Una Historia Personal de Arte
July 6, 2015
Ever since I was a kid I’ve enjoyed long walks on busy streets. I used to walk on Tustin Ranch Road in my hometown, a busy, 50 mph thoroughfare that has a nice wide sidewalk lined with trees. Sometimes I would end up at a friend’s house and stop by to say hi, but mostly I did it just for the walk. I liked seeing up close the everyday things that I normally zoomed passed, riding in my parents’ car. It also served as a kind of meditation, a time for self reflection and processing the relationship between myself and the things of the world: speeding cars, planted grass verges, ice cream bar wrappers, tumbleweeds.
In Oaxaca I often go on lone walks to explore the city and my presence here. Absolutely every corner has beauty, interest and poetry. Across the city, the streetscape drastically varies from majestically restored colonial buildings, to artful murals smeared over concrete walls crowned with barbed wire. I photograph and sketch the streetscapes as ways to pause in my walks, to creatively catalogue the buildings and murals, a personal collection of monumental and vernacular architecture.
Frida, whose rebellious personal image was as much a part of her body of artwork as her paintings were, has become one of the most internationally recognizable Mexicans. Her photo graces the $500 peso note (about USD$35), one of the largest monetary denominations. I share Frida’s thick, bushy eyebrows from a similar paternal heritage; my father’s family is Jewish from eastern Europe as well.
Being Jewish in Oaxaca is another way of being foreign here. My partner and I hosted our annual seder this spring for the Passover holiday and, besides a few Chilean Jews, it was everyone’s very first seder. It was an honor to share this tradition, and our homemade haggadah, published zine-style back in Pittsburgh when we lived in the aptly named Friendship neighborhood. The trilingual (Spanish, English, Hebrew) affair had everyone singing together
Being Jewish in Oaxaca is another way of being foreign here. My partner and I hosted our annual seder this spring for the Passover holiday and, besides a few Chilean Jews, it was everyone’s very first seder. It was an honor to share this tradition, and our homemade haggadah, published zine-style back in Pittsburgh when we lived in the aptly named Friendship neighborhood. The trilingual (Spanish, English, Hebrew) affair had everyone singing together about freedom and got me to reevaluate, again this year, the importance of standing up for freedom in a world where many types of enslavement will persist to exist, and what it means to be seen as different from others because of your culture or the way you look.
With paternal heritage from Europe and material heritage from the Pacific islands, I’m what they call hapa, mixed Asian/pacific islander and white. Being hapa has been a pillar of my identity all my life; people are often treated by the way they look. The color of my skin and the shape of my eyes have caused me to sometimes be mistaken for Mexican or maybe Latina (at least until I open my mouth and say anything in Spanish). In my first few days in Oaxaca someone asked me if I had Mexican ancestry. My Spanish was almost nonexistent at this point, but I was able to manage to say “soy de asia” (I’m from Asia). Though this isn’t exactly accurate, it felt like this was the Spanish I possessed in order to get my point across: I am not Latina but I have heritage from the Pacific islands near Asia and that is why I look this way. Knowing that I didn’t really speak Spanish, the questioner quickly grabbed someone to help translate his question, thinking I didn’t understand. He was shocked to learn that I had actually meant what I said.
Mexico purports itself as a mestizo culture, with a mixed heritage from Europe and from peoples native to the American continent. In a way, they’re kind of hapa too. The widely accepted account for the ancestry of the people who first populated the American continent is that they travelled across a land/ice bridge from Asia to what is now Alaska and worked their way down. The decedents of these great world migrants formed the civilizations that were here when European conquerors arrived in the 16th century. So, in a way, hapa is a mestizo shortcut.
I acknowledge that race is a social construct, and that it, including the concept of mestizo, has been used as way to unjustly dominate one group of people over another, from the time of the Spanish conquest through to today, in Mexico and throughout the world. But, by calling mestizo "hapa", I’m in a way trying to identify with Mexicans here in probably a similar way they are trying to identify with me when they ask if I’m Latina. And, it is a personal reminder to honor all of our infinitely complex heritages, and to pose yet more inquiries instead of making assumptions.
When I visited the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, I was completely blown away by the vast collection and even vaster account of the history of the people of Mexico. I also felt heartbreakingly disappointed in my adolescent education of the people of the world, which was extremely Euro-centric. Only as an adult have I begun to really scratch the surface of the profound significance of civilizations on the American continent. As an adolescent, I dreamt of visiting far off places with exotic ancient history like Greece and Egypt, when there was so much see and learn about right here on my own continent—not only on the same continent as mine, but in the country immediately adjacent.
Since my museum visit, I’ve happened upon pyramid after ancient pyramid across all my travels here. There are stunning archeological sites throughout Mexico, and Oaxaca is no exception. These are the rich cultures from where the beautiful Dia de los muertos tradition comes from (see Dia de los muertos post). These beliefs are so strong that it couldn’t be suppressed, and had to be incorporated into Catholicism as the people here were converted. In this celebration of death, people confront their own position as a person in the world subject to the natural cycles of mortality. It is a complex holiday nearing the complexity of the phenomenon life and death itself: joyous while still sad, contented while still frustrated. Our identity as human beings is colored by our inevitable death.
Oaxacan inspiration is clearly evident in Frida’s gestalt, from her obsession with death and suffering to her distinct and contemporarily unconventional fashion choices. She often wore a huipil, which is a traditional Oaxacan woman’s frock. Frida rocked the huipil like none other, and I am constantly reminded of the artist any time I come across a huipil, which is often, here. Frida’s Oaxacan roots go even deeper; her mother, Matilde Calderon, was from the region and described as “like a little bell from Oaxaca”. She met Guillermo Kahlo while working in his photography shop in Mexico City.
Self-portraiture was Frida’s forte, and her personal image was a subject of authentication through repeated stripping away and adornment: in her paintings as well as in the flesh. Frida was constantly evaluating where she came from (her parents and the time of the Mexican revolution), where she had been in her life (from stationed in front of a mirror to travel to different lands and back) and where she was going (death and self understanding). I’m