the “Discovery” by a proliferation of pre-Columbian images, (2)
A critical investigation into the appropriation of pre-Columbian objects by the institutions of
“Re-Discovery,” and (3) A consideration of the continued repercussions of the absent pre-
Columbian objects for the source community (legacy of “Discovery” and “Re-Discovery”).
These three guidelines structure my analyses in Chapters Two and Three. Beyond thinking
through “De-Discovery,” these elements have also allowed me to write the first compendium that
accounts for the entire life cycle of the Codex Selden and Mapa de Teozacoalco. This narrative
also includes the diverse outcomes in Jaltepec and Teozacoalco, respectively, resulting from the
removed documents. “De-Discovery” plays out in Chapters Four and Five more in terms of the
institutional framework of the museum, and specifically according to the politics of display of
pre-Columbian objects and their forgeries.
In sum, the overall project of how to make the pre-Columbian past visible in
contemporary art relies upon a methodology of composing object biographies that traces the
object from its creation in a source community to its acquisition by a collecting institution. This
approach inherently avoids the pitfalls of Mesoamericanidad that derives from the “origin(ality)
myth” because extreme care is spent tracking a particular object through time and space. The
underlying sensibility of the dissertation is rooted in the decolonial project as conceived by
Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel. This theoretical disposition is manifested not only in the
terminology of colonialism, coloniality, and modernity, but also in the designation of
chronological time according to periods of “Discovery,” “Re-Discovery,” and “De-Discovery.” I
argue that during this period of “De-Discovery,” three contemporary Mexican artists are undoing
the legacy of Aztec-centric national identity rooted in an internal colonialism that emerged
during “Re-Discovery.” By challenging the art museums’ and universities’ collecting and display

36
practices, artists also show the ruptures in these institutions of modernity/coloniality in order
deny their neutrality and emphasize their role in knowledge production.

Genealogy of Pre-Columbian Appropriations

The appropriation of the pre-Columbian past, whether a critical engagement or a neutral
iconographic gesture, is not a new phenomenon, and these artists represent just the latest
incursion into this larger field. Scholarship has attempted to keep up with this development, as
indicated by this sampling of work over the last forty years. One of the first works to account for
the influence of pre-Columbian images on modern artists is Benjamin Keen’s book, The Aztec
Image in Western Thought (1971).
26
In Chapter Fifteen of his book, Keen explains the limited
though notable influence of Aztec art on European artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henry Moore,
and Alberto Giacometti, during the rise of Primitive Art in the 1920s and 1930s. He also
describes the different representations of the past in the work of the Big Three of the Mexican
Mural Renaissance, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as
the specific sociopolitical situation of nationalism and social revolution. In a more recent
volume, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of
Modern Art (1993), Barbara Braun expertly consolidates the history of artistic and architectural
appropriations of pre-Columbian images through the work of Paul Gauguin, Henry Moore, Frank
Lloyd Wright, Diego Rivera,
27
and Joaquin Torres-Garcia. Braun’s seminal work is the

26
Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1971).
27
Diego Rivera was one of a handful of artists, including Rufino Tamayo and Josef and Anni
Albers, who not only appropriated the pre-Columbian images in their work, but also avidly
collected pre-Columbian objects. Each of these collections are now housed in publicly accessible

37
touchstone for any scholarship on pre-Columbian appropriation, though her emphasis is clearly
weighed more heavily toward an analysis of the modern and contemporary art rather than the
pre-Columbian source imagery.
Following Braun’s book was a surge of exhibitions and scholarly works that treated the
appropriation of pre-Columbian imagery. Paradigmatic examples include the exhibition
catalogues South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1917-1947 by James Oles
(1993),
28
the book The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art by César
Paternosto,
29
and the dissertation, The Necessity of Pre-Columbian Art: United States Museums
and the Role of Foreign Policy in the Appropriation and Transformation of Mexican Heritage,
1933-1944 (1993) by Holly Barnet-Sanchez.
30
This trend continued into the 2000s with the
publication of Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915
(2004) by R. Tripp Evans,
31
The Maya of Modernism: Art, Architecture, and Film (2011) by
Jesse Lerner,
32
and Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western
Hemisphere (2011) by Robert Alexander Gonzalez.
33
This survey of books represents a moment

institutions. Josef and Anni Albers’ collection is housed at the Yale Peabody, the Rufino
Tamayo’s collection is housed at the Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art in Oaxaca, and Diego
Rivera’s collection is on display at the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City.
28
Oles et al., South of the Border.
29
César Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, 1st ed (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1996).
30
Holly Barnet-Sanchez, “The Necessity of pre-Columbian Art: United States Museums and the
Role of Foreign Policy in the Appropriation and Transformation of Mexican Heritage, 1933-
1944” (University of California, Los Angeles, 1993).
31
R. Tripp Evans, Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-
1915, 1st ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).
32
Lerner, The Maya of Modernism.
33
Robert Alexander Gonzalez, Designing Pan-America U.S. Architectural Visions for the
Western Hemisphere (Austin [Tex.]: University of Texas Press, 2011).

38
when serious scholarship in the United States evolved around the importance of tracking the
appropriation of pre-Columbian imagery in art and architecture within Mexico and beyond.
Despite the breadth of movements, time periods, and artists captured in the above
sampling, two important art movements were virtually ignored. The first major movement is the
use of pre-Columbian images by Chicano artists in the United States. Because there is a vast
literature on the topic, I will restrain myself to mentioning three major exhibitions, Chicano Art:
Resistance and Affirmation (1991),
34
The Road to Aztlán (2001),
35
and Phantom Sightings
(2008).
36
Despite the importance of pre-Columbian iconography for Chicano artists in supporting
a vision of Aztlán, or a mythical Aztec homeland located in the southwestern United States, very
little serious scholarship is dedicated to tracking what specific pre-Columbian images are
coopted, where they come from, and how their appropriation changes (or ignores) their original
meaning. Rather, the pre-Columbian images work as signposts of an indigenous identity through
iconography rather than serious meditation on the past.
The other more recent movement is Neo-Mexicanism, a loosely defined group of artists
who created large-scale, brightly colored oil paintings that incorporated, “popular art and toys,
pre-Christian and Christian religious imagery, legends, national heroes, pre-Columbian images,
and the legacy of colonial and modern Mexican art.”
37
While the work has historically been
dismissed as kitschy, folkloric, and reactionary, there has been a recent effort to recuperate its

34
Richard Griswold del Castillo et al., Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 (Los
Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991).
35
Virginia Fields et al., The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland, 1st ed (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001).
36
Rita González et al., Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement (Berkeley, Calif.;
Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press ; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008).
37
Eckmann, Neo-Mexicanism, 10.

39
important. In her book, Neo-Mexicanism: Mexican Figurative Painting and Patronage in the
1980s (2010), Teresa Eckmann insists on the critical dimensions of Neo-Mexicanist painting:
“Using irony, more often than not neo-Mexicanists poke fun at worn narratives of historic
continuity, national unity, and romanticized indigenism."
38
Drawing from an impressive array of
interviews over the course of a decade, Eckmann pieces together a compelling history of Neo-
Mexicanism that takes into consideration the economic, political, and aesthetic dimension of the
work through the lens of six artists. The publication of this book was shortly followed by the
exhibition, ¿Neomexicanismos?: ficciones identitarias en el México de los ochenta (2011) at the
Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
39

History in Appropriation Art and the “Archaeological Imaginary”

This brief summary of scholarship and exhibitions condenses a variety of artists who
have been appropriating pre-Columbian images for several generations, particularly during a
period beginning with the Mexican Muralists of the 1920s and ending with neo-Mexicanism in
the 1980s. Within this sixty-year period, a more formalized movement of Appropriation Art in
the United States and Europe developed.
40
In his book, Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in
the 1990s, art historian John Welchman explains the two horizons of Appropriation Art
originally proposed by literary critic Peter Bürger. The first horizon of the 1950s and 1960s was
marked initially by neo-Dadaists and Pop artists, and later in Conceptual Art, Earth Art and

38
Ibid., 5.
39
Josefa Ortega and Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico), ¿Neomexicanismos?: ficciones
identitarias en el México de los ochenta, 2011.
40
I distinguish this formal movement of Appropriation Art from artistic appropriations of the
pre-Columbian past, which do not seem to fit within this movement, through capitalization.

40
Performance Art.
41
The second horizon that occurred in the late 1970s and late 1980s arose from
Douglas Crimp’s landmark exhibition “Pictures” at Artist’s Space in 1977, and was
characterized by “re-photography” artists like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy
Sherman.
42

In describing the status of Appropriation Art after this second horizon, art historian David
Evans positions the role of history as the defining characteristic. This notion derives from art
critic Jan Verwoert’s article “Apropos Appropriation,” in which he writes,
So my claim is that the specific difference between the momentum of appropriation in the
1980s and today lies in a decisive shift in the relation to the object of appropriation - from
the re-use of a dead commodity fetish to the invocation of something that lives through
time - and, underlying this shift, a radical transformation of the experience of the
historical situation, from a feeling of a general loss of historicity to a current sense of an
excessive presence of history, a shift from not enough to too much history or rather too
many histories.
43

This shift from “dead commodity fetish” to “something that lives through time” suggests the
applicability of an object biography approach that attempts to account for the “too many
histories” that shape an object’s meaning. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the “official”
Appropriation Art movement transitioned to a focus on history, which dovetails not only with
artistic appropriation of pre-Columbian images, but also with the recent “historiographic turn” or
“archaeological imaginary” of contemporary art.
It is at this moment in the history of Appropriation Art, and at this point in the history of
appropriation of pre-Columbian images, that intersects with a larger art practice trend of the

41
John C Welchman, Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Amsterdam: G+B Arts
International, 2001), 9.
42
Ibid., 10. See also Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (April 1, 1979): 75–88.
43
Jan Verwoert, “Apropos Appropriation: Why Stealing Images Today Feels Different,” Art &
Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007),
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/verwoert.html.

41
early twenty-first century, alternatively termed by curator Dieter Roelstraete as the
“historiographic turn” or the “archaeological imaginary.” Roelstraete first explored this term in a
2009 e-flux article titled “The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art,”
44

followed in 2013 by an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago of the same
name.
45
The exhibition includes thirty-four established artists, mostly European though some
international, and he includes a list of over fifty more who are also working in this vein.
According to his introduction for the exhibition catalogue,
One of the defining ironies of our time is that so much of the vanguard art production -
that art that is most closely aligned with the boundary-pushing, experiment-prone,
horizon-expanding tradition of progressive culture, and with the avant-garde's traditional
claims to 'newness' in particular - should be so preoccupied, both in its choice of subject
matter and its choice of techniques, in both form and content, with the old, the outdated,
the outmoded - with the past. In other words still: it is one of the defining ironies of our
time that the sector of culture most commonly associated with looking forward should
appear so consumed by a passion for looking not just the proverbial other way but in the
opposite direction – backward.
46

This Janus-faced looking forward and backward simultaneously again, to echo, Verwoert, fills
the work with multiple histories that the artist and/or viewer has to unpack in the work.
According to Roelstraete, the artist’s process can also mirror an archaeologist or historian (the
two are often conflated in his work), who excavates a site or searches through archives to learn
about the past, respectively. The central concern is not even about finding some thing,
Roelstraete claims, as what remains lost, irretrievable, or absent is just as compelling as what is

44
“The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art | E-flux,” accessed March 28,
2014, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-way-of-the-shovel-on-the-archeological-imaginary-in-
art/.
45
Dieter Roelstraete and Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Ill.), The Way of the Shovel:
On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art in association
with The University of Chicago Press, 2013).
46
Ibid., 15, 17.

42
actually recovered. Two of Roelstraete’s points are particularly useful in consideration of these
artists. Firstly, his description of the “historiographic mode” as:
A methodological complex that includes the historical account, the archive, the
document, the act of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the art of reconstruction
and reenactment, the testimony - has become both the mandate ('content') and the tone
('form') favored by a growing number of artists (as well as critics and curators) of varying
ages and backgrounds.
47

As I describe in detail later, each of the artists under consideration here operates within this
“historiographic mode,” or, since he applies the term interchangeably, the “archaeological
imaginary” in both form and content. Parcero’s work centers on the document, while Castillo
Deball and Flores engage the practices of excavation and reconstruction. The second useful
aspect of his position is that artists are using this historiographic methodology to construct
alternative histories that dispel the fictions and propose new ways of thinking about the past.
48

This idea resonates strongly with my interpretation of Flores’s installation, which I place within
the category of Institutional Critique.
There are a few different explanations for the rise of the archaeological imaginary or
historiographic turn at the turn of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the attention to history
derives from a need to recuperate the past at a time of “historical rupture” resulting from the fall
of the Eastern Bloc or the World Trade Center,
49
or inspired by the proliferation of modern-day
ruins as a result of major natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Tsunami, or man-

47
“The Way of the Shovel.”
48
Roelstraete and Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, Ill.), The Way of the Shovel, 27.
49
Roelstrate as summarized by Bill Brown. Bill Brown, “Anarchéologie: Object Worlds & Other
Things, Circa Now,” in The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art
(Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art in association with The University of Chicago Press,
2013), 267.

43
made disasters like 9/11 or the Iraq War.
50
These larger sociopolitical seismic shifts may have
aftershocks in the artistic imaginary and called forth responses to these events in mimicking the
process, objects, or methodology of archaeology. Alongside these macro-level phenomena, the
rise of material culture studies in academia and the concomitant interest in things, including
“relics, products, objects, items, fetishes, evidence, commodities,”
51
may have influenced the
direction of art practice, theory, and criticism in favor of objects themselves. One final
explanation is that practitioners in the field of archaeology, after years of assuming that they
produced objective truths about the past through the scientific method, became self-aware of the
possible subjective interpretations inherent in their work. Known as postprocessualism or
interpretive archaeology, this new development made the discipline of archaeology as open to
critique as the arts and humanities.
52

As is the case with most neologism and the identification of “new” art movements,
Roelstraete was not the first to come up with the idea of the archaeological turn.
53
In 1983, Lucy
Lippard explored the relationship between prehistoric images and contemporary art, though
specifically “not prehistoric images in contemporary art,”
54
in her book Overlay: Contemporary
Art and the Art of Prehistory (1983). She attempts to return to periods in the past when art and

50
Ibid. Shannon Lee Dawdy, an urban archaeologist, as summarized by Brown.
51
Footnote 19, Roelstraete “Field Notes” p. 30
52
Ian Alden Russell, “The Art of the Past: Before and After Archaeology,” in The Way of the
Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art in
association with The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 305.
53
For the application of the archaeological impulse in literature, see Samuel Amago, “On the
Archaeological Impulse in Contemporary Spanish Narrative Fiction,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies
88, no. 7–8 (2011): 327–43.
54
Lucy R Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1983), 1.

44
life were inseparable as a means of recuperating “what we have forgotten about art.”
55
A similar
tone of nostalgic recovery permeates Donald Kuspit’s brief article “Archaeologism:
Postmodernism as Excavation,” in Dialogue (January/February 1988).
56
In this article, Kuspit
uses the term “archaeologism” as an alternative term to “historicism” in describing postmodern
art. Drawing from Freud and Foucault’s use of the archaeological metaphor, Kuspit argues, “the
rules that establish art's discursiveness exist at an 'unconscious' depth beneath the artistic
appearance they determine. They have the pull and gravity of the repressed, and can only be
uncovered by a kind of archaeological excavation.”
57
The rules that Kuspit refers to are those
that determine style, authority, and authenticity of an artist’s work. He argues that these three
elements are “relics” that only exist in the past and which artists must excavate.
58
To illustrate
his argument, he uses two artists, Sherrie Levine and Anselm Kiefer, and argues that the former’s
appropriative acts to achieve a cosmetic, “nominal identity” is a “negative archaeologism,” while
the latter achieves “positive archaeologism” because he appropriates past styles “in the service of
contemporary psychosocial, extra-artistic purpose, growing out of profound political and
historical need.”
59
While his assessment of these artists’ output and his evaluation of positive and
negative archaeologism seem unnecessarily polarizing, Kuspit’s awareness of this archaeological
moment in 1988 is rather prescient for the time.

55
Ibid., 4.
56
Reprinted in Donald B. Kuspit, “Archaeologism: Postmodernism as Excavation,” in The New
Subjectivism: Art in the 1980s, Studies in the Fine Arts. Criticism, no. 28 (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1988), 531–37.
57
Ibid., 531.
58
Ibid., 534.
59
Ibid., 535.

45
The intersection between art and archaeology began serving as a thematic premise for art
exhibitions starting the 1990s, particularly in Britain. Paradigmatic examples include From Art to
Archaeology at the South Bank Centre in London and Excavating the Present at Kettle’s Yard,
Cambridge, both in 1991, and Time Machine: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary Art at the British
Museum in 1994. This theme continued into the 2000s with the exhibitions Time Capsule:
Archaeology in Contemporary Art at Art in General in 2003, Ábhar agus Meon: Materials and
Mentalities at various sites in Dublin in the summer of 2008, and The Archaeologists at Ursula
Blickle Stiftung in Kraichtal, Germany in 2010. One of the most recent shows that unites
archaeology and contemporary art was The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old:
Contemporary Art and Archaeology from the Stone Age to the Present at various sites around
Lincoln, England in 2013. These exhibitions mostly engage with European artists reinterpreting a
Eurocentric history of archaeology in European institutions.
In contrast, two recent exhibitions in the United States focus on the appropriation of pre-
Columbian images. The first, Pre-Columbian Remix: the Art of Enrique Chagoya, Demián
Flores, Rubén Ortiz-Torres and Nadín Ospina at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2013, brought
the work of four artists together around the practice of “address[ing] pre-Columbian history
through a contemporary eye, fusing and remixing the ancient iconography with pop-culture
imagery in a humorous and ironic manner.”
60
A concurrent exhibition, Inspiring Art: The
Dumbarton Oaks Birthing Figure, in Washington, D.C., is a case study on the influence that the
Aztec-style birthing figure has had on contemporary artists, such as Diego Rivera, Demián
Flores, and Silvia Gruner. This concentrated meditation on a singular pre-Columbian object and

60
Chagoya et al., Pre-Columbian Remix, 14.

46
its vast permutations in art practice over the years is unique in its concept and execution,
providing a useful template for future exhibitions and scholarship.

The Archaeological Imaginary in Practice

Now that we have documented the evolution of the archaeological imaginary or
historiographic turn in scholarship since the 1980s and thematic exhibitions in the 1990s and
2000s as a way of positioning the work of these three artists, what is the best way of applying
this idea to the artists in this dissertation? How can we parse out this term in both form and
content, as suggested by Roelstraete? Mariana Castillo Deball seems to engage with the “politics
of archaeology,” while Tatiana Parcero’s work may be employing an “archaeological optic” in
her layering of images and attempt to recover a personal connection. Demián Flores combines
both a “politics of archaeology” and “archaeological optic” by placing ceramic forgeries of West
Mexican sculptures in front of nineteenth-century oil paintings to reveal the constructed nature of
an “archaeological imaginary” that persists today. While Roelstraete uses these terms at whim
and interchangeably -- along with the historiographic turn, which I consider existing in a
completely separate realm – I am working through the specific modes of archaeological
operation to identify how each artist engages in this “archaeological imaginary.”
In the case of Castillo Deball, she explicitly and recurrently grapples with the politics of
archaeological excavation and display, with a particular emphasis on who has the right to extract
and possess cultural heritage. This is perhaps more than an archaeological imaginary, and more
about the politics of archaeology. In the introduction to Estas Ruinas Que Ves, she writes,
“Mexico’s relationship with archaeology is a complex one,” and that the project “shifts between
politics, history, heritage, and identity in an attempt to find, in the present, the vestiges of

47
archaeological practice.”
61
In this show, we see the first appearance of a mold of the Coatlicue
Statue, yet here the image is whole yet on its side [Fig. 0.14]. Its three-dimensionality contrasts
with the flat photographs of pre-Columbian objects in Gabriel Orozco’s Photogravity installation
(1999) [Fig. 0.15] and its downtrodden position differs considerably from the futuristic Coatlicue
in Einar and Jamex de la Torre’s mixed media installation, Colonial Atmosphere (2002) [Fig.
0.16].
Beyond the politics of archaeology, Castillo Deball also engages in this archaeological
imaginary in the choice of the Coatlicue, as a pre-Columbian artifact that had been buried and
reburied several times, entering vicious cycles of excavation and display. The act of burial is
reminiscent of Keith Arnatt’s Self-Burial (1969) [Fig. 0.17] and Robert Smithson’s Partially-
Buried Woodshed (1970) [Fig. 0.18] The form of the mold as well is a technique used by early
archaeologists to document large, immovable objects in the field, by registering their direct,
indexical impression. The shattering of the mold echoes the prevalence of shards in
archaeological surveys and this breaking echoes an iconoclastic work like Ai Weiwei’s Dropping
a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) [Fig. 0.19] though perhaps with a less violent attitude.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “optic” describes, “A particular
way of interpreting or experiencing something; a viewpoint, a perspective.”
62
Deriving from
French literature and critical theory, the term is particularly useful in thinking through Parcero’s
overlay of a black-and-white photograph of her body over a reproduction of a Mixtec
manuscript. Not only is she creating a particular experience of the past by physically imposing

61
Mariana Castillo Deball, These Ruins You See (Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas
Artes, 2008), 165.
62
“Optic, Adj. and n,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, March 2014),
http://www.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/view/Entry/132056?redirectedFrom=optic.

48
herself into the landscape and dynastic lineages depicted in the documents, but she also shapes
the viewer’s perception of these images by selecting, cropping, and masking parts of the
documents. This optic is archaeological both because the black areas function almost as a topsoil
that the viewer must visually penetrate and in the Freudian sense of psychoanalysis as a form of
archaeology, of mining the individual’s personal memories to reveal truths about the past.
63

Parcero’s use of black-and-white photography harkens back to the importance of photography
for archaeology, particularly at the end of the nineteenth-century. At this moment in time,
archaeology sought to position itself as a serious, objective discipline, and the advent of
photography “inspired belief in the possibility to quantify, measure, record, and analyze the
traces of past human agency. Archaeology was acknowledged as the search for scientifically
verifiable truth about the past that was made apparent through photographic documentation of
excavated artifacts."
64
The interplay between a pre-Columbian image and the photographic
medium is also central to the cibachrome photographs of modern pre-Columbian-esque
architecture captured by Rubén Ortiz-Torres’s The Past Is Not What It Used to Be [Fig. 0.20] and
Leandro Katz’s Catherwood Project (1984-1993) [Fig. 0.21].
65

Flores positions forgeries of West Mexican sculptures on white pedestals in front of
nineteenth-century oil paintings. The scuffmarks, uneven surfaces, and overall beat-up

63
Julian Thomas, “Sigmund Freud’s Archaeological Metaphor and Archaeology’s Self-
understanding,” in Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now, ed. Cornelius Holtorf and
Angela Piccini (Frankfurt am Main; New York: Peter Lang, 2011); Stephen Barker, Excavations
and Their Objects Freud’s Collection of Antiquity (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1996); Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, “Freud and Archeology,” American Imago; a
Psychoanalytic Journal for the Arts and Sciences 8 (1951): 107; Eszter Karpati, “Freud and
Archeology: The Freudian Metaphor,” East Central Europe 24, no. 1–4 (January 1, 1997): 143.
64
Russell, “The Art of the Past: Before and After Archaeology,” 302.
65
For more on Ortiz-Torres’s ongoing project, see Pre-Columbian Remix.

49
appearance of the replica register the forger’s attempt to disguise the modern manufacture and
pass the object off as ancient. Flores’s use of forgeries in the gallery gestures towards the
fallibility of archaeology and its assumed position as an objective science, and instead moves
more towards postprocessualism or an interpretive archaeology model. These manipulated
forgeries maintain a conversation with the nineteenth-century oil paintings behind them, and
their assemblaged nature draws attention to the similarly constructed vision of the pre-
Columbian past depicted on canvas. This relationship between the sculpture and painting
operates according to an “archaeological imaginary,” in which artifacts supposedly recovered
during an archaeological dig helped construct an image of the past. The vision of the pre-
Columbian past, as represented in oil paintings and by the sculptural replicas, is mediated
through the archaeological imaginary; in other words, it is difficult to imagine the pre-Columbian
past without the tropes, nostalgia, and patina of archaeology. Though Flores’s project self-
consciously falls within the category of Institutional Critique, his use of pre-Columbian replicas
echoes Silvia Gruner’s The Middle of the Road (1994) [Fig. 0.22], in which she placed copies of
the Tlatzeotl Birthing Figure along the US-Mexican Border, and two of Nadín Ospina’s
installations, Bizarros y críticos (1993) [Fig. 0.23] and The Ground and the Real (2002), which
both rely heavily on fake artifacts.
While Roelstraete’s archaeological imaginary or historiographic turn are useful short-
hand expressions to capture the general sense of a larger movement, I have tried to account for
the nuances in each of the works and provide examples of the “politics of archaeology,”
“archaeological optic,” and “archaeological imaginary.” These specific strategies tended to
become interchangeable and confused in Roelstraete’s article, and I have tried to explore them
more methodically as they play out in the work of the three artists under consideration. More so

50
than just pinpointing the particular strand of the archaeological impulse in each of these
artworks, I have also developed a much-needed methodology for entering, analyzing, and
interpreting these works. This methodology of the object biography that I espouse in the
dissertation is an important contribution both to this recent trend and to the history of
appropriation of pre-Columbian images specifically. In the latter, scholars have tended to
identify the existence of a pre-Columbian image without taking into consideration the specific
provenance, function, or circulation, thereby perpetuating the Mesoamericanidad problem. If an
artist is at liberty to appropriate a pre-Columbian image, perhaps it is useful to figure out what
made that image available and accessible to the artist. When we consider how the image or
object survived the iconoclastic purge of colonialism, entered a collecting institution, circulated
in photographs and scholarship, a whole world of negotiations and power struggles emerges.
Like Neo-Mexicanism before it, contemporary pre-Columbian works at first glance might
appear folkloric or kitschy, but if when the object biography methodology is applied, the critical
edge of the artistic practice becomes sharpened. The object biography approach lays bare the
turmoil around the visualization of the pre-Columbian past through the remaining artifacts, and
the tense negotiations around its possession and display. The project of making pre-Columbian
images and object visible and accessible is a fraught process, made difficult by the fact that these
object biographies have to take into account over five hundred years of history – a period marked
by Spanish Conquest and colonization of the “New World,” the consolidation of objects in
museums and universities, and recent critical examination and practice of undoing this colonial
legacy.

Conclusion

51
In short, I perceive the artists’ use of the technologies of archaeological representation
and replication, namely black-and-white photography, casts, and oil paintings, in their renditions
of the pre-Columbian past as an invocation of the heyday of Mexican archaeology. By using
black-and-white photographs over reproductions of Mixtec codices, casts of the Coatlicue, and
oil paintings that rely on pre-Columbian artifacts for their feigned verisimilitude, the artists seem
to draw connections between these pre-Columbian objects and their original methods of
circulation, reproduction, and display in the nineteenth century. This recovery of the pre-
Columbian past through a homegrown Mexican archaeology was a centerpiece of
conceptualizing and energizing post-Independence, Aztec-centric nationalism. While this
reclamation of the past was seemingly intended to harness the energy of the entire population
regardless of race, gender, or class, in fact the privileging of the Aztec civilization further
isolated and disenfranchised the poorer peripheral communities. The ramifications of the
centrifugal power of Mexico City / Tenochtitlán over the rest of the Mexican population is
perhaps most vividly apparent in the consolidation of all archaeological artifacts in the Museo
Nacional de Antropología.
Through their material engagement with the technological apparatuses of archaeological
visualization, these artists seem to call forth and then critically question this link between
archaeology and nineteenth-century Mexican nationalism. By highlighting Mixtec rather than
Aztec images, breaking apart a key Aztec symbol, and rejecting painted renditions of the past as
fictional, these artists undermine the feigned cohesiveness of this Aztec-centric identity. Rather
than support this project of internal colonialism, these three artists engage in a decolonial act that
disrupts the nationalistic project that has for so long mediated pre-Columbian objects through the
archaeological enterprise. The radical nature of their work is only fully understood through an

52
object biography approach that accounts for the ontological and epistemic transformations that
these objects undergo from their initial creation to acquisition to their latest incarnation in
contemporary art.

53

Fig. 0.1. Annie Leibovitz, Mexico86 series, 1986. Teresa Eckmann, Neo-Mexicanism: Mexican
figurative painting and patronage in the 1980s, Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico
Press, 2010. Figure 82.

Fig. 0.2. Tatiana Parcero, Cartografía Interior #38, 1996, acetate and color print.

54

Fig. 0.3. Tatiana Parcero, Cartografía Interior #40, 1995, acetate and color print, 52 in. x 40 in.

Fig. 0.4. Tatiana Parcero, Cartografía Interior #36, 1996, Acetate and color photo, 70 x 100 cm.

55

Fig. 0.5. Codex Selden, 1560s, Jaltepec, Mexico, Coated (deer?) skin. Bodleian Library, Oxford
University, MS. Arch. Selden. A.2. Photograph by author during Children of the Plumed
Serpent: The Legend of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico (April 1, 2012-July 1, 2012) at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art.

Fig. 0.6. Mapa de Teozacoalco, 1580, Teozacoalco, Mexico, 23 sheets of European paper pasted
together, 142 x 177 cm. Benson Library at the University of Texas, Austin.

56

Fig. 0.7. Mariana Castillo Deball, Between you and the image of you that reaches me, 2010.
Photograph by author from Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012 (March 9, 2012-July 8,
2012) at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, France.

Fig. 0.8. Coatlicue Statue, Andesite, 2.7 m. tall, in Museo Nacional de Antropología.

57

Fig. 0.9. Demián Flores De/construcción de una nación, 2012. Photograph by author at the
Museo Nacional de Arte.

Fig. 0.10. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

58

Fig. 0.11. Kia Optima Super Bowl Ad, 2011

Fig. 0.12. Rodrigo Gutiérrez, El senado de Tlaxcala, 1875.

59

Fig. 0.13. José María Obregón, El Descubrimiento del pulque, 1869. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 0.14. Mariana Castillo Deball, Estas ruinas que ves, 2008.

60

Fig. 0.15. Gabriel Orozco, Photogravity, 1999.

Fig. 0.16. Einar and Jamez de la Torre, Colonial Atmosphere, 2002.

61

Fig. 0.17. Keith Arnatt, Self-Burial (Television Interface Project), 1969.

Fig. 0.18. Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970.

62

Fig. 0.19. Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995.

Fig. 0.20. Rubén Ortiz-Torres, The Past Is Not What It Used To Be, 2008.

63

Fig. 0.21. Leandro Katz, Catherwood Project, (1985-1995, reopened 2001)

Fig. 0.22. Silvia Gruner, The Middle of the Road/ La mitad del camino, 1994.

64

Fig. 0.23. Nadín Ospina, Bizarros y criticos, 1993.

65

Chapter 1. The Role of Pre-Columbian Objects in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Black-and-white photography, plaster casts, and academic oil paintings were three major
technologies for the visualization and dissemination of pre-Columbian images within Mexico
and internationally in the nineteenth century. Each artist discussed in this dissertation engages
with one of these technologies in their work. This fact necessitates an evaluation of these
technologies within the context of the nineteenth century, which I do in the individual chapters.
In preparation for those individual discussions, I provide this overview of the nineteenth century
and in particular the sites and institutions that served to visualize the pre-Columbian past. By
looking at museums, the discipline of archaeology, and world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, I
will show how the pre-Columbian past was mobilized in proposing a post-Independence Aztec-
centric national identity. By setting the stage in this way, the artists’ critical engagement with
black-and-white photography, plaster casts, and academic oil paintings can be interpreted as a
decolonial move that interrogates the internal colonialism during this period of “Re-Discovery”
of the pre-Columbian past. As an additional point of entry from a practical standpoint, I look at a
recent movement in museum practice that also reacts against the legacy of the nineteenth century
museum, namely the rise of communitarian museums in Mexico. This movement highlights the
practical implications of the decolonial sensibility in a broader, more systematic way.
The majority of the excavated pre-Columbian remnants that survived the ravages of the
Conquest and colonialism were either exported to Europe or remained in Mexico. Those objects
that left Mexico, including the Codex Selden and the Mapa de Teozacoalco, did so during a
period of external colonialism, in which a foreign body or individual imposed their will to
expropriate the artifact. As Ellen Hoobler writes, “the export to Europe of large amounts of

66
material culture, and its subsequent inaccessibility to the groups who had created and protected
it, meant a loss of Indigenous heritage."
66
The artifacts that remained in Mexico, such as the
Coatlicue Statue, fell under the auspices of the government, first as the Office of Archaeology
and eventually the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). INAH’s jurisdiction
over all pre-Columbian objects and archaeological sites operated as a form of internal
colonialism through which smaller, peripheral communities were systematically deprived of their
regional heritage.
The epicenter of internal colonialism in Mexico is the Museo Nacional de Antropología
in Mexico City not only because all pre-Columbian artifacts are centralized there, but also
because it was a key institution in the foundation of an Aztec-centric national identity. The
installation of an Aztec-centric national identity neglected the multitude of civilizations and
histories in Mesoamerica and continued to disenfranchise the indigenous population by
diminishing their history while effectively stealing their regional cultural heritage. I argue that
these three artists challenge this history of internal colonialism, which mainly took place in the
nineteenth century, and in doing so perform a decolonial intervention by foregrounding
alternative histories in Mixtec documents, fragmenting one of the main Aztec icons, and
illuminating the fictional narratives of academic history painting.

Mexican Nationalism

The roots of the Aztec-centric national identity extend deep into the sixteenth century, a
moment in time characterized by the simultaneous destruction and preservation of pre-

66
Ellen Hoobler, “‘To Take Their Heritage in Their Hands’: Indigenous Self-Representation and
Decolonization in the Community Museums of Oaxaca, Mexico,” American Indian Quarterly 30,
no. 3–4 (2006): 445.

67
Columbian "idols," books, languages, and customs. Dominican and Franciscan friars such as
Diego Durán (1537-1588), Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590), and Jerónimo de Mendieta
(1525-1604) were pioneers for collecting and preserving Mesoamerican history. Their work was
continued into the seventeenth century by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700), Agustín
de Vetancurt (1620-1700), and Juan de Torquemada (c. 1562-1624), and the latter's Monarquía
indiana (1615) put the Mesoamerican past on par with classical antiquity.
67
Around the same
time, Creoles and Mestizos began recuperating symbols of the Aztec past, including the emblem
of the foundation myth of Tenochtitlan, an eagle with a serpent in its mouth perched on top of a
prickly pear cactus [Fig. 1.1]. While the emblem surfaced on official documents beginning in
the seventeenth century, it was not until July 1815 when José María Morelos (1765-1815)
suggested that the Mexican flag feature this symbol [Fig. 1.2].
68

The symbol of the eagle and cactus is perhaps the most well known Aztec image, and
during the two hundred years that separated its first official appearance and its adoption on the
Mexican flag, Carlos María de Bustamante (1774-1848) proposed that other Aztec myths,
heroes, and symbols be added to the iconography of Mexican nationhood. The official
reclamation of the Aztec past occurred after Mexico declared its independence from Spain on
September 28, 1821, and when the nation struggled to define its identity after a long period of
colonial rule. Bustamante and others found a common call in the ancient Aztec past and
specifically, according to Magali M. Carrera, proposed to view “the nation [as] a resurrection of
the strong and independent Anahuac, the ancient civilization of the Aztecs.”
69
Enrique

67
Florescano National Narratives 225.
68
Florescano National Narratives 240.
69
Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico, 116.

68
Florescano confirms Bustamante’s role both during and after the war, and identified several
Aztec figures including Quetzalcoalt, Montezuma, and Cuauhtémoc to the “mixed pantheon of
indigenous and insurgent heroes” of the Mexican Republic.
70
This list of Aztec gods and rulers
affirms an Aztec-centric bend to the new foundational myths of the Mexican Republic, whose
capital of Mexico City was superimposed over the epicenter of the Aztec Empire at Tenochtitlán.
In addition to recuperating these Aztec leaders and gods, the Mexican government insisted on
recovering and consolidating pre-Columbian objects to “collect, order, display, and preserve the
nation.”
71
As I discuss briefly in the next section, this drive culminated in the foundation and
aggrandizement of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, and the consolidation of power in
INAH.

Museums and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century

An extended look at the history of museums would reach back to the ancient library at
Alexandria called the Museum,
72
but a more commonly espoused lineage roots the modern
museum in the cabinets of curiosity or Wunderkammern in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Europe [Fig. 1.3].
73
The cabinet of curiosity served as a predecessor for the natural history
museum, but while the former was based on the irregular and the unique, the latter instantiation

70
Enrique Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico: A History, trans. Nancy Hancock
(University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 250.
71
Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico, 120.
72
Ignacio Bernal, A History of Mexican Archaeology: The Vanished Civilizations of Middle
America, World of Archaeology (London ; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 130.
73
For an overview of objects from Mexico in cabinets of curiosity, see Christian Feest, “Mexico
and Latin America in the European Wunderkammer,” in The Origins of Museums: The
Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-‐Century Europe (Oxford [Oxfordshire]:
Clarendon Press, 1985), 327–335. See also Chapter 1: Misplaced Objects from the Americas
and the Emergence of the European Wunderkammern in Spitta, Misplaced Objects.

69
insisted on placing similar objects in a uniformly ordered progression.
74
At the same time,
private princely collections of fine art were opened to the public for the sake of edifying the
common citizen and encouraging the visitor to model the bourgeois behavior implied by the
space of the museum. In his book, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995),
sociologist Tony Bennett explains how government initiatives and outposts, including the
museum, transformed cultural artifacts into agents of social reform. In addition to encouraging
self-regulation and modeling bourgeois behavior, Bennett claims that the museum operated as “a
space of representation. Rather than merely evoking wonder and surprise for the idly curious, the
museum's representations would so arrange and display natural and cultural artefacts as to secure
'the utilisation of these for the increase of knowledge and for the culture and enlightenment of
the people' (Goode 1895:3).”
75

While these general premises may have held true for European museums, in Mexico a
specific tension needed to be reconciled. Namely, the issue was how to project a “civilized” and
enlightened model in a space filled with the gruesome, blasphemous remnants of a primitive
peoples. Luckily, a few precedents helped to convert the idolatrous stones into bona fide
artifacts, which could eventually be woven into a foundation myth of the modern Mexican
nation. Even before the first excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii starting in 1738, ancient
pre-Columbian sites and the artifacts had some value, as suggested by the law of 1575 under
Philip II that claimed all archaeological artifacts for the Spanish Crown.
76
At the end of the
seventeenth century, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora excavated the Pyramid of the Sun at

74
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London ; New York:
Routledge, 1995), 40–44.
75
Ibid., 24.
76
Bernal, A History of Mexican Archaeology, 140.

70
Teotihuacan, and between 1805 and 1807, Charles IV called for further excavation of
Palenque.
77
As evidenced by the royal sponsorship of these excavations, pre-Columbian objects
and their archaeological sites were important for the Crown, whether as potentially valuable
assets or just mere curiosities. It could be argued that instead Bennett’s notion that the museum
refined the common citizen in European museums, in Mexico, the museum also civilized the
objects themselves, in effect raising them from barbaric ruins into scientific artifacts.
The objects yielded from these and other excavations were eventually consolidated into the
Museo Nacional de Antropología as presaged by the Jesuit Francisco Xavier Clavijero in his
book Ancient History of Mexico (1780). In this book, he proposed establishing a museum to
house pre-Columbian objects, which would, according to Luis Gerardo Morales-Moreno,
develop “an enlightened memory of the past so that a common history and destiny could be
built.”
78
Following the discovery of the Coatlicue Statue and the Calendar Stone, and in
commemoration of the ascent of King Charles IV to the throne, Mexico City’s first museum, the
Museo Nacional, opened on August 25, 1790. The museum was only opened for a brief time
before it closed and the objects were relocated to the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México.
These objects later formed the collection of the Museo Nacional, which President Guadalupe
Victoria established in 1825 at the university.
79
The museum’s importance increased

77
José Luis Lorenzo, “Mexico,” in Approaches to the Archaeological Heritage: a Comparative
Study of World Cultural Resource Management Systems (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 90.
78
Luis Gerardo Morales-‐Moreno, “History and Patriotism in the National Museum of
Mexico,” in Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity
(London ; New York: Leicester University Press, 1994), 173.
79
According to Florescano, "Although the museum was founded in 1825, its legal existence was
not recognized until November 21, 1831 when the National Congress decreed its creation and
defined its functions. The decree, promoted once again by Lucas Alamán, divided the museum

71
dramatically in the latter half of the nineteenth century, beginning with a scientific overhaul of
the collection in 1854, continuing with Emperor Maximilian’s order to relocate the museum to
an autonomous site on Calle de Moneda in 1865, and concluding with the opening of the Gallery
of the Monoliths by President Porfirio Diáz on September 16, 1887, in commemoration of
Mexican Independence Day [Fig. 1.4].
80

The increasing importance of the Museo Nacional and its artifacts necessitated the
professionalization of scholars trained to oversee and interpret these objects of national
patrimony. This is not unique to the Mexico case, however, as the rise of museum culture in
Europe was “coincident with, and supplied a primary institutional condition for, the emergence
of a new set of knowledges,”
81
including archaeology. But what is specific to Mexico is the
desire for an emic, homegrown approach to archaeology – a field that for so long remained in
foreign hands. In her book, Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of
National Identity (2012), Shelley E. Garrigan neatly sums up this development:
Following over a century of foreign dominion over Mexican excavations and scholarly
expertise on Mexican antiquity, pioneer Mexican archaeologists and scholars such as
Alfredo Chavero, Gumesindo Mendoza, Leopoldo Bartres, Jesús Sánchez, and (bridging
the twentieth century) Jesús Galindo y Villa and Manuel Gamio all worked strategically
to nationalize the field of Mexican archaeology and to defend a place for Mexican
antiquity within the great canon of historical traditions. There were two fundamental
steps to this process: first, the integration of foreign scholarship into a nascent national
scholarly tradition as elaborated in the Anales del Museo Nacional, which began
publication in 1877, and second, the imbuing of archaeological object displays with new,
abstract meanings and powers (such as the awakening of patriotic feelings, the

into three sections: 'antiquities, industry and natural history and botanical garden.'" Enrique
Florescano, “The Creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico and Its
Scientific, Educational, and Political Purposes,” in Collecting the Pre-‐Columbian Past: A
Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990, ed. Elizabeth H. Boone
(Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research and Library Collection, 1993), 89.
80
Lorenzo, “Mexico.”
81
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 96.

72
completion of national history, and the positioning of Mexico on a firm road to
progress).
82

Rather than leave the interpretation of their national patrimony to foreign scholars, these
Mexican archaeologists asserted themselves as the proper stewards of knowledge. Though they
drew from European methodologies and prior findings, they wanted to produce, rather than just
receive knowledge, and the institutional foundation of the Museo Nacional and the legal
protections offered by the State enabled the development of archaeology as an academic
discipline in Mexico.
The expansion and professionalization of the museum was strengthened by the 1896 Law
of Monuments, which attempted to reign in the illicit removal of archaeological objects.
According to José Luis Lorenzo, the law required that excavations “could be carried out only
with a permit from the Government and under its supervision and inspection, with the further
stipulation that all objects found would remain the property of the State, the permit holder being
allowed to make moulds, copies, or duplicates of them.”
83
Although laws the held archaeological
monuments as national property had been on the books since 1575, it was not until the late
nineteenth century that they were enforced.
84
The Office of Archaeology was the government
entity responsible for overseeing the excavations, and the responsibility was later passed onto the
Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), which was established in 1934.
85
The

82
Garrigan, Collecting Mexico, 66.
83
Lorenzo, “Mexico,” 90–91.
84
Carrera describes the antiquities laws put into place in 1828 and 1834. Carrera, Traveling
from New Spain to Mexico, 121.
85
Clemency Coggins, “Latin America, Native America, and the Politics of Culture,” in
Claiming the Stones/naming the Bones: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of National
and Ethnic Identity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 202AD), 103.

73
Law of Monuments was followed shortly after by the decree of May 11, 1897, which protected
monuments from defacement, required a license for exportation of archaeological objects outside
of Mexico, and demanded the production of a map that pinpointed the main archaeological
sites.
86

While the centralization of artifacts in the Museo Nacional and the enforcement of laws
protecting national patrimony and archaeological sites were necessary steps to prevent the
exportation of artifacts beyond Mexico’s boundaries, it also initiated a series of perhaps intended
though undesirable consequences that continue to impact Mexico today. The two main effects
were the broadcasting of an Aztec-centric national identity and the disenfranchisement of
peripheral communities of their regional cultural heritage. Ever since the opening of the Hall of
Monoliths in 1887, the large Aztec monuments have overshadowed the other objects in the
museum, so much so that the “the ancient monuments came to function as the symbols of
Mexican identity. They became the proud testimony of the creativity and cultural development of
the Mexican people throughout their history.”
87
The large scale of the objects, the masterful
execution of carving, and the complex iconographic images all contributed to the recuperation of
these objects as worthy of study and admiration [Fig. 1.5]. While this recovery raised the profile
of Aztec civilization – a phenomenon already underway – it did little to enhance the importance
of non-Aztec cultural objects, which tended to reside in storage.
When the museum was relocated in 1964 to its current location in Chapultepec Park, the
emphasis on Aztec monuments became even more pronounced through the architecture of the

86
Lorenzo, “Mexico,” 91; Garrigan, Collecting Mexico, 80.
87
Florescano, “The Creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico and Its
Scientific, Educational, and Political Purposes,” 94.

74
building. The bottom level of the museum is dedicated to archaeological artifacts from a
multitude of Mesoamerican civilizations that progresses through time, including the Olmec,
Zapotec, Mixtec, and Maya. The second level shifts to ethnographic exhibits of living
descendants of these civilizations. Both levels culminate in a two-storied central hall filled with
Aztec monuments. According to Shelly Errington, “By failing to locate the descendants of the
Mexicas in a single Indian group, region, or set of language speakers (as is done for all other pre-
Columbian civilizations that produced artifacts on display on the ground floor), the exhibition
asserts that modern Mexicas cannot be located in a single group in Mexico: Mexicas have as
descendants all Mexicans, who are their heirs.”
88
She goes on to argue that “the overwhelming
thrust of the official view of the past is, rather, not that Aztecs were protonationalists but that
Mexicans are present-day Aztecs.”
89

Though this later rehanging is outside of the purview of the current focus on the
nineteenth-century, I include it to demonstrate how Aztec-centric national identity continues to
impact the visualization and understanding of the Mexican past today. This privileging of the
Aztec past ignores the fact that the Aztecs themselves were violent colonizers who exploited
tributary towns,
90
and that the continued spotlight on the metropolis of Mexico City /
Tenochtitlán turns the focus away from the plight of peripheral communities. The exhibition
places the Aztecs at the pinnacle of Mesoamerican civilization, in a move that defined Mexican
identity as different from, but archaeologically and historically on par with, European
civilizations. In the aftermath of the pressures of colonialism from external forces from Spain

88
Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998), 176.
89
Ibid.
90
Hoobler, “To Take Their Heritage in Their Hands,” 444–445.

75
and France, this consolidation in the Museo Nacional was a necessary step in defining modern
Mexico. However, by placing the Aztecs as the pinnacle of Mesoamerican civilization and
demoting the ethnographic exhibit to the “run down and little visited” second floor,
91
the
museum missed an opportunity to give voice and representation to the thriving but underserved
living indigenous population.
Coincident with this staging of the indigenous population a side show to the main
spectacle of the Aztec monoliths was another more pernicious and real-life intrusion of the
Mexican government on the lives and cultural artifacts of the indigenous population. Beginning
with the enforcement of the Law of Monuments in 1896 and strengthened by the foundation of
INAH in 1934, all archaeological objects and sites were owned by the Mexican government.
Because of these regulations over cultural patrimony, all artifacts had to be sent to INAH in
Mexico City and all excavations required a permit distributed by INAH.
92
This type of forced
expropriation is a form of internal colonialism that deprived the regional communities of their
heritage and financial benefits of tourism.
Beginning in the 1970s, archaeologists and anthropologists voiced their concern over
INAH’s monopoly over the past. Out of this initial discontent from these scholars and indigenous
communities eventually emerged the communitarian museum movement, which is particularly
prominent in the state of Oaxaca. As opposed to the centralization and flattening of the pre-
Columbian past into an Aztec-centric narrative, the communitarian museums tell the stories that
are important for the community through the objects and the proceeds stay within the

91
Ibid., 447.
92
Garrigan, Collecting Mexico, 80.

76
community.
93
By reclaiming stewardship over their local cultural patrimony and controlling the
narratives about their own history, the indigenous participants in the communitarian museum
movement are engaged in a decolonial project that seeks to shed the legacy of internal and
external colonialism.
94

From Artifact to Imagery: Mobilizing the Pre-Columbian Object Internationally

In contrast to the undesired or illegal removal of pre-Columbian objects from Mexico, the
government in the nineteenth century began sponsoring the temporary display of pre-Columbian
objects abroad through World’s Fairs and museum exhibitions. The pre-Columbian past began to
stand-in for “Mexico,” in effect functioning as a New World antiquity on par with Greek and
Roman civilization. Museums in the United States and Europe had already began mounting their
own shows of pre-Columbian artifacts, including a mid-nineteenth show of Mexican ceramics at
the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and the 1850 show of Mexican artifacts at
the Louvre in Paris.
95
It was not until a few decades later that Mexico fully began participating in
the international scene, and when they did mount shows of international importance, it was
usually at World’s Fairs or at the Museo Nacional.
96

93
Hoobler, “To Take Their Heritage in Their Hands,” 443.
94
As a counterpoint to the Mexican case, one could turn to the one-dimensional representation of
Native peoples in museums of the United States. For more on the potential of museums as sites
of healing through self-representation and truth-telling, see Amy Lonetree's, Decolonizing
Museums : Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
95
Bernal, A History of Mexican Archaeology, 132.
96
The Mexican government took part in the following World’s Fairs: “the 'Centenary of the
French Revolution,' in Paris in 1889; the 'Fourth Centenary of the Discovery of America,' in
Madrid in 1892; the 'World's Columbian Exposition,' in Chicago in 1893; the 'International,'
in Paris in 1900; the 'Panamerican,' in Buffalo, New York, 1901; and the 'Archaeological,' in

77
When the pre-Columbian past was represented abroad, it was always structured as an
Aztec-dominated narrative. One of the earliest and most discernable example of this
phenomenon is the Aztec Palace at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, where a copy of the Coatlicue
Statue and the Calendar Stone appear near a generalized two-tiered temple structure reminiscent
of the Temple of Xochicalco [Fig. 1.6]. These sculptural and architectural elements were
conflated into a generalized notion of an Aztec past, which became even more pronounced in a
later iteration of the Aztec Palace in 1889, also in Paris. In this case, the Aztec-centric narrative
was bolstered by the inclusion of oil paintings including El senado de Tlaxcala by Rodrigo
Gutiérrez [Fig. 0.12] and El descubrimiento del pulque by José Obregón [Fig. 0.13], both of
which appear in Demián Flores’s De/construcción de una nación. These paintings were
commissioned by historian and lawyer, Felipe Sánchez Solis, and were purchased by the
Mexican government to exhibit in the World’s Fair circuit as symbols of a refined and historic
Mexican past.
97
In the fourth chapter, I specify which archaeological artifacts and images were
incorporated into and transformed by Obregon’s canvas. As the paintings and architecture
derived from Aztec predecessors, the Mexican past was tightly construed as linked to an imperial
ancestor with its own governmental structures, protagonists, and foundational myths that could
be conveyed in the European oil painting tradition. The marketing of the Mexican past took on a
specifically Aztec character, which when conflated with European materials, conventions, and
expectations, had the flavor of both an internal and external colonialism. The internal
colonialism resulted from the privileging of the Aztec civilization at the expense of peripheral

Rome, 1910." Morales-‐Moreno, “History and Patriotism in the National Museum of Mexico,”
179.
97
Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs, 118–119.

78
communities, and this mixed with the lingering aftertaste of an external colonialism that imposed
its aesthetic and historical requirements on the “New World.”

Conclusion

“The representation of archaeology has been spread through copies, illustrations, textbooks,
models, and souvenirs. The meaning and the authenticity of archaeological material are involved
in this chain of infinite representation.”
98
– Mariana Castillo Deball

In this chapter, I provided a backdrop for the development of an Aztec-centric national
identity, including its political and historical necessity and its manifestation in the culture of
display in museums and World’s Fairs. This discussion points to some of the forces that the
artists are reacting against, where that lineage came from, and how the Aztec-centric national
identity developed in the first place. It shows how an Aztec-centric identity was promulgated in
material and visual culture, and though it continued into the twentieth century, the nineteenth
century is not only a turning point, but also the moment in which casts, black-and-white
photography, and oil paintings were instituted as visualizing devices. To preview the individual
chapters to come and to highlight the linkages between the different visualizing devices in one
place, I discuss each of these technologies briefly to conclude this section and to set up the rest
of the dissertation.
If the 1896 Law of Monuments is any indication, cast copies of archaeological finds were
permitted and commonplace by the end of the nineteenth century. This form of acceptable
reproduction allowed singular works of national patrimony to circulate beyond the borders of the
state and, in some cases, the casts preserved objects that were eventually lost or damaged.
Archaeologists and explorers also made moulds, casts, and imprints of pre-Columbian

98
Castillo Deball, These Ruins You See, 165.

79
architecture or architectural elements that were too large to remove.
99
Making mould or cast
replica in the field was a challenging undertaking, requiring the transportation of large
equipment, specific environmental conditions for drying the material (often lacking during the
rainy season), and enough space to execute the fabrication of the copy.
100
The history of casts
and moulds made in the field is poorly documented compared to the role of the casts once they
reach the museum or university collection,
101
but what is clear is that these casts participated in
part of the visualizing of the pre-Columbian past by providing an objective, scientific recording
of the object with minimal risk of damage.
This desire for an objective, scientific chronicle of pre-Columbian artifacts through cast
making was manifested earlier in its two-dimensional correlate of black-and-white photography.
Prior to the invention of photography, archaeologists and explorers made sketches, paintings, and
lithographs of the monuments with a varying degree of accuracy. During their travel though
Mexico and Central America between 1839 and 1843, the explorers John Lloyd Stephens and
Frederick Catherwood experimented with different formats for obtaining the best accuracy, with

99
For more on making moulds from paper, see Alfred P. Maudslay, “Paper Moulding of
Monuments, or ‘Squeezes’,” in Hints to Travellers, Scientific and General (Royal
Geographical Society, 1893), 455–60.
100
Aguirre, Informal Empire, 25.
101
Even more studied than casts of archaeological objects are those of Greek and Roman
sculpture and their role in refining public taste in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For
more, see James K. McNutt, “Plaster Casts after Antique Sculpture: Their Role in the
Elevation of Public Taste and in American Art Instruction,” Studies in Art Education 31, no.
3 (April 1, 1990): 158–67; Rune Frederiksen, Plaster Casts : Making, Collecting, and
Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin ;;New York: De Gruyter, 2010); B.
Fahlman, “A Plaster of Paris Antiquity: Nineteenth-‐Century Cast Collections,” Southeastern
College Art Conference Review 12, no. 1 (1991): 1–9.

80
the camera lucida offering the best and, ironically, daguerreotypes as the worst.
102
The successful
employment of photography to document archaeological sites in the Americas did not arrive
until 1857, when the French archaeologist Claude Desiré Charnay traveled through Mexico and
photographed the ruins of Uxmal and Chichén Itza.
103
Like the production of casts, making
photographs in the field was no easy task, and R. Tripp Evans describes the conditions as such:
"Battling insects, severe humidity, and the unstable nature of photographic chemicals, Charnay
faced a constant series of challenges - not least of which was the tremendous weight of the
equipment itself,” which Evans estimates at more than four thousand pounds.
104
Charnay was
one of the foremost cast-makers and photographers working at archaeological sites in the
Americas and played a pivotal role in visualizing and theorizing about the pre-Columbian past,
particularly through his book Les Anciennes villes du Nouveau Monde (1885; English translation,
The Ancient Cities of the New World, 1887).
105
His casts appeared in World’s Fairs,
106
at the
Trocadéro Museum in Paris, and alongside those of Eufémio Abadiano at the Smithsonian
National Museum.

102
Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico, 95.
103
Boris Kossoy, “Photography in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The European Experience
and the Exotic Experience,” in Image and Memory : Photography from Latin America, 1866-
1994 : FotoFest (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1998), 37; Evans, Romancing the
Maya, 105.
104
Evans, Romancing the Maya, 106.
105
Not only did Charnay make objects and take photographs in the field, but he was also an avid
collector of pre-Columbian artifacts. He also devised elaborate and racist theories of pre-
Columbian ancestry, arguing, for example, that the Toltecs had origins in Aryan ancestors of
northern Europe. For more information on Charnay, see Chapter Four of Evans, Romancing the
Maya.
106
For example, his casts appeared at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. Lerner, The
Maya of Modernism, 21.

81
While casts and photography have direct linkages to archaeology as technologies of
visualization and dissemination of pre-Columbian artifacts and sites, oil painting has perhaps a
more oblique connection to archaeology. Rather than an accurate, scientific recording of the past,
oil paintings offer a mediated, subjective construction of the past through the eyes of an artist.
Although perhaps less accepted as directly corresponding to the original, oil painting offers a
larger context and imaginative landscape in which to place the artifact. According to Mauricio
Tenorio Trillo, the paintings and the field of archaeology benefited from “a mimetic mutual
convenience: patriotic history and archaeology procured with these paintings useful
representations to reinforce their stories; and these paintings obtained from history and
archaeology the inspiration for every detail.”
107
In the last chapter, I pinpoint the specific
archaeological objects that underpin the veracity of the painting, and argue that Flores undoes
this “mimetic mutual convenience” by highlighting the role of the artifact through juxtaposition
of the painting with an object.
On the sliding scale of capturing the pre-Columbian object or site as objectively as
possible, the cast lent the most direct impression followed by the photograph and the oil painting.
According to Fahlman, “From a functional perspective, casts had more in common with black
and white reproductions, regarded as preferable to those in color… Yet neither medium achieved
the desired three-dimensional illusory effect that made the cast so effective.”
108
Casts in Mexico
also presided over drawing courses at the Academia de San Carlos, though in this case, the casts

107
Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs, 119.
108
Fahlman, “A Plaster of Paris Antiquity,” 2.

82
were primarily of Greek and Roman statues.
109
Despite the benefits of using casts in art
instruction, they proved too difficult to maintain and too large to store, and were eventually
replaced by the lanternslide and photograph. Though the hierarchy between the cast and the
photograph changed over time, in the nineteenth century, they were both handmaidens to the
more legitimate practice of oil painting.
In their own way, the cast, photograph, and oil painting contributed to the visualization of
the pre-Columbian past both in Mexico and abroad. The portability and reproducibility of these
objects enabled them to travel beyond the legal confines of the original, and, perhaps just as
effectively, to stand in for the original. While casts and photographs provided more documentary
evidence of the existence of the pre-Columbian civilizations, the oil paintings arranged these
images, objects, and sites into a comprehensible narrative context. By employing these
nineteenth century technologies in their work, I argue that Tatiana Parcero, Mariana Castillo
Deball, and Demián Flores harken back to the role of these materials in the archaeological
enterprise. This formalization of Mexican archaeology as government-sponsored academic
enterprise was deeply entwined in the project of Aztec-centric Mexican nationalism, and I argue
that by using casts, photography, and oil painting, these artists dredge up this past as part of the
baggage that they eventually carry with them and attempt to unload. In this dissertation, I parse
out this intertwined and complicated relationship between archaeology, nationalism, and art
production, and consider how these late twentieth-century artists try to unburden themselves –

109
Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas, “Art and Pedagogy of the Plaster Cast Collection of the
Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City,” in Plaster Casts : Making, Collecting, and Displaying
from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin ;;New York: De Gruyter, 2010).

83
and the pre-Columbian past – of this weighty, consuming, and manipulative connection to
Mexican nationalism developed through archaeology since the nineteenth century.

84

Fig. 1.1. Representation of the foundation of Tenochtitlán. Folio 2R of the Codex Mendoza,
mid-16th century Aztec document.

Fig. 1.2. Mexican flag.

85

Fig. 1.3. Cabinet of curiosity depicted as frontispiece for the Museum Wormianum.

Fig. 1.4. Porfirio Diáz in front of Calendar Stone before its relocation to the Gallery of
Monoliths.

86

Fig. 1.5. Salon de Monolitos in old Museo Nacional from Enrique Florescano, “The Creation of
the Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico and its Scientific, Educational, and Political
Purposes,” Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993. Page
95.

Fig. 1.6 Replica of the “Mexican Temple” at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle from Hugh
Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the
Present Time, New York: Pantheon Books, 1975. Page 184.

87
Chapter 2. Tracing the Codex Selden in Tatiana Parcero’s Cartografía Interior

Introduction

In a work from her suite, Cartografía Interior #38 (1996) [Fig. 0.2], Tatiana Parcero
overlays a restored replica of the Codex Selden, a 1560s post-Contact Mixtec document painted
in a pre-Contact style [Fig. 0.5] over which she places a Plexiglas layer imprinted with a black-
and-white photograph of her body. I begin this chapter by highlighting the importance of
employing a Mixtec Codex from the Oaxacan town of Jaltepec in a visual realm of pre-
Columbian iconography dominated by Aztec images.
110
I argue that Parcero's use of Mixtec
codices challenges the Aztec-centric Mexican national identity forged after Mexican
Independence. I then excavate the long history of the Codex Selden to compile an object
biography that accounts for its circulation and acquisition by the Bodleian Library at Oxford
University, as well as its later reproductions in books. This research helped me identify the
version of the Codex Selden in Parcero's work, and think through the different institutional
forces and circumstances that control the distribution of the codex after it left its source
community.
Parcero frames this particular line drawing of the Codex Selden by a photograph of the
sole of her foot, and I analyze how these two elements reciprocally inflect one another. I contend
that her use of Plexiglas gestures towards the technology of glass plates in early photography and

110
Mayan images and material culture have also been appropriated as symbols of Mexico and
circulate widely. However, the distance from the capital city coupled with the rise of the
Zapatista Movement have problematized the acceptance of Mayan visual culture as a part of
Mexican national identity. Recent research by R. Tripp Evans explores the appropriation of
Mayan history, monuments, and culture in European and U.S. museums in the early nineteenth-
and twentieth-centuries. See, Evans, Romancing the Maya.

88
the specificity of the foot refers to the complicity of photography in the hierarchical ordering of
colonial subjects according to physical measurements. Finally, I discuss the current position of
the Codex Selden within the source community of Magdalena Jaltepec through the lens of an
educational program that teaches local students to read the Codex Selden. I assert that the
program directly pushes back against the construction of an Aztec-centric national identity by
restoring pride in the illustrious history of the peripheral town of Jaltepec, and demonstrates the
benefits of image reproduction and circulation.

After the Bottleneck: Multiplying Pre-Columbian Images

The Cartografía Interior series is a typical example of Parcero’s output in general. Her
work focuses primarily the relationship between the human body and the past as mediated
through photography. In her online artist statement, she clarifies her vision: "Working with the
body as a way to rebuild with pictures and videos, experiences, social and cultural symbols, I
explore these subjects in terms of maps, as a way in which I can relate these different concepts of
identity, memory, territory and time."
111
In her work, Parcero draws upon a loose definition of
maps that refers conceptually to documents and visual images that capture the charting of
change, movement, and identity in relation to space. The codices that she employs contain
cartographic elements like geographic place signs, but often function more as narrative histories
and genealogies that unfold in a defined spatio-temporal framework. The majority of Parcero's
work mirrors this formal layering of images, in which meaning emerges from the dialogue
between the black-and-white photograph and the document beneath.

111
Tatiana Parcero, “Tatianaparcero.com » Statement,” accessed April 8, 2014,
http://tatianaparcero.com/blog/?page_id=2.

89
Although Parcero does not exclusively draw from a Mixtec visual database and does
employ Aztec imagery in her other works, this dissertation focuses only on the Mixtec cases as it
elucidates the internal colonialism of the Mexican government and the role of Oxford University
as an institution that operates according to the modernity/coloniality paradigm. As a response to
the former, I argue that her use of Mixtec imagery provides a counter-narrative to the imposition
of an Aztec-centric national identity forged during the early twentieth century beginning with the
Porfiriato and fully institutionalized by José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio.
112
This
proliferation of pre-Columbian images in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reverses the
iconoclastic purge of these “idolatrous” forms during the Conquest and colonization of the New
World. The objects that survived the bottleneck of colonization testify to the existence and
aesthetic sensibilities of pre-Contact indigenous communities. Despite the survival of “non-
Aztec” objects, like the Codex Selden, the Mexican Government honed in on these Aztec objects
at the exclusion of others in a process of internal colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
The use of pre-Columbian art as a device of Mexican nationalism has had a long
trajectory, beginning with Mexican Independence on September 16, 1810. The independent
Mexican nation-state was built upon the ruins of the pre-Columbian past, as a means of rejecting
the Spanish colonial history and asserting a truly "Mexican" history that relied on a specifically
Aztec imperial genealogy. After Mexican Independence, the Mexican government sought to
consolidate the exploits of their own domestic archaeological missions by founding the Museo

112
Shelley E. Garrigan discusses the centrality of pre-Columbian visual and material culture
during the Porfiriato in her recent book, Collecting Mexico.

90
Nacional de Antropología in 1825,
113
which included anthropology and history sections in
1877.
114

This strategy came to full fruition after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), when
Mexican elites needed to marshal the support of Mexican peasants and workers, who awaited
land, labor, and education reform, in order to gain control over the nation. In 1914, José
Vasconcelos, the father of "indigenismo" philosophy and champion of "modern mestizaje" was
elected as Minister of Education and two years later, the archaeologist Manuel Gamio promoted
an endemic form of archaeology divorced from the ideology and preconceptions of the European
branch. In 1920, President Obregón appointed Gamio to excavate the ancient Classic site of
Teotihuacan, which is considered the home of the gods according to Aztec myth-history. This
recovery and appropriation of a sacred Classic site by Post-Classic Aztecs resulted in the
construction of Aztec identity itself on the ruins of previous civilizations to ensure their own
legitimacy as the rightful rulers -- the same operation enacted by post-Independence Mexican
governmental officials. The collapse of the variety of pre-Columbian civilizations into iconic
Aztec artifacts like the Calendar Stone, Coatlicue Statue, Tizoc Stone, and even the eagle and
serpent emblazoned on the Mexican Flag, continues its hold on the imagination of Mexicans and

113
For a discussion of the intersection between national identity building, pre-Columbian
artifacts, and the establishment of museums within a Mexican context, see Shelly Errington,
“Progressivist Stories and the Pre-Columbian Past: Notes on Mexico and the United States,” in
Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October
1990, ed. Elizabeth H. Boone (Washington, D.C: Dumbarton Oaks Research and Library
Collection, 1993), 209–49.
114
Enrique Florescano details the chronology of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in relation
to broader political concerns in his article, “The Creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología
of Mexico and Its Scientific, Educational, and Political Purposes.”

91
foreigners alike, and reflects the strength of the monolithic Aztec-identity to subsume all
difference.
Despite a championing of the indigenous population in creating a national myth, in
reality, the policies of collecting pre-Columbian artifacts directly undermined and negatively
impacted the peripheral communities outside of Mexico City, the center of political, military, and
economic power since Tenochtitlan. By draining smaller, rural communities of their cultural
patrimony, the national government dried up a sense of communal pride and channeled the flow
of tourist dollars from these sites into the coffers of the national capital.
115
Furthermore, the
relocation shifted the epistemological and ontological significance of the object as a site-specific
indicator of a location’s importance to a generalized piece in a museum collection, probably to
remain forever embalmed within storage cabinets rather than proudly displayed. In the pre-
Columbian site of Zaachila, for example, the outstanding gold objects discovered in Tomb Two
in 1962 were removed from the town and most likely sent to Mexico City's Museo Nacional de
Antropología. As a reaction to this act of internal colonialism, town leaders mounted enlarged
photos of these objects to a long wall; this makeshift display serves as a poor stand-in for the
original objects. By removing these objects and imposing a museological framework on a pre-
Columbian artifact, local interpretations are devalued, a normalizing methodology is applied in
studying the object, viewing conditions are tightly controlled, and handling and storage
requirements are enforced. As a means of retaining the few objects that remain in the town,
several community leaders have established their own museums that abide by basic museological

115
One exceptional example of the consolidation of national patrimony in Mexico City was the
forced removal of the colossal monolith from Coatlinchan in 1964 to greet visitors in front of the
Museo Nacional de Antropología. For more, see Sandra Rozental, “Becoming Petrified: The
Making of Archaeological Personhood,” in These Ruins You See (Berlin ;;New York NY
;Ciudad de México: Sternberg Press ;;Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2008), 193–223.

92
standards and ensure that the objects remain accessible to the local people. These communitarian
museums struggle from lack of funding and a reliance on the objects hidden within family
homes, upturned by plowing or unearthed during heavy rains and flooding.
116

Similar to the rescuing of cultural patrimony in communitarian museums, Parcero
recovers and disseminates Mixtec visual imagery as a counter-narrative to the dominant Aztec
discourse. Rather than fading to the background, Parcero emphasizes Mixtec images as central
rather than peripheral to a history of Mexico that extends beyond the history of the Aztec
conquerors. By retrieving these Mixtec codices from obscurity and presenting them to a
contemporary audience, Parcero expands the visual vocabulary of viewers to include Mixtec
figures, landscape, and naming conventions. Like the bottleneck effect of Conquest and
colonialism that restricted the variety of pre-Columbian visual culture that survived iconoclasm,
the Mexican government further constricted the known images by reproducing and boosting
mainly Aztec images. Parcero's active recuperation of Mixtec images counteracts this force by
highlighting a visual product from a peripheral community.

Object Biographies, Reproductions, and Re-framings
History and Reading of the Codex Selden
While making the codex visible is the first step in a “De-Discovery” of the Codex Selden
and the story of Lady Six Monkey, it is equally important to relay the history of the object and
the narratives contained within. This act not only reiterates the function of pictographic
documents as narrative devices on par with textual documents, but also preserves the story of

116
For more on the development and impact of communitarian museums in Oaxaca, see Selma
Holo, “The Pueblos Speak for Themselves: Communitarian Museums,” in Oaxaca at the
Crossroads: Managing Memory, Negotiating Change (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books,
2004), 29–58.

93
Lady Six Monkey through a visual retelling. In this work from her Cartografîa Interior series,
Tatiana Parcero places a black-and-white photograph of her foot above a line drawing of the
Codex Selden, an animal-hide screen-fold manuscript made around 1560 in the pueblo of
Magdalena Jaltepec in Oaxaca, Mexico [Fig. 0.5].
117
The codex consists of twenty square pages
(27.5 centimeters) and one reads the codex according to a boustrophedon pattern from the
bottom of the page to the top [Fig. 2.1]. The manuscript portrays the history of one ruling family
from 794 to 1556, and depicts central moments in the family's life, including alliances with
neighboring towns, important births, marriages, and deaths. According to Mary Elizabeth Smith,
the manuscript was created to resolve a controversy over the town of Zahuatlán, which the
neighboring pueblo Yanhuitlán also claimed as under their jurisdiction.
118
In order to assert
Jaltepec’s rulership over Zahuatlán through direct inheritance, the codex narrates events the story
of the relationship between a royal woman of Zahuatlán, Lady Twelve Rain, and the king of
Jaltepec, Lord Thirteen Wind.
Underneath the photograph of her foot, Parcero places a line-drawing reproduction of page
seven of the codex that portrays the critical turning-point in the claims of legitimacy: the
marriage ceremony between Lady Six Monkey of Jaltepec and Lord Eleven Wind of Hua Chino
(Red and White Bundle), and the subsequent incident that leads to war [Fig. 2.2]. This scene
depicts the circular dance in honor of ritual-bath wedding ceremony between Lord Eleven Wind

117
The Codex Selden has recently acquired a Mixtec name, the Codex Añute, as part of a recent
trend to rename the codices with a more appropriate title that reflects their source community.
For more information, see Maarten Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez, “Renaming the
Mexican Codices,” Ancient Mesoamerica 15, no. 2 (July 2004): 267–71. I have chosen to retain
their original name to indicate the history of importance attributed to the collector
118
Elizabeth Smith, “Why the Codex Selden Was Painted,” in Caciques and Their People: A
Volume in Honor of Ronald Spores, ed. Joyce Marcus and Judith Francis Zeitlin (Ann Arbor:
Museum of Anthropology, 1994), 115.

94
and Lady Six Monkey. After the exchange of gifts, Lord Ten Lizard advises Lord Two Flower
and Lord Three Crocodile to transport Lady Six Monkey to her husband’s town, but along the
way they encounter two men who hurl insults, as represented by spears coming out of their
mouths, at Lady Six Monkey. In order to take revenge on these men for insulting her, Lady Six
Monkey consults the sorcerer Lady Nine Grass, who advises her to wage war on them.
This section of the codex highlights the importance of women as critical protagonists in the
narrative. Lady Six Monkey is one of the most acclaimed female rulers in Mixtec history, and is
heralded as a “heroine” by Alessia Frassani.
119
By aligning her foot with Lady Six Monkey,
Parcero intuitively establishes a personal connection with a powerful Mixtec female ruler, who
maintained the exceptionally powerful right to unilaterally declare war. The emphasis of the
codex on legitimate claims to rulership based on direct descendants may further support this
interpretation, as she claims that “by means of combining pictures of fragments of my body with
diagrams from anatomy as well as old codices, I have constructed maps - metaphoric/rituals -
and reinvented my history.”
120
In effect, Parcero incorporates the history of Lady Six Monkey
into the fabrication of her own history — her own attempt at drawing a direct lineage with
Jaltepec.
In considering the overlay between the photograph and the codex, a visual resonance
emerges in the representation of Parcero’s foot and the small representations of footprints in the

119
Alessia Frassani, “Pilgrimage and the Temple of Death in the Ancient Mexican Manuscripts,”
in Visualizing Rituals : Critical Analysis of Art and Ritual Practice, ed. Julia Werts (Newcastle-
upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 164. For more on the importance of Lady Six Monkey,
see Robert Lloyd Williams, Robert Lloyd Williams, Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-
Columbian Studies (University of Texas Press, 2009), 164. Lady Six Monkey has also been
declared an early feminist figure in certain circles.
120
“Tatiana Parcero. Cartographies,” accessed April 4, 2010,
http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/tatiana/default.html.

95
codex. According to interpretations of Mixtec iconography, footprints, such as those in the
second row on the top of the foot, serve a common symbol for movement and travel. The
photograph of the foot underlines the importance of migration and movement not only for Lady
Six Monkey, but perhaps the continued impact of migration today as well — particularly in
regards to continued emigration of people and artifacts out of the town of Jaltepec and Zahuatlán.
Parcero may also be reflecting on her own personal migration from Mexico to Argentina, or the
movement of contemporary art beyond national borders in international exhibitions and on the
art market.
This doubling of the footprints also gestures toward two performative acts within the
context of pre-Columbian civilization in relation to the codex: the function of the codex as a
prompt book and the walking of the boundary lines. According to Alfonso Caso, John
Monaghan, and Nancy Troike, codices were not documents read by a single individual in silent
contemplation while seated at a table. Instead, scholars propose that pictorial images in codices
served as visual mnemonic devices for telling a story in public to an audience, much in the same
way that a script might function today. Standing up, walking around, acting using verbal and
gestural communication, this performance was an active and engaging enactment of the
information portrayed in the codices.
121
The performance helped the stories come alive, and the
use of a shared visual database rather than written words was a conscious strategy of eliminating
language barriers that would have hindered the formation of alliances across Mixtecs, Zapotecs
and other groups. For example, an extended upward palm with trigger finger pointed forward
symbolized a conversing individual, while daggers coming out of the mouth represented an

121
A similar practice continues today within the Mixtec and Zapotec regions of Oaxaca through
the use of weavings that portray pictorial narratives from wall paintings, codices, and other forms
of Pre-Columbian visual culture.

96
insult. Year demarcations and topographical markers located the events in time and space, while
name signs linked with a single dark line to human figures endowed specific names and even
attributes upon individuals. The use of visual images rather than text enabled all people to
comprehend the narrative across time and space — perhaps a superior form of knowledge
transmission than a traditional written script not only because it was the most effective form of
communication in a specific historical context, but because it can still be analyzed and
understood today.

Codex Selden in the Bodleian Library
Having established the narrative arch of page seven and proposed interpretations of
Parcero’s work based the overlap between the codex and her photographed foot, I move beyond
the imagery itself and turn to the object of the Codex Selden. The second step of “De-Discovery”
depends on an analysis of the institution that collected the pre-Columbian object, especially since
the provenience of pre-Columbian objects is usually murky and therefore difficult to study.
However, this overlooked period of an object’s biography can reveal the logic of
modernity/coloniality that structure an institution and the unfortunate ramifications for the source
community. Here, we must consider under what conditions the Codex Selden, and the story of
Lady Six Monkey, is made visible and to whom. Though I have been able to document the path
of the Codex Selden once it reached Oxford, I only have a few suggestions as to its transatlantic
excursion away from Jaltepec. This lacuna in the documents suggests the difficulty of this object
biography approach, but more importantly the impossibility for the town of Jaltepec or
government of Mexico to assert a case against Oxford given the murky details of the object’s
arrival in the hands of John Selden.

97
I visited the Bodleian Library to investigate how the Codex Selden traveled from Jaltepec
to Oxford University by way of its namesake, John Selden [Fig. 2.3]. According to primary
sources like John Selden’s will and secondary sources, including the Annals of the Bodleian
Library and Summary Catalogue of Post-Medieval Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian
Library, I have been able to establish a basic understanding of how the codex exchanged hands
from John Selden to the Bodleian Library. John Selden’s involvement with Oxford University
began when he matriculated into Hart Hall on October 24, 1600. Selden left the university
without graduating, but eventually entered the bar on June 14, 1612 and practiced law for the
majority of his life. In addition to working as a successful lawyer, Selden developed a strong
interest in ancient history, including Greek, Talmudic, Asia Minor civilizations, as well as
contemporary history, especially regarding laws and governance. His passion for the law and
historical study culminated in his appointment as the expert legal historian in the House of the
Lords in 1621. His ongoing relationship with Oxford University is particularly noted in his
ongoing friendship with Archbishop William Laud, chancellor of Oxford University in the
1630s, and with his appointment to Parliament as a representative of Oxford University from
October 17, 1640 until 1653.
Over his lifetime, John Selden amassed one of the largest and most important libraries in
Europe. In his will of June 11, 1653, Selden added an appendix that bequeathed all of the
Oriental, Greek, Latin and printed Talmudical and Rabbinical manuscripts, and Greek marbles,
to Oxford University [Fig. 2.4].
122
The Codex Selden, although a Mexican manuscript, was most

122
Although Oxford is never exactly defined, it is assumed through context that the “University”
and “Library” referred to in the documents is, in fact, Oxford.

98
likely catalogued as an “Oriental” manuscript according to conventions of the day.
123
The rest of
John Selden’s library, around 8,000 books, were bequeathed to Selden’s four executors, Edward
Heyward, John Vaughan, Rowland Jewks, and Matthew Hale. The latter executor was the
primary intermediary between the executors of Selden’s estate and Oxford University.
124

Following Selden’s death on November 30, 1654, the manuscripts described in the annex
of Selden’s will were transferred immediately to Oxford, but the fate of the 8,000 books
remained uncertain. Almost two years after his death, on October 31, 1656, the Congregation of
Oxford University sent a letter to the four executors asking them for the books to be housed in
the new West End of the Bodleian Library. Three years later, on June 18, 1659, the executors
accepted the proposal and the 8,000 volumes arrived at the Bodleian. The Bodleian received the
books as a gift from the estate, but the university had to cover the costs of transporting, binding,
and chaining the books. The Convocation of Oxford University authorized a special tax “ranging
from 10s. from the Heads of Houses to 1s. from undergraduates” to pay for the costs of
acquisition. The executors stipulated certain requirements, conditions, and rules for the
collection, including that they must remain in “one distincte [sic] pile and body under the name

123
The classification of Mexican documents as "Oriental" may reveal an inability to classify
Mexico or a paucity of documents to justify the creation of a separate category. The
classification, however, still continues, as evidenced by the location of another Mixtec codex, the
Aubin Manuscript 20, in the "Oriental" room of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
124
The cost for lending a manuscript could have jeopardized the Bodleian Library's acquisition of
Selden's library: "Originally he determined to bequeath it to the University of Oxford, but with a
weak betrayal of his wounded pride, he altered this resolution, because the deposit of a sum of
money had been required of him, before he was permitted to have the loan of a manuscript from
the Bodleian Library...Although Selden withdrew his express bequest of his library to the
university, yet he left its disposal to the discretion of his executors, and even by his uncertain
expression, seemed willing to confess that he relented of his petulant resolution." George
William Johnson, Memoirs of John Selden and Notices of the Political Contest During His Time,
by George W. Johnson (London: Orr and Smith,, 1835), 357.

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of Mr. Seldens [sic] Library,” that they not be sold or removed, that they be properly preserved
and subject to annual examination by the executors.
125

Not only was John Selden a massive book and manuscript collector, he was also a prolific
writer and was so heavily embroiled in governmental politics that he ended up in jail.
126
We can
gain some insight into his political leanings through his writings; in particular, his notion of
ownership over natural resources and transportation in his Of the Dominion, or Ownership of the
Sea (1635) [Fig. 2.5], which “defended British sovereignty over a wide expanse of the sea.”
127

Based on his propositions and his large collection of Greek marbles and “Oriental” manuscripts,
we can infer that Selden was a man of his times in believing that England not only had the
opportunity to collect objects from other countries, but perhaps the obligation and legal right to
do so. Within this mentality, perhaps we can further think about the status and function of a
Mixtec codex for Selden, as well as the role of the codex today in the collection.
Despite evidence for how the manuscript exchanged hands between Selden and the library,
it is still unclear as to how Selden acquired the manuscript.
128
Because there is no evidence that
Selden himself traveled to Mexico, there must have been some sort of intermediary involved in
acquiring the Codex Selden, as well as another document with his namesake, the Selden Roll. In
his book, The Selden Roll: An Ancient Mexican Picture Manuscript in the Bodleian Library at
Oxford, C.A. Burland puts forth a few suggestions as to how the latter arrived in the Bodleian

125
Anthony à Wood, The Life of Anthony à Wood from the Year 1632 to 1672 (Oxford: At the
Clarendon Press, 1772), 132–134.
126
Paul Christianson, “Selden, John (1584–1654),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25052.
127
Ibid.
128
Burland, C. A. (Cottie Arthur), The Selden Roll : an Ancient Mexican Picture Manuscript in
the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Mann, 1955), 10–11.

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Library, including purchase, exchange, or theft by a privateer, the transport from Spain to
England by an attendant of Prince Charles, or that it “reached England direct from the hands of
some adventurous raider in the Spanish Main.”
129
I would propose a few other channels,
including the idea that the codex may have been part of the Countess of Kent’s possessions,
which she left to Selden upon her death on December 7, 1651. Selden also acquired the books of
Sir Robert Cotton, John Donne, and John Dee after they died. Finally, I wonder whether his
friendship with Archbishop William Laud, himself a namesake of a pre-Columbian codex had
any impact into Selden’s acquisition of the Mixtec screen-fold. Further investigation into each of
the above individuals and their collections may help to solve the question, although, perhaps the
answer is much simpler, and he may have received it as a personal gift or purchased it from a
dealer.

Reproductions of the Codex Selden
Although the original Codex Selden remains deposited in the Bodleian Library,
reproductions of the pages proliferated since the object’s reemergence in the 1970s. Scholars
working in the United States and Europe recovered the Codex Selden from the Bodleian Library
and began deciphering the story. However, even before its official entry into scholarship, Lord
Kingsborough published a version of the Codex in his Antiquities of Mexico (1831). In order to
trace the path of the specific line drawing that Parcero uses in her work, I perused several
potential sources. I not only wanted to account for the course of the Codex Selden in general, but
also how Parcero herself encountered the image that she eventually incorporated into her work.

129
Ibid.; David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in
Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 20–21.

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Guiding my search were two important visual peculiarities: (1) Parcero uses a black-and-white
line drawing of the Codex Selden while the original was executed in vibrant colors, and (2) the
line-drawing does not adhere to the page-break of the folded codex. In the Codex Selden, there is
a page-break directly underneath the ritual dance and bath on the bottom of page seven, whereas
in the line drawing that Parcero uses, the image continues onto page six. Parcero uses the line
drawing from Schrift und Buch im Alten Mexiko by Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen,
published by Akademische Druck-u. Verlangsanstalt in 1988 [Fig. 2.6].
130
This book contains
several reproductions of key pre-Columbian codices in color photographic reproductions and
black-and-white line drawings, and was probably also the source for Parcero’s image of the
Mapa de Teozacoalco in two other works in her Cartografía Interior series.
It is clear that Parcero’s ability to appropriate the line drawing on page seven of the Codex
Selden depended upon the availability of the image. Had the Codex Selden not survived the
document burning executed by the Spaniards during colonialism, had it not been preserved and
catalogued by the John Selden and the Bodleian Library, had it not been published by Anders and
Jansen, and had that book not reached Parcero, the art work would not exist in its current form.
The codex has dramatically transformed from a key document portraying Jaltepec’s history to a

130
It might be helpful to understand how the source image for the reproduction in Parcero’s
work, Schrift und Buch im Alten Mexiko came into being, how many copies were printed, how
they were distributed and where to, and what the status of the book is in Mesoamerican Studies
both within Mexico and internationally. It is a good source book for images of codices, though
the fact that it hasn’t been translated into English or Spanish is a limitation for its global
usefulness beyond the images. Perhaps the fact that it has not been translated into one of the
major languages of Mesoamerican Studies nor reprinted since its first edition in 1988 signals that
the book has not had much impact on the field. That said, Anders and Jansen continue to be
important scholars within the field, publishing important articles and books. Jansen in particular
has played a key role in Jaltepec; his ability to speak Mixtec has enabled him to do ethnographic
work and he has reproduced a version of the Codex Selden that is only available for sale in the
community museum of Jaltepec.

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curio of Mexican exotica in John Selden’s hands to an object of study and interpretation in the
Bodleian Library. The codex has undergone various epistemic, semantic, and ontological changes
that depended on the context and intent of the possessor, and I argue that all of these layers can
complicate a reading of Parcero's work. Whether we view her work in light of recent scholarship
on codices as promptbooks or the legal disputes of seventeenth-century England, or even subtle
mutations from one reproduction to the next, Parcero's choice of the Codex Selden brings these
moments in the object's life to the surface.
Beyond the university library, the Codex Selden has also entered the other institution of
“modernity/coloniality” – the fine art museum. As part of the recent exhibition, “Children of the
Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico” at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art (April 1-July 1, 2012), the curators decided to present pages seven and eight of
the Codex Selden. Encased in a large glass cube with a red velvet base and propped up on a stand
[Fig. 0.5], the codex occupied a central space in the museum, next to a digital display where the
audience could virtually flip through the pages of the codex.
The emphasis on page seven in Parcero’s work, Schrift und Buch im Alten Mexiko, and the
LACMA show undeniably underscores this page as important. Not only does this page represent
a turning point in the narrative of Lady Six Monkey in her ascendency as a ruler, but it is also
visually compelling. The bright colors pop against the white surface, the figures perform specific
actions and are further individuated by their garb, and unique geological features and
architectural structures ground the story in a particular location. The position of the codex within
an enclosed glass case on a pedestal of an art museum brings attention to these visual qualities in
the work, and also transforms an object that might normally exist within an anthropology
museum into the realm of the art museum. Though both types of museums participate in the

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modernity/coloniality paradigm, the anthropology museum treats history “external” to Europe,
while the art museum is a privileged place for Europe’s “internal” history. Of course this
schematic proposed by Mignolo oversimplifies the history of display of pre-Columbian objects
and I will approach the nuances of this debate further in Chapters Four and Five. For now, this
brief discussion on the recent LACMA exhibition shows an overall sea change in the perception
of codices over the last five hundred years, which the Spanish friars once considered idolatrous
objects and burned in the pyre, and John Selden had classified as an “Oriental Book.” Perhaps
we see the merging again of “writing and painting” in the codex that recuperates the original
status and function of the object. Parcero’s work similarly operates in the gaps between the art
and anthropology museum, but rather than locate the codex in an exhibition of ancient Mexico,
she links the Codex Selden to contemporary art. Accordingly, she simultaneously collapses the
temporal boundaries that so strongly structure the classification of art.
131

Parcero’s layering of a piece of Plexiglas over the Codex Selden brings to the surface the
fact that the codex itself is a palimpsest. According to Alfonso Caso, residual marks from a
previous drawing exist under the layers of paint and gesso applied to the deerskin surface. These
faint traces suggest either a different narrative or alternative version of the same story over which
the current codex was painted.
132
As early as 1956, Philip Dark and Joyce Plesters used infra-red
and x-ray technology to decipher the text below, and the most recent effort by John Monaghan in

131
The simultaneity of different historical times within the same space is a characteristic feature
of Mexico, particularly prevalent in Mexico City or Tenochtitlan, the former seat of the Aztec
Empire. The most important temple of Tenochtitlan, the Templo Mayor, sits just across from the
Metropolitan Cathedral, the oldest and largest cathedral in Latin America. I propose that Parcero
dismisses the temporal and spatial distinctions imposed by a discipline like art history that fail to
capture the reality of Mexico, where the ancient & contemporary continually co-exist.
132
Bodleian Library, Interpretación Del Codice Selden 3135 (a.2) (México: Sociedad Mexicana
de Antropología, 1964), 62–64.

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2004 employed multispectral imaging to reveal alterations, previous reading lines, and damaged
figures.
133
Parcero’s photograph acts as yet another layer in the palimpsest as the black-and-white
layer obscure, distort, and overwrite certain areas of the codex, so that the original is visible, but
not fully legible. The photograph also highlights, obscures, and crops the codex and these
framing tendencies mimics the original acts of editing and erasure in the Codex Selden.

Two Left Feet: The Clumsiness of Photography and Anthropometry
At the same time that our interpretation of the Codex Selden is inflected by the framing by
the photograph of the foot, we must also consider how the Codex Selden shifts the meaning of
the photographed foot. At first glance, the photograph of the left foot may seem unremarkable,
except perhaps for isolation of the body part and its unusual downward configuration. We also
note that the photograph is on Plexiglas rather than behind a piece of Plexiglas, and we may not
fully understand the significance of that decision. I argue that the choice of a photograph of a left
foot on Plexiglas as a frame for a Mixtec codex relates directly to the early history of
photography in the nineteenth-century, one that was employed for the purposes of control,
categorization and, in some places, a justification for colonialism. Although the soles of feet
were not as common photographic image as the hand, facial profiles, or frontal torso, Parcero
combines the technology of photography with the subject of the left foot, which served as a
marker of difference in the identification system developed by Alphonse Bertillon.
Parcero prints the black-and-white photograph on a piece of Plexiglas — an act that recalls the
early stages of photography in which glass plates played a central role in capturing and

133
John Monaghan, A Codex Imaging Project at the Bodleian Library: The Recovery of Lost
Mixtec Writing (Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies,, 2008),
http://www.famsi.org/reports/03104C/index.html.

105
displaying photographs. Although Parcero uses a modern form of glass, the overall appearance
of the work mimics glass in its sheen and reflection. Based on the reception of the piece, I delve
into this history of glass in photography. Shortly after the French artist and chemist Louis J. M.
Daguerre invented the copperplate daguerreotype in 1829, another Frenchman named Abel
Niepce de Saint-Victor began experimenting with glass plates rather than metal ones in 1847.
These negatives made with albumen on glass later evolved into the lanternslide by the
Langenheim brothers in 1850. These lanternslides were slotted into a Magic Lantern machine, a
forerunner to the modern slide projector, which enlarged the small images and cast it on an
opposing wall [Fig. 2.7].
With the increase in portability and decrease in price, black-and-white photography
proliferated as a scientific technology for an exact recording of data, and was marshaled into the
field of anthropological research and criminology among others. These two fields, in particular,
shared a similar impetus to measure, categorize, and evaluate subaltern individuals and therefore
borrowed pictorial conventions from one another. In the next chapter, I will discuss the history of
photography in anthropometric studies in more detail, particularly the paradigms of photographic
regulation developed in parallel to one another in Britain in 1869. In relation to the photograph
of the left foot, however, we turn to the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon, who introduced the
"Bertillonage" system for taking ten significant measurements in order to distinguish
identificatory characteristics in repeat criminal offenders.
Although the police kept photographic records of criminals, they could not sort through
them quickly or accurately enough to identify repeat offenders. Recognizing this problem,
Alphonse Bertillon developed a system to photograph the individual both frontally and in profile,
as we commonly know as a "mug shot," and record measurements such as height, width of

106
cheeks, and length of the right ear and left foot [Fig. 2.8]. These numbers were recorded into a
card that accompanied the mug shot and could easily be filed and sorted. The Bertillonage
system was eventually replaced by the fingerprint, though the mug shot is still a prevalent
technology.
This system of measurements extended beyond the criminal sphere and began to seep into
anthropological studies. In 1894, M.V. Portman and W. Molesworth conducted a study of the
Andamanese in which they photographed individuals in front of checkered screens, recorded
narratives on the manufacture of artifacts, and filled out detailed questionnaires titled
"Preliminary Particulars."
134
These fifty-four item questionnaires were accompanied by hand-
drawn outlines of the hands and feet of individuals, which were published in a four-volume
book, Observations on External Characteristics [Fig. 2.9Error! Reference source not found.].
The indexical nature of the traced foot supplied even more information than just length,
including width of the foot and the shape of toes. Rather than assisting the police in tracking
criminals, these documents were part of an anthropometric study intended to classify and
categorize individuals along a hierarchical stratum according to external physical characteristics.
The extension of Bertillon's system implied an inherent criminalization of those people subjected
to these dehumanizing measurements, and the partitioning of the human body into data points
underpinned a calculation of human worth according to these arbitrary physical markers.
By photographing the left foot in particular and inscribing it on a Plexiglas plate, Parcero
draws upon both the histories of early photography and measurement technologies. At the same
time, the large size of the photographed foot denies any attempt at objective measurement and

134
Christopher Pinney and Elizabeth Edwards, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and
Photography,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992), 80–81.

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the placement of the codex below obscures useful identificatory features. The codex beneath the
photographed foot prioritizes a different narrative that seemingly reduces the photograph to a
frame for the more compelling visual imagery beneath it. Perhaps Parcero used the left foot
intentionally to reference this history of anthropometry and criminology only to frustrate its
goals and disavow its legitimacy in categorizing and dehumanizing subaltern individuals.

Back to the Source

The final step in "De-Discovery" requires a consideration of the continued repercussions of
the absent codex for the source community. The Codex Selden, currently housed in the Bodleian
Library at Oxford University, is in such fragile condition that even scholars with legitimate
academic needs and university affiliation cannot view the document. Based on the poor condition
of the codex and its extreme protection, it is doubtful that the Codex Selden will ever return to
the town of Magdalena Jaltepec. Not only does the community lack the appropriate storage
conditions for the codex as defined by museological conventions of air-conditioning and
humidity control, but the town also does not have a legal claim to bring against the university.
By circulating reproductions of Mixtec codices in her work, Parcero gestures towards these
institutional structures that have both preserved and controlled these documents for hundreds of
years.
In the town of Magdalena Jaltepec, where the codex was originally created, Manuel Miguel
Robles, a professor of social sciences, has initiated an educational program of teaching students
in Magdalena Jaltepec and neighboring regions how to read the codices. During our interview, he
repeatedly emphasized the importance of the next generation to recover the ability to read
codices as a means of instilling pride in the importance of Magdalena Jaltepec within the

108
expanse of Mexican history. Smaller, peripheral communities like Magdalena Jaltepec have been
devalued, defunded, and demoralized by the increased centralization of culture and funding in
the nation’s capital. Perhaps giving students a sense of pride in their community through this
self-funded and self-run initiative will help to stem the flow of immigration to Mexico City and
the United States, and even inspire others to stay and give back to their community. These
students gave a similar kind of performance that may have been enacted in the past, but using
modern technology. With the help of a PowerPoint and projector, the students presented a public
reading of the codex for community members of Magdalena Jaltepec. The students reenacted the
original form of presentation, thereby consciously or unconsciously performing the past both in
form (public lecture) and function (using the codex to stage a narrative).
In reading the various layers of feet in Parcero's work within the context of Magdalena
Jaltepec, we may also consider the act of walking the boundaries of the pueblo. In order to
ensure that neighboring pueblos continued to respect the mutually agreed-upon boundary lines as
demarcated on a map, certain members of the community, usually male leaders, would
physically walk the perimeter of the territory annually. Without the availability of aerial
photography or other technologically-advanced ways to observe, maintain, and protect the
boundary markers, walking the land continues to be one of the only ways for enforcing these
boundaries. As the Codex Selden’s main purpose is to claim Zahuatlán as part of the Jaltepec
territory, the layering of the foot over the codex, reinforces different strategies for claiming land
and the importance of land for the Mixtec for the past and present. In the town of Yanhuitlán, the
town that also claimed Zahuatlán, a hand-drawn map stored in the Comisariado de bienes
comunales is still used for walking the boundary [Fig. 2.10]. Like any map, the document is a
working image of the boundary markers that evolves and shifts over time.

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Conclusion

In this chapter, I have applied the framework of "De-Discovery" to one work in Tatiana
Parcero's Cartografía Interior suite. In my approach, I have considered how the history of Lady
Six Monkey is made visible in Parcero’s Cartografía Interior #38 piece. This visibilizing
practice required the survival of the Codex Selden, which I studied in an object biography
approach from its creation in the 1560s to its acquisition by John Selden before 1653. This object
biography approach avoids the trap of Mesoamericanidad, where images in contemporary art
indiscriminately “stand-in” for an “ancient” pre-Columbian past. This methodology also
sidesteps the problem of the “origin(ality) myth” that often accompanies Mesoamericanidad,
because clearly the sixteenth-century document is not “ancient,” but in fact made shortly after
Contact and nearly five hundred years after the founding of Oxford University in 1096. While
the style of the images may appear “ancient” to our eyes, in fact it was an advanced system of
communication that overcame the language barriers between Zapotec, Mixtec, and other
speakers. While the logocentric disposition of the modernity/coloniality paradigm may position
pictographic recording as less valid than textual documents, in fact the images better suited the
needs of the community.
Parcero’s use of a specifically Mixtec rather than Aztec document emphasizes the
possibility of an alternative imaginary of the pre-Columbian past than that proposed and
implemented by the post-Independence Mexican government. By incorporating the Codex
Selden into contemporary art, Parcero expands the visual vocabulary of audience beyond the
typical images of the Calendar Stone and the Coatlicue. Furthermore, Parcero brings her own
female body in connection to the long lineage of Mixtec rulers such as Lady Six Monkey, in

110
effect inserting herself in this genealogy through the physical overlap of her foot and the formal
similarities with the depictions of feet in the codex. I elaborated further on the status of the body
in my analysis of Parcero’s left foot and use of a glass-like surface to the early history of
photography and its use in anthropometric studies. Finally, I turned the spotlight back on the
community itself, which continues to sustain a strong connection to their Mixtec past through the
program initiated by Manuel Miguel Robles. This recuperation of the Codex Selden operates
within a decolonial vein that seeks to undo the legacy of historical colonialism that resulted in
the Codex Selden entering an institution of modernity/coloniality, namely the university. This
chapter has laid out many of the key concepts and methodologies that will structure of my
analysis of two of Parcero's other works, as well as the subsequent chapters on Demián Flores
and Mariana Castillo Deball.

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Fig. 2.1. Reading pattern for Codex Selden from Herbert J. Spinden, “Indian Manuscripts of
Southern Mexico,” Annual Report Smithsonian Institution,1993. P. 420.

Fig. 2.2. Codex Selden from John Pohl, “Ancient Books: Mixtec Group Codices.”
http://www.famsi.org/research/pohl/jpcodices/selden/selden07.jpg

112

Fig. 2.3. Portrait of John Selden from Bodleian Library at Oxford University.

Fig. 2.4. John Selden’s Will, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 110 Folio 26 Full.

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Fig. 2.5. Cover page for Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea, Bodleian Library.

Fig. 2.6. Page 7 of Codex Selden from Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Schrift und Buch
im Alten Mexico, Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1988.

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Fig. 2.7. Magic lantern from Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 1671.

Fig. 2.8. Alphonse Bertillon, Measurement Room of the Service Anthropometrique, 1887.

115

Fig. 2.9. Tracing of Andamanese hand and foot in M.V. Portman and W. Molesworth’s
Observations on External Characteristics, 1894, from Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and
Photography, 1860-1920, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Fig. 50i.

116

Fig. 2.10. Map of Yanhuitlan. Photograph by the author.

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Chapter 3. Mapping the Mapa de Teozacoalco in Tatiana Parcero’s Cartografía Interior

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I introduced Tatiana Parcero’s Cartografía Interior series by way
of the photograph of her left foot over a line drawing of page seven of the Codex Selden. In this
next chapter, I continue to apply the methodology of the object biography to two more of her
works in the series. In Cartografía Interior #40, Parcero places a photograph of her face in
profile over a black-and-white line drawing of the bottom left-hand corner of the Mapa de
Teozacoalco [Fig. 0.3], a late sixteenth-century document created in response to a questionnaire
issued by King Philip II [Fig. 0.6]. The small figures crawl from her jawline to cheekbone and
several geometric architectural features frame her closed eye. In another work, Cartografía
Interior #36 [Fig. 0.4], the right-hand section of the Mapa de Teozacoalco appears in which
several red roads and blue rivers traverse a black-and-white photograph of her hand, weaving
through geological formations and leading to colonial buildings. Unlike the Codex Selden, the
Mapa de Teozacoalco was intended to depict the surrounding landscape, communities, natural
resources, and history of the town for an elite, foreign audience in Spain. Rather than adhere to a
pre-Contact Mixtec style, the document contains both Mixtec and European pictorial
conventions. Also distinct from the Codex Selden is the format of the document, which is a
large, bed-sheet size surface made of pieces of European paper, rather than an accordion folded
object on deerskin.
These differences in function, style, and format contribute to the distinct path of the Mapa
de Teozacoalco, which traveled from a small town in Oaxaca to Spain and finally to the

118
University of Texas, Austin, by way of Los Angeles, California. By mapping the document’s
journey from its inception to completion, I compose an object biography that reveals how the
object responded to the demands of colonialism, and how it circulated under the radar until the
mid-twentieth century. The document resurfaced in the 1940s thanks to the work of archaeologist
Alfonso Caso, whose decoding of the Mapa resulted in its current status as the “Rosetta Stone”
of the Mixtec writing system. Despite the importance of the document for academic scholarship,
the map and its pictorial elements remain relatively obscure in the visual vocabulary of pre-
Columbian imagery. My focus on identifying the map and relaying its object biography eludes
the trap of Mesoamericanidad, which tends to collapse time and place into a generalized pre-
Columbian past. Furthermore, the object biography approach highlights the fact that the map is
not from an “ancient” time of “origin,” as the “origin(ality) myth” might have it, but rather a
post-Contact document that incorporates European formal and stylistic content. This research
into the specificity of the object as a Mixtec / European hybrid, and its particular path not only to
Europe but also away from Teozacoalco, enriches my analysis of how Tatiana Parcero makes the
history of Teozacoalco visible through her appropriation of the document. As I will demonstrate
in my close analysis of the Mapa, the history of Teozacoalco depends upon a series of legitimate
rulers and their ties to the land. I argue that this central element is emphasized in Parcero’s
pieces, particularly in the way she reasserts a threatened identity through a visual mechanism that
grounds the body -- the carrier and preserver of genealogy -- in geography.
This chapter unfolds in a similar fashion to Chapter Two. First, I will discuss the Mapa de
Teozacoalco in terms of its production as part of a response to the relación geográfica, its
circulation from Spain to Texas, and its reproduction through scholarship. I then briefly examine
the continued impact of the loss of the Mapa de Teozacoalco for the source community and

119
attempts at reviving that history despite the absence of the map. After staking out the major
claims about the Mapa de Teozacoalco, I situate the map in two of Parcero’s photographic works
to explore how to read the codex through a photographic lens, and how to read photography
through the field of the codex. While Parcero herself proclaims not to have known about the
specific significance of the Mapa while making the work, she appears rather to intuit the link
between the body and territory. I argue that she embeds herself within this genealogy that
colonialism eventually cut off and replaced with foreign structures of government. Finally, I
analyze the face in profile and outstretched palm as visual analogues to the colonial device of
anthropometric photography, which measured and classified people according to physical
characteristics. The black-and-white photograph thus becomes less of a neutral choice, and
instead a move that foregrounds control over an indigenous female body.

History of the Mapa de Teozacoalco

The Mapa de Teozacoalco was created by binding several pieces of European paper
together and it measures 142 x 177 cm. or approximately the size of a large bed-sheet. The map
and the written response currently exist in the Benson Latin American Collection at the
University of Texas, Austin. The map consists of two distinct sections: the left section contains
two ruler lists that depict the rulers of Tilantongo and Teozacoalco [Fig. 3.1]. The right section
depicts a round globe that includes a portrayal of another ruler list above the church of San Pedro
[Fig. 3.2].
The Mapa de Teozacoalco was created in response to a questionnaire called a relación
geográfica developed by royal cosmographer-chronicler Juan López de Velasco and dated May
25, 1577. The undertaking grew out of an administrative reform of 1569 in which Juan de

120
Ovando y Godoy conducted surveys of the colonial Spanish holdings.
135
The 1577 questionnaire
contained fifty questions about the climate, population, indigenous government, geographical
features, flora and fauna, and general infrastructure of the town. Each relación geográfica
requested a written response and a map of the area. The questionnaires were sent across the
Atlantic and distributed to the Spanish Crown officials in each colonial town in New Spain, the
Caribbean, and South America. There are 167 extant relaciones geográficas from New Spain
and an additional 40 from South America and one from the Caribbean for a total of 207
surviving documents. Of the 167 remaining relaciones geográficas, 76 of the accompanying
maps remain, and 37 of these are located at the University of Texas, Austin. The majority of the
relaciones geográficas were prepared between 1579 and 1581, while a later group also were
requested and completed between 1584 and 1585.
136
The corregidor of Teozacoalco, Hernando
de Cervantes, received the questionnaire from Don Martín Enríquez, viceroy of New Spain.
According to the cover page, Cervantes completed the relación geográfica with translation
assistance by Father Juan Ruiz Zuazo [Fig. 3.3].
137
Unfortunately, the responses to the first ten
questions are missing in the written version of the relación geográfica.
It is evident from the language and tone of the writing that when López de Velasco
composed the survey, he expected Spanish royal officials, whether corregidor, alcalde mayor or
viceroy in each town or municipality to answer the questions. While the Spaniards in New Spain
certainly completed the written portions, most of the maps were executed by native artists from

135
Howard Francis Cline et al., Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vol. 12, Guide to
Ethnohistorical Sources, Pt. 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), 189.
136
Ibid., 193.
137
Caso, El Mapa de Teozacoalco, 9.

121
the elite class.
138
Mundy attributes this both to the fact that the Spaniards were still trying to
sense of the territorial landholdings and that López de Velasco’s use of “pintura” for item 10 and
42 may have seemed like a request for a painting rather than map, and therefore fell into the
domain of native artists rather than colonial officials.
139
Furthermore, the Mixtec elite already
had an existing mapmaking tradition and probably even extant examples from which to work
from,
140
as most maps were considered secular documents and were not targeted for
destruction.
141
The request for a pictorial document alongside a longstanding Mixtec tradition
naturally resulted in a hybrid document that combined format, style, technique, and images in
new and unexpected ways.
Perhaps ingeniously, the mapmaker developed a giant document that could have answered
at least twenty of the questions in the survey. For example, the map contains two ruler lists that
depict the rulers of Tilantongo and Teozacoalco to the left of the round globe [Fig. 3.1]. Within
the globe itself is another ruler list above the church of San Pedro and the house of Don Felipe
and his son Francisco, the “señores naturales” of Teozacoalco [Fig. 3.2]. These depictions of
the history of Teozacoalco and its rulers help to answer some of the questions, such as 9, 14, and
15. We will never know if the mapmaker intentionally responded to these questions or whether
he knew about the fifty questions beyond the two questions specifically requesting pictorial

138
Barbara E Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the
Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67.
139
Ibid., 57–58.
140
Ibid., 97.
141
Ibid., 92.

122
representations of the territory. However, if we examine the map, we see that the following
questions could have been at least partially answered:
142

1. Firstly: For towns of Spaniards, state the names of the district or province in which it lies.
What does this name mean in the native language, and why is it so called?

2. Who was the discoverer and conqueror of this province? By whose order was it discovered? In
what year was it discovered and conquered, as far as is readily known?

3. What is the general climate and character of the province or district? Is it very cold or hot,
humid and dry? Does it have much or little rain, and when, approximately, does it fall? How
violently and from where does the wind blow, and at what times of the year?

4. Is the terrain flat or rugged, clear or wooded, with many or few rivers or springs, abundant in
or lacking water? Is it fertile or without pasture, abundant or lacking in fruits and sustenance?

7. What are the league distances and the direction of each Spanish city or town in the district to
the city of its Audiencia, or to the town where the governor to whom it is subject resides?

8. Likewise, what are the league distances and the direction of each Spanish city or town to
adjacent ones? Are these leagues long or short, through flat or hilly land, over straight or winding
roads, easy or difficult to travel?

9. What are the present and former names and surnames of each city or town? Why are they so
called, if known? Who gave each its name, who was its founder, by whose order was it settled?
What year was it founded? How many residents did the settlement first have, and how many
does it have now?

10. Describe the sites upon which each town is established. Is each upon a height, or low-lying,
or on a plain? Make a map of the layout of the town, its streets, plazas and other features, noting
the monasteries, as well as can be sketched easily on paper. On it show which part of the town
faces south or north.

11. For native towns, state only how far they are from the town in whose corregimiento or
jurisdiction they are, and how far they lie from their cabecera de doctrina.

12. In addition, state how far the native towns lie from surrounding native or Spanish towns.
Declare for all their direction from these other towns. Are the leagues long or short, the roads
through level or hilly land, straight or winding?

13. What does the name of this [native] town mean in the indigenous language? Why is it called
this, if known? What is the name of the language spoken by the natives of this town?

142
Ibid., sec. Appendix B.

123

14. Who were the rulers in heathen times? What rights did their former lords have over them?
What did they pay in tribute? What forms of worship, rights, and good or evil customs did they
practice?

15. How were they governed? With whom did they wage war? How did they battle? What was
their battle dress and clothing like, both formerly and now? What was their former and is their
present means of subsistence? Were they more or less healthy than now and what are reasons for
this that you may know?

16. For all towns, both Spanish and native, describe the sites where they are established. Are they
in mountains, in valleys, or on open flat land? Give the names of the mountains, valleys, and
districts, and for each, tell what the name means in the indigenous language.

17. Is the land or site healthy or unhealthy? If unhealthy, why (if it is known)? What illnesses
commonly occur, and what cures are commonly used for them?

18. How far or near, and in what direction does each town lie from a nearby prominent mountain
or range? Supply its name.

19. What major river or rivers flow nearby? How distant and in what direction do they lie? How
great is their flow? Is there anything notable known about their sources, water, orchards and
other growth along their banks? Are there or could there be irrigated lands of value?

20. What are the significant lakes, lagoons, or springs within the town boundaries? Note
anything remarkable about them.

21. What are the volcanoes, caves, and all other notable and remarkable aspects of nature in the
district worthy of being known?

34. In which diocese of the archbishopric, bishopric, or abbey does each town lie? In which
district does each lie? How many leagues and in which direction does each town lie from the
town of the cathedral and the cabecera of the district? Are the leagues long or short, along
straight or winding roads, and through flat or hilly land?

35. In each town, what are the cathedral and parish church or churches? What is the number of
endowed church offices and allotments for clergymen’s salaries in each? Do any have a chapel or
significant endowment, and, if so, whose is it and who established it?

36. What are the monasteries or convents of each Order? By whom and when were they
founded? How many notable things to they contain? And what is the number of religious?

49. Describe any other of the notable aspects of nature, and any notable qualities of the soil, air,
and sky in any part of the region.

124
50. Having completed the account, the persons who have collaborated on it will sign it. It must
returned without delay, along with these directions, to the person from whom it was received.

Of particular note is the fact that the questions about discovery and rulership (Question 2)
were also folded into the map, as demonstrated by the two ruler lists from Tilantongo and
Teozacoalco. Again, the intentionality behind this decision cannot be determined, but it is rather
fortunate that this information exists since the first few pages of the written portion of the
relación geográfica are no longer extant. The map clearly gives the viewer plenty of information
the thirteen estancias under Teozacoalco’s jurisdiction (complete with churches and Spanish
glosses indicating name and ruler), geographical features including rivers, mountains, and
ravines (Question 4, 16, and 19), and a wealth of other information encoded in Mixtec place-
signs circulating the border of the globe. The information encoded in the map and the written
document often overlap and strengthen the validity of the assertions, such as the thirteen
estancias under the rule of Teozacoalco. Of particular note is that when one compares the map
with the written gloss to a current geographic map of the region, the distances and orientation of
Teozacoalco to its subsidiary estancias is remarkably accurate. For example, San Mateo Sindihui
is two leagues west of Teozacoalco and is therefore represented closer to the town than Santo
Domingo Teojomulco, which is fourteen leagues to the south of Teozacoalco. When making
these comparisons, it is important to remember that the map is configured in the Mixtec tradition
with north on the left and south on the right, with the sun at the top of the map rising in the east.
The pictorial map, however, exceeds the amount of information contained within the
written text. The direction and flow of the rivers, the rolling hills, detailed ruler lists, and
additional place signs overwhelm the viewer and supply a wealth of information, however
indecipherable it may have been to the royal crown. Of the seventeen instances of written text in
the map, thirteen pertain solely to identifying the estancias and their churches, rulers, and

125
distance from Teozacoalco in leagues. The text does not clarify Mixtec place-signs, rulers’
names, rivers, mountains, caves, or other natural features. Perhaps the writer of the glosses,
probably a Spanish scribe, could not identify the other features, or considered them irrelevant for
the purposes of the relación geográfica questionnaire.
Very little information is given about the exploitable natural resources including questions
about “wild trees and fruits” (Question 22), “wheat, barley, wine, or olive oil” (Question 25),
“medicinal or poisonous” plants (Question 26), “animals and birds” (Question 27), “gold or
silver mines or sources of other metals, or black or colored pigments” (Question 28), “sources of
salt” (Question 30), “houses” (Question 31), “towns’ fortifications” (Question 32), “dealings,
trade, and profits” (Question 33). There are isolated images of a bird, a fish, and a tree, but it is
not clear whether these symbols served as stand-ins for larger quantities of natural resources.
Written responses are provided, but they do not appear in the map, perhaps because this type of
information was normally not provided in indigenous lienzos or because pictorial images were
not appropriate as a response. Perhaps the mapmaker understood the danger of including visual
representations of these natural resources and averted their exploitation by not depicting them.
Questions 38 through 47 only apply to towns along the coast and therefore could not be
answered by the mapmakers.
In this section, I have focused on the relationship between the painted map and the written
documents, both in the form of the original questionnaire and the response. Although the royal
cosmographer-chronicler Juan López de Velasco presumed that a Spanish official would have
drawn the map, the task was left to indigenous scribes who had more familiarity with the land
and maintained their own mapmaking tradition. I argued that the pictorial information exceeds
the requested information and ends up providing information that Velasco would have preferred

126
in a written document. The indigenous painter clearly had an impetus for identifying rulers and
place signs that surpassed what information was desirable or comprehensible to a foreign
audience. This excess is balanced by a silence, perhaps intentional, regarding the exploitable
natural resources of the land, which were reduced to a single fish or solitary bird. This contrast
between an emphasis on naming rulers and their territory and a neglect of pointing to natural
resources may provide insight into the priorities of the painter who aimed to protect legitimate
rule and the environment. This close reading between the written and pictorial documents
suggests one way that indigenous mapmakers may have reasserted an indigenous identity in an
undetected manner that remained elusive to European eyes.

Indigenous and European Cross-over and Selective Adoption
Negotiation between the written and pictorial documents echo the process of interaction
between European and indigenous visual conventions in the Mapa de Teozacoalco. This is
particularly apparent in the circular map that dominates the right side of the document. While the
left side of the document contains a ruler list that strictly adheres to a Mixtec style in format and
style, so much so that it may have been copied from a pre-Contact or early colonial genealogical
manuscript,
143
the right side of the document contains elements that attest to experimentation
with European techniques. This process of negotiation is exemplified by several moments in the
circular globe, including the format of the map, the depiction of the landscape, the architecture of
the churches, and assorted iconographic elements.

143
Cline et al., Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vol. 12, Guide to Ethnohistorical
Sources, Pt. 1, 262.

127
The conception of the world as a circular globe was not a common trope in the Mixtec
worldview, and therefore the format of the mappa mundi indicates “new mode of vision” that the
Mixtec artist experimented with in this document.
144
Within this circular globe, curvy blue-green
swatches of paint reflect the uneven and rugged terrain of the Mixteca. As landscape as such had
no perfunctory role in pre-Contact codices, it could be eliminated as extraneous information that
did not enter Mixtec depictions until the Spaniards arrived.
145
Furthermore, the attempt at
shadowing suggested by the gradients of lighter and darker hues of blue and green in the
mountains points to artistic exploration of techniques imported from Europe — an
experimentation at least somewhat required by the types of questions about terrain stated in the
relación geográfica. Smaller, less significant details in a European style also permeate the map,
including the representation of an orange sun with a face and linear rays, several churches with
crosses, a black prancing animal with a curly tail, and small black horseshoe prints alternating
with footsteps on the red trails.
In looking closer at the uniform representation of the churches, there seems to be a tension
between analyzing their standardization as reflecting a foreign institution of control or as
incorporating that regulatory body into the Mixtec-Puebla “International Style.” There is a clear
tendency to create units of European-style churches with Spanish text as legible, normalizing
forces punctuating an otherwise unwieldy landscape. The churches are unusually consistent in
their square facade with an arched door, three windows, stepped fret crowned by a red cross.
Certainly, these depictions did not reflect the diversity of facades within the Mixteca Alta.
However, when we consider that Mixtec mapmakers drew upon a conventional set of agreed

144
Ibid., 249.
145
Ibid., 262.

128
upon symbols rather than true-to-life portraiture, the uniformity makes sense. The mapmaker,
while experimenting with European stylistic techniques, may have reasserted a Mixtec form of
visual representation by manipulating the European institution through an indigenous symbolic
practice. Furthermore, despite the importance of the churches and textual accompaniment for the
purposes of the relación geográfica, they are inevitably dwarfed by the visually stunning rivers,
mountains, roads, and place-signs that dominate the map. By undercutting the importance of the
church and putting them visually on par with other place-signs, the Mixtec mapmaker upholds
the indigenous mapping practice and landscape perception rather than buckle under the newly
arrived European schematic.
Although scholars have yet to pinpoint the exact European sources brought to Teozacoalco
for instruction, in general they concur that easel paintings, prints, illustrated books, and printed
single-sheet maps were instrumental in teaching European conventions to indigenous artists.
146

The highly developed indigenous pictorial system already established through codices and
lienzos enabled the swift adoption of new pictorial styles, as evidenced by the co-existence of
indigenous and European iconography, format, and style in the map. Through copying paintings
and prints, Mixtec artists developed an additional repertoire of image-making that included
naturalistic or illusionistic depictions alongside the more abstract, symbolic, and almost
linguistic pre-Contact style. This impetus to teach native artists in European artistic techniques
derived both from a desire to interact with the native population using a shared interest in

146
Ibid., 259; Lori Boornazian Diel, “Painting Colonial Mexico: The Appropriation of European
Iconography in Mexican Manuscript Painting,” in Painted Books and Indigenous Knowledge in
Mesoamerica : Manuscript Studies in Honor of Mary Elizabeth Smith, ed. Elizabeth H. Boone
(New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 2005), 303; Mundy, The Mapping of New
Spain, 34.

129
iconography and also from a more sinister drive to control the population.
147
By coercing
indigenous painters to perceive and represent their history and landscape through a European
lens, church officials perhaps attempted to supplant indigenous ways of perception that linked
genealogy with geography.
The friars encouraged the Mixtec artists to pursue this visual education in European art,
which relied less on a prescribed set of images and more on direct encounters with their
immediate environment.
148
Craib points out that the translation of “three dimensional space on a
two-dimensional surface gave artistic expression to a developing new 'way of seeing.’”
149
This
new “way of seeing” depended upon the development of observation-based mathematical
principles that resulted in linear perspective and enabled a precise scaling on a different order
than that proposed by Mundy. This distillation of the environment into measurable units along
coordinate-locked axes was a profound departure from previous maps based less on specific
measurement and more on the general existence of named places led by specific rulers. Though
the Mapa de Teozacoalco suggests the beginning of Euclidean principles in the form of the round
globe and shadowing to depict the scale of the mountains, this early colonial map still retains
core elements of Mixtec mapping and therefore was not particularly helpful as a tool of
colonization and control as desired by the Spanish crown. Both Mundy and Craib argue that a
novel form of ocular perception and expression emerged through contact with the Spaniards, or
at least that post-Contact Mixtec artists began to imprint a different conception of landscape in
maps. The maps in the relaciónes geográficas, and particularly the Mapa de Teozacoalco,

147
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 84.
148
Ibid., 77.
149
Raymond B. B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive
Landscapes (Duke University Press Books, 2004), 6.

130
preserve this moment of early colonial history when indigenous mapping practices thrived
alongside the adoption of European visual and mapping conventions. Maps created later in the
colonial period begin to shed their place-names, ruler lists, and knobby rivers.

Circulation & Acquisition by Benson Latin American Collection at U.T. Austin
Ironically, despite the massive transatlantic effort to collect data on the colonies of New
Spain, the collection of the relaciónes geográficas remained relatively untouched until Juan
Bautista Muñoz uncovered them in the late eighteenth century.
150
According to Cline, some of
these documents were utilized in the seventeenth century by Antonio Herrrera y Tordesillas and
Antonio de León Pinelo for historical scholarship.
151
However, the main purpose of the
relaciónes geográficas project was to have a better sense of the land, population, and natural
resources to better administer and control the territories of New Spain – an effort that panned out
without consulting the relaciónes geográficas. Perhaps maps like the Mapa de Teozacoalco,
despite the inclusion of Spanish text and European visual elements, remained unintelligible or
useless in the view of the Spanish government. For similar reasons of indecipherability, many of
the pre-Contact and early colonial lienzos and maps survived the iconoclastic purge of the
Spanish Conquest as they were “recognized as secular documents by Europeans and never
specifically earmarked for destruction.”
152
The “international style” of the Mixteca-Puebla style
clearly had its limitations, which both protected documents from the pyre and led to their demise

150
Cline et al., Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vol. 12, Guide to Ethnohistorical
Sources, Pt. 1, 194.
151
Ibid.
152
Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain, 92.

131
as indigenous cartography was eventually replaced by European mapping practices based in
Euclidean principles of geometry.
The Mapa de Teozacoalco likely remained in Spain until 1853, when Joaquín García
Icazbalceta (1825-1894) acquired the relaciones geográficas from an unknown source.
Icazbalceta was a self-taught scholar who collected primary documentary sources from the
colonial Mexican period, and though he wrote several books and bibliographies regarding this
history, his foremost interest remained the collecting of authentic documents. He described his
drive to collecting as “almost a mania” and considered it his true vocation in life.
153
A humble
and devoutly Catholic man, Icazbalceta preferred to collect rather than interpret sixteenth-
century documents “in order that the genius who may be destined to write the history of our
country might advance with greater rapidity and with fewer handicaps.”
154
He believed that the
interpretation of these primary sources through scholarly writing often distorted the original
meaning of the document, and he focused on collecting and preserving the documents. His
interest in Mexican history began in 1846 during his late teens and early twenties, when he
developed a special interest in the sixteenth century, which he described as the "most interesting
period of our annals during which an ancient people disappeared and a new one was formed - the
same that exists in our days and of which we are a part.”
155
Unfortunately, these self-guided
studies were interrupted by the Mexican-American War on March 25, 1847 until February 2,
1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed. Icazbalceta enlisted in the army and fought

153
Manuel Guillermo Martínez, Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta: His Place in Mexican
Historiography. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1947), 28–29. Quoted from
Teixidor, op. cit. pp. 4-5.
154
Ibid. Quoted from Teixidor, op. cit. pp. 4-5.
155
Ibid., 27. Quote from Col. Doc. (Mexico), I (1858)

132
valiantly at the battle of Molino del Rey on September 8, 1847.
156
He acquired the relaciones
geográficas at age 28, shortly before he married Filomena Pimentel Heras. The couple raised two
children and were about to have a third when Filomena died unexpectedly during childbirth
along with the baby on June 16, 1862. Struck by overwhelming grief at this terrible tragedy,
Icazbalceta plunged himself in his work and continued his industrious study and prolific writing
despite his loss.
To expand his collection of firsthand accounts of colonial Mexican history, he reached out
to libraries in Madrid and private owners to see if they could provide him with copies of their
holdings. He realized that he had more luck with the latter and he thought his request for copies
would be more persuasive if he could provide something valuable in exchange. In this way, he
cajoled William Prescott into sending him copies of original documents in exchange for a
Spanish language translation of Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Peru.
157
The
correspondence between Icazbalceta and Prescott is documented in a brief publication, including
a letter from Icazbalceta on November 29, 1853, in which Icazbalceta describes his recent
acquisition from Europe “de más de sesenta documentos, MSS originales de 1524 a 1580. Hay
entre ellos una carta original inédita de Cortés (15 de octubre de 1524), dos igualmente
originales de Fr. B. De las Casas, informes de Ramírez del Fuenleal, Fr. Domo de Betanzos,
oidor ceynoz, Fr. Martín de Valencia, de Motolinía, Arsbp. Montufar, etc., unas 50 relaciones de

156
Ibid., 7.
157
Ibid., 32–33.

133
ciudades, con mapas, en respuesta a la instrucción de Felipe 2o.”
158
This brief sentence suggests
the range of Icazbalceta's impressive bounty of important primary sources.
The exact manner of how Icazbalceta acquired the rare collection of relaciones geográficas
from Europe is not fully known, though it is suspected that he purchased the documents just as
he did the Franciscan documents published in Códice Mendieta and the Documentos Inéditos del
Archivo de Indias.
159
The Mapa left Teozacoalco around 1560 for Spain and was recorded by
López de Velasco in a document of 1583. The relaciónes geográficas were transfered from the
Council of the Indies in Madrid to Simancas in 1659 and 1718. Sixty-five years later, the
documents were transferred back from the General Archive of Simancas to Madrid and two
separate inventories of the relaciones geográficas were created in 1783 by the royal
cosmographer, Juan Bautista Muñoz and another created by an archivist named Larrañaga.
160

The larger collection of 85 relaciones geográficas and their 49 maps then disappeared until 1853.
Cline hypothesizes that the collection of relaciones geográficas somehow ended up in the hands
of the Spanish writer, bibliographer, and politician, Bartolomé José Gallardo, as his death in
1853 “coincides with the reappearance of one of two groups of the RG’s that did not go to
Sevilla.”
161
The Mapa de Teozacoalco entered Icazbalceta’s hands as part of the relaciones
geográficas and remained in his collection until his grandson, Joaquín García Pimentel sold part

158
William Hickling Prescott and Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Correspondencia entre los
historiadores, William H. Prescott y Joaquín García Icazbalceta, 1847-1856 (México, D.F.:
Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales, 1984), 55.
159
Martínez, Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta, 77.
160
Cline et al., Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vol. 12, Guide to Ethnohistorical
Sources, Pt. 1, 196.
161
Ibid., 356, note 40.

134
of his grandfather’s library and collection of manuscripts to the University of Texas, Austin on
August 27, 1937 for $80,000.
The University of Texas at Austin made its first major acquisition of Latin American
documents in mid-1921 with the purchase of the Genero García collection, “comprising 11,000
volumes, 15,000 pamphlets, and numerous files of papers, plus the Diario Oficial and 200,000
pages of manuscripts.”
162
A year earlier, Dr. Charles W. Hackett, adjunct professor of history at
U.T. Austin, and Regent H.J. Lutcher Stark were walking down Madero Street in Mexico City
when Hackett eyed a first edition of Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Verdadera historia de la
conquista de México in a bookstore. The gentlemen purchased the book from Mary Blake, who
alerted them to the sale of “an exceptionally fine private library of the recently deceased senator,
historian, and bibliophile, Genero García.”
163
With the combined efforts of professors, librarians,
and administration at U.T. Austin and the García family, the university acquired the collection --
an act that planted a seed that would bloom into the largest and most renowned collection of
Latin American manuscripts and books in the United States, namely the Benson Latin American
Collection.
While cataloging the Genero García collection, the librarian of the García collection began
communicating with Luis García Pimentel, son of Joaquín García Icazbalceta, in September
1924.
164
Luis García Pimentel was a historian in his own right and continued his father’s legacy
of collecting and scholarship after Icazbalceta's death in 1894. He was a member of the Real

162
Nettie Lee Benson, “Latin American Collection,” Discovery: Research and Scholarship at
The University of Texas at Austin, 1983, 54.
163
Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, “Joaquín García Icazbalceta,” 1978, 2, Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta
Collection, Acquisition Files, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.
164
An extensive correspondence supposedly exists between Lota Spell and Luis Garciá Pimentel,
but not in the Benson Latin American Collection. Benson, “Latin American Collection.”

135
Academia de la Historia de Madrid and the Sociedades de Geografía y Americanistas de París.
Luis García Pimentel passed away in 1930 before he could oversee the transfer and his son,
Joaquín García Pimentel, inherited his grandfather’s library. Joaquín García Pimentel was living
in Los Angeles at the time of the sale, which was brokered between himself, Dr. Charles W.
Hackett, Regent Kenneth H. Aynesworth, M.D., Regent J.R. Parten, and Carlos E. Castañeda, the
Latin American librarian from 1927-1946 after Lota Spell who served from 1921-1927. There is
ample correspondence in the archives of the Benson Library at U.T. Austin that details the
negotiations over price and the conditions of the transfer.
Joaquín García Pimentel originally asked for $150,000 for the collection, which contained
247 total bound volumes which included 87 volumes of 25,000 pages (9/10 original) and 160
printed volumes.
165
This quantity was a fraction of the 12,000 volumes that his father had
originally inherited in 1914, though some of the 12,000 volumes were lost in a theft of Luis
García Pimentel’s house on No. 68 Calle de Donceles in Mexico City. Part of the collection
ended up in Ladero, Texas, while another part traveled to the Ateneo Fuente, a high school in
Saltillo, Coahuila in Northern Mexico. Luis García Pimentel worked diligently to recover the
dispersed documents and reached an agreement with Venustiano Carranza, the President of
Mexico, to secure the return of most of the volumes.
166

While Joaquín García Pimentel wanted $150,000 for the collection, Carlos E. Castañeda
recommended that the university pay no more than $50,000. In the same memorandum of April
26, 1937, Castañeda valued the relaciones geográficas collection of 41 texts accompanied by 35

165
Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, “Memorandum No. 2,” March 5, 1937, Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta
Collection. Correspondence related to acq., Charles W. Hackett Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.
166
Martínez, Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta, 31. Quote from Gallindo y Villa

136
maps at $10,000 and the Carta de relación of Hernán Cortes from October 15, 1524 at between
$5,000 to $10,000.
167
In an earlier memorandum of March 5, 1937, Castañeda recommended the
university begin at a base of $74,100,
168
which was a closer number to the final agreed upon
amount of $80,000 with $1,000 deposit and installment schedule: $15,000 in September 1937
and four equal installments of $16,000 between September 1938 and September 1941.
169
Almost
half of the funds came from Senate Bill No. 139, the educational appropriation bill, which
secured an annual payment of $17,500 for two years to help pay for the acquisition.
170

One obvious question is why the Latin American Library at U.T. Austin spent an exorbitant
$80,000 in 1937 to purchase this collection — the equivalent of around $1.2 million dollars with
today’s inflation rate. The funding earmarked for Senate Bill No. 139 certainly helped pay for
almost half of the cost, but the rest of the money had to come from another source, probably the
university itself. Carlos E. Castañeda put forth a very persuasive argument for securing this
collection of “precious pearls, [and] bibliographic jewels,”
171
arguing that this rare collection
would help to put U.T. Austin’s Latin American Collection on par with the Bancroft Library at

167
Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, “Memorandum on the Garcia Icazbalceta Collection of Books and
Manuscripts,” April 26, 1937, 14–15, Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta Collection. Correspondence
related to acq., Charles W. Hackett Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of
Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.
168
Castañeda, “Memorandum No. 2.”
169
“Contract Signed Between J. Garcia Pimentel and UT Austin,” August 22, 1937,
Correspondence related to acq., Charles W. Hackett Papers, Benson Latin American Collection,
University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.
170
J.R. Parten, “Letter from J. R. Parten to Honorable James V. Allred, Governor of Texas
Regarding Senate Bill No. 139,” May 26, 1937, Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta Collection.
Correspondence related to acq., Charles W. Hackett Papers, Benson Latin American Collection,
University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.
171
Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, “La Collection Latin-American de La Universidad de Texas,”
Umbral, no. 17 (n.d.): February 1944, accessed November 6, 2012.

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U.C. Berkeley and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. The sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century documents in the Icazbalceta collection perfectly complimented the Genero
García collection, which mainly consisted of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century volumes.
According to Castañeda, the collection would help U.T. Austin to “become a center of Latin
American studies as is natural to expect, both because of its geographical location and the
relatively large collection of Latin American materials, of which the García Library is the
nucleus.”
172
With the acquisition of the Icazbalceta collection, Castañeda’s vision was fully
realized, as U.T. Austin today is the premier institution for Latin American Studies in the United
States. The purchase of the collection paid off handsomely, as the Mapa de Teozacoalco, just one
item from the collection, was appraised by Christie’s at $1.6 million dollars in 2011.
173

By tracing the voyage of the Mapa de Teozacoalco from its source community to Madrid
and to its final resting place at U.T. Austin, I have composed an object biography that for the first
time captures the extent of the object’s travels and its different valuations. While the Mapa
passed through the hands of Joaquín García Icazbalceta as part of his collecting “mania” for
sixteenth-century documents, the document entered the Benson Library at U.T. Austin to balance
out the García collection and put U.T. Austin on the map as a serious research center for Mexican
studies. Despite the fact that U.T. Austin spent $80,000 to purchase the entire Icazbalceta
collection, the current $1.6 million estimation for just the Mapa de Teozacoalco indicates the
foresight of that acquisition and the shift of the document’s importance.

172
Castañeda, “Joaquín García Icazbalceta.”
173
Christian Kelleher, “Christie’s Insurance Appraisals,” August 20, 2011.

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Mapa de Teozacoalco in Scholarship
Perhaps the monetary value of the document derives from its importance in academia as
the "Rosetta Stone" of written Mixtec documents. Soon after U.T. Austin purchased the
document in 1937, Alfonso Caso cracked the code of the Mapa de Teozacoalco and was able to
prove the Mixtec origins of the Codex Vindobonensis, Codex Nuttall, Codex Columbino, Codex
Bodley, Codex Selden and Codex Becker.
174
Caso noticed the same cast of characters appearing
in the Codex Zouche-Nuttall and the Mapa de Teozacoalco, and the existence of rulers from
Tilantongo and Zaachila expanded the geographical reach of the map into other communities and
linked important people, like Lord Eight Deer of Tilantongo, the main protagonist of the Codex
Zouche-Nuttall with Lady Six Monkey, one of the main figures in the Codex Selden.
Furthermore, Caso’s excavation of Tomb 7 at Monte Alban just outside of Oaxaca City in 1931
revealed similar images of individuals with their names and historic dates on carved bones,
which led Caso to create a catalogue that would eventually transform into “biographical
dictionary of Mixtec princes” (“un diccionario biográfico de los príncipes mixtecos”).
175

Although later scholars have reworked the proposed chronology initially posed by Caso,
particularly Emily Rabin,
176
his brief elaboration of the Mapa de Teozacoalco still stands at the
cornerstone of Mixtec codical studies.

174
David Shoemaker, “El Mapa de Teozacoalco,” FAMSI: Foundation for the Advancement of
Mesoamerican Studies, 2000, http://www.famsi.org/reports/98032/.
175
Caso, El Mapa de Teozacoalco, 6.
176
Nancy P. Troike, “The Interpretation of Postures and Gestures in the Mixtec Codices,” in The
Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico: A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks,
October 22nd and 23rd, 1977, ed. George Kubler and Elizabeth H. Boone (Washington D.C.:
Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), 176.

139
In addition to interpretations of the manuscript executed by scholars such as Mary
Elizabeth Smith, Nancy Troike, Barbara Mundy, John Pohl, and Bruce Byland, the archaeologist
Stephen Whitttington has used the Mapa to locate some of the place-signs indicated on the map.
In 1999, Whittington and graduate student David Shoemaker traveled to Teozacoalco to identify
archaeological complexes depicted on the sixteenth-century map as part of their “Retracing El
Mapa de Teozacoalco.” During this 1999 project, the archaeologists presented a small mounted
and laminated copy of the Mapa de Teozacoalco and copies of the Codex Nuttall to the
Presidente Municipal, Alberto León Mendoza Cruz, and the Suplente del Presidente, Mario
Silva [Error! Reference source not found.]. Together they discussed creating a community
museum and excavations of archaeological sites. According to personal communication with
Whittington, he continued his excavations in 2008 and 2013.

Mapping Teozacoalco Today

"We view Mixtec pictorial history as recording a specific chapter in the ongoing behavioral
patterns of political factions that are still of significance to people living in the region today.”
177

Following the lead of Whittington and Shoemaker, I visited Teozacoalco to understand the
importance that the codex continued to have within the community, as well as to see what
community members thought of Parcero’s use of the Mapa de Teozacoalco in her work. I met
with former Presidente Municipal, Alberto León Mendoza Cruz, and the current Regidor de
Hacienda, Fernando Caballero Cruz, to discuss these issues. Both of them shared the view that
their ancestors had not understood the value of pre-Columbian history and therefore did not

177
Bruce E. Byland, In the Realm of 8 Deer: The Archaeology of the Mixtec Codices (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 107.

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conserve the legends, artifacts, traditions, and ancient documents. According to them, today
people in the community agree that all of these things have value (a word they often repeated),
but unfortunately now people do not have enough knowledge to interpret the reproduction of the
map that hangs on the wall in the palacio municipal — the same reproduction given a decade
ago by Whittington and Shoemaker. In contrast to the students of Jaltepec, even the elders at
Teozacoalco remain ignorant of the ancient history of the town and feel isolated from the rest of
Mexico and even more from the University of Texas in Austin. Both Alberto León Mendoza
Cruz and Fernando Caballero Cruz expressed a desire to recover the map and believe that the
document's return would have a positive impact on the community, especially in terms of pride
and identity. In this case, we must ask: What is the responsibility of the artist and the art
historian to the indigenous community, particularly when the former benefits from the cultural
patrimony of the latter?
In the case of Teozacoalco, a few initial steps would include founding an educational
program like that initiated by Professor Robles in Jaltepec and also to request that U.T. Austin
provide a life-size reproduction for the community museum. I am not sure if these initiatives
would alleviate some of the larger problems plaguing the town, such as stemming the tide of
emigration from Teozacoalco to the major cities or constructing paved roads from Nochixtlán to
Teozacoalco to ease the transportation of goods and tourism. However, from this initial
investigation into the role of the Mapa in Teozacoalco brings up important questions, including:
(1) the responsibility of scholars and artists to the source community; (2) the discrepancy in
academia between the importance of a community in its pre- and early-Contact formation and its
present condition; (3) the flow of information-sharing between academics and community
members; and (4) the responsibility of the collecting institution to the source community.

141
Scholars working in disciplines like anthropology and archaeology have certain standards and
expectations for giving back to the communities that they study by providing copies of their
articles and books to the community. To my knowledge, art historians have yet to establish such
recommendations. Recent controversies over the return of artifacts, such as the battle between
the Peruvian government and Yale University over the Machu Picchu excavations and the Getty
controversy over trafficking in stolen antiquities, suggest a renewed effort at rebalancing the
power disparity between wealthy institutions and source communities. Unfortunately, the high
monetary value of the Mapa de Teozacoalco and its centrality to scholarship on Mixtec codices
means that it will probably never return to its source community in its original form.

Reading the Mapa de Teozacoalco

In the previous sections, I have composed an object biography for the Mapa de
Teozacoalco based on its changing hands of ownership and role in scholarship. It is my
contention that one cannot simply acknowledge the existence of a pre-Columbian image in a
contemporary artwork, but an art historian has the responsibility to treat the pre-Columbian
document with as much rigorous research as the contemporary art work itself. This attention to
the original document transforms the image from a sign of "pre-Columbianness," or
Mesoamericanidad, to a visual element worthy of its own investigation. Through the type of
diligent analysis of the document, I have recovered the history of this itinerant document from its
creation for a relación geográfica to the hands of Joaquín García Icazbalceta and U.T. Austin. I
have also highlighted the drastic ontological and epistemic difference between the wealth of
information generated by scholars from this "Rosetta Stone" and the small reproduction hanging
in a town hall for community members who remain unable to interpret it. By tracing the long

142
history of the Mapa and writing an object biography for it, I not only acknowledge its importance
within artistic and academic sphere, but also enliven the interpretation of Parcero's work.
Now that we have a grasp on the history of the document, we turn our attention to
deciphering the map as a whole and particularly the section highlighted by Parcero's black-and-
white photograph. Using John Monaghan's theory of the confluence between the Mixtec
landscape and corporeal processes, I consider the overlay of a photograph of her body on the
Mapa as an attempt to reassert an indigenous identity that had been discontinued since the
Spanish conquest. As discussed previously, the map is unique in that it combines a genealogical
history on the left with a geographical representation of the physical landscape on the right.
Though one of the dominating features of this map, this division is also blurred by the intrusion
of architectural features and place-signs on the left and the ruler list embedded within the circular
globe on the right. Directly linking the left and right portion of the document is thin red road
leading out of the town upon which an army of seven line-drawn individuals confronts a man and
woman. This simultaneous separation and fusion between genealogy and geography signals two
pre- and post-Contact phenomena: (1) indigenous claims of legitimate rulership rooted in
territory, and (2) Mixtec political structure as polities based on the division of land.
The ancient Mixtec conceived of the earth as a living body. While the Aztecs identified the
earth as a particular goddess, Tlatecuhtli, the Mixtecs visualized the earth in more abstract yet
visceral terms, as they perceived “‘soil is 'flesh,' rocks are 'bones,' rivers are 'veins' and water is
'blood.’”
178
Linguistically, the word for community in the Mixtec language, ñuu, may be closely

178
Barbara E Mundy, Elizabeth Hill Boone, and Mary Elizabeth Smith, “At Home in the World:
Mixtec Elites and the Teozacoalco Map-Genealogy,” in Painted Books and Indigenous
Knowledge in Mesoamerica : Manuscript Studies in Honor of Mary Elizabeth Smith (New
Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 2005), 371.

143
related to the word ñu’uu, the word for earth.
179
This close connection between the community
and the earth shaped the system of granting, maintaining, and defending rulership within the
polities. The Mixteca Alta consisted of several small independent polities led by an elite class of
rulers called cacicazgos that derived their legitimacy from a long line of ancestors. As depicted
in the codices, rulers of these principle Mixtec dynasties were “born from the crocodile monster's
mouth, the body of the goddess, or even specific natural features in the environment such as
trees, rivers, or rocks.”
180
Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas and Fray Antonio de los Reyes affirm
this notion, and Reyes in particular notes that the Mixtecs called themselves “tay nuhu” or
“people of the earth / hombres de la tierra.”
181
Emerging from the earth granted certain dynastic
lineages an indisputable, almost supernatural, right to rule that could then be passed on from
generation to generation.
The link between the earth and legitimate rulership was established, circulated, and
reaffirmed through pictorial expressions, including codices and lienzos, which Barbara Mundy
classifies as “map-genealogies.” These lienzos were often large-scale documents that combined a
historical narrative detailing specific genealogies of individuals with identificatory calendrical
and personal names with place-signs marking the boundary limits. The Mixtec developed a
conventional style of representing and labeling people and places, and this style is known as the
“international style” or the “Mixteca-Puebla style.” The name of individuals include an animal
sign next to a series of dots that represent a number. This combination reflects the calendrical
birthdate of the individual and either hovers near the figural image or is linked by a line. Places

179
Ibid., 371–372.
180
John M.D. Pohl and Bruce E. Byland, “Mixtec Landscape Perception and Archaeological
Settlement Patterns,” Ancient Mesoamerica 1, no. 01 (1990): 116.
181
Alfonso Caso, El mapa de Teozacoalco. (México: Editorial Cultura, 1949), 23.

144
are often indicated by a small hill, temple, or other geographic features with a pattern, animal, or
other sign to label the space. This use of abstract symbols rather than an accurate portrait enabled
legibility across several language groups who may have otherwise been unable to
communicate.
182
This legibility was essential as maps such as this one would have been called
upon to serve as legal documents to verify the legitimacy of a ruler’s land claim.
183

The distillation of entire community's history into a ruler-list and a large geographic
landscape into a bed-sheet size map relies on a similar conceptual process that Mundy identifies
as scaling. This shared operation of reduction further points to “the land and its rulers as two
sides of the same coin - they are inextricably linked, and geographic order is bound up in
political order.”
184
This condensation into a transmittable form was especially important because
the Mixtec political structure was developed as polities based on the division of land. This visual
system of place-names and calendrical names points to the importance of communication
between different polities in the Mixteca, and particularly Zapotec, Mixtec, and Nahua speaking
communities. The major royal dynasties of the Mixteca, including Tilantongo, Jaltepec,
Teozacoalco, Zaachila, Apoala, and other sites in the Nochixtlan Valley, had long histories of
war, trade, and marriage alliances that linked these independent polities throughout history. The
demarcation and representation of territorial boundaries both separated one polity from another
and fostered a sense of shared identity among the individuals within a community. Mixtec
society was structured into four different categories: elite rulers, nobility, commoners, and

182
For more on the importance of symbolic legibility at the expense of realistic portraiture, see
Troike, “The Interpretation of Postures and Gestures in the Mixtec Codices,” 178–179.
183
Cline et al., Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vol. 12, Guide to Ethnohistorical
Sources, Pt. 1, 262.
184
Mundy, Boone, and Smith, “At Home in the World: Mixtec Elites and the Teozacoalco Map-
Genealogy,” 375.

145
slaves. Although the rulers took stewardship over the land, they still encouraged commoners to
identify with the land and established a reciprocal relationship based on elite protection and
commoners’ tribute. Furthermore, the large scale of the map suggests that it was meant for public
display, perhaps encouraging enhanced identification and pride for the land that the commoners
tilled daily.

Narrative Summary of the Mapa de Teozacoalco

This public display of the Mapa de Teozacoalco was, like the Codex Selden, probably
accompanied by an oral recitation that would relay the information included in this section. By
including this close reading, I am summarizing the interpretation of the Mapa since Alfonso
Caso first began deciphering this “Rosetta Stone” – a narrative that is accessible to a scholarly
audience, though not current members of Teozacoalco. Although not essential to my overall
analysis of Parcero’s work, I include the full text here because I want to emphasize the
importance of the story, the link between the Mapa and the Codex Selden, and the method for
analyzing the images. Finally, the close reading enables me to highlight the fact that the figures
in the Mapa portray historical individuals as evidence by their names and specific dates as
indicated by year signs. The specificity of time also helps to dispel the “origin(ality) myth,”
because rather than events unfolding in some amorphous “ancient” time of origin, the document
accounts for over five hundred years of history from 992 to 1542.
In the bottom left-hand corner of the document, we find a building with black-and-white
motif on the bottom and three eyes in the roof, which is a symbol for Tilantongo or “black earth

146
house of the sky” (“tierra negra casa del cielo”).
185
To the right of the building, we see a year
sign with a flint and twelve dots for the year “Twelve Flint” or 972 C.E. Above the symbol of
Tilantongo sits a man “Smoke that Falls from the Sky” (“humo que cae del cielo”) and on the
right, his wife “Turquoise Quetzal” (Quetzal-turquesa”), who gives birth to the man above,
Twenty Tiger or Oco Ñaña. These three figures represent the first dynasty of Tilantongo. To the
right of Twenty Tiger sits seven noble individuals with calendrical and personal names who
appear to give tribute to him.
In 992 C.E., Twenty Tiger died at the age of twenty-two, and thus began the second
dynasty of Tilantongo with the marriage of “Tlaloc-sun” to “Garland of Cacao Flowers.”
"Garland of Cacao Flowers" gave birth to Lord Eight Deer “Bloody Tiger” who is depicted
above his parents and is receiving riches from seven nobles. Lord Eight Deer was one of the
protagonists of Mixtec dynastic histories and his legacy is revealed through several codices
including Becker I, Codex Selden, and Zouche-Nuttall. In fact, the story of Lord Eight Deer, one
of the main lineage heads of the Mapa de Teozacoalco is linked closely with that of Lady Six
Monkey of the Codex Selden, as discussed in Chapter Two. Lord Eight Deer was born in 1063
and began ruling Tilantongo in 1097, after receiving a nose ornament from Lord Four Jaguar to
legitimize his reign. In 1101, Lord Eight Deer attacked Red and White Bundle (Hua Chino) and
killed its rulers Lord Eleven Wind and Lady Six Monkey along with their oldest sons, the royal
heirs. Lord Eight Deer spared their younger sons, Lord One Alligator and Lord Four Wind. Lord
One Alligator became the ruler of Jaltepec, while Lord Four Wind eventually married Lord Eight
Deer’s daughter, Lady Ten Flower, and ruled Place of the Flints from 1120 to 1164. Lord Four

185
René Acuña, Relaciones Geográficas Del Siglo XVI (México: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, 1982), 136.

147
Wind eventually took revenge on his father-in-law for murdering his parents by sanctioning the
sacrifice of Lord Eight Deer in 1115.
In 1110, Lord Eight Deer and Lady Thirteen Serpent or "Serpiente de flores" had a son
named Lord Four Dog Tame Coyote. In the bottom third of the column of the first ruler list, we
trace the footsteps of Lord Four Dog Tame Coyote from the Tilantongo to the second column,
which represents the ruler list of Teozacoalco, where he married a royal woman from
Teozacoalco named Lady Four Death Jewel Crocodile. This event marks the first in a series of
leadership crises in Teozacoalco, as Lord Four Dog Tame Coyote's migration indicates the
foundation of the second dynasty in Teozacoalco by a lord from Tilantongo. The next major
dynastic shift occurred in 1321 with the arrival of Lord Two Dog and his wife Lady Six Reed
from the Zapotec town of Zaachila, an event depicted at the top of the second column. As they
enter the road into Teozacoalco, they are confronted by a line of men armed with weapons. This
does not hinder the Zaachila lords, however, as we see them instated as rulers of Teozacoalco in
the ruler-list embedded within the map itself [Fig. 3.2Error! Reference source not found.].
The crisis in rulership within Teozacoalco resulted in rulers from Tilantongo and Zaachila taking
over Teozacoalco, thereby strengthening the alliances between Teozacoalco and these
neighboring towns, though clearly not without a sense of threat as indicated by the armed men.
The final crisis in rulership occurred after the arrival of the Spanish in the Mixteca in 1521. In
1542, Antonio de Mendoza, the Spanish viceroy, ordered an investigation into the political
disorder plaguing Teozacoalco. During an interregnum period, the Spaniard Don Luis ruled the
town until Don Felipe de Austria (identified on the Mapa as “Don Felipe de Santiago”), son of
Lord Four Deer of Tilantongo, took over. The house of Don Felipe de Austria and his heir,

148
Francisco de Mendoza, is depicted near the center of the map to the right of the main church of
Teozacoalco.

Reading the codex through photography

This series of three leadership crises in Teozacoalco is suggested in Cartografía Interior
[Fig. 0.3] as Tatiana Parcero inverts and crops the ruler lists from Tilantongo and Teozacoalco,
in effect further disrupting the linear orderliness of dynastic succession. She selects the bottom
left section of the ruler list, which portrays the ceremony to confer rulership to Lord Eight Deer,
one of the most important Mixtec rulers. Sprinkled across Parcero’s closed eyes and bent
forearm are pairs of male and female rulers facing each other and seated on woven mats in the
traditional marriage position. Each of the figures that float across Parcero’s face has a specific
identity conveyed by either a personal or calendrical name sign beneath their body, and each
character plays a particular role in this dynastic performance. From the corner of her left eye to
the bridge of her nose we find a set of marching footprints belonging to Lord Four Dog Tame
Coyote, who left his hometown of Tilantongo to marry Lady Four Death Jewel Crocodile from
Teozacoalco. As mentioned previously, this was a critically important event as it founded the
second dynasty of Teozacoalco. The marriage between a lord from Tilantongo and a royal
woman from Teozacoalco resulted in a strong economic and political alliance, and filled the void
of leadership in Teozacoalco. By etching these ancestors onto her face, Parcero inserts herself
into this lineage and attempts to reconnect to this discontinued royal line in Highland Mexico.
Although unsure of whether Parcero implicates herself as the child of a marriage pair, I would
argue for a reading of these layered images as symbolic of Parcero’s search for an indigenous
heritage. This insertion of herself as part of the narrative is mimicked visually by the photograph

149
of her face in profile, which works as a visual analogue to the line drawings of the Mixtec figures
who also appear from the side.
In a completely separate work from the series, Parcero selects the other half of the Mapa de
Teozacoalco that depicts the roads and rivers leading into the town center [Fig. 0.4]. Since these
two works exist independently from one another, neither connected by successive number nor by
proximity in display, it is up to the trained art historian to link them by a shared source image.
The fact that one uses a color reproduction and the other a black-and-white line drawing further
confounds the unsuspecting viewer. In Cartografía Interior #36, Parcero draws from the ruler
list embedded within the mappa mundi section of the map. Below the depiction of the Zaachila
couple Lord Two Dog and Lady Six Reed founding the ceremonial center in the upper left of the
map, we find four marriage pairs that each represent the successive rulers of Teozacoalco. In
Parcero's work, we find a few of the royal couples gracing her right pointer finger. To the left of
the couples, we recognize the main town square and colonial church portrayed on her middle
finger and ring finger, respectively.
One of the most graphically compelling aspects of the work are the four red roads leading
from the church to surrounding communities traverse Parcero’s fingers and palm, wrapping and
winding around her hand like exposed veins. A blue stream flows from her wrist and separates at
the base of her palm as if arterial canals pumping blood into and out of the town center. The
slippage between human body and geographical features is not accidental. John Monaghan
considers this tendency to express motion through the body:
Mixtecs use corporeal processes, the function of organs, and bodily products as models
for other processes, functions, and products. Thus, when producing a history, or a
description of a ritual, or an account of how settlements may be related to one another,

150
the Mixtec scribe was likely to focus on how the event, or practice, or relationship could
be expressed in terms of the body.
186

In applying Monaghan’s theory to this work, the veins channel blood from the heart to the rest of
the body and mimics the flow of the economic and religious lifeblood between the ritual center
and the peripheral towns under its jurisdiction. Parcero illustrates the similarities between the
human body and topographical features, and it is clear that she recognizes the poetic tendencies
of indigenous artists to visualize space as an organic, interlocking entity.
Just as the photographed face in profile links Parcero with the Mixtec rulers, the
photograph of the hand carries potential significance. Since maps and codices were accompanied
by oral recitation and performance, the different hand gestures may have functioned as
mnemonic devices, symbols, or instructions for the performers. In her essay, "The Interpretation
of Postures and Gestures in the Mixtec Codices," Nancy P. Troike suggests that the upward hand
gesture represented "acceptance," particularly when paired with another figure with an extended
horizontal or downward hand gesture that conveys "request" [Fig. 3.5].
187
Though her findings
are limited to gestures in the Codex Colombino-Becker, her research suggests the possibility of
executing similar studies in other codices. If we consider the upright hand as a gesture of
"acceptance," then we must as what is being requested. Perhaps an action or a material good?
Perhaps she is accepting her position within this lineage, or acquiescing to the fact that these
links have been irreparably broken. Either way, the photograph of the hand emphasizes the

186
John Monaghan, “The Text in the Body, the Body in the Text: The Embodied Sign in Mixtec
Writing,” in Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 95.
187
Troike, “The Interpretation of Postures and Gestures in the Mixtec Codices.”

151
importance of the pictorial gesture in Mixtec codices as well as the performative enactment of
the codices through the physical body of the actor.

Photography through the lens of the codex

Parcero overlays a black-and-white photograph of her profiled face and outstretched hand
on a Plexiglas plate, which she places over a reproduction of a Mixtec codex. As previously
argued in Chapter Two, Parcero’s choice of a reflective glass-like surface beckons to the history
of photography, thrusting us backward in time where photography was used to immortalize
famous people in cartes-de-visite portraits and immobilized others into “types” based on class,
profession, or race. A time when large cameras mounted to huge tripods and trailing a long piece
of dark cloth became part of the packing requirements for anthropologists and archaeologists
avant la lettre. This proliferation of realistic representations of non-European peoples from
British colonies and other foreign countries were viewed as essential pieces of evidence that
required standardization, systematization, and storage. Two paradigms of photographic
regulation developed in parallel to one another in Britain in 1869: the grid system by J.H.
Lamprey and the measuring stick by T.H. Huxley. In Lamprey’s grid system, the naked
individual stood in front of a black background with threads hanging vertically and horizontally
to create two-inch squares, and photographs were taken from a frontal and profile position. In
Huxley’s system, the naked subject stood next to a measuring stick and the photographer would
capture a series of photos including frontal and profile both with the right arm extended [Fig.
3.6].
Parcero uses a profile angle that could provide the type of information regarding facial
proportions that anthropometry sought, yet the close-up perspective, downward tilt of her face,

152
and position of crooked elbow and fingertips suggest a more stylized self-representation [Fig.
0.3]. Similar to the photograph of the foot mentioned in Chapter Two, the hand recalls recording
practices analogous to the indexical function of the photograph, but more physically direct
registration of the body [Fig. 0.4]. As exemplified by the drawings in Observations on External
Characteristics, the anthropologists M.V. Portman and W. Molesworth traced the hands and foot
of Andamanese individuals, and they compiled these along with written surveys as reliable,
objective, scientific data [Fig. 2.9]. These tracings recall the hand and foot of Parcero’s
photograph, but instead of providing information in support of a scientific project, the
enlargement of the hand and foot combined with the surplus of visual information from the
codex refuses a status of objective measurement.
The imbrication between photography and anthropology has been explored by other
contemporary artists including David Lewis and a collaboration between Pushpamala N. and
Claire Arni. In his series, The Impossible Science of Being (1995), Lewis plays with the notion of
the grid as a regulatory device that measures the body and structures knowledge of the Other
[Fig. 3.7]. By overlaying a warped fish-eye photo of card-catalogue drawers with a photograph
of a dark-skinned half-nude male, Lewis suggests the distortion of information within an archive
and the imposition of the gridded system into knowledge structures of non-European people.
Pushpamala N. and Claire Arni more explicitly reference anthropometric photography by
occupying the place of the photographed subject and the photographer, respectively [Fig. 3.8].
Standing against a black-and-white checkered backdrop with a right hand extended at a ninety-
degree angle next to a measuring stick, this image merges the techniques developed by Huxley
and Lamprey.

153
Unlike these artists, Parcero does not create a one-to-one visual correspondence between her
images and anthropometric photography. Instead, as I have tried to suggest, her use of the
fragmented foot, hand, face, and Plexiglas beckon towards the use of photography in
anthropological studies. Furthermore, her choice of maps and codices align the technology of
photography with earlier visualizing devices for recording historical events, genealogical data,
and territorial boundaries. I have tried to reconcile the use of black and white photography over
post-Contact documents despite the fact that the two developed during different time periods.
Photography did not exist as a tool of Spanish colonial power, and instead other technologies like
mapping and written surveys captured the information about the inhabitants and locale.
Photography as a colonial device did not fully emerge until the mid-nineteenth century, at which
point Mexico had fully undergone colonization, yet was still the subject of ethnographic and
anthropological research.
188

Parcero functions as the anthropologist or archaeologist in her recovery of the codices, as
well as the subject of the anthropological gaze in displaying fragmented body parts as
photographs. Parcero attempts to recuperate the very documents and images that have been used
to exoticize, degrade, and primitivize the Mexican population, yet is not so overtly critical in her
appropriation of the past as David Lewis or Pushpamala N. According to Wendy Watriss, "One
of the challenges for some Latin American photographers has been to adequately depict the
vestiges of ancient indigenous cultures without falling prey to exoticism."
189
Parcero seems to

188
Photographs of half-nude Mixtec women appear in several images by the nineteenth-century
German expeditionary photographer Teobert Maler (1842-1917) photographed bare-chested
women from the Mixtec region in 1874.
189
Wendy Watriss and Lois Parkinson Zamora, Image and Memory : Photography from Latin
America, 1866-1994 : FotoFest (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1998), 84.

154
struggle with this same burden of representing the codices, and adds another layer of complexity
when she inserts fragments of the female body into the frame, thus presenting a colonialism both
at its inception (the burning of codices and removal of the surviving ones to European
institutions) and towards its decline in the nineteenth century (the collusion between
anthropology and colonialism, particularly in the tools of classifying and ranking cultures based
on external physical measurements and skin color).

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have analyzed two works by Tatiana Parcero that appropriate and
reinterpret the Mapa de Teozacoalco. As a post-Contact document created in response to a royal
questionnaire or relación geográfica, the Mapa is a hybrid document that selectively combines
Mixtec and European visual conventions. I tried to recuperate the perspective of the indigenous
painter by point to moments of visual excess and informational lack, and passages in the map
where the reassertion of an indigenous imaging practice prevails. I insisted on including the
entire narration of the story, albeit succinctly, to emphasize the importance of these historical
people who ruled during specific time period rather than in some amorphous “ancient” period.
When we look at the longer object biography, the irony of the Mapa and the corpus of the
relaciones geográficas comes into view, as these surveys meant for colonial control end up in
some storeroom in Spain, only to re-enter the public sphere after their transfer to U.T. Austin in
1937. Rather than a tool of colonization and control through mapping practices and the
consolidation of knowledge prevalent during “Discovery,” the maps and written documents
bypass the period of nineteenth-century Mexican nation-building during “Re-Discovery” and
instead remain solely within the realm of scholarship. However, the irreconcilable and permanent

155
distance between the Mapa and its source community indicate the lingering effects of
“Discovery” and the logic of modernity/coloniality that continues to structure university
libraries. The truly decolonial gesture would be to return the Mapa to Teozacoalco and teach the
current community members how to read their own history.

156

Fig. 3.1. Mapa de Teozacoalco line drawing from Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Schrift
und Buch im Alten Mexico, Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1988. Page
137.

Fig. 3.2. Mapa de Teozacoalco from Ferdinand Anders and Maarten Jansen, Schrift und Buch im
Alten Mexico, Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1988. Plate 135.

157

Fig. 3.3. Title Page for Mapa de Teozacoalco Relación Geográfica. Benson Library at
University of Texas, Austin.

Fig. 3.4. Reproduction of the Mapa de Teozacoalco displayed in the Palacio Municipal in
Teozacoalco.

158

Fig. 3.5. Hand gestures from Nancy Troike, “The Interpretation of Postures and Gestures in the
Mixtec Codices,” The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico: A Conference
at Dumbarton Oaks, October 22nd and 23rd, 1977, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982.
Page 194.

Fig. 3.6. Four views of a South Australian aboriginal female according to Huxley’s
“photometric instructions,” c. 1879, from Frank Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply
Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century" in
Anthropology and Photography 1860 to 1920, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Page
101.

159

Fig. 3.7. David Lewis, photograph from the Impossible Science of Being commission, 1995,
from Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Page
136.

Fig. 3.8. Pushpamala N. and Claire Arni, The Ethnographic Series, 2000-2004. From
Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Page 138.

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Chapter 4. Casting Coatlicue in Mariana Castillo Deball’s Between You and the Image of
You That Reaches Me

Introduction

In the previous two chapters, I have analyzed three works in Tatiana Parcero’s Cartografía
Interior series by composing object biographies that inform a reading of the black-and-white
photographs that frame them. By drawing from relatively obscure Mixtec sources, Parcero
expands the visual vocabulary beyond the typical Aztec iconography that modern and
contemporary artists appropriate in their work. One of the most significant contributions in both
sections was my first-hand interaction with the contemporary leaders of the source communities
to learn about the continued impact of the objects’ removal for Jaltepec and Teozacoalco.
In the next two chapters, I shift from two-dimensional reproductions of Mixtec codices to
three-dimensional replicas of pre-Columbian objects. This turn to replicas foregrounds the
undoing of the “origin(ality) myth” by focusing on copies and multiple iterations of an object to
counteract the myth that all pre-Columbian objects are authentic “originals.” The existence of
pre- and post-Contact copies highlights an indigenous process of mass-production that
challenges a European monopoly over this “modern” technology. The temporal dimensions of
the “origin(ality) myth” are disputed in this chapter on the Coatlicue Statue, since the object was
carved between 1454 and 1506, rather than an ancient time of “origin” [Fig. 0.8]. This focus on
the Coatlicue Statue, one of the most famous Aztec images, also deviates from the previous two
chapters on relatively unknown Mixtec codices.
In this chapter, I analyze how Mariana Castillo Deball makes visible the history of the
Coatlicue in cast form. In her installation, Between You and the Image of You That Reaches Me
(2010), Castillo Deball scatters fragments of a green cast of the Coatlicue around the gallery

161
floor at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and the Musée d’Art Moderne in
Paris [Fig. 0.7]. I argue that the history of the Coatlicue is inextricably linked to its
reproductions in cast form for two reasons. Firstly, the Coatlicue Statue was unburied so that the
British showman and businessman William Bullock could make a cast of it. Secondly, the
interactions between the Coatlicue and the public outside of Mexico were achieved only through
its reproductions. Whether at World’s Fair in New Orleans, the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, or the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., cast
replicas of the Coatlicue were made to stand-in for the “original” Coatlicue. I argue that this
issue of visibility is especially important in the case of the Coatlicue because of the cycles of
burial, reburial, and multiplicity that characterize the statue’s history. The Coatlicue Statue was
effectively “disappeared” by the Aztecs, who buried the statue in the ground. It entered a few
cycles of unburial and reburial that inevitably resulted in the statue entering a discourse of “Re-
Discovery” that depended on its particularity as a singular masterpiece. This masterpiece was
made exceptionally visible in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, when this already enormous
monument was put on a pedestal and dramatically lit. The myth of this singular monument was
challenged when multiple iterations of the Coatlicue were made visible in plaster casts, and also
further undone when similar looking monuments were identified by Cecelia Klein and Elizabeth
Hill Boone.
In this chapter, I argue that Mariana Castillo Deball undoes the idea of a monolithic Aztec
national identity by fracturing a copy of the iconic Coatlicue Statue and dispersing it on the floor
of an art museum. The act of breaking the copy of the Coatlicue apart suggests a dismantling of
the notion of a singular national identity in favor of multiple identities, whether coalesced around
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, language group, location, etc. The imposition of a singular Aztec

162
identity in the late nineteenth-century delegitimized the cultural patrimony of peripheral non-
Aztec communities, who were further disenfranchised by economic and political policies. By
disassembling the Coatlicue, Castillo Deball takes apart this Aztec-centric identity and refuses to
provide a guide for putting the pieces back together again. Scattering the pieces on the floor is a
particularly apt decision for the Coatlicue, as the floor is an interstitial space between a display in
the museum and burial in the ground – the two places the Coatlicue and her copies most often
occupy. To highlight the display and dispensability of the Coatlicue in cast form, I compose an
object biography for one of the casts from its inception in the hands of Mexican bookseller and
cast-maker, Eufémio Abadiano, and its final location in the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History, formerly the U.S. National Museum. This case study is one of the multiple “Re-
Discoveries” of the Coatlicue Statue in the United States and Europe that were motivated by
foreign political and economic interests, and I will explain how those investments also
perpetuated an idea of the “ancient” Mexican past or Mesoamericanidad. Finally, Castillo
Deball’s artistic intervention is the latest in a series of artistic appropriations of the Coatlicue
Statue. I point to a few key instances of these engagements of the image of Coatlicue and argue
that the Coatlicue only enters an art context when mediated through the hands of a modern or
contemporary artist.
Literature Review

This section on casts of the Coatlicue fills an important gap within the literature of both
appropriations of pre-Columbian art and the history of casts in the United States. As previously
mentioned, several scholars have written about the appropriations of pre-Columbian visual
material in modern art and architecture, including Barbara Braun’s Pre-Columbian Art and the
Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources for Modern Art (1993), Majorie Ingle’s The

163
Mayan Revival Style: Art Deco Mayan Fantasy (1984), and the exhibition Pre-Columbian
Remix: The Art of Enrique Chagoya, Demián Flores, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Nadín Ospina
(Neuberger Museum of Art, April 28-July 14, 2013). Recent dissertations by Holly Barnet-
Sanchez (1993) and Ruth A. Phillips (2007),
190
as well as Jesse Lerner’s newly published book,
The Maya of Modernism: Art, Architecture, and Film (2011), have integrated notions of Pan-
Americanism, aestheticization of artifacts, and contemporary artistic appropriations into existing
scholarship.
Despite this plethora of scholarship on appropriations of pre-Columbian visual imagery,
very little has been written on actual reproductions of Mesoamerican artifacts, particularly the
casts of pre-Columbian monuments that once filled the halls of natural history museums. Diana
Fane and Curtis M. Hinsley’s contributions to the book, Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past: A
Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks (1990),
191
are two notable exceptions that provide inroads for
future research. At the same time, a recent resurgence in scholarly interest in nineteenth-century
casts collections has resulted in restoration and accession projects in North American and
European museums, as well as the recent publication of a 750-page tome, Plaster Casts: Making,
Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (2010).
192
Despite this

190
Barnet-Sanchez, “The Necessity of pre-Columbian Art”; R. Phillips, “‘Pre-Columbian
Revival’: Defining and Exploring a United States Architectural Style, 1910--1940” (City
University of New York, 2007).
191
Diana Fane, “Reproducing the Pre-Columbian Past: Casts and Models in Exhibitions of
Ancient America, 1824-1935,” in Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past: A Symposium at
Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th October 1990 (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection, 1993), 141–76; Curtis M. Hinsley, “In Search of the New World
Classical,” in Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past: A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 6th and 7th
October 1990 (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993),
105–21.
192
Frederiksen, Plaster Casts, 2010.

164
suggestive title that implies a comprehensive study, there are no articles dedicated to casts of
non-Western monuments – a blatant oversight in this history of casts. This chapter on the
Coatlicue Statue’s multiple iterations and its inextricable link to the history of cast technology is
an initial venture into a much larger project on the role of cast replicas of pre-Columbian
monuments in natural history museums.

History of Coatlicue

Original Meaning and Context
Before delving into the Coatlicue in cast form, I want to establish a basic understanding of
the original monument as discussed in the current literature. The Aztecs probably sculpted the
Coatlicue Statue between 1454 and 1506, perhaps in imitation of an earlier sculpture.
193
The
Coatlicue is commonly referred to as a representation of an earth goddess, though earlier
accounts identified her as a goddess of death. The stone statue stands at 2.50 meters tall and 1.60
meters wide, and weighs approximately 2 tons. The head is composed of two serpents in profile
whose eyes, fangs, and tongue converge into the two eyes, four teeth, and bifurcated tongue of
the goddess’ face — or rather where the head would be if Coatlicue had not been beheaded.
While the snakes look like a head, they also represent streams of blood in Aztec iconography;
these permanently frozen streams of blood support the argument that Coatlicue had been
decapitated.
Encircling the two sagging breasts lays a chain of alternating hearts and hands punctuated
by the outward face of a skull that simultaneously forms the main pendant of the necklace and

193
Jean Franco, “The Return of Coatlicue: Mexican Nationalism and the Aztec Past,” Journal of
Latin American Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (August 1, 2004): 217. Citing Esther Pasztory 1983.

165
the protruding buckle of the serpent belt around her waist. Snakeheads replace the dismembered
arms and a skirt of intertwined snakes form the exquisite skirt for which she is named. Her eagle
claws grasp the ground beneath her and the combination of bird and snake attributes harkens to
Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, who easily glides through earth, sky, and sea. The back of the
statue mimics many of the formal aspects of the front but is differentiated by two draping folds
that cascade beneath the skull buckle. The entire surface of the statue is intricately carved,
including the concealed carving under the feet of the statue, where one finds a frontal view of a
squatting figure with arms hinged at the elbow and a circular medallion with an embedded
square. This figure has been identified as Tlaloc-Tlatecuhtli,
194
Mictlantecuhtli,
195
or Tlaloc. The
Aztecs probably placed the statue at the Templo Mayor, where they eventually buried it shortly
after the consolidation of their empire in the Valley of Mexico and beyond, and roughly 100
years before the Spanish Conquest.
196

The Templo Mayor is comprised of two main temples: one dedicated to the god of war and
founding Aztec deity, Huitzilopochtli, and one to the god of rain, Tlaloc [Fig. 4.1]. Due to its
distinguishing garment and location near the Temple of Huitzilopochtli, scholars have identified
the statue as Coatlicue, Huitzilopochtli’s mother. According to Bernadino de Sahagún (1499-
1590), Coatlicue was sweeping when a tuft of feathers descended upon her. She tucked the tuft
between her breasts and suddenly became impregnated with Huitzilopochtli. When her four
hundred other children caught wind of the news, they prepared to kill their mother. Just in time,
Huitzilopochtli emerged fully formed and heavily armed from the womb and fought off his

194
Ann De León, “Coatlicue or How to Write the Dismembered Body,” MLN 125, no. 2 (2010):
279.
195
Franco, “The Return of Coatlicue,” 209.
196
Ibid., 205. Citing Matos Moctezuma 2002.

166
siblings, including Coyolxauhqui whose dismembered body rolled down the mountain of
Coatepec (“snake mountain”). A giant circular slab representing Coyolxauhqui’s fragmented
body was recently discovered at the foot of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, thereby further
solidifying the claim that the Temple of Huitzilopochtli referred to the mountain of Coatepec and
the entire complex dramatizes this founding Aztec myth.

Multiplicity and Mass Production
The academic community and larger public have largely accepted this interpretation of the
Coatlicue Statue, and is the version taught in both general survey courses and specialized
seminars. However, scholars Elizabeth Boone and Cecelia Klein proffer a different interpretation
of the Coatlicue Statue based on the fact that three nearly identical Coatlicues exist around the
vicinity of the Templo Mayor — a phenomenon for which the accepted Coatlicue myth cannot
explain. One of these statues is the Yolotlicue, discovered in 1933 at the corner of Seminario and
Guatemala near the west facade of the Templo Mayor, and the other examples (between 1-3) are
fragments located in the storerooms of the Museo Nacional de Antropología [Fig. 4.2].
197
Both
Boone and Klein claim that these statues actually represent tzitzimime, or celestial beings, which
Huitzilopochtli defeated.
198
Statues of the slain women would have served as a constant reminder
of Huitzilopochtil’s prowess and his ability to protect the citizens of Tenochtitlán. In a later
paper, Klein suggests another reading which emphasizes that Sahagún’s account does not take
into consideration that the statue is dismembered, and therefore she links the statue to the

197
Cecelia F. Klein, “A New Interpretation of the Aztec Statue Called Coatlicue, ‘Snakes-Her-
Skirt’,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 2 (March 20, 2008): 233.
198
Elizabeth H. Boone, “The Coatlicues at the Templo Mayor,” Ancient Mesoamerica 10, no. 02
(1999): 204.

167
creation of the current world. According to other sixteenth-century accounts, Coatlicue and four
of her sisters were sacrificed to put the fifth and present sun in motion and when they died, they
left behind their mantas, or skirts.
199
These skirts eventually enabled the resurrection of
Coatlicue and her sisters. Unlike previous attributions, Klein’s argument accounts for the large
size and material emphasis on the braided snake skirt.
The existence of multiple versions of the Coatlicue Statue and the fact that it may have
been based on an earlier sculpture challenge the Western conception of a singular masterpiece
whose execution is unsurpassed. While the Yolotlicue and other similar statues may not have
survived in such pristine states as the Coatlicue Statue, during their time of creation and display,
they may have been equally well crafted and highly revered. Perhaps the relative silence and
devalued positions of the other sculptures, particularly those relegated in dusty storerooms,
suggest a preference for highlighting a single masterpiece of Aztec stonework. The multiplicity
of the object undermines the uniqueness required for the designation of an original masterpiece
according to Western standards.
While the appellation of a masterpiece demands an individual instantiation, the existence
of multiple iterations of an object harkens to an opposite practice equally heralded by Western
worldview, namely that of industrialized mass-production. One technique of mass-production
already mentioned as central to the Coatlicue is her incarnation in plaster cast form. The Western
roots of cast production date back to the fourth century BCE, when the Greek sculptor
Lysistratos of Sikyon created a cast of a living person’s face in wax. From that wax impression,
he made a ceramic mold for a bronze statue.
200
This lineage of European cast making contrast

199
Klein, “A New Interpretation of the Aztec Statue Called Coatlicue, ‘Snakes-Her-Skirt’,” 229.
200
Frederiksen, Plaster Casts, 2010, 21.

168
with the history of cast-making in Mesoamerica, where the first pre-Columbian molds were
made from local fruits or vegetables and were used to decorate ceramic vessels. The cast objects
perfectly replicated the actual form and proportions of the original, but it was much easier to
produce and duplicate. While organic vegetables would have eventually disintegrated, the cast
form preserved the original forever.
201

This early form of cast production eventually grew to a large-scale operation during the
Classic Period site of Teotihuacan (450-600 CE), where archaeologists have recovered a
substantial cache of molds mostly used for hand-held figurines, small functional elements, and
decorative additions.
202
The archaeologist in charge of this excavation, Sigvald Linné argues that
this "pottery-moulding technique….must be looked upon as the incipient stage of
industrialization."
203
Like the existence of multiple Coatlicues, this notion of industrialization
undermines many of the basic assertions about the pre-Columbian past, particularly that of a
simple and backward civilization. If modernity is characterized as “progress, development, [and]
growth,”
204
then how do we account for an “ancient” civilization that already bears one of the
hallmarks of modernity, namely industrialization? I contend that an emic form of pre-Columbian

201
The longevity of the durable sustenance in cast form makes even more sense in the case of
Peru where, "often actual specimens of maize, squashes, peanuts, and fruits have been used for
making molds for the burial vases found interred with the mummies” Safford, William E.,
“Food-Plants and Textiles of Ancient Americas,” Congress of Americanists 19 (1917): 16.
Safford points out that these objects are such accurate instantiations that they can be identified
and compared to current varieties, or that had these specific plants been eradicated, the casts
could give insight into the extinct species. This ability to reconstruct a vanished original from a
preserved cast is also one function of modern casts of pre-Columbian objects. At the NMNH,
one researcher was using the cast of a pre-Columbian object to study the original, which had
unfortunately been damaged.
202
Sigvald Linné, Archaeological Researches at Teotihuacan, Mexico, 2003, 123.
203
Ibid., 193.
204
Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, xviii.

169
mass-produced mold technology since the Classic Period challenges the Western monopoly over
industrialization, while at the same time countering the “origin(ality) myth,” which always
positions the pre-Columbian as an “original” object rather than a copy.
A Vicious Cycle: Burial, Unearthing, Casting, and Reinterment
The relatively recent designation of the Coatlicue as a masterpiece of Aztec sculpture
obscures a long history of fear, revulsion, and curiosity that resulted in a cycle of the statue’s
burial, excavation, and reinterment. Charting this cycle reveals the shifting significance of the
Coatlicue Statue from its initial location alongside Greek and Roman casts, to its unearthing and
casting motivated by foreign interests, and its later incorporation into the Aztec pantheon in the
Museo Nacional de Antropología and in modern art. At each of these points, I argue that the
display of the original is inextricably linked to cast replicas, and therefore one cannot tell the
history of the Coatlicue without referencing plaster incarnations. To further illuminate this
relationship between the original and its copies, I compose an object biography for one of
Coatlicue’s copies by Eufémio Abadiano in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History.
The Aztecs themselves first buried the Coatlicue Statue near the Templo Mayor in
Tenochtitlán after consolidating power in the Valley of Mexico and surrounding regions.
205

According to the account by Antonio de León y Gama (1735-1802), the statue lay buried until
August 13, 1790 when workers discovered it while building an underground aqueduct for the
palace of viceroy Conde de Revillagigedo (1740-1799). In a departure from previous trends to

205
Franco, “The Return of Coatlicue,” 205. Cciting Matos Moctezuma 2002.

170
either destroy or reincorporate stone monuments into colonial architectural projects, the
government requested the removal and storage of the Coatlicue Statue.
206

In early September 1790, the Spanish magistrate Bernardo Bonavia y Zapata and viceroy
Revillagigedo ordered for the relocation of the heavy statue to the Real y Pontificia Universidad
de Mexico, where it stood among casts Greco-Roman casts donated by Charles III (1759-
1788).
207
This is the first instance in the history of the Coatlicue Statue that is linked to the
technique of cast production, though only by vicinity. The collection of Greek and Roman casts
formed the foundation of the national sculpture collection in Mexico City [Fig. 4.3].
208
These
casts were followed by the arrival of another group of 192 casts in 1791 ordered from the Real
Academia de San Fernando in Madrid by Jerónimo Antonio Gil (1731-1798), director of the
Real Academia de San Carlos.
209
These Greek and Roman casts were clearly intended to help
young artists master Neoclassical painting and sculpture techniques. The Coatlicue Statue and
the casts shared similar formal characteristics since they were all three-dimensional sculptures of
ancient gods, though they had entirely different functions within the university.

206
Michael J Schreffler, “The Making of an Aztec Goddess : a Historiographic Study of the
Coatlicue,” 1994, 9. Citing Bullock 1824; Antonio de León y Gama and Carlos María de
Bustamante, Descripción Histórica y Cronológica de Las Dos Piedras: Que Con Ocasión Del
Nuevo Empedrado Que Se Está Formando En La Plaza Principal de México, Se Hallaron En
Ella El Año de 1790, 2a ed (México: Imprenta del ciudadano Alejandro Valdés, 1832), 80.
Bernal, A History of Mexican Archaeology, 39.
207
Schreffler, “The Making of an Aztec Goddess,” 9–10; Luz Aurora Pimentel, “Ekphrasis and
Cultural Discourse,” Neohelicon 30, no. 1 (January 2003): 61.
208
For the sake of comparison, the first casts of Western sculpture arrived in the English colonies
of North America in 1728. Interestingly, the collection brought by John Smibert was intended to
“serve as teaching aids in Dean George Berkley’s proposed college for instructing the Indians of
Bermuda (Foote, p. 17),” McNutt, “Plaster Casts after Antique Sculpture,” 159. The plan fell
through, though the cast collection was used by acclaimed American artists like John Singleton
Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and John Trumbull.
209
Frederiksen, Plaster Casts, 2010, 230–231.

171
The reception of these casts by the late colonial Mexican elite cannot be confirmed, though
Michael J. Schreffler suggests that they may have viewed the Greek and Roman cast sculptures
as an imposition of European aesthetic values and Classical heritage onto the New World.
Schreffler contends that the ruling elite may have considered the forcing of the Classical past as
“one of its imperialistic tools, designed to marginalize the subaltern population and legitimize
New Spain as a land worthy of colonization,”
210
yet the importation of so many cast objects also
served as an acknowledgment of the potential of the New World to adopt and become part of this
history. Perhaps in a move to distinguish themselves from this Western Classical canon and
assert an indigenous sculptural and historical prowess, the Mexican elite positioned the Coatlicue
next to the casts. Of course, this interpretation is mere speculation on the part of Schreffler and
should not be unquestionably adopted as fact.
The Coatlicue was removed from the room with the Greek and Roman casts, perhaps due
to the objections of the university professors and the rector who may have disapproved of the
monstrous Aztec sculpture rubbing elbows with the refined works of European artistic
mastery.
211
The university officials relocated the Coatlicue to the courtyard, where members of
the indigenous population began revering the statue by leaving offerings and other indications of
idol worship.
212
This repositioning from the room of casts to the courtyard must have been
completed by 1800 when the humanist and scientist Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769-
1859) visited Mexico City to view the sculpture collection at the Academy, since von Humboldt
“suggested that the casts of Greek and Roman works be placed next to pre-Hispanic sculptures in

210
Schreffler, “The Making of an Aztec Goddess,” 17.
211
Ibid., 10. Citing Bernal 1980, p. 85.
212
Florescano, “The Creation of the Museo Nacional de Antropología of Mexico and Its
Scientific, Educational, and Political Purposes,” 86.

172
order to show that the latter were similar to those created by Hindus and Egyptians.”
213
Clearly,
had the Coatlicue been exhibited in the university alongside the casts, Humboldt would not have
made these remarks, though his insight unwittingly speaks to the previous display and points to
his aesthetic values that sought to legitimize (though also orientalize) pre-Columbian artifacts as
important contributions to world heritage. The university officials grew increasingly concerned
about the indigenous worship of the Coatlicue and decided to rebury the statue in the courtyard.
Three years later, Humboldt revisited Mexico City after reading the Italian version of León
y Gama’s published account of the Coatlicue in Descripción histórica y cronológica de las dos
piedras (Historical and chronological description of the two stones) (1792).
214
In 1803,
Humboldt solicited the help of the Bishop of Monterey to have the university officials unearth
the Coatlicue from the ground. Humboldt describes the experience as thus:
"We saw him lying down, and, true, the huge mass of this colossus - once suspended in
the air - is amazing. I accompanied the bishop to his convent and then went back to the
university in order to contemplate the colossus once more, but he had seen the light of
day for just 20 minutes; when I arrived, he had been buried again."
215

This rapid reburial suggests the power that the monolith retained for indigenous worshipers
and the clergy’s fear of rekindling Aztec beliefs. The statue remained buried until 1823, when
the English traveler, collector, and museum founder William Bullock (c. 1773-1849) [Fig. 4.4]
arrived in Mexico City and requested to view and make a cast reproduction of the Coatlicue for
his upcoming exhibition, “Ancient Mexico,” which opened in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly,

213
Frederiksen, Plaster Casts, 2010, 23.
214
Schreffler, “The Making of an Aztec Goddess,” 10–11.
215
Pimentel, “Ekphrasis and Cultural Discourse,” 62. Citing Zea, 1999,11-12.

173
London in April 1824 and closed in September 1825 [Fig. 4.5, Fig. 4.6, and Fig. 4.7].
216

William Bullock visited Mexico and made casts of other monumental sculptures including the
Calendar Stone and models of important sites, such as the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.
With the help of Señor Del Río, Professor of Mineralogy, Bullock convinced the clergy to have
the Coatlicue disinterred so that he could create a cast for his museum exhibition. In the exhibit
catalogue, A Description of the Unique Exhibition called Ancient Mexico; Collected on the Spot
in 1823, by the Assistance of the Mexican Government, and Now Open for Public Inspection at
the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, the Coatlicue Statue is listed as No. 17, the “Great Idol of the
Goddess of war,”
217
which was one of the contemporary interpretations of the statue. However,
the visual description of the head “of two rattle snakes united”
218
and “necklace composed of
human hands, hearts, and skulls,”
219
as well as the history of disinterment by Humboldt secure
the identification of the statue as the Coatlicue. The image of the Coatlicue towering over the rest
of the sculptures in the first few pages of the catalogue reinforce this attribution and provide a
glimpse into the layout of the exhibit [Fig. 4.6].

216
For a detailed biography on William Bullock, see Edward P. Alexander, “William Bullock:
Little-Remembered Museologist and Showman,” Curator 28, no. 2 (1985): 117–47. It should
also be noted that this exhibition on “Ancient Mexico” was coupled with a concurrent exhibition
on “Modern Mexico” in which Bullock tried to lure British investment in Mexico. Bullock
directed the Mexican Company and owned a silver mine in Mexico. Though initially lucrative,
these endeavors eventually failed and he ended up selling the cast collection to the British
Museum to keep his silver mine afloat. Robert D. Aguirre theorizes Bullock’s enterprises as a
form of “informal empire” in contrast with the “formal empire” of the Spaniards.
217
W. William Bullock, London Museum, and W. William Bullock, A Description of the Unique
Exhibition Called Ancient Mexico [electronic Resource]: Collected on the Spot in 1823 by the
Assistance of the Mexican Government: And Now Open for Public Inspection at the Eqyptian
Hall, Piccadilly (London: Printed for the proprietor, 1824), 41.
218
Ibid., 42.
219
Ibid., 43.

174
The fact that the Coatlicue was only unearthed upon a foreigner’s request indicates that
initial appreciation for the statue was driven by outside interests. By this point in 1823, the
Mexican government still did not know how to make the Coatlicue visible, since it lacked the
scientific rigor of the Calendar Stone and the victorious narrative of the Stone of Tizoc. The
statue did not belong among its Greek and Roman deity counterparts, nor could it reside in the
courtyard lest it rekindle the fervor of indigenous worshippers. In 1825, the statue was eventually
relocated to the National Museum, where it currently stands today, though not in its prominent
location. According to Jean Franco, “the statue of Coatlicue, with its references to human
sacrifice, was difficult to incorporate into a national ideology that was then in its incipient
stage.”
220

It was not until over forty years later that the statue’s significance and status in Mexico
shifted dramatically.
221
In 1867, President Benito Juárez (1806-1872) proclaimed the importance
of honoring the ancient pre-Columbian past for consolidating a national Mexican identity. A
drawing shows an assorted conglomeration of Aztec sculptures, vessels, and weapons apparently
collected during the mid-nineteenth century, and includes a small-scale version of the Coatlicue
Statue in the back left-hand corner [Fig. 4.8]. This initial step toward pre-Columbian
reclamation gained traction and momentum, reaching its pinnacle with the opening of the Salón
de Monolitos (Gallery of Monoliths) by Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915) on September 16, 1887 in
commemoration of Mexican Independence Day [Fig. 1.5]. The Gallery of Monoliths was a long

220
Franco, “The Return of Coatlicue,” 207.
221
Jean Franco identified the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) as the central turning point in the
reevaluation of the Coatlicue, and notes Saturnino Herran’s 1915 frieze as paradigmatic of this
shift. I locate it sooner based on its location in the Gallery of the Monoliths and its depiction
among Aztec images. Ibid., 210.

175
narrow corridor with a single arched wrought-iron gate and a series of skylights to allow for
natural light. Upon entering the gate and turning left, the monolithic Coatlicue statue appeared
perched upon a rectangular pedestal. The Xochipilli statue poised in front and below of the
Coatlicue appears to be peering up at the Coatlicue with reverence and awe.
Whereas previously European explorers and collectors, such as Humboldt and Bullock,
instigated the recovery and rediscovery of pre-Columbian artifacts, in the mid-nineteenth century
the Mexican government itself heralded the pre-Columbian past as an essential, emic foundation
of modern Mexico. The Aztec imperial past, in particular, became the building block upon which
a non-European, distinctly indigenous history could be constructed.
222
Aztec history was
particularly low-hanging fruit because it contained the seeds of a major ancient civilization,
including its own artistic and architectural masterpieces, heroic tales of battle, and a roster of
divinities and great leaders. The heart of the Aztec empire beat at Tenochtitlán, the epicenter of
present-day Mexico City, thereby delineating a ready-made spatial conduit between the past and
present. The initiatives by Presidents Juárez and Diáz to celebrate the pre-Columbian past
centered around the Aztecs specifically, or rather, the idea of the Aztecs. The government did not
reciprocate or seek to benefit the surviving descendants of the Nahua-speaking people or any
indigenous populations and often times directly sabotaged the native population by
disenfranchising them politically and economically, and by removing objects of archaeological
or anthropological interest from these communities to Mexico City. Further away from the
capital, communities in other parts of Mexico were marginalized on sociopolitical and economic
levels, and their cultural heritage was disregarded or co-opted as "Aztec" in forming a national
Mexican identity. The turn-of-the-century image of Mexico revolved around a heraldry of Aztec

222
León, “Coatlicue or How to Write the Dismembered Body,” 259.

176
images, artifacts, and mythologies meant as a rallying cry to unite Mexican citizens, the chosen
“mestizo” race, but built around the same imperial iconography that the Aztecs themselves
employed years earlier.
223

Casts as Portable Conveyors of Mexican Identity

Even before the initiatives by Presidents Juárez and Díaz, Mexican leaders attempted to
protect the cultural patrimony of the nation. In 1829, Mexican statesman Carlos María
Bustamante (1774-1848) introduced legislation that forbade the removal of pre-Columbian
artifacts beyond Mexico’s border. While the law did not stem the tide of archaeological objects
beyond the Mexican border, as perhaps best exemplified by E.H. Thompson’s removal of piece
of Uxmal to Chicago in 1893,
224
it did contribute to the increased movement of plaster casts from
Mexico to the United States. Plaster casts were an affordable way to meet the needs of
encyclopedic museums and temporary World’s Fairs, which wanted to include pre-Columbian
objects without the difficulties or risk of borrowing the original artifacts. Since casts often
blended in with authentic artifacts, the viewer often remained unaware of, or at least unfazed by,
the casts as “stand-ins” for the original monument. This binational trade of casts of pre-
Columbian monuments in the nineteenth-century has not previously been discussed, as most
scholars focus on the transatlantic movement of casts from Mexico to Europe or from Europe to

223
It should be noted that this appropriation of the pre-Columbian past follows a similar strategy
of ancient appropriation not only evident in the heralding of a Greek and Roman past during the
sixteenth-century Renaissance, but also during the twelfth-century appropriation of ancient texts
and monuments. For more on this phenomenon, see Byron Hamann, “The Social Life of Pre-
Sunrise Things,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 3 (June 1, 2002): 351–82.
224
Hinsley, “In Search of the New World Classical,” 112..

177
the United States.
225
As a first step into this history of cross-border exchange of casts, I introduce
the Mexican bookseller and cast-maker, Eufémio Abadiano, who made casts of pre-Columbian
monuments from the collection in the Museo Nacional de Mexico, later renamed as the Museo
Nacional de Antropología.
Eufémio Abadiano came from a long line of booksellers and his store “Abadiano’s Ancient
Book-store” was the “oldest in America” and dated back to 1684.
226
Eufémio had a different
vision than his predecessors and, instead of focusing entirely on selling books, he turned his
attention to founding a magazine devoted to Mexican literature and history, and to producing
casts of famous pre-Columbian artifacts in the Museo Nacional de Mexico. On April 1, 1887, he
auctioned off the entire collection of Abadiano’s Ancient Book-store, including ancient
paintings, furniture, books, and various objects [Fig. 4.9]. In addition to “thousands of volumes

225
The majority of the scholarship focuses on the casts of Désiré Charnay made for the
Trocadero Museum in Paris. Several of these casts also ended up alongside Eufémio Abadiano’s
casts in the Smithsonian.
226
Although not exclusively owned by the same family since the seventeenth century, the
bookstore that Eufémio Abadiano inherited did have roots to 1684 when Diego Calderón
Benavides took over Doña Paula Benavides' printing shop, which had several different names
over the years, including “Imprenta Antuerpia," "Imprenta Plantiniana" and "Imprenta del
Superior Gobierno.” In 1732, the great-granddaughter of Doña Paula Benavides inherited the
“Imprenta del Superior Gobierno," which continued operations until 1767, when the shop
merged with Licenciando José de Jáuregui, who recently purchased the Biblioteca Mexicana
bookshop from Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren, a famed Mexican humanist and bibliographer.
The business continued in the Jáuregui family until 1817 when the business was sold to
Alejandro Valdés, who became the imperial printer for the government of Agustín de Iturbide in
1821. Ten years later in 1831, Valdés’ bookstore merged with the store run by Luis Abadiano
and his two sons Francisco and Dionisio, and in 1835, the “Imprenta de Luis Abadiano y
Valdes”mofficially opened on calle de Tacuba número 4 at the corner of calle de Santo Domingo
with a printed dedication to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The store remained in good hands until
1883, when Francisco Abadiano died and passed the bookstore onto his son, Eufémio Abadiano.
I have recreated this timeline based on the documents found in the Mexicana Manuscripts, Sutro
Library Special Collections, University of California, San Francisco, accessed March 6, 2012.

178
of Mexican history, literature, religion, philosophy, and political theory,”
227
he also sold the
largest collection of nineteenth-century Mexican pamphlets in the world to Adolph Sutro, a
German émigré and later two-term San Francisco mayor [Fig. 4.10 and Fig. 4.11] These
pamphlets now make up the majority of the Mexicana Collection of the Sutro Library in San
Francisco State University.
228

At the same time that Eufémio Abadiano put the bookstore items on auction, he also began
making, circulating, and selling casts of pre-Columbian monuments from the Museo Nacional de
Mexico. He included thirty-four of the casts that he produced in the Descriptive Catalogue of the
Archaeological, Historical and Artistic Collections of Eufemio Abadiano, published by Franco-
American print in New Orleans in 1885 [Fig. 4.12]. The casts were housed in Chartres Street
No. 45 during the New Orleans World Fair, and this is where key players in the foundation of the
Smithsonian U.S. National Museum, Otis T. Mason, Curator of Ethnology, and R. Edward Earll,
Honorary Curator of the U.S. National Museum, had first come across Abadiano’s casts. The
cast collection ranged from the most famous Aztec monumental sculptures, like the Aztec

227
Michael Mathes, “A Bibliophile’s Dream: Adolph Sutro in Mexico,” The Book Club of
California Quarterly News-Letter, 1980, 74.
228
Adolph Sutro was born in Germany in 1830 and immigrated to San Francisco in 1850, where
he excelled in the field of mining engineering. He served a two-year term as the mayor of San
Francisco from 1895-1897, owned a large percentage of San Francisco, and opened the largest
private library in the United States. In the late 1870s, he began collecting books and manuscripts
for his collection, traveling the world and purchasing everything from documents to Egyptian
mummies. He traveled to Mexico in 1885 and 1889 and seems to have personally purchased
manuscripts in a “per-volume amount for entire stocks of evidently old material, regardless of its
content.” W. Michael Mathes, Mexican Manuscripts in the Sutro Library, San Francisco: A
Catalog (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1984), 417.Though 60%
(100,000 volumes) of his collection was destroyed in a fire in the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake, the majority of the Mexicana collection remained undisturbed and currently resides
in San Francisco State University.

179
Calendar Stone, Coatlicue Statue, and Stone of Tizoc, to lesser-known smaller objects like the
grasshopper (chapulin) and stone yoke.
After seeing Eufémio Abadiano’s casts in New Orleans, Mason, Earll, and G. Brown Goode,
Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, arranged for Abadiano to deposit his cast
collection at the Smithsonian.
229
Using the Descriptive Catalogue as a guide, each of the casts
were priced according to their size with the Coatlicue Statue, or No. 2 “Teoyaomiqui or Goddess
of Death” valued at $2,000.
230
On May 29, 1885, two sets of casts (one for display and one for
storage, totaling 12,894 tons!) left New Orleans via railroad and arrived one month later on June
25, 1885. The agreement stated that Abadiano could “deposit” the set of duplicate casts at the
U.S. National Museum until a buyer willing to pay $7,660 for the forty casts stepped forward
(the duplicate “storage” cast collection cost the same). The Smithsonian U.S. National Museum
paid for shipping and installation costs, including Abadiano’s and his translator Wendell
McLaughlin’s four-month stay in Washington D.C. [Fig. 4.13]. On October 21, 1885, Abadiano
completed the installation of his casts in the museum alongside those received from Désiré
Charnay that were previously on display in the Trocadéro Museum in Paris.

229
“Accession File 16185,” June 25, 1885, Accession Records, Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History, Washington D.C. This file contains hundreds of pages of documents related to
the acquisition and display of Abadiano’s casts, ranging from this early acceptance of the
Smithsonian’s proposition from Eufémio Abadiano on May 22, 1885 to receipts verifying the
total amount that Abadiano and his translator Wendell McLaughlin were paid for transporting
the casts from New Orleans and installing them at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
230
Eufemio Abadiano, Descriptive Catalogue of the Archæological, Historical and Artistic
Collections of Eufemio Abadiano. (New Orleans: Franco-American Print, 1885).

180
From Place to Place: Tracking the Coatlicue in the Smithsonian
Using archival records from the National Museum of Natural History,
231
I have
reconstructed the evolution of the display of Abadiano’s casts, from a very prominent position in
the rotunda of the U.S. National Museum in the late 1890s to their current location in off-site
storage pods. By tracing this path of display locations and contexts, I suggest a shift in curatorial
priorities from visualizing ancient civilizations through reproductions and cultural artifacts to an
emphasis on the natural environment, including minerals, animals, and dinosaurs over the 130
years of the U.S. National Museum, now called the National Museum of Natural History.
Once it arrived in Washington, D.C., the cast of Coatlicue held a very prominent position in the
Rotunda of the National Museum at the entrance to the East Hall in the 1890s [Fig. 4.14]. The
statue once stood to the right of the full-size plaster model of the Statue of Freedom by Thomas
Crawford, whose bronze statue tops the Capitol dome [Fig. 4.15]. When the new U.S. National
Museum opened across the Mall in 1910, the cast of Coatlicue was relocated to the center of the
Hall of Latin American Archaeology in between two models of temples along with other pre-
Columbian artifacts [Fig. 4.16]. These “artifacts” were a mix of authentic objects and plaster
replicas, all displayed in the same glass case. The curators grouped the objects seemingly
according to formal considerations, with the larger casts and models in the middle and smaller
items in uniform display cases along the periphery and lining the back. Mayan objects were
interspersed with Aztec ones; sculptures of gods were juxtaposed with yokes for the ballgame.
This random conglomeration of civilizations ignored the temporal or geographic boundaries of
different civilizations and yoked them together as undefined symbols of the “pre-Columbian” or

231
“Hall 21, 22, and 23 Exhibit Photos,” n.d., Photograph Binders, Smithsonian National
Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C.

181
as signs of Mesoamericanidad. In an attempt to create an encyclopedic museum, the Smithsonian
elided important distinguishing factors and the exhibit appeared as a formally organized but
factually undisciplined collection.
This hodgepodge of real and reproduced objects from a range of pre-Columbian
civilizations was reconfigured in 1952, when the hall was subject to the “museum modernization
project” led by John C. Ewers to “integrat[e] all the disciplines of anthropology in Latin
America.”
232
The focus of the hall shifted from a “cluttered” conglomeration to a streamlined
showcase that “show[ed] human ecology, the interrelationship of man and his environment,
during various time periods up to the present in geographical zones ranging from the plains to the
high Andes and from the tropics to the desert.”
233
The inclusion of two mannequins carving stone
is one of the most powerful examples of this shift from objects to a new emphasis on the
“interrelationship of man and his environment” [Fig. 4.17Error! Reference source not found.].
Despite this pedagogical turn in museum display, the cast of the Coatlicue State still remained
out of context, this time lodged between casts of Mayan hieroglyphs and a display case of pre-
Columbian pottery [Fig. 4.18]. After the 1952 rehanging, the Coatlicue seems to fall out of the
record books and does not currently reside in the storage pods. Either the Coatlicue is lost, or
more likely, deaccessioned and discarded of, perhaps due to disrepair.
By tracing the cast of the Coatlicue from the World’s Fair in New Orleans to its different
locations within the Smithsonian, I have highlighted the fact that the curators struggle to find a
suitable location to make the Coatlicue visible. The statue’s prowess does not come across when

232
“Highlights of Latin American Archaeology,” n.d., Hall 21, 22, 23 Exhibition Photos,
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C.
233
Ibid.

182
juxtaposed with the large Statue of Freedom in the Rotunda, and its specificity as an Aztec
representation of an earth goddess is lost when sandwiched between models of temples in the
Hall of Latin American Archaeology. Its latest location next to full-scale Mayan hieroglyphic
panels makes the least amount of sense, and suggests that the Coatlicue does not quite fit in the
narrative proposed by the curators. The necklace of alternating hearts and hands, the bifurcated
snakehead face, and the overall monstrosity of the object do not find analogues in other pre-
Columbian imagery and make the object difficult to parse. This inability to place the Coatlicue in
the National Museum of Natural History may have led to its eventual demise. Other institutions
have solved this problem of including the Coatlicue without incorporating her into the larger
narrative by placing her outside. At the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a cast replica of the
Coatlicue was situated near the entrance to the Temple of Xochicalco [Fig. 1.6], and she
appeared again in the sculpture garden during the exhibition, "Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art"
at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in the 1940s [Fig. 4.19]. By relocating the
Coatlicue outside, the curators avoided the problem of engaging her within a conversation with
other objects and also recuperated the original location of the Coatlicue’s display.
Although the cast of the Coatlicue no longer exists, two of Abadiano’s other casts have
survived in storage pods and as source images for later architectural elements during Pan-
Americanism. This slight detour into the history of the casts of the Xochipilli, Aztec god of
flowers, and a rain deity from Uxmal opens onto a larger discussion of the political possibilities
of pre-Columbian visual culture in Washington, D.C., thereby proposing another afterlife for
Abadiano’s casts. Both the Xochipilli and the Uxmal rain deity were incorporated as
architectural elements in the Pan-American Union headquarters, which was inaugurated on April
26, 1910. The designation of the Pan-American Union headquarters in Washington, D.C. was the

183
culminating act of the United States’ cooptation of Pan-Americanism, Simón Bolívar's early-
nineteenth-century vision of a united economic and political front in Latin America. When the
center of gravity shifted from Latin America to the United States, the latter co-opted the political
force behind Pan-Americanism and transformed it into a diplomatic arm that reached out to the
poorer countries to the south. Rather than working together as equal partners, the United States
positioned itself as the wiser, richer, and more powerful leader and elaborated policies
accordingly.
The political appropriation of Pan-Americanism was reinforced by the visual incorporation
of pre-Columbian visual elements into the Pan-American Union complex, later renamed the
Office of the American States (OAS). The architectural design of Pan-American Union complex
was determined by a competition, which Albert Kelsey and Paul Philippe Cret won. Kelsey, in
particular, was the driving force behind the incorporation of Mesoamerican motifs and visited
archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula, museums of Mexico City, and the National
Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. as part of a "crash course on pre-Columbian
architecture."
234
During his visit to the latter, he would have come across Abadiano’s Xochipilli
Statue [Fig. 4.20] and the Uxmal rain deity [Fig. 4.21], which may have provided templates for
architectural elements of the outdoor pool [Fig. 4.22] and the loggia walls [Fig. 4.23Error!
Reference source not found.], respectively. In designing these elements of the Pan-American
Union complex, Kelsey may have drawn artistic inspiration from Abadiano’s casts. Whereas
eighteenth-century Mexican art students copied from casts of Greek and Roman sculptures, here
we find an American architect imitating plaster casts of pre-Columbian monuments.

234
Gonzalez, Designing Pan-America U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere,
84.

184
Kelsey’s appropriation of the Xochipilli Statue and the Uxmal rain deity was part of a
larger phenomenon brewing since the turn-of-the-century, namely the recognition of “Primitive
Art” as a legitimate art historical category. As U.S. and European artists began to draw
inspiration from objects that normally resided in natural history museum, the cultural taste-
makers and authorities (namely curators, critics, and academics) needed to account for the
abstract and seemingly avant-garde quality of these non-western images and objects.
235
Picasso's
admiration for the tribal objects in the Trocadéro Museum in Paris and his incorporation of
African masks into his paintings is perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon.
236
As
the cultural products from non-western civilizations became incorporated into fine art
museums,
237
avant-garde cultural magazines,
238
and modern art production, a major
epistemological and ontological shift occurred. Rather than studying the cultural context of the
object's production and use-value, the object became valued for its aesthetic qualities.
239
Within
the space of the art museum, Primitive Art was given the same display treatment as Modern Art,

235
Errington, “Progressivist Stories and the Pre-Columbian Past: Notes on Mexico and the
United States,” 220.
236
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and
Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 228.
237
Key exhibitions of include the 1940s show, "Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art" at MoMA, the
1984 show "'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” at MoMA,
the opening of New York's Museum of Primitive Man in 1954, and the foundation of the
Rockefeller Wing of Primitive Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1982.
238
Erica Segre, Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualisation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-
Century Mexican Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 251.
239
Hinsley, “In Search of the New World Classical,” 105. Kubler denies that it is possible to
separate the art from the artifact: “no artifact is conceivable without art; no work of art can be
divested of its function as a tool, and the interval between art and artifact is a graded
series. There literally is art in every artifact and vice versa; in every work of art there lies a
shadow of an artifact or tool"George Kubler, Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art,
Yale Publications in the History of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 17.

185
and the objects were "given dramatic lighting, placed into vitrines, and onto pedestals."
240

Suddenly the term "masterpiece" emerged as an appropriate designation for non-western objects
previously dismissed as unimportant, idolatrous, or ritualistic.
241

Appropriations by Modern and Contemporary Artists

The Coatlicue in Modern Mexican Art
In returning to the Coatlicue Statue, it appears that the Coatlicue only moves inside the art
gallery when modern or contemporary artists appropriate her image. Her mediation through the
hands of artists makes her visible to a wider audience, though her meaning is also reconfigured
in the process. One of the earliest examples is Saturnino Herrán’s (1887-1918) Coatlicue
Transformed (1918), which was a study for the mural Nuestros dioses [Fig. 4.24].
242
In the
painting, the Coatlicue is clearly recognizable as the double-headed serpent atop a rectangular
body with a necklace of alternating hearts and hands and donning an entwined serpent skirt.
However, emerging from the bifurcated serpent tongue is the bent head of Christ, whose hands
seem to merge with those on the necklace and whose knees protrude from the serpent skirt. The
painting merges two sacrificial figures central to Aztec and Catholic religions, perhaps to suggest
points of convergence in the formation of the new mestizo race. According to Zamora, Herrán
planned to flank the painting with a panel of indigenous worshipers on the left and Spanish

240
Errington, “Progressivist Stories and the Pre-Columbian Past: Notes on Mexico and the
United States,” 222.
241
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 228–229.
242
Unfortunately, Herrán’s early and untimely death at age thirty-one prevented the completion
of the mural, though fortunately the study is preserved.

186
worshipers on the right.
243
In this example, the Aztec goddess is transformed through European
oil paint into a religious symbol for a new Mexican race.
In 1932-1933, Diego Rivera (1886-1957) adapted the Coatlicue Statue’s form in fashioning
a giant machine in the bottom right-hand corner of the south wall of the Detroit Industry mural
[Fig. 4.25]. A few years later, Rivera more directly appropriated the Coatlicue Statue in the Pan-
American Unity mural (1939-1940) for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San
Francisco [Fig. 4.26Error! Reference source not found.]. Here the Coatlicue is literally half-
human and half-machine, as the downward hanging breast on the left transforms into a metal
piston on the right and the braided serpent skirt adopts the clean geometric lines of a steel base.
Like the Coatlicue-Christ, the Coatlicue-machine merges two cultures, from the ancient
handcrafted tradition of sculptural representations of an anthropomorphic earth goddess to the
promise of mass-produced, mechanized production in the service of a Pan-American vision.
Unlike Herrán's painting, the mural technology self-consciously references an ancient pre-
Columbian technique that Rivera, at the insistence of José Vasconcelos,
244
rejuvenated. Rivera’s
homage to Coatlicue reappeared once more in the ceiling mosaic of Coatlicue at the Anahuacalli,
Rivera’s museum that houses his collection of 60,000 pre-Columbian artifacts that opened in
1963 [Fig. 4.27]. Here, the Coatlicue is schematized in black-and-white stone mosaic and hovers
above the viewer in direct contrast to its original position buried underground.
In both the Herrán and Rivera works, the Coatlicue emerges like a blank canvas or open
signifier willing to bend to the whims of the artists’ desire. The flattening of the Coatlicue in

243
Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), xiii, xv.
244
Vasconcelos paid for Rivera to train fresco techniques in Italy so that he could produce murals
in Mexico of high caliber.

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two-dimensional space denies the objecthood of the original sculpture, though the larger-than-
life size of Rivera’s monumental murals conveys its grandeur. The Coatlicue can be read either
as a religious icon or symbol of ancient sculptural mastery, and remains open to interpretation,
perhaps since it is one of the most unresolved and enigmatic monuments, and one that Boone
argues “continues to evoke the greatest emotional response.”
245
The Coatlicue still manages to
inspire contemporary female artists and writers working today, exemplified by the performance
artist Jesusa Rodríguez, the theater group Teatro Coatlicue, and the Chicana writer Gloria
Anzaldúa.
246

Between You and the Image of You That Reaches Me

Mariana Castillo Deball’s installation, Between You and the Image of You that Reaches
Me, is the latest instantiation of a cast of the Coatlicue Statue [Fig. 0.7Error! Reference source
not found.]. The title immediately signals a distance between "you" and the "image of you that
reaches me." If we assign this “you” to the Coatlicue Statue, then Castillo Deball is signaling a
separation of the Coatlicue Statue and the image of the Coatlicue Statue. Perhaps the “you” is the
original Coatlicue Statue in Mexico City and the “image of you” is the cast of the Coatlicue.
Between those two objects lies the entire history of cast reproductions of the Coatlicue. Or
perhaps we could expand it to other impressions of the Coatlicue that circulate independent of
the original. Between “you” and the “image of you” is the history of your circulation through
lithographs, paintings, casts, murals, and photographs. Between “you” and the “image of you that

245
Boone, “The Coatlicues at the Templo Mayor,” 189.
246
Franco, “The Return of Coatlicue,” 216.

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reaches me” stretches a geographic distance and temporal expanse that I am trying to breach. In
the gaps between the pieces of you scattered on the ground is a dead, non-kinetic space of refusal
to reconcile, a rejection of the need to put you back together again. Because when I put you back
together again, I'm literally rebuilding your myth and facilitating other people's appropriation of
you. This urge to resolve into a cohesive, mended sculpture is a desire for unity and resolution
for the sake of display and appropriation. By leaving you broken and shattered, your pieces
speak for the whole, your myths are undone, and in the spaces between your pieces, you regain
an impenetrability and indecipherability that restores some of your powerful mystery that refuses
to be co-opted for anyone's purposes, even mine.
Taking apart a cast of the Coatlicue Statue accomplishes a few things. First of all, by using
a cast form, Castillo Deball installs a reproduction in the gallery rather than the original object.
By putting a cast on the same level of importance as the original, Castillo Deball challenges the
hierarchy between copy and original. Secondly, casts of the Coatlicue have a provocative lineage
that extends back to William Bullock's first cast of the Coatlicue, and the Coatlicue’s proximity
to displays of Greek and Roman cast statues when it was first disinterred. Thirdly, the cast of a
pre-Columbian monument opens up an entire emic history of cast making in Mexico since the
Classic Period and challenges a European monopoly over mass-production. Fourthly, while the
original Coatlicue statue stands in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Castillo Deball's work is
solely exhibited in art museums, including the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach
and the Musée d'Arte Moderne in Paris, France.
This appropriation of the pre-Columbian past eludes reconciliation and evades a clean
restructuring into an original whole. This Coatlicue is different from Diego Rivera's mechanized
version or Saturino Herrán's composite Christ / Coatlicue. I would argue that Castillo Deball

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operates within the same milieu that Erica Segre develops for Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, and
Manuel Alvarez Bravo in which "archaeological artifacts, pre-Hispanic, colonial, folkloric, and
industrial paraphernalia, surface to interrogate identity" where "totemic objects are often
reproduced not in situ but extracted and installed, recontextualized yet ahistorical."
247
She goes
on to argue that modern and contemporary photographers like Silvia Gruner, Gerardo Suter, and
the collective SEMEFO infuse their work with "an archival density and melancholy or ironic
reflexivity…[that] do not so much demystify canonical representations as reinvest in the
metaphorical potential of archaeology -- to resist official memory and collective amnesia."
248
In
this chapter, I have attempted to tease apart the "archival density" of Castillo Deball's piece by
working through the history of the Coatlicue Statue in its cast form, and decipher what that
meant during different periods of history. Bullock's cast was part of a program to entice British
investment in Mexican mines, while MoMA's cast represented a masterpiece of Aztec sculpture.
The Smithsonian cast of the Coatlicue "passed" as an original, while Castillo Deball's cast
reveals the fissures that permeate the cohesive Aztec-centric national identity promulgated by the
government. This move to "resist official memory" helps in the fight against "collective
amnesia" about how official memory was created and perpetuated.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have used Mariana Castillo Deball’s installation Between You and the
Image of You That Reaches Me, as a launchpad into the deeper history of the Coatlicue Statue
and her multiple iterations in cast form. The focus on the multiple rather than single Aztec icon

247
Segre, Intersected Identities, 244–245.Segre 244-245.
248
Ibid., 251–252.

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has undone the myth of the isolated masterpiece and also suggested a fracturing of a monolithic
Aztec national identity into many irreconcilable fragments. One of the key controversies
surrounding the Coatlicue Statue that trailed her copies as well was the issue of visibility. The
original statue was buried and unburied multiple times, while the copy in the Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History similarly failed to find a suitable place. Only with the
mediation by modern and contemporary artists could the image of the Coatlicue fit within an art
context, with the work by Mariana Castillo Deball as the latest instantiation. This chapter is not
only the first thorough compendium of the Coatlicue Statue in the English language, but is also
the first time that the history of Eufémio Abadiano and his casts of pre-Columbian object has
been told.

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Fig. 4.1. Model of the Templo Mayor; http://www.johnpedroza.com/blog1/wp-
content/uploads/2011/08/mayorscalemodel.jpg

Fig. 4.2. Yolotlicue from Elizabeth H. Boone, “The Coatlicues At Templo Mayor,” Ancient
Mesoamerica, 10.2, 1999. Page 192.

192

Fig. 4.3. Manuel Buenabad, photograph of Sculpture Gallery in Escula Nacional de Artes
Plasticas, 1897. From Elizabeth Fuentas Rojas, “Art and Pedagogy of the Plaster Cast Collection
of the Academia de San Carlos,” Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classic
Antiquity to the Present, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Page 232.

Fig. 4.4. Drawing of William Bullock from Edward P. Alexander, “William Bullock: Little
Remembered Museologist and Showman,” Curator, 28.2, 1985.

193

Fig. 4.5. Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London, in 1815. From Edward P. Alexander, “William
Bullock: Little Remembered Museologist and Showman,” Curator, 28.2, 1985.

Fig. 4.6. Drawing of the exhibition in the catalogue by William Bullock, A Description of the
Unique Exhibition Called Ancient Mexico, London, 1824.

194

Fig. 4.7. “Modern Mexico,” 1824. Drawn and printed by A. Aglio from Edward P. Alexander,
“William Bullock: Little Remembered Museologist and Showman,” Curator, 28.2, 1985.

Fig. 4.8. Ancient sculptures and objects gathered in Museo Nacional by mid-nineteenth century
(after J.F. Ramírez 1855-56: pl. 37) from Nationalism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, ed.
John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, Volume IV, Routledge: New York, 2000. Figure 54.2.

195

Fig. 4.9. Auction notice for Abadiano’s Ancient Book-Store from the Sutro Library at San
Francisco State University.

Fig. 4.10. Photograph of Aldoph Sutro from the Sutro Library at SFSU.

196

Fig. 4.11. Books purchased by Adolph Sutro from Abadiano’s Ancient Book-Store at the Sutro
Library at SFSU. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 4.12. Eufémio Abadiano, Descriptive Catalogue of the Archaeological, Historical, and
Artistic Collections of Eufémio Abadiano, New Orleans: Franco-American Print, 1885.

197

Fig. 4.13. Letter from G. Brown Goode regarding payment for Eufémio Abadiano and his
translator Wendell McLaughlin. Source: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Accession File 16185.

Fig. 4.14. Photograph of rotunda of the U.S. National Museum with cast of the Coatlicue in the
right hand corner.

198

Fig. 4.15. Thomas Crawford, Statue of Freedom.

Fig. 4.16. Hall 23: Hall of Latin American Archaeology, 1911. Photograph from Smithsonian
National Museum of Natural History, Hall 21, 22, 23 Exhibition Photos.

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Fig. 4.17. Maya carving glyphs in a stone monument, after 1952 reinstallation of Hall of Latin
American Archaeology. Photograph from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
Hall 21, 22, 23 Exhibition Photos.

Fig. 4.18. Coatlicue Cast next to Mayan hieroglyphs, after 1952 reinstallation of Hall of Latin
American Archaeology. Photograph from Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
Hall 21, 22, 23 Exhibition Photos.

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Fig. 4.19. Workers reassemble Coatlicue for "Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art" at the Museum
of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in the 1940s.

Fig. 4.20. Eufémio Abadiano, Xochipilli Statue cast, Accession number AT13263 in the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Off-site storage pods. Photograph by the
author.

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Fig. 4.21. Eufémio Abadiano, Uxmal rain deity cast, Accession number AT16733 in the
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Off-site storage pods. Photograph by the
author.

Fig. 4.22. Xochipilli Fountain in front of the Pan-American Union Building in Washington, D.C.
Photograph by the author.

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Fig. 4.23. Loggia featuring representation of the Uxmal rain deity. Located in the Pan-American
Union Building, now Art Museum of the Americas, in Washington, D.C. Photograph by the
author.

Fig. 4.24. Saturino Herrán, Coatlicue Transformed, 1918.

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Fig. 4.25. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry South Wall, 1932-1933.

Fig. 4.26. Diego Rivera, Pan-American Unity, 1940.

Fig. 4.27. Coatlicue Fresco at Museo Anahuacalli. Photograph by author.

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Chapter 5. Critical Juxtapositions in Demián Flores’ De/construcción de una nación

Introduction

While the previous chapter focused on the dismantling of a monolithic Aztec national
identity through the fragmentation of the Coatlicue Statue, this chapter turns to a deconstruction
of nineteenth-century imaginaries of the pre-Columbian past depicted in oil painting. These oil
paintings incorporate pre-Columbian visual imagery that does not correlate precisely to existing
artifacts and excavated sites, and therefore have been mediated by the painter. Despite these
creative liberties taken by the artist, the paintings have entered the imaginary as representative of
the past. In the exhibition, De/construction de una nación (Museo Nacional del Arte in Mexico
City from May 15, 2012 to February 12, 2013),
249
Mexican artist Demián Flores reveals the
fictionalized nature of these representations by juxtaposing the oil paintings with replicas of
West Mexican sculptures that he has drastically transformed [Fig. 0.9]. Rather than scattering
the cast apart into various fragments like Castillo Deball, Flores adds additional appendages to
the replicas. For example, an outstretched arm of a warrior bears the pressure of a menagerie of
animals [Fig. 5.1], while in another instance, a torso sprouts out of the crown of a squatting
woman's head [Fig. 5.2]. These heavily mediated objects juxtaposed with the large oil paintings
that depict the conquest and colonization of the New World encourage the visitor to unpack the

249
The installation formed part of a larger project titled "100 y 30 Palacio Museo" initiated to
commemorate the re-opening of the museum in 2000 after a major restructuring and re-
conceptualization project. For more, see Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, “El Ojo Breve /
Diálogos Contemporáneos En El MUNAL,” Reforma, October 10, 2012, 22.

205
visual interchange between the sculpture and the painting, and within the sculpture and painting
itself.
I argue that Demián Flores uses the strategies and conventions of nineteenth-century oil
painting and the museum against itself. The logic underpinning both painting and the institution
relies on a system of collecting and juxtaposition that appears naturalized, but is in fact highly
constructed and operates often according to the imagination of the artist or curator. Cultures from
different temporal or geographic regions of Mesoamerica are woven into the same canvas, or
architectural elements and sculptures are sometimes totally invented and pass as a generalized
pre-Columbian aesthetic. The same sort of haphazard treatment resonates through the practice of
collecting and display in the museum. Often times there is some sort of logic guiding the
presentation, perhaps according to object function, dimensions or culture. But more often than
not, the gallery is simply a conglomeration of objects that operates according to the same thought
process that resulted in the cabinet of curiosities — a logic that serves and reflects the interest of
the owner rather than the source community or the object’s original function. Finally, both the oil
paintings and museum space collaborated in forming a cultured Mexican national identity
centered around this fictionalized, idealized Indian and his “ancient” heritage — often at the
disservice of the living descendants that continue to inhabit the peripheral, disenfranchised
communities.
Demián Flores intercedes as the artist, collector, and curator, but rather than seduce the
audience with a seamless presentation of the past, he disrupts the space of the museum. Flores
uses the techniques of juxtaposition and curation against itself to reveal the breaks of the
sculpture as a metonym for the ruptures within the paintings and the museum space. He
introduces forgeries into the museum, proposing a fraught narrative of sculptural fakes of West

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Mexican artifacts based on a system of supply and demand driven mostly by the art market and
collectors, but a narrative that implicates the museum as well. By placing the forged sculpture on
a pedestal, Flores legitimizes its function as a bona fide art object. This act draws both on the
history of forgeries and the current conditions of producing forgeries for scholars and collectors,
as well as the consequences of such production for the same disenfranchised communities that
were at best ignored, at worst actively harmed, in the construction of Mexican national identity.
Focusing on a few of the nineteenth-century oil paintings and the nearby twenty-first
century sculptural assemblages as a series of case studies, this chapter highlights particular
unresolved ruptures within each artwork. This type of rigorous, detailed study helps to unpack
the larger arguments of the exhibition, particularly revealing the constructed nature of painting
and museum exhibits. Although painters and curators take great pains to naturalize the scenes
and narratives that they propose in their work, a trained, critical eye can identify the components,
mechanisms, and seams that they try to hard to cover-up. By unsettling the individual images and
narratives, I hope to destabilize the larger national projects that have relied on these smaller
contributions. More specifically, I am interested in how these paintings and the museum as an
institution have played an instrumental role in the construction of a Mexican national identity
through the incorporation of pre-Columbian iconography and the figure of the Indian.
This chapter will look at two moments in the exhibition. The first is the juxtaposition of
Demián Flores’s work Arbol de la vida between two oil paintings by Félix Parra (1845-1919),
Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1875) [Fig. 5.3] and Escenas de la conquista (La matanza de
Cholula) (1877) [Fig. 5.4Error! Reference source not found.]. The second moment is the
positioning of Flores’s Santa Sangre in front of José María Obregón’s (1832-1902), El
descubrimiento del pulque (1869) [Fig. 0.13]. I will begin with a visual analysis of the paintings

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to identify the pre-Columbian sculptures and architectural elements, and particularly those that
suggest distortions or creative liberties with the past. I then perform the same kind of
iconographic analysis with Demián Flores’s sculpture before moving on to a discussion of Flores
as a curator within the museum and his role in revealing the false notion that the museum is an
unbiased storehouse and purveyor of unmediated historical information. This chapter starts with
the components of the exhibition itself, in oftentimes minute detail, because such an analysis has
not fully been heretofore executed for either the paintings or the sculptures.
The second and third sections of the chapter will take a broader perspective on the
sociopolitical conditions of Mexican nation building in the nineteenth-century, in particular the
role of the painting and museums in the formation of Mexican national identity, as well as the
controversial position of the “Indian.” The reclamation of the pre-Columbian past in the forging
of a non-European lineage was critical in the evolution of mexicandidad, as was the continued
support for art instruction at the Academia de San Carlos and foundation of art and anthropology
museums. I will argue that Flores acknowledges and then undercuts these strategies by self-
consciously introducing forgeries of West Mexican sculpture in the art museum. These forgeries
represent two facts that the museum would rather keep under wraps: (1) many forgeries have
"passed" as authentic artifacts and have entered the hallowed halls of museums, and (2) the same
“Indians” that were celebrated in the paintings and rhetoric of nationalism were simultaneously
disenfranchised by the government, and continue to suffer the consequences of museum
acquisitions. By forthrightly displaying forgeries in the gallery, Flores challenges the acquisition
practices of museums in general and emphasizes the continued oppression of the forger, who is
often demonized as the source of the forgery, but is the least empowered individual who is

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simply responding to the cycle of supply and demand for West Mexican sculptures generated by
international collectors.
Finally, I will put the exhibition in a larger art historical framework by discussing the
exhibition as a whole within the lineage of Institutional Critique. Like Fred Wilson before him,
Flores operates both as archaeologist and historiographer, and relies on the technique of
juxtaposition to make his critiques. They both build narratives according to the logic of the
curator, and in doing so, foreground what stories are told and which are silenced by the museum.
However, Flores uses famous works and forgeries to construct and de-construct visions of the
nation, and his work is less about the site-specificity of MUNAL as an institution, and rather the
idea and role of the Museum as a conceptual category. In addition to Fred Wilson, I compare this
exhibit with a recent show by Pedro Lasch, entitled Black Mirror / Espejo Negro at the Nasher
Museum of Art at Duke University (May 22, 2008 to January 18, 2009) [Fig. 5.5]. In this
installation, Lasch transferred well-known Spanish Renaissance masterpieces currently on
display in El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Phillip III onto eleven panes of black
glass and placed sixteen pre-Columbian sculptures from the permanent collection on white
pedestals. Similar to Flores’s installation, Lasch instigated a dialogue between the sculpture and
the painting both through placement and the reflective properties of the darkened glass. The
comparisons with Fred Wilson and Pedro Lasch help to draw out the critical aspects of Flores's
installation and point to potential interlocutors for the exhibition.

Importance of Exhibition within Demián Flores's Oeuvre

This exhibition is a quite drastic departure from Demián Flores’s standard artistic output.
Although he primarily draws from pre-Columbian iconography, he usually works in two-
dimensional media, such as painting and printmaking, using a similar recombinant sensibility.

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Like the three-dimensional sculptures, Flores combines diverse pre-Columbian images to create
hybrid individuals that are half-gods, half-business men or martial art fighters defending
themselves with Aztec shields [Fig. 5.6]. These playful pieces incorporate painting, screen-
printing, and found objects to create a canvas that is as physically multi-layered as it is
temporally multivalent. These strategies of hybridity and overlap clearly persist into his three-
dimensional sculptures in De/construcción de una nación, but engage in a dialogue with the
nineteenth-century oil paintings behind them. In the two-dimensional canvases, Flores more
seamlessly merges pre-Columbian and contemporary iconography within the individual figures
themselves, while in the three-dimensional sculptures the junctures are clearly exposed. The
juxtaposition of pre-Columbian and contemporary elements in his two-dimensional works may
perhaps indicate that certain phenomena, like war, work, and the economy, are a part of the
human condition irrelevant of a specific time period. These universal circumstances existed in
the pre-Columbian period and today, though often in different guises and with distinct
motivations. Flores could also be pointing to the persistence of pre-Columbian iconography
today as he re-enlivens the eagle helmets of Aztec warriors and the dripping second skin of Xipe
Totec for today’s audience. The perseverance of these pre-Columbian images despite the
attempted eradication during the Spanish conquest and colonization, and institutional siloing in
museums and universities, is a testament to alternative re-surfacing that contemporary Mexican
artists contribute to by making these images public and relevant.
Alongside his artistic output in two- and three- dimensions, Flores has developed a
community-based project in Oaxaca City called La Curtiduría [Fig. 5.7]. In the barrio of
Jalatlaco, Flores transformed an old tannery consisting of several buildings surrounding a main
courtyard into an art space in 2006. The space functions as a combination of apartments for their

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ongoing artist-in-residence program, studio space for art production, a small shop / exhibition
space in the front, and an office area. Flores, with the assistance of the program director Monica
Villegas, runs the artist-in-residence program, a public series of cultural events, and an
educational program for high school students who cannot get into college, but have creative
leanings and no formal art training. This two-year program teaches them a variety of art forms
and gives them an opportunity to work closely with the artist-in-residence. At the end of the
program, they receive a certificate and many of them continue as artists in their own right in
Mexico, exhibiting their works in galleries and group exhibitions.
This unique program is aligned with a general trend in Oaxaca of artists giving back to
their community. This movement began in the 1990s with the most internationally recognized
and successful artist from Oaxaca, Francisco Toledo. Toledo developed a series of cultural
spaces in Oaxaca City and the neighboring town of Etla, ranging from the El Pochote Cineclub
(1998-2011) to El Centro de las Artes San Agustín Etla (CASA) (2006-ongoing) and even
converted his own house into the Instituto de Arte Gráfica de Oaxaca, complete with the largest
library of 60,000 art books in Oaxaca. These unique spaces provide a free cultural education to
Oaxaqueños through a rich program that includes exhibitions, talks, performances, and art-
making activities. Demián Flores was a student of Francisco Toledo and continues this legacy
through La Curtiduría and future projects in Mexico City, where he currently resides.

Visual Analysis of Paintings

In the space of MUNAL, Demián Flores juxtaposed mediated replicas of West Mexican
sculptures with the nineteenth-century oil paintings that are permanently displayed in the gallery.
As a first step in understanding the relationship between the paintings and the sculptures, I begin

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with a detailed analysis of the paintings in which I highlight the pre-Columbian elements and
their varying degrees of veracity. The painting in the first pair is by Félix Parra, who was born in
Morelia, Michoacán in 1845. Parra entered the Colegio de San Nicolás in 1861 before
transferring to the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City in 1864, where he studied and later
taught drawing and painting. In Mexico City, he created his two most famous works, Fray
Bartolomé de las Casas and Escenas de la conquista, and he won a scholarship based on the
latter to live in France and Italy for four years. Upon returning from Europe in 1882, he taught
decoration at the Escuela Nacional de Artes before passing away in 1919.
In 1875, Parra exhibited his large academic history painting, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas,
a portrait of a major sixteenth-century figure who gained notoriety as a defender of the
indigenous population against the cruel mistreatment by the Spanish conquistadors. Las Casas
penned an important book, Historia general de las indias o bien sea historia apologética, from
which Parra drew inspiration. In this painting, Bartolomé de las Casas stands arms crossed,
clutching a cross in his left hand, and gazing up towards the heavens. Poised between an Aztec-
looking sculpture on a rectangular base and a decapitated Greek-like column, Las Casas
maintains the stability and countenance of a round statuesque figure. Blithely wrapping her arms
around the lower portion of Las Casas’s white cassock, an unidentifiable barefoot native woman
in a black shawl and striped skirt leans towards him. Her multiple layers of clothing contrast with
the bare chest and legs of the man whose arm reaches out to her and whose legs wrap around Las
Casas’s left side. The man’s head rests upside down on the carved staircase, as a pool of blood
drips down from the crown of his head to the step below him.
With the death of the Indian man, Las Casas steps in as the substitute husband, brother,
and, most pertinently, Father, who will guide the indigenous population away from their heathen

212
ways and toward a civilized Christianity.
250
Parra represents this death of the male Indian and
replacement of Las Casas allegorically as well, with the beheading of the phallic column next to
the fallen, markedly male Indian body. The continuation of the female line, though distraught
and in need of repair, is epitomized by the intact sculpture of a female goddess and the weeping
Indian woman. Perhaps the figure of the woman lives on because male Spanish conquistadors
required them to procreate and form the mestizo race, or alternatively to show some minimal
degree of humanity towards the native population. The overall painting highlights the
beneficence of Las Casas as a savior and father-figure who will lift the remaining (female)
population into civilization out of the ruins of their past.
The believability of this narrative relies on Parra’s ability to recreate a cohesive pre-
Columbian backdrop for this scene of salvation. To underscore the need for Las Casas’s mission
of conversion, Parra needed to imbue the pre-Contact environment with sculptural and
architectural markers of a barbaric past. At the same time, Parra undermines the savageness of
the scene by including symmetry, order, and advanced architectural designs. In other words, the
same space that reads as wildly heathen because of the goddess statue and broken chain of
psychedelic flower below her is counterbalanced by the familiarity of the Grecian carvings that
mark the environment as civilized.
251

250
Widdifield mentions this possible interpretation: "what is killed off, so to speak, is the
possibility for replication of a pure Indian line in either painting" in The Embodiment of the
National in Late Nineteenth-century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1996), 134.
251
According to Uribe, the flower is the Tolohuaxihuitl, or Datura, and was used as a
hallucinogen in shamanic rituals. “Más allá de lo que el ojo ve, sobre el relieve de Fray
Bartolomé de las Casas (1864),” Memoria, no. 3 (Spring-Summer 1991): 20.

213
During the time of this painting in 1875, archaeologists and amateur explorers had already
spent over fifty years surveying and cataloging the Mexican region, as evidenced by Alexander
von Humboldt’s publication of Vues de cordilleres et monuments in 1810 and the opening of the
Museum of Antiquities in Mexico City in 1822.
252
By 1829, the removal of Mexican antiquities
was already forbidden by law and between 1831 and 1844, volumes of pre-Columbian imagery
had been published by Lord Kingsborough,
253
Guillermo Dupaix, Carl Nebel, John Lloyd
Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and William H. Prescott. This wealth of information
resulted in two main outcomes for academic history painters working in Mexico. First, the
circulation of images through published books and the display of artifacts in museums provided a
visual fount of primary sources from which painters could draw from. Secondly, the recovery
and recuperation of these artifacts helped develop a local sense of national pride in the
achievements of earlier Mexican civilizations, particularly the Aztecs, who had lived in
Tenochtitlán, the nation’s current capital of Mexico City. This sense of nationalism wrapped up
in ancient civilizations will be discussed in more depth in the next section.

252
Humboldt "published drawings of selected pages of the Borgia, Vaticanus A / Ríos, Vaticanus
B, and Tellurian-Remiss"in Elizabeth Hill Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican
Books of Fate, 1st ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 6.
253
Lord Kingsborough's nine volume Antiquities of Mexico contained plates of drawings of
sixteen pictorial codices including the Tellurian-Remiss, Vaticanus A / Ríos, Laud, Cospi,
Borgia, Fejérváry-Mayer, and Vaticanus B. Antiquities of Mexico: Comprising Fac-Similes of
ancientMexican Paintings and Hieroglyphics, Preserved in the Royal Libraries of Paris, Berlin,
and Dresden; in the Imperial Library of Vienna; in the Vatican Library; in theBorgian Museum
at Rome; in the Library of the Institute atBologna; and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Together with the Monuments of New Spain, by M. Dupaix: With Their Respective Scales of
Measurement and Accompanying Descriptions. The Whole Illustrated by Many Valuable
Inedited Manuscripts (London: Printed by James Moyse ... : Published by Robert Havell ... and
Colnaghi, Son, and Co, 1831).

214
In returning to the issue of artifact and archaeological sites as source images for nineteenth-
century oil painters, I will review several of the most prominent elements of each painting to sift
through the conglomeration of assorted images from different sites and time periods. To begin
with, the statue of the female deity to Las Casas’s right has often been identified as
Chalchiuhtlicue, whose name means “She of the Jade Skirt,” and who is the goddess of ground
water. She is often depicted as kneeling with her hands on her lap, wearing a headpiece with
round disks across the forehead and large ear plugs with vertical, often striated, tassels hanging
down. One typical example for comparison is the Chalchiuhtlicue acquired by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in 1900 [Fig. 5.8Error! Reference source not found.]. Standing at almost
twelve inches tall, this Aztec figure is made of basalt and contains traces of pigment. In addition
to this figure at the Met in New York, other similar figures exist at the Museum für Völkerkunde
und Schweizerisches Museum für Volkskunde Basel, the Museum of the Americas in Spain, the
British Museum, and at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, where Parra may have seen the
figure.
254
The museum collected this standing figure in the middle of the nineteenth century at a
time before Parra painted Las Casas, though other statues of the more common kneeling
Chalchiuhtlicue may also have been on display.
Despite these formal similarities, there are some major differences that suggest an element
of Parra's artistic liberty and imagination. One of the major differences is that in the painting,
Parra depicts the figure’s legs spread akimbo with her knees touching and shins splaying out to
either side. The more common position for the legs is directly underneath the goddess’s torso
with legs tucked underneath her. The second difference is her clothing, specifically the triangular

254
Uribe, “Más allá de lo que el ojo ve, sobre el relieve de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1864),”
25.

215
neckpiece formed by two strands of thin, rope-like material. Parra was most likely attempting to
render the quechquemitl, a traditional piece of clothing worn by indigenous women, but rather
than covering over the breasts like most quechquemitls, Parra’s version frames and accentuates
them. The light emanating from the upper left-hand corner of the painting gleams off of the
statue’s breasts as well as the chest of the collapsed woman. Finally, statues like the
Chalchiuhtlicue were not traditionally elevated on tiered pedestals above the ground as in the
painting. This detail in particular reflects a Europeanized vision of proper museological display
of sculptures. Furthermore, the base contains an iconographic hodgepodge of decorations,
including two skulls reminiscent of a skull-rack or tzompantli, two rows of four circles similar to
the decoration on the round temple to Ehecatl, and a tapered rectangular form that possibly
mimics a generalized temple design. While the white trumpet flowers hanging down from the
pedestal were used in shamanic ceremonies, their chain form here is unusual, as is the pinwheel
above it that resembles palm frond decorations more commonly associated with Palm Sunday
celebrations rather than an indigenous commemoration.
The architectural features of the painting, including the broken column to Las Casas’s left,
the ornamental facade of the temple, and the staircase suggest additional liberties taken with pre-
Columbian source materials excerpted from museums, publications,
255
or archaeological sites.
These architectural features share commonalities with those from Greek and Roman antiquity in
their design, especially the circular column, stepped fret design, and lintel decoration. The
rounded column may have been an architectural feature that Parra had seen in the Museo
Nacional de Antropología, as Eufémio Abadiano had already made a cast of the column and

255
Widdifield mentions publication of primary sources including sixteenth-century chronicles of
Indian culture and history, including that of Las Casas. The Embodiment of the National in Late
Nineteenth-century Mexican Painting, 107.

216
deposited it in the Smithsonian National Museum by 1885 [Fig. 5.9]. This type of column is
unusual in pre-Columbian architecture and its design is much more reminiscent of drums or
ahuehuetl than pre-Columbian pillars, which were often square and heavily carved such as those
at Teotihuacán and Tula. Widdifield mentions cylindrical columns from Mexican and Mayan
sites, but does not specify particular sites or examples in her book.
256

The stepped fret design that cascades down the facade of the temple in vertical bands is
most similar to the carvings at Mitla, a major Mixtec and Zapotec site in the state of Oaxaca,
which is about 300 miles away from Mexico City [Fig. 5.10Error! Reference source not
found.].
257
The site remains incredibly intact today despite the demand for its destruction by the
Oaxacan Archbishop Albuquerque in 1553 that resulted in the reuse of many of the stones in the
construction of the Church of San Pablo.
258
Although the similarity between the stepped fret
design in Parra’s painting and the palace at Mitla is undeniable, the major difference is that the
original motif at Mitla runs horizontal to the ground rather than perpendicular. Although it seems
like Parra directly copied the fret design from Mitla, he either made an error in transferring the
design to the painting or intentionally deviated from the original.
Finally, the decoration of the lintel above Las Casas and the three steps below him are both
unusual features that are not common in pre-Columbian architecture. The lintel would more
likely extend beyond the edges of the doorframe. The pleats along the entrance of the temple are

256
Ibid., 106.
257
Baddeley also sites Mitla as a possible source. “A Death of History or a History of Death:
Visual Metaphors of the Past Within Contemporary Mexican Art,” in History Painting
Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000), 56.
258
More on the historiography of Mitla: Eduard Seler (1849-1922) published Les Ruines de Mitla
in 1906, Porfirio Díaz highlighted Mitla as symbol of pre-Columbian ancestors in 1910, Alfonso
Caso excavated Mitla in 1920s and 1930s.

217
also uncommon in pre-Columbian architecture. Although buildings had stone steps, they were
not often carved with designs. Both the carvings themselves and their placement in the
architectural space seem at odds with known archaeological sites and were probably drawn from
Parra’s imagination, or perhaps a creative reinterpretation of artifacts he had seen at the Museo
Nacional de Antropología.
In this way, Parra draws from this storehouse of artifacts and combines them in different
ways to form a seamless image of the past — a practice akin to curatorial techniques in the
museum itself. As the Museo Nacional de Antropología’s collection is not fully accessible,
259

one alternative is to gain a glimpse into the collection at the time by reviewing the artifacts in
Eufémio Abadiano’s cast collection from the Museo Nacional. We find both a “kneeling nun”
like the Chalchiuhtlicue [Fig. 5.11] and a cast of the rounded column [Fig. 5.9Error!
Reference source not found.]. We see this same figure along with the standing Chalchiuhtlicue
in a drawing of the Museo Nacional’s collection in the mid-nineteenth century [Fig. 4.8], though
the rounded column is either obscured or absent from this particular rendition. The combination
of Abadiano’s cast collection, available drawings, and the limited information online provides a
sense of what artifacts Parra may have seen when working on his painting. His selective picking
and choosing from the available material mimics a curatorial practice designed to create an
impression of the past.
The collecting of pre-Columbian artifacts under the roof of a single institution adheres to
the established rubric of European museums, which act as storehouses for national and
international treasures. During the pre-Contact period, these artifacts and architectural spaces

259
The museum’s website provides a selective assortment of key pieces in the collection, but to
my knowledge there is no searchable database available to the public.

218
would have existed in situ throughout the urban core of the town, and normally served to
legitimate and glorify the ruling elite class. According to Enrique Florescano, “the inhabitants of
cities in Mesoamerica, just like those in the ancient Greek cities, lived in a kind of city museum,
literally filled with monuments and symbols that alluded to the founding events of the
kingdom.”
260
Once these previous civilizations fell or underwent colonization, their buildings
and monuments were destroyed, left to rot, hidden, or collected and exported. This comparison
between Mesoamerican and classical European civilizations is just the beginning of similarities
that historians, politicians, and religious leaders identified and often marshaled for the benefit of
their specific undertakings. One of the main benefits of linking the Mesoamerican and European
ancient pasts is that the elite Creoles in Mexico could use the trappings of antiquity to justify
their independent rule over Mexico and operate separate from European rulership. They
conceived of themselves as the rightful inheritors of this glorious past and developed a pantheon
of heroes and a catalogue of nationalistic myths that they could mobilize to distinguish
themselves from Europe and develop a homegrown antiquity.
261

The roots of classicizing pre-Columbian antiquity date back to the seventeenth century
with the publication of cardinal Juan de Torquemada's (1388-1468) Monarquía indiana (1615),
which compared the history of the Greeks and Romans to that of the Aztecs.
262
This emphasis on
the Postclassic Aztecs rather than any other pre-Columbian civilization as the great civilization
of Mesoamerican antiquity is often referred to as Neo-Aztecism and is the driving force behind

260
Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico, 89–90.
261
John Leddy Phelan, “Neo-Aztecism in the Eighteenth Century,” in Culture in History, Essays
in Honor of Paul Radin (New York: Published for Brandeis University by Columbia University
Press, 1960), 792.
262
Ibid., 760–761.

219
the privileging of the Aztec civilization over all others that continues today. According to Phelan,
"the correlation of Aztec culture with Greek and Roman cultures reached its colonial culmination
in the Historia antigua de México of Francisco Javier Clavigero,”
263
published in 1780. One of
the main differences is that while Torquemada scorned pre-Columbian civilizations and linked
their cultural remnants to devil-worshipping,
264
Clavigero (1731-1787) recuperated and
promoted the rights of the remaining indigenous population.
265
After Mexican Independence in
1810, the Mexican statesman and historian Carlos María de Bustamante (1774-1848) took up the
call of Neo-Aztecism and formalized a “mixed pantheon of indigenous and insurgent heroes”
that included “Morelos, Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama…Quetzalcóatl, Netzahualcóyotl, Montezuma,
[and] Cuauhtémoc.”
266

This brief history of Neo-Aztecism and the link between pre-Hispanic and Classical
antiquity was visually underwritten by the recovery and display of pre-Contact objects, as well as
the commissioning of new works to commend these heroes and national myths. Academic
history painting such as Parra’s Las Casas emphasized both the urban environment as a “city
museum” and the logic of the European museum in Parra’s curatorial arrangement of the artifacts
in space. Furthermore, the statue on a pedestal, the lintel carvings, circular column, carved steps,
and white color of the stone all visually tie this site to Greek and Roman ruins that archaeologists
had begun to excavate in the eighteenth century.
267
According to Widdifield, the transformation
of the architectural space and the figures populating the history paintings resulted in the

263
Ibid., 761.
264
Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico, 225.
265
Phelan, “Neo-Aztecism in the Eighteenth Century,” 766.Phelan 766.
266
Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico, 250.
267
Pompeii had been discovered in 1748.

220
“classicizing of visual and literary representations” through which “ancient Mexican history
could enter 'universal' history.”
268

The Chalchiuhtlicue, Mitla stepped frets, and rounded column are thus doubly mediated:
first through the eye and hand of the painter, and secondly through the classicizing narratives
imposed on the past. In the akimbo legs, vertical designs on the facade, and smoothed over
column, we can identify these moments of rupture in which the individual elements fail to add up
and fuse into a coherent vision. The Postclassic Aztec Chalchiuhtlicue in front of the Classic
Zapotec facade conflates geographical region, civilization, and time-period in a way that reveals
the constructed nature of the past. And though this type of artistic liberty was common at the
time and accepted by critics, the one distortion that contemporary critics did acknowledge was
the “modern” clothing and accessories of the female figure.
269
Rather than the traditional
quechquemitl of the Chalchiuhtlicue, the woman wears a striped skirt and dark shawl that women
commonly donned on the streets of late nineteenth-century Mexico. This temporal disjunction
seemed to disturb the critics who sought some sort of cohesion in the painting. Perhaps the
integration of a “modern” Indian into the painting was Parra’s attempt to address the current dire
situation of the living descendants of the Aztecs, or as Widdifield suggests, a commentary on the
fact that the nineteenth-century incorporation of the figure of the Indian into academic history

268
Perhaps best illustrated by another painting in the exhibit called The Senate of Tlaxcala.
According to Widdifield, ”Rodrigo Gutiérrez's Deliberation of the Senate of Tlaxcala effects a
form of assimilation more through allusion to a classical institution than through the
Europeanizing of Indian garments or faces. The painting stages a classicized drama of pre-
Hispanic Indian politics.” The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-century Mexican
Painting, 103.
269
Ibid., 108.

221
painting -- a beacon of high culture -- was just the latest version of converting the Indian to
Christianity.
270

Despite the artistic liberties taken with the depiction of the statue and architecture, this
painting nonetheless lends an aura of authority in its impression of the ancient past. By
conflating Greek and Roman elements with pre-Columbian ones, this notion of the “ancient” and
therefore the antithesis of “modern” is solidified through its pictorialization and the teleological
path to the “modern” is laid upon the ruins of the past. Although a painting is clearly an artistic
intervention that has been constructed and manipulated through the imagination of the artist, this
individual reflection on the past may contain an element of partial truth in the rendering of the
past. The Chalchiuhtlicue statue, column, and stepped fret design are close enough to their
authentic originals that they might “pass” as concise reproductions, especially to the untrained
eye. This is especially possible given the fact that the European eye could not read or analyze
images of the pre-Columbian past depicted in murals, vases, and codices. Therefore, a painting
that depicted a legible past to the European eye, such as this one by Parra, would be a welcome
sight because they could easily understand the codes and arrange the elements of the scene into a
digestible impression.
Escenas de la conquista (La matanza de Cholula) (1877)
In the MUNAL gallery, Parra’s subsequent major painting, Escenas de la conquista (La
matanza de Cholula) (1877) [Fig. 5.4Error! Reference source not found.], is placed directly
next to the Las Casas painting. This painting was exhibited in the Academia de San Carlos show
in 1877 and received high critical praise for its depiction of a historical scene that Las Casas also
described in Historia general de las indias o bien sea historia apologética. According to Las

270
Ibid.

222
Casas’s text, Moctezuma planned to thwart an attack by the Spaniards by coordinating with the
people of Cholula. Unfortunately, Cortés and his Spanish troops caught wind of these plans and
attacked the city ahead of schedule, leaving thousands murdered and the entire site in ruins.
271

This painting is unique among academic history paintings of the Conquest because it
shows the violence of slaughter without the redemptive qualities of colonization.
272
There is no
Las Casas to defend the indigenous population and move the country forward. Instead, Cortés
stands in the middle of the scene, holding his steel sword with its tip still bloodied by a recent
killing, presumably of the man to his right. The soldier to Cortés’s left holds up a metallic chain
in his left hand, possibly inspecting its intricate craftsmanship and potential financial value. One
soldier in the background lingers about, seemingly surveying the stonework of the architectural
structure, while another busies himself with a few weapons. The casual positions of these four
Spanish soldiers contrasts with the other four adult figures in the foreground. The woman to the
far left of the canvas protectively covers her injured or deceased baby with her outstretched left
arm, which reaches out towards the prostrate man lying dead on the floor. Like the Las Casas
painting, this male figure lies naked on the ground, wearing nothing more than a simple white
loincloth. He extends one arm as blood pools around the crown of his head and into the crevices
of the stone slab beneath him. Again, in this painting, the father figure has been murdered,
leaving the Spanish warriors as the only potential men for indigenous women to procreate with
and found the mestizo race. This dim prospect of the future and disruption of the conjugal Indian
pair is emphasized by the erect posture of the Spanish men, carrying their long, phallic weapons,

271
Las Casas overstates the number of murdered citizens, citing that thirty thousand Cholulans
died at the hands of the vicious Spaniards. Ibid., 111.
272
Ibid., 116.

223
and lording over the women. While the men are protected by coats of shiny, protective armor,
the women have only swaths of dark fabric to cover them. The bare-breasted kneeling woman
conceals her chest with her arms, shielding them against the viewer’s gaze, but also suggesting
the precariousness and vulnerability of her compromised situation. To the right of the painting,
two crouching women kneel back-to-back, one bowing her head and grasping a long stick, while
the other looks toward the sky in despair and clutches a baby to her breast. Her face shares the
same expression of Las Casas in Parra’s earlier painting, though in this scene, it is the child
rather than the cross that offers some hope for the future.
This dismal scene contrasts starkly with the shockingly white space that surrounds the
figures. The geometric forms fail to give order to the brutality of this violence, and the beauty of
the intricate carvings only increase the unjustified nature of this attack against an artistically
accomplished civilization. In the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, we find again a statue
of Chalchiuhtlicue, but this time much smaller, knocked off her pedestal, and toppled over to her
right side. This same disruption occurs in the deeper recesses of the painting, where a chair lies
on its side, as if another victim of the rampant violence. As in the Las Casas painting, we find a
range of sculptural and architectural elements that were sourced from several different
geographic and temporal time periods. The portable items like the statue and tripod vessel in the
lower right-hand corner could have been brought to Cholula by people paying homage to
Quetzalcoatl, as this was the largest Postclassic offering center. Alternatively, the tripod vessel
appears to be executed in the Mixteca-Puebla style, which is an “international style” that could
visually communicate across language barriers through an accepted set of shared iconographic
images. These vessels were also produced at Cholula, but were found all over Mesoamerica as
well, making its exact provenience difficult. Cholula was a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic center,

224
until the Spaniards arrived and razed the main pyramid to build the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de
los Remedios (Church of Our Lady of Remedies) in 1594 [Fig. 5.12].
Several buildings have been excavated and reconstructed, but during the time that Parra
was painting in the late nineteenth century, these efforts had not yet taken place.
273
Therefore,
like in the case of the Las Casas painting, Parra had to rely on other excavated sites in his
imagining of the site of Cholula. The carvings on the building in the far left-hand corner of the
painting and those on the main building contain elements reminiscent of Xochicalco (600-900
CE), a late Classic Period site outside of Mexico City that Alexander von Humboldt first
published in 1810. In particular, the carvings to the left of the second rectangular column in the
back have the same general linear shape as the headdresses worn by the elite at the Temple of the
Feathered Serpent at Xochicalco [Fig. 5.13]. Given the fact that this site was close to Mexico
City and published by Humboldt, there is a good chance that Parra may have drawn from the site
of Xochicalco in his visualization of Cholula. The overall structure of the main building behind
Cortés is quite unusual and seems to combine Aztec and Mayan architectural elements. The
trapezoidal roof comb is highly unusual, as the overall form looks Aztec, though normally
multiple roof combs would be present. The Mayans were more inclined to use a single roof
comb, though the decoration on the roof comb of the three circles is reminiscent of the Aztec
glyph for gold. The white sandstone and stark geometric features are perhaps more evocative of
ancient Egyptian archaeological sites rather than pre-Columbian ones, in which a dark basalt
stone would have more likely been used. This proposition requires much more investigation into
the history of Egyptian archaeology and the availability of this type of information to Parra in

273
The first excavation of Cholula took place in 1881 by Adolph Bandelier. The initial findings
were published in 1884.

225
Mexico, but the use of Egyptian elements could be part of a larger trend of comparing pre-
Columbian art to Nubian, Abyssinian, Egyptian, and Hindu art.
274

Like the Las Casas painting before it, Parra took liberties with the depiction of Cholula —
an artistic decision made even more imperative by the fact that the buildings of Cholula were
flattened by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Parra may have drawn inspiration from the
nearby site of Xochicalco, whether he visited in person or had access to Humboldt’s publication.
He inserted inanimate objects that could metonymically speak of the destruction, including the
tipped over Chalchiuhtlicue statue and chair, which complemented the despair and slaughter
depicted in the foreground. The stark blankness of the architectural site, which would have most
likely been painted with vibrant colors, lends a harsh blankness and stark contrast of light and
shadows to heighten the drama of this scene. The only concern that arises is when this painting
of Cholula is mistaken or made to stand-in for the actual site of Cholula. The specificity of this
narrative in Las Casas’s text and Parra’s decision to depict it removes it from the realm of a
generalized "pre-Columbian" space and into a specific category of “Cholula." Parra's singular,
imagined version runs the risk of becoming the authoritative rendition of the site despite the fact
that he incorporates architectural designs from Xochicalco. Are there any consequences for
liberties taken when depicting a specific site? I would argue that there is a greater risk of Parra's
image standing-in for Cholula within the national narrative. I also contend that this questioning

274
"The comparison of pre-Hispanic art with 'those of Nubia and Abyssinia' is typical of the
decline in understanding of the esthetics of ancient Mexican art in informed circles at the time.
Sixty years before, Humboldt had shown a much keener insight, with his reference to 'the
remains of the Mexican sculpture, those colossal statues of basalts and porphyry, which are
covered with Aztec hieroglyphs, and bear some relation to the Egyptian and Hindoo style," Jean
Charlot and Academia Nacional de San Carlos (Mexico), Mexican Art and the Academy of San
Carlos, 1785-1915, The Texas Pan American Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962),
125.

226
of the formation of national myths and their visual rendition is exactly what is at stake in Flores's
exhibition.

Obregón’s El descubrimiento del pulque
José María Obregón (1832-1902) studied at the Academia de San Carlos and was one of
the first artists to heed Ramón Alcaraz’s call for the creation of a national art in 1869.
275
Unlike
Parra’s work, Obregón depicted an image prior to Spanish contact in his painting El
descubrimiento del pulque (1869) [Fig. 0.13]. One of the critics writing at the time lauded
Obregón’s painting: “‘Mr. Obregón's picture is entirely national and we believe that it will
awaken the taste for this genre that it initiates, and that it offers such beautiful and new subjects
to our artists.’”
276
This push for a national art came at a time when indigenous leaders were
taking center stage — a phenomenon perhaps best exemplified by President Benito Juárez (1806-
1872), a Zapotec Indian who held the highest office in the land.
277
The painting was
commissioned by the lawyer and historian Felipe Sánchez Solis (1816-1882), who claimed
descent from a royal line of the Acolhua Chichimeca,
278
which the male protagonist of the
painting, Tecpancaltzin, also came from. In essence, this painting suggests a reclamation of this
elite pre-Hispanic genealogical line, yet in the visual, stylistic, and formal trappings of European
high culture. This strategy is akin to the Aztecs sloughing off their barbaric Chichimec heritage

275
Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-century Mexican Painting,
80.
276
Ibid.
277
Ibid., 90.
278
Ibid., 94.

227
and linking themselves to the more culturally refined Toltecs as a way of justifying their rule and
dominance over Mesoamerica.
In this painting, the central protagonists are Xochitl, the daughter of the man who
transformed the maguey plant into the alcoholic beverage named pulque, and Tecpancaltzin, who
leans forward in his throne towards the three approaching figures. According to the legend,
Xochitl and Tecpancaltzin eventually married and perpetuated the Acolhua Chichimeca lineage.
Similar to the Parra paintings, Obregón blended classicizing European and Mesoamerican visual
strategies in devising the painting. Most notably, the contemporary critics of the period and
scholars today note the pale skin and Europeanized features of Xochitl, who wears a headpiece
similar to a laurel wreath, a white top, and thin pink skirt. Her light skin color distinguishes her
from the rest of the crowd, as if foreshadowing the mestizo race in Mexico or mirroring the racial
differences between President Benito Juárez and his European wife.
279

Obregón counteracts the Europeanized features of the figures by placing them in an interior
architectural space that is marked as “pre-Columbian.” With the exception of one stone throne in
the Museo Nacional de Antropología,
280
[Fig. 5.14] not many known Aztec thrones survived the
Conquest and colonization. Because of this dearth of existing examples, Obregón most likely
invented this image of a throne, which seems to be transposed from a pre-Columbian codex. In
Mixtec and Aztec codices, a rectangular structure situated on the place sign of a hill refers to the
site of the palace. Obregón may have seen this image in a book, perhaps one of Lord
Kingsborough’s volumes published in 1831, which included the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and
interpreted this commonly used geographical device as a throne for the seat of the king — an

279
Ibid., 130.
280
Even the identification of this stone block as a throne is up for debate.

228
inference that is not far off from scholarly thought today. The open rectangular shape of the
throne with a slight overhang topped by roof ornaments and a series of steps leading to the chair
eloquently blend architecture and furniture in one object. When combined with the green slope
and two small knobs of the place-sign of “hill” or yucu in Mixtec [Fig. 5.15], the conflation
between two-dimensional geographical feature and three-dimensional furniture is complete.
Though not historically accurate, this moment in nineteenth-century oil painting eloquently
merges pre-Contact iconography with modern-day exegesis in a single form.
This moment of clever convergence unfortunately stands out as an isolated success, as the
rest of the painting signals a generalized pre-Columbian past as a hodgepodge of invented and
actual artifacts. For example, in the foreground of the painting are a round incense burner and a
small jug held by Xochitl’s mother. While incense burners may have been manufactured in this
shape and been used in this context, the small rounded tripod jug does not appear to have an
artifactual correspondent. A man to the left side of the throne makes a pointing gesture with his
left hand and in his right he holds the handle of a macuahuitl or axe embedded with obsidian
shards. Images of macuahuitl appear held by warriors in the Florentine Codex Book IX (written
in 1579, first published in 1829), which may have been the source for Obregón’s painting [Fig.
5.16Error! Reference source not found.].
281
While the accuracy of this weapon as part of the
Aztec arsenal is confirmed by visual comparison, the background of the painting contains forms
more loosely signaled as "pre-Columbian." In the second chamber of the palace, the profile of a
large stone sculpture looms in a doorway, yet is too blurry to pin down and identify. A mural of
rounded circles with black dots in the upper portion of the wall may characterize this place as a

281
Henry M Reeves, “Sahagún’s ‘Florentine Codex’, a Little Known Aztecan Natural History of
the Valley of Mexico,” Archives of Natural History Archives of Natural History 33, no. 2 (2006):
302–21.

229
tecpan, or a palace or royal house, such as those crowning the upper portion of the Casa de
Cacica in Teposcolula, Oaxaca [Fig. 5.17]. These rounded representations might also symbolize
chalchihuites or precious stones. However, in Mixtec and Aztec architecture, these rounded
shapes would normally appear above the lintel rather than painted like a mural on the wall.
This painting is unique in the history of Mexican academic oil painting in the fact that it
takes on a purely pre-Columbian theme at a point in time before Spanish Contact. Though the
painting fuses classicizing European elements with pre-Columbian ones, the painter also
demonstrates familiarity with images from the codices as exemplified by the throne and the
macuahuitl. The creative liberty taken with the image of the throne in particular results in a
rather ingenious interpretive element that shows either a working knowledge or uncanny
intuition about the function of place-signs. Like the two Parra paintings, Obregón's painting also
advances a genealogical argument about the future of the Mexican people; however, unlike
Parra, there is hope embedded in the future mestizo population as foreshadowed by the
Europeanized Xochitl and the Indianized Tecpancaltzin. The celebration of an indigenous ruler in
a painting echoed the coterminous political situation, with the instatement of Benito Juárez as the
President of Mexico. For the first time in Mexican painting, a moment of indigenous history is
perceived as not only an appropriate, but actually necessary, subject for oil painting. This drastic
shift raises the barbaric Indian up to the level of the civilized, classicized individual, complete
with their own genealogical history.

Demián Flores’s sculptures

This deep iconographic analysis of the oil paintings was prompted by the sculptural
assemblages by Demián Flores, in which he appends an assortment of random knick-knacks to

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the bodies of West Mexican replicas. The two sculptural assemblages under consideration here
are the ones juxtaposed with the paintings I analyzed above. The first, Arbol de la vida (Tree of
Life) [Fig. 5.1], stands on a white pedestal between the two Parra paintings, and the second,
Santa Sangre (Holy Blood) [Fig. 5.2Error! Reference source not found.], is located in front of
the Obregón work. After determining the source image of the West Mexican sculpture,
identifying a few of the appendages, and proposing a general interpretation of the object itself, I
will then put it in conversation with its adjacent oil painting. The main argument that I advance
in this section is that Flores’s seemingly ad hoc incorporation of modern manufactured elements
to three-dimensional West Mexican sculptures provokes a critical deconstruction of visions of
the pre-Columbian landscape portrayed in nineteenth-century oil paintings.
The main figure of Arbol de la vida is a male West Mexican figure with stalky legs, a
painted torso, rope-like arms, and a solemn countenance. He wears a headpiece reminiscent of a
helmet with thick, defined contours outlining the rim. In attempting to identify the figure’s
provenience, the most distinctive features are the eyes, apparel, and stance of the figure. The eyes
appear most similar to the “coffee bean” type found commonly in the Colima region, and this
designation is reinforced by the short tunic top and triangular pubic covering.
282
The “brimmed
or crested tight-fitting helmet” is also distinctive to Colima warriors especially compared to
Jalisco or Nayarit warrior figures.
283
These warrior figures were often sculpted to accompany the
dead in their shaft tombs. Although it is not clear exactly why these sculptures were buried with

282
Jacki Gallagher, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, and University of California, Los Angeles,
Companions of the Dead: Ceramic Tomb Sculpture from Ancient West Mexico (Los Angeles:
Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1983), 39–40.
283
Ibid., 40.

231
the dead, Townsend suggests that it may relate to commemorating important initiation rites for
warriors across various Mesoamerican cultures.
284

Atop the Colima warrior’s head and shoulders are a series of smaller figurines delicately
balancing on the figure. These smaller figurines have been covered with a white plaster that
contrasts with the dark red sheen of the Colima warrior. Teetering on the outstretched right arm
are a stack of animal figures, including a kneeling horse, a standing horse, a small cat, and a tiny
lamb. Perched on the figure’s hand is a blue bird facing away from the rest of the menagerie.
These animal figurines contrast with the two standing human figures, a female encircling the
crown of the helmet and a male tiptoeing on the edge of the Colima warrior’s left shoulder. Both
figures appear heavily plastered over with white paint or another substance, so that their
identities cannot be firmly secured.
The entire sculptural assemblage gives the impression of a staunch, ancient figure with a
top-heavy load on his shoulders. The title of the piece Arbol de la vida reinforces the overall
form, with the stalky legs as strong trunks that support the smaller figures branching out from the
main figure. Most of the human and animal figures arise in pairs that indicate a future
proliferation of life from this main form. In terms of the material processes of the sculpture, it
should also be noted that the West Mexican sculpture is perhaps one of the oldest three-
dimensional artistic practices, and therefore the smaller, modern figures depend on the same
molding, firing, and decorating processes that began hundreds of years ago. As this West
Mexican sculpture is not an authentic artifact from but rather a modern replica that can “pass” as
an original, it also shares a history of reproduction with the other figurines, which were probably

284
Richard F Townsend, “Before Gods, Before Kings,” in Ancient West Mexico: Art and
Archaeology of the Unknown Past (New York; Chicago: Thames and Hudson ; Art Institute of
Chicago, 1998), 112.

232
mass-manufactured. Hence, the Arbol de la vida is both a glimpse into the foundations of
sculptural practice yet firmly lodged in modern politics of replica-making and mass
reproduction.
Positioned between Parra’s Las Casas and his Escenas de la conquista, the sculpture
accentuates a few specific moments in each painting. In the Las Casas painting, the Colima
warrior sculpture brings the Chalchiuhtlicue Statue and the dead warrior to the foreground. Like
the Chalchiuhtlicue Statue, the Colima warrior stands a few feet off the ground on a pedestal and
represents a pre-Contact moment in Mesoamerican cultural production. Like the Colima Warrior,
certain elements of the Chalchiuhtlicue do not cohere with the original renditions, such as the
akimbo legs and the outlining rather than obscuring of the breasts by the quechquemitl. The
Colima Warrior shares its subject matter and darkened skin color with the slain figure on the
ground, and had this scene taken place hundreds of years earlier in West Mexico, perhaps a
figure like the Colima warrior would have been buried in a shaft tomb alongside the dead
warrior. In comparison with the Escenas de la conquista painting, the Colima warrior’s position
mimics that of the powerful Cortés standing among the defeated Cholulans. However, the
Colima warrior faces Cortés in profile, perhaps ready to continue defending the Cholulans
beyond the mise-en-scène of the painting’s frame. Unlike the tilted Chalchiuhtlicue sculpture in
the painting, the Colima warrior maintains his upright position, perpetually ready to defend his
comrades against enemy invaders.
On a less iconographic and more self-referential level, the common feature among all three
works is a merging of pre-Columbian material culture and contemporary artistic materials,
techniques, and visions of the past. Academic oil painting was a European import intended to
instruct Mexican artists in the foundation of a high art tradition to civilize the other members of

233
society. The incorporation of pre-Columbian themes, stories, figures, and material culture was
part of this push for a national art, yet there was a palpable friction in this continued colonization
of the Mexican people. The medium of oil painting unforgivingly mediates the scene not only
because of its European “high art” origins, but because of its sly ability to lull the viewer into
believing the validity of the scene before them. Oil painting has the unique capacity to dupe the
viewer into credulity rather than criticality, especially in visualizing scenes from a deep past that
newer inventions, like photography and film, could not capture. I argue that this gentle lulling is
disrupted by Flores’s sculpture, because the viewer innately understands that the artist is
somehow manipulating the West Mexican sculpture. The not-so-subtle additive process and the
apparent breaks not only between the individual pieces, but also between the various time-
periods represented by the sculptures, alerts the viewer to the extent of the manipulation and
intrusion by both the painters and Flores. Flores highlights the ruptures and breaks between the
West Mexican sculpture -- itself an object situated between the pre-Columbian past and modern
manufacture -- and its multiple appendages. By separating and identifying the various pre-
Columbian elements in both paintings and the sculpture, my intervention underscores the
artistically constructed rather than seamless visions of the past — visions that so easily become
co-opted as containing “fact” or “truth” because of the artists’ mastery over the oil painting
medium.
Finally, how can a European painting technique that contains within it the same impetus to
civilize be used to defend the indigenous population, or at the very least condemn the violence of
Spanish Conquest? When the artistic medium stems from the same desire to Europeanize the
“savage,” how can that same medium vindicate the “savage”? The technique of oil painting was
introduced to Mexican artists, who would then produce art that would “civilize” their common

234
man. This civilizing process relied on developing a canon of painting centered around historical
events unfolding in a linear trajectory. In order to accomplish this, artists needed to lure their
audience into believing in the veracity of their visually expressed claims, and needed to give the
impression of historical accuracy. This relied on a combination of signaling pre-Columbian
architectural and material cultural elements, and by representing both Spaniards and Indians in
the paintings. Each artist took liberties with both parts of the painting, often combining, editing,
or conflating different pre-Columbian elements, and in the case of the individuals, using
contemporary clothing, which created a temporal dissonance for some critics. Perhaps painters
self-consciously included these small moments of rupture to alert the viewer, and the political
leaders and academy directors fueling this national art movement, to the constructed nature of
the past. More likely, however, the artists used the European medium of oil painting to critique
the Spanish conquest and colonization; in effect, they turned the weapons of the colonizer against
itself. Cortés may be highlighted as the main protagonist in Las escenas de la conquista, but he is
simultaneously demonized as a cold, brutal, and unfeeling slayer of defenseless Indian men,
women, and children. The true sympathy lies with the murdered indigenous population and the
destroyed temples, sculptures, and civilization that can never be recovered.
Similarly, Demián Flores's sculpture stands-in for one of the remaining vestiges of pre-
Columbian civilization, as a reminder that pieces of material culture did survive, and that certain
native traditions carry on today. Like the oil paintings, they incorporate foreign elements, in this
case literally grafted onto the figure of the Colima warrior. In this case too, there is a temporal
confusion between the past and the present, especially as this replica of a West Mexican
sculpture is based on a pre-Columbian sculpture, but was manufactured at a more recent period

235
that is co-temporal with the small sculptural appendages. Like the oil paintings, the sculpture is a
contemporary re-imagination of the past that is (loosely) based on a pre-Columbian predecessor.
Demián Flores’s sculptural combine, Santa Sangre, sits on a white rectangular pedestal in
front of Obregón’s El descubrimiento del pulque. The sculpture's gender is signaled by the title
of the work and is further reinforced by her squatting position and the sculptural bust of Venus de
Milo emerging out of the top of her head. The figure has a sloped forehead, almond shaped eyes,
and smooth facial features. She wears a red necklace around her neck and rings both through her
nose and stacked around her ears. Her eyes and mouth are slightly ajar and are carved out of the
ceramic surface to outline their shape. She sits on her rear and balances her body on her incised
toes with her diminutive hands perched upon her spread knees. Around her waist, she wears a
skirt made of orange fabric with rows of black dots. Between her spread legs emerges a
handcrafted white figure splayed on a cross that fits perfectly between her chin, knees, and
bottom. The bust of Venus de Milo sprouts from the crown of her head, elongating the figure and
emphasizing its verticality.
The central female figure appears most similar to the Chinesca or Lagunillas female
sculptures of West Mexico. Scholars like Von Winning and Gallagher suggest that the Chinesca
style figure developed around 100 CE in a localized region, perhaps even from one school or
workshop, like the town of Tequilita in Nayarit.
285
According to Richard Townsend, these female
figures were associated with rites of passage, from maidenhood to marriage and motherhood, and
were often buried in shaft tombs in a fashion similar to the Colima Warrior.
286
These Chinesca

285
Hasso Von Winning, The Shaft Tomb Figures of West Mexico (Los Angeles: Southwest
Museum, 1974), 74; Gallagher, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, and University of California,
Los Angeles, Companions of the Dead, 107.
286
Townsend, “Before Gods, Before Kings,” 123.

236
figures gained popularity in the 1960s and were collected for their rarity and refined technique as
well as their strangely “oriental” appearance.
287
The term “Chinesca” or “Chinese” is a trade
term that refers to the “oriental” appearance of the sculpture, such as the “slanted, almond-
shaped eyes and high cheekbones.”
288
Clearly this is a modern interpretation and designation of
these figures according to exoticizing and orientalizing perceptions of the sculpture, and several
of the Chinesca sculptures do not adhere strictly to these Asiatic qualities. The exotic sensibility
of the sculptures is underscored by the fact that all of the Chinesca figures were depicted nude
with clearly defined genitals.
289
It is perhaps the figure’s nudity combined with a sensual female
body that gave the Chinesca sculptures the epithet of “Venus” in some Mexican publications.
290

The figure of Santa Sangre diverges from these Chinesca figures in several ways. First of
all, the figure dons a cloth to cover her genitals and buttocks and the added figure of the cross
physically denies any access to her genitals and breasts. The figure’s arms and legs are in a
different position than other known Chinesca figures, and I have yet to come across a Chinesca
figure with knees bent and hands resting upon them. The other figures have their knees splayed
open with hands on their belly or knees bent with arms crossed in front of them [Fig. 5.18].
Finally, the three-dimensional quality of the figure’s jewelry is much more pronounced than the
other known figures, whose necklaces and earrings are etched more subtly from the clay.

287
Von Winning, The Shaft Tomb Figures of West Mexico, 69.
288
Gallagher, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, and University of California, Los Angeles,
Companions of the Dead, 107. Von Winning also mentions the “oriental appearance” of the
Chinesca figures in The Shaft Tomb Figures of West Mexico, xiv.
289
Gallagher, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, and University of California, Los Angeles,
Companions of the Dead, 107; Townsend, “Before Gods, Before Kings,” 120.Gallagher 107,
Townsend “Before” 120.
290
Von Winning, The Shaft Tomb Figures of West Mexico, 81.

237
This figure of Santa Sangre is undeniably a replica and not an original object. Not only
does the figure drastically depart from known Chinesca sculptures, but she wears a loin cloth and
has clearly been manipulated through paint and the addition of jewelry. This statue might be one
of those mentioned by Peter T. Furst, which “would fool anyone but the novice in pre-Columbian
art,”
291
as it has been so drastically modified from its source image. Furst goes on to describe a
technique used by forgers of pre-Columbian sculptures in which the forger begins with a few
fragments of a broken authentic artifact and then intersperses these original segments with newly
manufactured pieces. Rather than smooth over the joints between the ancient and contemporary
pieces, the forger leaves these visible as if an attempt to “pass the piece off as having been
discovered in a broken condition and merely glued together, rather than actually
reconstructed.”
292
This ingenious method transforms the shortcomings of the technique of
reconstruction into an advantage that testifies to the originality of the object. Whether any part of
the Chinesca figure of Santa Sangre is original or not, the logic of the visible rupture is evident
in the joints between the Venus de Milo figure and the top of the Chinesca’s head. Flores uses
white paint to smooth over this joint between the Venus de Milo and the Chinesca figure, but the
break is still unresolved and apparent.
This unreconciled “white washing” continues down the right side of the Chinesca sculpture
though the figure of the cross. Flores used the same white washing technique in fusing the added
figures of animals and people atop the Colima warrior’s shoulders. This visible white washing
draws attention to an underlying intent of covering over, while simultaneously blending the

291
Peter T. Furst, “Pre-Columbian Mexico: The Faking of Art and the Art of Faking,” Quarterly,
Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History 6, no. 1 (1967): 7.
292
Ibid., 8.

238
various forms together -- a strategy present in the oil paintings as well. Just as the white paint
merges and separates the assembled three-dimensional forms, the pre-Columbian elements both
stand-out as “ancient” and yet blend-in as part of the mise-en-scène. The Europeanized figure of
Xochitl stands-out because of her white skin tone, and yet blends-in because of her clothing and
surrounding figures. This oscillation between ancient and contemporary, Mexican and European,
is a common trope shared by both the sculpture and the painting, and, I argue, the main
phenomenon that Flores is attempting to "deconstruct" in the exhibition. There is both a
dissonance between the “ancient” elements and the contemporary figures, but also a luring into
believing the scene.
The Mexican “Venus” and European Venus highlight the role and position of the female as
source of life, beauty, and lust. The Europeanized figure of Xochitl is mirrored by the Venus de
Milo figure, whose beauty is unsurpassed and whose iconic figure forms a large part of the
classical mythology. The Chinesca “Venus” offers a different sense of the female that appears
more linked to fertility in her spread legs — a position of conception and birthing — and the
exoticizing tendency not only in the 1960s, but with the very “discovery” of the New World, in
which the continent was perceived as a languid woman awaiting conquest. But just as Xochitl’s
beauty is unsurpassed, so is the lust after the alcoholic beverage that she presents to
Tecpancaltzin. Unbridled alcoholism was one of the contributing factors that led to the downfall
of the indigenous population and continues to be a threat to the productivity and health of
Mexicans today, though less in the form of pulque and more in beer and hard liquor.
293

293
Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs, 121.

239
Museum

In this exhibition, Demián Flores plays the role of both artist and curator. Flores both
creates original works of art in his sculptural combines and arranges objects in a gallery space to
propagate a narrative. Flores relies on a dialogic interchange between the sculptures and
paintings, as well as fomenting conversation within the sculptures and paintings themselves. This
inter- and intra-dialogic exchange promotes a reconceptualization of the nineteenth-century oil
paintings and replicas of West Mexican sculptures within the specific context of the museum.
The space of the gallery serves as a third interlocutor in this exhibition. According to "A Museum
of a Center for Mexican Contemporaneity?" by Karen Cordero Reiman, the Museo Nacional del
Arte (MUNAL) initiated a program in 2000 that would perform a sort of institutional self-
critique of the permanent collection and the role of the museum in defining art, history, and
culture. This museum-initiated program of redefinition and reconceptualization is a self-
conscious move away from the concept of the museum as an unbiased storehouse and purveyor
of cultural treasures, and an embrace of new museological principles that encourage artistic
collaboration, critical questioning of the institution, and experimentation with new forms of
display.
Flores’s installation operates within these parameters firstly because the West Mexican
replicas are temporally confused objects that are modern manufactured interpretations of ancient
artifacts. Secondly, pre-Columbian material culture in general teeters on the line between art
object and anthropological artifact. The exhibition also developed out of initiative, Diálogos
Contemporáneos: 100 y 30. Palacio y Museo, which marked the 100 years since the construction
of the building and 30 years since its transformation into a museum. MUNAL’s self-conscious

240
curatorial mission to investigate its own history and its insistence on remaining relevant to
contemporary art are strategic moves that expand the realm of possibilities for the museum.

Picturing a National Mexican Identity

The title of Demián Flores's exhibition De/construcción de una nación plays off the title of
the MUNAL gallery La construcción de la Nación, which highlights art during the first century
of Mexican Independence (1810-1910). Filling the galleries 19-26 of the second floor, paintings
such as those by Parra and Obregón would normally be displayed along with paintings of
landscapes and Mexican customs. Flores replaces the definitive article "la" with the indefinite
article "una," effectively changing it from "the nation" to "a nation" perhaps to open up the idea
of nation building on a broader level, or to undermine the notion that a singular nation exists. He
further draws out this line of investigation when he adds the "de/" to the front of "construcción,"
in a linguistic move that suggests that deconstructing a nation is required prior to the
"construction" of a nation; in other words, that the physical destruction of the pre-Columbian
civilization was necessary before the construction of a civilized colonial world. Similarly, the
deconstruction of that Spanish-dominated colonial world was a requisite step before the
construction of the independent Mexican nation. On a less literal level, the "de/construction" that
Flores calls for has a more activist component as well, and his work encourages critical visual
analysis to dismantle the components that propel the mechanism of national culture forward. If
oil painting and West Mexican sculpture are cogs in the machine of national culture, then
isolating them for critical analysis helps us decode the hidden agendas embedded within the
works, and particularly those prioritized by the cultural and political elite. The elite dictated what
was painted, how it was painted, what was collected, and how it was displayed. By identifying

241
those power players and their underlying motivations, we gain a glimpse into the world of the
nineteenth-century and their continued impact on museum exhibitions today.
Both nineteenth-century Mexican oil painting and replicas of West Mexican sculptures
contain within them contradictions that I will highlight and evaluate in this section. Mexican oil
paintings exist at the crux of emic national narratives promulgated by the independent Mexican
government and etic pictorial devices and techniques imported from Europe. The demand for
Mexican oil paintings came from an internal Mexican governmental push to adopt foreign
standards in creating a civilized national body linked to a linear vision of history. Unlike
Mexican oil painting, the original West Mexican artifacts for replicas came from an
autochthonous source (Jalisco, Colima, and Nayarit civilizations in the Classic Period) and the
techniques and materials used to make the replicas are also indigenous to Mexico. However, the
desire for these sculptures derives from a U.S. and European market rather than an internal one.
This appetite began with the rediscovery of West Mexican sculpture by Diego Rivera and then
transformed into an international demand when primitive art became all the rage. The
interrelationship between Mexico and the West played an important role in the rise of oil painting
in Mexico and West Mexican sculpture in the U.S. and Europe, and this development often
revolved around definitions of national identity on an international stage.

What is History Painting?
Academic history painting developed in Europe after the Renaissance. The subject matter
usually derived from significant legendary or historical stories, and the artist picked a turning
point in the narrative from which the antecedent and consequence of the story would become

242
evident.
294
The story was often motivated by a didactic or moralizing purpose, which strove to
teach the audience an important lesson.
295
History painting as a movement was strongly tied to
the rise of art academies as teaching institutions that used history painting as a tool to instruct
their students on how to depict the human figure within a specific scenario. This type of figure
painting relied on human models or cast sculptures to teach students how to accurately portray
human proportion.
296
History painting was particularly prominent in France, and after the French
Revolution, the subject matter shifted from celebrating aristocratic culture to founding a
democratic nation built on the principles of “self-sacrifice, patriotism, and civic virtue.”
297
These
qualities highlighted in post-Revolution French painting evidently transferred to Mexico and
were central in visualizing the foundation of their own post-Revolution Mexican nationhood.

Academia de San Carlos
The primary site for the development of history painting in Mexico City was the Academia
de San Carlos. The Academia de San Carlos was established in 1783 with a royal charter granted
by Charles IV’s administration to convert the School of Engraving into the Royal Academy of
Fine Arts of San Carlos.
298
The foundation of an official art academy for the proper training of
artists in the high arts of Europe was deemed essential for the continued civilizing process of
New Spain. Contemporary critics of the time proposed that Mexican artists could educate the

294
David Green and Peter Seddon, eds., History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of
History in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 6.
295
Ibid., 7.
296
Ibid.
297
Ibid., 8.
298
Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-century Mexican Painting,
15.

243
public on fine art and architecture, and thereby cultivate good taste. This process evolved into a
national patriotism centered around the fine arts in an effort to Europeanize the once "barbaric"
nation. As Widdifield writes, “Participating in the protection of the fine arts was in itself a
patriotic act. From 1842 through 1881, hardly any writer neglected to proclaim loudly that la
gloria nacional was at stake in the protection of the Academy.”
299
Also at stake was the potential
for financial investments in Mexico by European countries, and a thriving academy of art stood
as a testament to the urbanity and sophistication of Mexico. This became especially apparent
with the evolution of the exhibition program, which in 1869 was mostly geared toward national
scope, while by 1881 expanded its international reach.
300
The Academia de San Carlos was the
linchpin in the cultural refinement of the Mexican citizens, and played a critical role in the
development of a national art.
Mexican history painting, however, was filled with unreconciled contradictions,
particularly when it came to the representation of the ancient past. Because the pre-Columbian
past had been mostly eradicated, artists had to develop a set of canonical narratives that would be
appropriate for oil painting. These narratives mostly came from early colonial accounts, like Las
Casas, or legends that had been passed on either orally or through the few writings of Fernando
de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl. Complicating this recovery of canonical stories was the fact that the
ancient stories positioned indigenous people as either protagonists or at least minor characters
present in the story. Artists struggled to represent these indigenous peoples who were
simultaneously heralded as revered ancestors and despised as downtrodden present-day peasants.
A similar challenge arose with the representation of the Spanish conquistadors. Although they

299
Ibid., 29.
300
Ibid., 73.

244
too were forefathers of the mestizo nation, they were also responsible for the massacre of
thousands of indigenous ancestors and the destruction of an entire way of life. In comparing the
figure of Las Casas to that of Cortés in Parra’s paintings, it is evident that Parra shows the
redemptive value of Las Casas while highlighting the brutality of Cortés.
Painters also needed a way of depicting the pre-Columbian environment, complete with
material culture and architectural structures, much of which was already excavated or in the
process of being dug up from the ground. While the ruins of ancient Pompeii, which were
discovered in 1748, could bolster European claims of cultural superiority based on harmonic
proportion, the archaeological remains from Mexico often did not have the innate logically
ordered beauty prized by Europeans. Sites like Mitla contained classicizing elements that were
comparable to Greek and Roman sites, but others had less refined carvings and suffered from
visual elements that evoked barbarism (i.e., skull racks, beheaded figures) or paganism. Oriana
Baddeley addresses this complex issue in the paintings of Obregón and Parra when she states
that they, “focused on themes from the pre-Hispanic past for their subject matter, but in general
avoided reference to archaeological and sculptural details which formed the basis of
contemporary descriptions of ancient Mexican culture. Those surviving elements of the past
which on one hand served to define its existence were not deemed appropriate to communicate
its reality in a self-consciously positive fashion.”
301
Though I would argue that Obregón and
Parra do indeed refer to “archaeological and sculptural detail” as I’ve highlighted in previous
sections, Baddeley's assessment that these associations are not “self-consciously positive” may
be valid. The representation of archaeological remnants in painting was a challenging

301
Baddeley, “A Death of History or a History of Death: Visual Metaphors of the Past Within
Contemporary Mexican Art,” 56.

245
undertaking in that the artist needed to incorporate some of these elements to make the painting
believable, but at the same time, they needed to distance itself from this uncivilized past.
Therefore, artists could not unbridledly celebrate the archaeological and material remains of the
ancient past, but needed to depict them in a matter-of-fact way — a signaling without a
glorifying.
Perhaps Tenorio Trillo’s analysis of the relationship between depictions of archaeology and
oil painting is useful here: “the aim was not historical accuracy but rather a mimetic mutual
convenience: patriotic history and archaeology procured with these paintings useful
representations to reinforce their stories; and these paintings obtained from history and
archaeology the inspiration for every detail.”
302
Tenorio Trillo goes on to say that the mutually
beneficial relationship was not dependent on artistic accuracy when representing pre-Columbian
remains, as critics and the public understood that some artistic liberty would be taken for
“didactic and artistic effectiveness” in depicting the past.
303
By placing archaeological remnants
in a narrative frame that the public could comprehend, artists were instrumental in visualizing the
past; yet these images often became the manner of representing the past rather than a vision of
the past. Reproduced in books like México a través de siglo (1884) and circulating to students
through general textbooks and museum visits, these paintings effectively stood-in as accurate
images of the past. They began to constitute the image of Mexico not only within Mexico, but
also internationally through World’s Fairs, as El descubrimiento del pulque and El senado de
Tlaxcala were exhibited at the 1884 New Orleans World Fair.
304
Like the casts of the Coatlicue,

302
Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs, 119. Emphasis mine.
303
Ibid., 120.
304
Ibid., 118–119.

246
these paintings passed for a vision of the past, but more so than the Coatlicue, they also
demonstrated artistic mastery that came along with cultivating progress in Mexico. Paintings of
the past were commissioned by the wealthy lawyer and historian Felipe Sánchez Solis, and
eventually the subject matter of pre-Hispanic history became part of the accepted canon as well
as embedded in the curriculum of students at the Academia de San Carlos as evidenced by their
assignments.
305

I argue that Flores challenges the authority of these paintings to render the past by
encouraging a visual deconstruction indicated both by the title of the exhibition and by the
juxtaposition of the paintings with similarly mediated sculptures. Just as the paintings function
according to an additive process whereby Mitla frieze decorations form a backdrop to an Aztec
Chalchiuhtlicue, the West Mexican replicas are the bases for the attachment of mass-produced
miniature knick-knacks. Flores further emphasizes the mutual reliance between archaeology and
history painting by putting a sculpture literally in front of a painting in a move that gives the
sculpture some pictorial context. Flores points to the interrelationship between Mexico and the
West in validating the pre-Columbian past by literally grafting Western imagery onto the surface
of West Mexican sculptures. In the case of West Mexican replicas specifically, Flores also
gestures toward the system of supply and demand that resulted in the mass production of fake
replicas — a system that stems from a U.S.-European demand and a supply chain that often
demonizes the most disenfranchised individual in the chain, namely the producer.

305
Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-century Mexican Painting,
118–119.

247
Possession and Dispossession of the “Indian"
The simultaneous promotion of an image of the “Indian” and marginalization of the
indigenous population is a process captured both by nineteenth-century oil paintings and twenty-
first century replicas. As discussed in a previous section, beginning in the late eighteenth-century,
important public figures like statesman Carlos María de Bustamante nurtured Neo-Aztec
sentiments in the development of a pantheon of national heroes reaching back to Quetzalcoátl
and Cuauhtémoc.
306
By 1824, the iconic Aztec foundation image of the eagle perched on a
prickly pear with a serpent in its mouth became an emblem of the Federal Constitution.
307
When
academic oil painting co-opted the image of the Indian in the mid-nineteenth century as “the only
possible sign of the authentic,”
308
it reinforced racial and class hierarchies that distinguished
descendants of an “elite” Aztec indigenous culture from the contemporary "barbaric" peasants
populating peripheral states like Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Sonora.
309
These “Indians” were defined
by their darker skin tone, lack of individuation, and general disposability within the frame of the
painting. At the same time, several politicians and cultural figures in power claimed descent from
an “elite” indigenous ancestry, perhaps best exemplified by Felipe Sánchez Solís who
commissioned Obregón’s painting El descubrimiento del pulque and claimed that he was
descended from the same line of Acolhua Chichimec rulers as Tecpancaltzin.
310

306
Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico, 250.
307
Ibid., 258.
308
Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-century Mexican Painting,
87.
309
Ibid., 99.
310
Ibid., 94.

248
As Widdifield acutely points out, the Porfirian government forcefully put down indigenous
rebellions and “advocated the establishment of military colonies as the only way to keep the
Yaqui of Sonora under control.”
311
At the same time that this type of violent aggression was
enacted against indigenous communities, there were individuals who spoke out against this
discrepancy between the construct of the ancient Indian and the reality of the lives of their
descendants. For example, Phelan singles out Francisco Javier Clavigero’s contribution to the
Creole concept of Neo-Aztecism: “the Creoles could not merely adopt the Aztec world as the
classical antiquity of America and continue to ignore the social conditions of the descendants of
the Aztecs.”
312
On a similar line of thought, Julio Zárate published an essay in 1870 titled “La
raza indígena” in which he bemoaned the loss of historical memory among the indigenous
population and the fact that, “the foreigner knows more than the Indian about the past glories of
our grandfathers.”
313
This discrepancy was exacerbated by the fact that history as an academic
discipline was based on the written word as captured in textual documents composed by
authoritative sources. Though some indigenous documents survived the Spanish book burning
campaign as discussed in Chapter 1 and 2, they relied on pictorial language systems that were
not considered valid written documents. The historical information that did survive in document
form often came through a collective memories based on oral legend, rituals, and traditions that
formed more of a repertoire than archive.
314
Florescano describes this evolution of history

311
Ibid., 110.
312
Phelan, “Neo-Aztecism in the Eighteenth Century,” 766.
313
Cited in Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-century Mexican
Painting, 93.
314
See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

249
writing in the West and argues that when it was imported to Mexico, both the information
embedded within collective memory and the individuals who relayed such narratives were
“rejected by academic standards that decreed that only an investigator trained within their walls
had the qualifications to objectively rescue the past.”
315
With the rise of ethnohistorical research
that values individual testimony as a valid source, this type of data is now readily sought after
and accepted as evidence.
The consolidation of archaeological artifacts in Mexico City was another strategy of co-
opting indigenous culture and highlighting the achievements of a vaguely defined “Indian”
ancestor, while eradicating the potential for tourism in these smaller communities. As if taking a
cue from the Aztecs before them, the elite Mexico City-based politicians and cultural taste-
makers yoked together cultural artifacts from various time periods and geographical regions
under the category of indigenismo or lo mexicano at the expense of the individual communities
who had less political power and economic resources to fight back. Rather than promoting
indigenous self-knowledge and the reinstatement of property rights to their own cultural artifacts,
the Mexican government continues to promote education and integration of peripheral
indigenous communities into a larger “Mexican” nation.
316
Under the guise of education, culture,
and patriotism, smaller communities continue to be disenfranchised through uncannily similar
strategies employed since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This disenfranchisement continues today and is brought to the foreground in the production
of replicas for international consumption. The creators of forged artifacts who pass them off as

315
Florescano, National Narratives in Mexico, 368.
316
Ida Rodriguez Prampolini, “La Figura Del Indio En La Pintura Del Siglo XIX,” in La
Polémica Del Arte Nacional En México, 1850-1910 (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1988), 207.

250
“original” are using the logic of the authentic indigenous artifact, and the system of supply and
demand to benefit from their cultural heritage that has been inherited form, material, and
technique.

Historiography of West Mexican Sculptures

Geographically, West Mexico is defined by the region encompassing the states of “states of
Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, and adjacent parts of Guanajuato and
Guerrero.”
317
This region was particularly active from around 200 BCE to 250 CE, and the
majority of the sculptures were discovered buried with elite rulers and family members in
subterranean shaft tomb structures. Each region, particularly Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima, had
slight differences in the form, content, and stylistic treatment of their ceramic sculptures.
Scholars like Von Winning, Townsend, Kan, Meighan, and Nicholson have worked to categorize
sculptures according to their geographic region — an undertaking hampered by the fact that most
of the sculptures were illicitly removed from their tombs without proper archaeological
recording.
318
It is this categorization system that I relied upon in determining the likely source
images for the West Mexican replicas in Flores’s work. Compared to the wealth of information
garnered from other regions in Mexico, the amount of data from West Mexico is severely limited
by looting and the fact that few tombs remain in tact. This dearth of verifiable information has

317
Von Winning, The Shaft Tomb Figures of West Mexico, 13.
318
Clement W Meighan and H. B Nicholson, “The Ceramic Mortuary Offerings of Prehistoric
West Mexico: An Archaeological Perspective,” in Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico: Nayarit,
Jalisco, Colima : a Catalogue of the Proctor Stafford Collection at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art (Los Angeles, Calif.; Albuquerque, N.M.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ;
published in association with University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 31.

251
led scholars like Townsend to rely on comparison between West Mexican sculptures and the
cultural production of the Aztecs -- a tricky maneuver that grafts concepts from the Aztec world
view onto West Mexican cultures.
319
Though this strategy is helpful and often necessary when
there is a lack of information, it can also be a risky enterprise to assume that certain similarities
exist without hard evidence.
West Mexico is not only on the geographic periphery of Mexico, but also remained less
explored because it seemed to lack a strong political presence in ancient Mexico as exemplified
by its lack of large monumental structure and limited range of influence.
320
The rampant looting
that resulted in a vast number of ceramic sculptures without provenience further diminished the
status of West Mexico in academic studies, as the cultural wares were literally dissipated and
diluted both nationally and internationally. This disinterest in West Mexico as an archaeological
region reversed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One of the earliest documented
encounters with West Mexican sculptures occurred in 1896 when Norwegian explorer Carl
Lumholtz collected Nayarit and Jalisco pieces and visited a shaft tomb in the Ixtlan del Río
area.
321
He published his account in the 1902 book, Unknown Mexico.
This nascent interest of West Mexican sculpture was boosted tremendously when Diego
Rivera began collecting these objects between 1910 and 1920. Rivera, along with Frida Kahlo,

319
This particular device pervades the article by Townsend, “Before Gods, Before Kings.”
Though it is a common practice to use well-known cultures to draw out potential similarities in
less well-known civilizations, there is always the potential downside that these inferences may be
too deeply colored.
320
For more on the lack of monumental structures as a reason for its peripheral status, see
Richard F Townsend and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, eds., Ancient West Mexico: Art and
Archaeology of the Unknown Past (New York; Chicago: Thames and Hudson ; Art Institute of
Chicago, 1998), 32–33.
321
Meighan and Nicholson, “The Ceramic Mortuary Offerings of Prehistoric West Mexico: An
Archaeological Perspective,” 33.

252
Rufino Tamayo, and Miguel Covarrubias, incorporated West Mexican art in their paintings.
322

According to Townsend, “It was this warm, expressive appeal that made these earthenware
figures so attractive to the artists and intellectuals of the Left who found them to be ideologically
significant because they seemed to speak of an ideal, communal way of life, far from the
regimented coercion and economic exploitation of warlike fascist or imperialistic states.”
323

Although perhaps a romanticized characterization of the ancient past — a reality more likely
structured by elite privilege and dominance at the expense of commoners — this perception of
the past corresponded with the idealized image of the past captured in Rivera’s mural paintings.
Braun highlights the fact that many of the figures in Rivera’s paintings have the same red-tint to
their bodies as clay sculptures and that several of the figures may have been based on Colima
ceramic sculptures in his collection.
324
Rivera’s collection is currently housed in the Anahuacalli
in Mexico City and it is probable that his incipient collection was the driving force behind the
acquisition of West Mexican sculptures by other museums.
325

Rivera’s recovery of the past did not, of course, exist in a vacuum, but developed alongside
a larger art movement that recognized the potential of so-called “primitive art” to tap into a
subconscious, instinctual space and expand creative possibilities of the plastic medium. As

322
Barbara Braun, “West Mexican Art and Modernist Artists,” in Ancient West Mexico: Art and
Archaeology of the Unknown Past (New York; Chicago: Thames and Hudson ; Art Institute of
Chicago, 1988), 267.
323
Townsend and Anawalt, Ancient West Mexico, 17–18.
324
Braun, “West Mexican Art and Modernist Artists,” 268–270.
325
Michael Kan, “The Pre-Columbian Art of West Mexico: Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima,” in
Sculpture of Ancient West Mexico: Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima : a Catalogue of the Proctor Stafford
Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, Calif.; Albuquerque, N.M.:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; published in association with University of New Mexico
Press, 1989), 14.

253
previously mentioned, starting in the late nineteenth century with artists like Vincent Van Gogh
and Paul Gauguin, the cultural and archaeological artifacts from Africa, Latin America, and the
amorphously defined “Oceania” influenced artistic production in Europe and the U.S. The
British artist Henry Moore, in particular, spent time abroad in Mexico visiting archaeological
sites like Tenayuca and at home at the British Museum, which held objects like stone masks from
Teotihuacán.
326

History of Forgeries

The incorporation of West Mexican sculptures into private and public collections resulted
in an increased demand for these objects. Aided by the completion of the western coast railroad
in 1927, ceramics from West Mexico began streaming out of the region and into collectors’
hands.
327
This plundering reached its apogee between the 1950s and 1970s.
328
The alternative to
looting archaeological sites is producing forgeries, though unexpectedly the early phase in the
manufacture of West Mexican forgeries did not seem directly tied to increased demand.
329
In
fact, Kelker points out that even within Rivera’s collection housed at Anahuacalli, which sparked
this collecting frenzy, a high proportion of West Mexican sculptures were fakes.
330

326
Esther Pasztory, “Three Aztec Masks of the God Xipe,” in Falsifications and
Misreconstructions of Pre-Columbian Art: A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 14th and
15th, 1978 (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 1982), 77.
327
Meighan and Nicholson, “The Ceramic Mortuary Offerings of Prehistoric West Mexico: An
Archaeological Perspective,” 31.
328
Townsend and Anawalt, Ancient West Mexico, 32–33.
329
Nancy L Kelker and Karen Olsen Bruhns, Faking Ancient Mesoamerica (Walnut Creek,
Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2010), 149.
330
Ibid.

254
The falsification of ancient artifacts dates back to the seventeenth-century with the
production of wares to meet the Spanish desire for souvenirs, particularly in the region of
Tlaltelulco.
331
The demand for ancient objects increased in the 1820s, when European explorers
like Alexander von Humboldt, John Stephens, and Frederick Catherwood prompted interest in
the “noble savages” of Mexico.
332
In January 1884, Paul Eudel published an account of the fake
wares in his article "Le truquage: les contrefaçon dévoilées.” In this article, Eudel points out that
in the anthropology section of the 1878 World’s Fair, Dr. Ernesto Hamy, a conservator of the
Trocadero Museum, installed a special display of falsified objects for the public’s edification.
333

The acquisition and display of forged artifacts by museums may not have always been so self-
conscious, as evidenced by three falsified sculptures accessioned into the Museo Nacional de
México.
334
The corpus of fake artifacts in the Mexican museum must exceed these isolated
incidents, because when Désiré Charnay visited the museum in 1878 to make copies of several
vessels, he realized later that these supposedly “authentic” vessels were actually fake.
335
These
early rumblings of catching fakes in the museum erupted with Holmes’s 1902 publication that
denounced three-fourths of the museum’s collection as fake.
336

This high proportion of falsified artifacts is quite astounding, but unfortunately is not a
unique case. Although museum curators, administrators, and directors are reluctant to disclose

331
Leopoldo Batres, Antigv ̈ edades Mejicanas Falsificadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores
(Mexico, D.F.: Impr. de F.S. Soria, 1910), 7–8.
332
Kelker and Bruhns, Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, 15.
333
Batres, Antigv ̈ edades Mejicanas Falsificadas, 5.
334
Batres, Antigv ̈ edades Mejicanas Falsificadas.
335
Pasztory, “Three Aztec Masks of the God Xipe,” 92.
336
Ibid.

255
the number of fake artifacts in their collection, partly out of embarrassment, partly out of a fear
of devaluing their collection, there are a few statistics that have recently come to light. According
to Robert Pickering, forty percent of Colima dogs are fake, and Thomas Hoving “estimates that
40 percent, or about 20,000 of the 50,000 or so works he examined while director of the Met,
were fakes.”
337
Likewise, the Smithsonian Institution’s collection contains “unbelievably bad
counterfeit pieces purchased in Mexico by American travellers or diplomatic personnel in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and later donated by them to the Smithsonian.”
338

These fake objects often enter the museum because a curator cannot reject the gift of an
important donor, and has to accept the lot in its entirety. Commonly, genuine artifacts are
interspersed with blatantly obvious fakes, but the curator must accession all of the objects. Once
accessioned, the fake object gains equal status as an artifact in the eyes of the registrar, and
despite a curator’s attempts to bury, hide,
339
or red-flag the fake, it enters the collection just as
any other object.
Once these fake objects enter a collection, they have the potential to serve as evidence for
larger claims and arguments in scholarly publications. When the forged objects are published
either in a museum exhibition catalogue or scholarly article or book, they gain a legitimacy that
is hard to challenge. A similar phenomenon occurs with reconstructions of monumental
archaeological sites, such as that of Chichén Itzá and Tula. In his article, "Archaeological
Buildings: Restoration or Misrepresentation,” Augusto Molina-Montes points out that the
supposed connection between the Mayan site of Chichén Itzá and the Central Mexican site of

337
Kelker and Bruhns, Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, 45.
338
Furst, “Pre-Columbian Mexico: The Faking of Art and the Art of Faking,” 6.
339
Gordon Ekholm, “The Problem of Fakes in Pre-Columbian Art,” Curator: The Museum
Journal 7, no. 1 (January 1, 1964): 20.

256
Tula relies completely on modern archaeological reconstructions, which should be viewed as
interpretations of the site. Instead, these “reconstructions in archaeological buildings have a
tendency to become fossilized and accepted as archaeological evidence, to be accepted as
truth.”
340
Similarly, scholarship that depends on falsified artifacts as evidence has the potential to
lead to erroneous conclusions. One of the problems specifically with forged artifacts in museum
collections is that if the collection is devalued, the rest of the collection may come under
heightened scrutiny. Furthermore, any publication of these forged items that details how the
curators detected the falsified object might actually help the forger avoid these pitfalls in the
future and create even more perfect fake objects.
341

Despite the development of new technologies to detect forgeries, like thermoluminescence
or Carbon-14 dating, scholars agree that the trained eye of experts is the best tool for separating
forgeries from authentic artifacts.
342
Of course, this undertaking is easier said than done, as there
is not much incentive for spending time detecting forgeries, especially if that means potentially
undermining research performed by one’s colleagues or damaging the reputation of museum
collections. This lack of incentive means that the forgeries continue to creep undetected into
scholarship and collections, potentially leading to erroneous conclusions that will then be
replicated by future scholars. Turning a blind eye or trying to be rigorous in one’s own
scholarship and collecting practices are temporary solutions to this problem.

340
Augusto Molina-Montes, “Archaeological Buildings: Restoration or Misrepresentation,” in
Falsifications and Misreconstructions of Pre-Columbian Art: A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks,
October 14th and 15th, 1978 (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard
University, 1982), 132.
341
Ekholm, “The Problem of Fakes in Pre-Columbian Art,” 21.
342
Boone, Falsifications and Misreconstructions of Pre-Columbian Art, vi; Furst, “Pre-
Columbian Mexico: The Faking of Art and the Art of Faking,” 6–7.

257
Recent studies on contemporary forgers has helped to elucidate the means of production
and types of forgeries, as well as strengthened experts’ abilities to detect forgeries. Ethnological
research based on interviewing forgery producers, such as that executed by Ronda L. Brulotte at
Monte Albán and neighborhoods around Oaxaca, have provided a more nuanced and
multifaceted perspective on the forgers. In her book, Between Art and Artifact: Archaeological
Replicas and Cultural Production in Oaxaca, Mexico, Brulotte describes her time spent with the
forgers during the production and selling of the fake artifacts.
Certain claims to authenticity arise in the use of molds from authentic artifacts and the
insistence on “traditional materials” and “ancient techniques.”
343
Based on the production of the
sculptures, the question arises as to who owns this history, or to whom does this history rightfully
belong? Are the Oaxacan sculptors the legitimate inheritors of this ancient tradition? And if so,
does the main question hinge on whether they are classified as illegal forgers or overlooked
artisans? Rather than demonize the producers as criminals performing illegal acts, Brulotte
provides a nuanced perspective that complicates the simple binaries of legal and illegal, producer
and consumer, cultural guardian and destroyer. She outlines the controversies, such as the
legitimate practice of using an inherited cultural custom to make money, letting consumers
assume the authenticity of objects, the competition among forgers in both production and
distribution of the wares, and the often tense relationship with INAH, who controls the site of
Monte Albán. This type of detailed account from informants themselves lends a biographical
sensibility to the research on forgeries, and this intimate look into the lives of forgers helps to

343
Ronda L. Brulotte, Between Art and Artifact: Archaeological Replicas and Cultural
Production in Oaxaca, Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 101.

258
counteract the lack of personal information we have both about earlier forgers and even more
remotely the individuals represented in authentic Mexican sculptures.
According to Brulotte’s research in Oaxaca, forgers start with balls of clay and use tools
like matchsticks to etch eyes and other designs. Sometimes they use molds, perhaps made from
original artifacts, to speed the process along. After drying and firing the clay, they employ
“finishing techniques” like applying dirt or corn husk ash to make the sculptures look old.
344
To
enhance the believability of these copies as original artifacts, certain forgers use the “same local
clays, types of tools, and techniques that had been used in the manufacture of the ancient
originals.”
345
Along the same lines, Brulotte points out that the forgers working in Monte Albán
are more likely to use Zapotec and Mixtec designs commonly found around the archaeological
site.
346

Forgers have three main sources that guide their artistic output. Firstly, the forger may use
three-dimensional objects that are either genuine artifacts (whole or partial) or earlier copies,
perhaps even used for generations.
347
Secondly, the forger may turn to two-dimensional drawings
or photographs of the artifacts that circulate in museum exhibition catalogues, history textbooks
published by the Mexican Secretary of Public Education (SEP),
348
or through online databases
such as the Kerr Archives.
349
Thirdly, and most uncommon, is the artist that draws exclusively on

344
Ibid., 103.
345
Kelker and Bruhns, Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, 68.
346
Brulotte, Between Art and Artifact: Archaeological Replicas and Cultural Production in
Oaxaca, Mexico, 95.
347
Kelker and Bruhns, Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, 18.
348
Brulotte, Between Art and Artifact: Archaeological Replicas and Cultural Production in
Oaxaca, Mexico, 99.
349
Kelker and Bruhns, Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, 18.

259
his or her imagination.
350
This last option classifies the forger closer to the category of an artist
or artisan than a copyist, though the underlying intention is still to deceive an unsuspecting buyer
that the object is a genuine ancient artifact.
According to Kelker, most people assume that a replica is a mere copy of an existing
artifact. While direct copies are common, he also identifies other forms of replica production,
including pastiche, “false restoration,” and “original forgery” or “replivention.”
351
Pastiche or
pasticcio is when the artist combines images and motifs from different sources to create a new
object that can “pass” as an original artifact to an inexperienced viewer. By melding iconography
that appears vaguely “pre-Columbian,” the artist imbues his work with a general ancient
sensibility without resorting to being a mere copyist. A “false restoration” is a type of pastiche in
which the forger assembles various authentic fragments and combines them into a new form. To
smooth over the crevices between the sculptures, he applies a thin coat of plaster, paint, and
lacquer.
352
According to Furst, this technique is commonly used in forgeries of the Chinesca
figure, in which the artist reconstructs a figure by “start[ing] with nothing more than a head, an
arm, and some fragments of torso.”
353
In this scenario, rather than filling in the creases between
the fragments, the forger will leave them visible, as if suggesting that he merely glued the broken
fragments together. The last category of “original forgery” or “replivention” occurs when the
artist is not using a specific source image as a model, but instead derives the form and

350
Raphael X. Reichert, “A Counterfeit Moche-Recuay Vessel and Its Origins,” in Falsifications
and Misreconstructions of Pre-Columbian Art: A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 14th
and 15th, 1978 (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 1982),
51.
351
Kelker and Bruhns, Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, 16–20.
352
Ibid., 19.
353
Furst, “Pre-Columbian Mexico: The Faking of Art and the Art of Faking,” 7.

260
iconography from his or her imagination. Kelker considers these “independent creations,” again,
as mentioned previously, most closely akin to works of art than slavish copying.
An additional category of copying is the use of pre-Columbian molds in the contemporary
production of ceramics. While these ceramic objects may exist as independent creations,
sometimes they are also appended to vessels according to the logic of pastiche.
354
The apparent
logic behind this practice is to increase the authenticity of the vessel through a transfer of
originality through proximity from the sculpture to the vessel.

Connection to Demián’s work

In considering this history of replica production with Demián Flores’s installation, a few
points of intersections emerge. First of all, Flores chose to display forgeries from West Mexico,
which is the region of Mexico from which the majority of fraudulent artifacts come from.
355

Secondly, we recognize a few of the techniques described by Kelker in the production of the
West Mexican sculptures and Flores’s additive process. The Chinesca figure may be a “false
restoration,” in which the forger combined a variety of existing pieces to form a new figure. The
hodgepodge of smaller sculptures that Flores attaches to the West Mexican replica riffs off the
idea of “pastiche,” though in a more extreme sense. While he coats the objects with plaster to
suggest a cohesive object, Flores takes no major pains to disguise the breaks between the
independent elements. Thirdly, by placing these forgeries within the setting of the museum,
Flores gestures towards the existence of other fakes in the Museo Nacional del Arte and other

354
Pasztory, “Three Aztec Masks of the God Xipe,” 90.
355
Furst, “Pre-Columbian Mexico: The Faking of Art and the Art of Faking,” 9.

261
museums. Museums not only house forgeries, but play an active role in the validation of fakes
and the cycle of supply and demand, especially with the increased popularity of West Mexican
sculptures resulting from a combustible mix of the Primitive Art movement and the accessibility
to West Mexican shaft tombs due to the train expansion.
By positioning the sculpture in front of oil paintings, Flores suggests that both art forms
convey constructed narratives about the past that continue to impact the present. Flores draws
attention to how pre-Columbian images are manipulated to visualize the past, and hints at the
powerful individuals and institutions that perpetuate these myths. In the case of both the painting
and sculpture, clearly the museum plays a critical role in the preservation and presentation of
these narratives. In this last section, I place Flores’s installation within the rubric of institutional
critique and suggest potential points of contact with two other artists, Fred Wilson and Pedro
Lasch.

Institutional Critique

As previously mentioned, Flores’s installation, De/construcción de una nación, developed
out of a concerted programmatic effort by MUNAL to challenge its own role in the cultural
sphere at the start of the new millennium. This museum initiative owes its ideological
underpinnings to an art movement that began in the late 1960s, called institutional critique. The
movement did not begin as a cohesive effort by artists to question the authority of museums, but
instead gained a proper name and roster of key players in 1990 when it was codified by
Benjamin Buchloh. Artists working in the 1960s like Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Michael
Asher, Robert Smithson, Cildo Meireles, Martha Rosler, and Hans Haacke independently created
works of art that questioned the system of art museums, galleries, and the art market. Given the

262
tense political situation of the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, and other activist crusades,
it is not surprising that these artists interrogated the underlying assumptions of the institutions
that they operated within.
356
By the 1990s, the movement reemerged with a new cast of
international characters including Fred Wilson, Jorge Pardo, Gabriel Orozco, and Rikrit
Tiravanija. These artists challenged the physical boundaries of the museum, broke down the
hierarchies that separated the artists from the audience, and questioned the racialized structures
of the museum.
Demián Flores’s installation at MUNAL most closely resembles the work by two artists:
Fred Wilson and Pedro Lasch. All three artists drew from a museum’s existing collection to
comment critically on the acquisition and display practices of the institution. Each of the artists
performed a role normally reserved for the curators of the museum — a move that upended the
institutionalized position of the artist as producer and curator as narrator. Eventually, the artist-
as-curator phenomenon compelled curators into taking a more critical approach to their role,
357

and in turn, influenced museums like MUNAL to reevaluate their praxis as an institution.

Fred Wilson Mining the Museum (1992)
One of the most cited and critically acclaimed work of institutional critique is Fred
Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992), in which he dug through the collections of the Maryland
Historical Society to uncover artifacts from the slave era that remained hidden from view [Fig.

356
Lynn Zelevansky, “From Inside the Museum: Some Thoughts on the Issue of Institutional
Critique,” in Institutional Critique and After (Zürich; New York: JRP/Ringier;
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2006), 173.
357
Jens Hoffman, “The Curatorialization of Institutional Critique,” in Institutional Critique and
After (Zürich; New York: JRP/Ringier; D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2006), 324.

263
5.19Error! Reference source not found.]. In this installation, Wilson juxtaposed these artifacts
in dialogical combinations to incite the viewer to question why these artifacts were collected,
what narratives the Maryland Historical Society normally told, and which stories remained
unspoken. Rather than insisting upon specific didactic messages through explicative wall text or
other narrative devices, Wilson relied upon the juxtaposition of objects themselves to provoke
the viewer into a practice of critical thinking.
Like Wilson’s installation, Flores also relies on juxtaposition of objects, specifically
sculptural combines and oil painting, as a means to instigate self-questioning by the viewer. Both
installations highlight the fact that historical narratives are often fictional accounts composed by
the victor at the expense of the victim. The recovery of these lost voices is often embedded
within historical fragments or artifacts within museums themselves, and thus the practice of
uncovering them from storage vaults is both an archaeological “mining” of the museum as well
as a critical historiographical practice.

Fred Wilson Addiction Display (part of The Other Museum) (1990-91)

Although Mining the Museum is the most well known of Wilson’s oeuvre, the installation
The Other Museum (1990-1991) at White Columns and the Washington Project for the Arts
operated as a sort of preface to Mining the Museum in that it gestured towards some of Wilson’s
initial thoughts about museum acquisition and display practices [Fig. 5.20]. The installation was
more focused on undoing the whitewashing that occurs in the acquisition of objects, using terms
like “stolen from” rather than “gift of,” and mimicked the display conventions of ethnographic
museums to “present a critical and historical view of anthropological and ethnographic discourse

264
- and its attendant museum displays.”
358
Anthropological and ethnographical discourse and
display conventions also rely upon the aestheticization of objects found in the field, and
according to Wilson, it is this resignification of an artifact as an art object that can “anesthetiz[e]
their historic importance...certainly covers up the colonial history...which keeps imperial
attitudes going within the museum.”
359
This is certainly aligned not only with Flores’s
installation, but also with all of the artists under consideration in this dissertation. The question is
whether contemporary artistic interventions that are intended to reveal these “imperial attitudes”
are actually perpetuating them through continued aestheticization of artifacts. I would argue that
it is possible to aestheticize objects without succumbing to a full anesthetization of the conditions
of their acquisition and display. Perhaps aestheticization of an object can make it more palatable
and relatable to the viewer than the cold distance of a strict tool-based, functional artifact.
The display modes of De/construcción de una nación and The Other Museum exercise the
two main conventions for presenting pre-Columbian artifacts. In the former, the West Mexican
replicas are perched on white pedestals, which is a custom of fine art museums. In The Other
Museum, Wilson lays four ceramic copies of pre-Columbian artifacts flat in a glass display
cabinet in a work titled Addiction Display [Fig. 5.20].
360
To the right of the artifacts are thirty
articles of cocaine paraphernalia arranged neatly in rows according to their formal and functional
characteristics, and above the cabinet is a sepia-tone photograph of a “Pre-Colombian

358
Jennifer A González, “Against the Grain: The Artist as Conceptual Materialist,” in Fred
Wilson: A Critical Reader (London; Santa Monica, Calif.: Ridinghouse ; distributed in the US by
RAM Publications, 2011), 140.
359
Lisa G. Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at
Themselves,” in Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader (London; Santa Monica, Calif.: Ridinghouse ;
distributed in the US by RAM Publications, 2011), 56.
360
The exhibition catalog states four copies, but it looks like there are actually six pre-Columbian
artifacts in the cabinet. I am not sure why this discrepancy exists.

265
archaeological site 1500-500 BC (Colombia)." Whether Wilson is self-consciously referencing
the country of Colombia in his description “Pre-Colombian,” as in before the foundation of the
country, is not clear. However, the placement of pre-Columbian artifacts next to cocaine
paraphernalia suggests two types of dangerous addictions -- collecting artifacts and drug use.
Wilson may simultaneously reference the longevity of the practice of cocaine use in Colombia,
though one for sacred, ritual use and one for secular recreational use. Either way, both collecting
and cocaine addiction have negative impacts on the country’s residents and reputation, as they
rely on an underground market that exploits those in a weaker economic, political, or social
position, while benefiting those in power.

Pedro Lasch Espejo negro

In Espejo negro / Black Mirror (May 22, 2008-January 18, 2009) at the Nasher Museum of
Art at Duke University, the artist Pedro Lasch juxtaposed two-dimensional European paintings
etched onto black glass with three-dimensional pre-Columbian sculptures [Fig. 5.5]. The black
mirrors hung on the wall and the pre-Columbian sculptures stood on white pedestals facing the
paintings with their back turned towards the viewer. In the reflective surface of the black mirror,
the viewer could see the reflection of pre-Columbian objects, other viewers, and in some cases,
other reproduced paintings. All of the objects came from the Nasher collection and many of the
paintings were on display in another gallery in the exhibition, El Greco to Velázquez: Art During
the Reign of Phillip II.
Like Flores’s installation, Lasch uses the curatorial technique of juxtaposition to bring pre-
Columbian sculpture and oil painting together. These two types of works would normally be

266
separated within the museum, or even relegated to different types of museums altogether, as the
pre-Columbian work could find a home in an anthropology collection just as easily as an art
museum. Lasch's emphasis on the play of gazes and visual encounters between the objects
distinguishes this installation from Flores’s work. Another point of departure is that Lasch uses
“authentic” artifacts from the Nasher collection — or at least those considered authentic by
experts and not disproven as fakes — and transfers the oil paintings to a different material
entirely. Because Lasch displays authentic sculptures, the question of forgeries and fakes does
not enter the conversation and the exhibit pivots around ocular interchanges between the viewer,
sculpture, and black mirror.
Both Flores and Lasch disregard the geographic, temporal, and functional specificities of
pre-Columbian sculptures, instead lumping them together according to formal or thematic
similarities in a gesture much more akin to an aesthetic treatment of artifacts rather than one
based on understanding their original purpose. This neglect for the original function or context of
the object repeats some of the same violence to the object as it erases the object’s history and
replicates some of the “aesthetic anesthetization” that occurs by putting an object on display in a
museum. This practice mirrors the sensibility of early twentieth-century U.S. and European
artists who co-opted and incorporated these artifacts and visual motifs freely, as if they were
free-floating signifiers, and devoid of their own object histories. Instead, their significance
remains tied to a signaling their “pre-Columbian-ness” or Mesoamericanidad beyond which the
object held little innate value.

Demián Flores

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Like Fred Wilson and Pedro Lasch, Flores draws the bulk of the exhibition from the
museum’s permanent collection. However, beyond the works of Wilson and Lasch, Flores is not
a mere archaeologist who “mines” the museum, but instead highlights the very fallibility of
archaeology as a discipline because it accepts forgeries as “authentic” artifacts. Archaeology is
not a perfect science and it suffers from the lure of the antiquities market, and participates in the
chain of supply and demand that keep forgers in business. Flores works as a critical
archaeologist, intent on questioning the very premise of what “authenticity” means, how we
define it, and how we employ it. Authenticity operates as an elastic term open for prolonged
questioning, which Flores commences by using forged sculptures. By adding appendages to the
sculptures, he signals the status of the objects as fakes, since one would be remiss to manipulate
an original artifact in such a manner. This blatant intervention encourages the viewer to question
the other types of artistic liberties performed in the nearby paintings and within the institution of
the museum itself as well.
I argue that Flores’s installation, like Wilson’s Mining the Museum, addresses
historiography as much as archaeology. Historiography is the study of how history is written and
includes who is writing it, when and why they are writing it, and what evidence they use to
support their claims. Wilson’s work interrogates the issue of what is absent or left out of the
museum, which is a space for the narrativizing and dissemination of history. Flores’s installation
operates like a historiography, as he interrogates the history of collecting and manufacturing the
images and objects that would form the centerpiece of national identity formation in museums.
This identity formation relied just as much on archaeological excavations as the chroniclers of
history, and found expression equally in nineteenth-century oil paintings and more modern
artistic appropriations of the past. But Flores's primary contribution is that he pushes the

268
envelope just a bit further, because he examines how forgeries and fakes have undermined the
stability of that accepted national history and emphasizes how that history is a constructed
narrative built upon visual fictions.

269

Fig. 5.1. Demián Flores, Arbol de la vida, 2012. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 5.2. Demián Flores, Santa Sangre, 2012. Photograph by the author.

270

Fig. 5.3. Félix Parra, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 1875.

Fig. 5.4. Félix Parra, Escenas de la Conquista (La matanza de Cholula), 1877. Photograph by
the author.

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Fig. 5.5. Pedro Lasch, Incest, Narcissism & Melancholy / Incesto, Narcisismo y Melancolía
[S3BM6A] from Black Mirror / Espejo Negro: The Photographic Suites (2007-2008)

Fig. 5.6. Demián Flores, Defensa Personal, 2005.

272

Fig. 5.7. Entrance to La Curtiduría http://www.arquine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/AEM_3.jpg

Fig. 5.8. Metropolitan Museum of Art Chalchiutlicue, Aztec, 15th-early 16th century.

273

Fig. 5.9. Eufémio Abadiano, Cast - Section of a Column, 1884. Accession number A77237-0 in
the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 5.10. Example of Frieze at Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico.

274

Fig. 5.11. Eufémio Abadiano, Cast of Kneeling Nun, 1885 in the Smithsonian National Museum
of Natural History. Photograph by the author.

Fig. 5.12. Model of the Great Pyramid of Cholula.

275

Fig. 5.13. Detail, Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Xochicalco.

Fig. 5.14. Motecuhzoma II Throne (also known as Teocalli Stone or Monument of Sacred War)
1507 CE.

Fig. 5.15. Image of yucu (hill in Mixtec) from John Pohl “Ancient Books: Mixtec Group
Codices” http://www.famsi.org/research/pohl/jpcodices/pohlmixtec8.html

276

Fig. 5.16. Example of macuahuitl from Book IX of the Florentine Codex, 16th century.

Fig. 5.17. Casa de Cacica in Teposcolula, Oaxaca, Mexico.

277

Fig. 5.18. Chinesca figures from Jack Gallagher, Companions of the Dead: Ceramic Tomb
Sculptures from Ancient West Mexico, Los Angeles, Museum of Cultural History UCLA, 1983.
Figure 150 and 151.

Fig. 5.19. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992.

278

Fig. 5.20. Fred Wilson, The Other Museum, 1991.

279
Conclusion

The main question driving the dissertation is how pre-Columbian history is made visible in
contemporary art. Each chapter has focused on a particular slice of the pre-Columbian past,
ranging from sixteenth-century accounts of Mixtec Lady Six Monkey in the Codex Selden to the
mass production of replicas since the Classic Period. Though the pre-Columbian period may
have officially phased out with the arrival of the Spaniards, its visual and material culture
continues to live on through the circulation and display of pre-Columbian visual and material
culture in Mexico and abroad. By composing object biographies for the Codex Selden and Mapa
de Teozacoalco, I have been able to trace the changing ontological and epistemological meaning
of these sixteenth-century documents since their removal from their source community to their
acquisition by U.S. and European university libraries. While these documents contribute to the
intellectual and financial riches of the universities, their absence from their source community
continues to have ramifications today, whether as an inspiration for an educational program or as
a regrettable and seemingly irreparable loss. By reinterpreting the Codex Selden and Mapa de
Teozacoalco through black-and-white photographs of her body, Tatiana Parcero introduces these
Mixtec documents into a new sphere of contemporary art, thereby expanding the visual
vocabulary of viewers beyond the Aztec-centric imagery consolidated during the nineteenth
century and promulgated even today as part of a cohesive Mexican national identity.
While Parcero introduces relatively unknown pre-Columbian imagery as an alternative to
famous Aztec ones, Mariana Castillo Deball and Demián Flores interrogate the cohesiveness of
an Aztec-centric national identity by exposing its cracks and its fictionalizations, respectively.
Castillo Deball's fragmentation of a cast of the Coatlicue in the gallery floor highlights a
multiple, fragmented national identity, and beyond that, the use of a cast of the Coatlicue opens

280
up onto the history of replicas in the broadcasting of a Mexican national identity in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. Eufémio Abadiano's cast collection in the Smithsonian
provides a novel case study that suggests the difficulty of situating the Coatlicue within a
museum narrative, and shows the possibility for pre-Columbian casts as a source of artistic
inspiration, particularly in the service of Pan-American architecture in Washington, D.C. This
Mexican national identity encapsulated in the pre-Columbian transforms into a Pan-American
identity around the turn of the century, and I argue that Abadiano's casts play an important role in
the visualization of a hemispheric unity. The manipulation of pre-Columbian visual imagery also
forms the pivot point in the last chapter, which examines how Demián Flores's juxtaposition of
manipulated West Mexican sculptural replicas draws out the artistic liberties taken by nineteenth-
century painters. The representations of pre-Columbian sculptures and architectural features in
the oil paintings were intended to suture the viewer into believing the accuracy of the depictions
of the past. However, a careful analysis of these pre-Columbian elements reveals levels of
intercession by the artist by the painter -- an act that Flores reiterates in his sculptures. His use of
counterfeit objects in the gallery opens onto a long and tumultuous history of forgeries, many of
which continue to represent the pre-Columbian past in museums. By juxtaposing fake West
Mexican sculptures with oil paintings in the space of a museum, Flores participates in a type of
institutional critique in the vein of Fred Wilson and Pedro Lasch.
The methodology of the object biography was essential not only for revealing the longer
history of the object from creation to acquisition and artistic appropriation, but also to avoid the
pitfalls of Mesoamericanidad, or the blending of all pre-Columbian objects into a generalized
"ancient" past. This emphasis on the object and its movement through time was an attempt to
correct a common error in previous scholarship on modern and contemporary appropriations of

281
the pre-Columbian past. Scholars tended to point out pre-Columbian iconography or reference to
an archaeological site, but without delving into the specific history of that image or site. Rather,
the pre-Columbian image was at the service of the contemporary artwork, and little effort was
spent reflecting on how the recent intervention opens onto a longer history of the pre-Columbian
object. In this dissertation, I have tried to move back-and-forth between the pre-Columbian
object and its contemporary iteration to see how each inflects each other; this toggling also
foregrounds the fact that "modern" technologies like cast making and mass produced replicas
actually have an emic, pre-Columbian provenance. Rather than assume that all pre-Columbian
objects are "original" (read, authentic) and from a time of "origin" (read, ancient), I show the
pitfalls of this "origin(ality) myth" by focusing on three-dimensional replicas in Chapters Four
and Five.
The underlying theoretical framework for this dissertation derives from decoloniality. The
decolonial project calls for an acknowledgement of and active reaction against the legacy of
historical colonialism manifested in the remaining structures of coloniality. As objects that
survived the Conquest only to end up in museums operating according to an internal or external
logic of coloniality, pre-Columbian artifacts uniquely benefit from a decolonial analysis. I argue
that the primary decolonial intervention executed by these artists is the challenging of an Aztec-
centric national identity, which developed from the consolidation of pre-Columbian artifacts in
the Museo Nacional de Antropología driven by an internal colonialism.
This project was born out of a need to reconcile an academic training in contemporary art
with a newfound interest in pre-Columbian art, and this personal quest evolved into a
disciplinary critique of the temporal and geographic divisions of art history. By focusing on
contemporary artists who reinterpret pre-Columbian visual images in their work, I insisted that

282
the reevaluation of the art historical discipline stemmed from the art itself. How could you
possibly unpack the Mariana Castillo Deball piece without a working knowledge of at least the
Coatlicue Statue, if not the embroiled relationship between cast technology and reproductions of
the Coatlicue? How would you proceed with an analysis of Tatiana Parcero’s work without a
basic understanding of Mixtec codices? As these works circulate through the contemporary art
sphere, which is normally out of the purview of traditional archaeologists and pre-Columbianists,
they normally do not benefit from the type of detailed analysis and larger framework that I
provide in this project. While previous scholars have noted the appearance of a pre-Columbian
image, they lacked the training to specifically identify the object, its original function, and its
history as an object. By composing object biographies for the pre-Columbian images, I am
insisting that the pre-Columbian is just as important as the contemporary, particularly in artworks
where they are mutually constitutive and dependent upon one another.
This type of research is especially important when artists are drawing from a rich archive
of images and investigating ways that these pre-Columbian images have been marshaled into
state-sponsored narratives. The inherent criticism that comes from creating interior
cartographies, fragmented monuments, and deconstructed national imagery demands that the art
historian be equally attentive and informed about these histories. If not, the artists’ intervention
can fall into a trap of Mesoamericanidad, and can lose its critical edge. But without the proper
training, incentive, and positive reception by the academic community, art historians might not
perform this type of detailed research into the history of these pre-Columbian images from their
source to contemporary artwork, and therefore the artistic practice suffers. Perhaps this project
begs the question: Can we restructure the discipline to respond more adequately to art
production? I would argue that it is possible, especially in this moment of crisis in the

283
humanities, which struggles to retain its relevancy. An art history that divides art between
“ancient” and “contemporary” and “Western” and “non-Western” not only fails to account for the
nuances in art that blurs these boundaries, but also reaffirms a commitment to a colonial
structuring of time and space along an arbitrary linear progression of time and bifurcated division
of space. By liberating the discipline from these restraints, we open up the possibility for new
ways of studying and analyzing art.

284
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Creator Reynolds-Kaye, Jennifer L. (author)

Core Title Contemporary pre-Columbian art: recasting artifacts through object biographies

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Tag archaeological imaginary,archaeology,Artifacts,Casts,Coatlicue statue,contemporary art,decolonial,Demián Flores,institutional critique,Mariana Castillo Deball,Mexico,museum,national identity,OAI-PMH Harvest,object biography,pre-Columbian art,Tatiana Parcero,visual culture,World's Fair

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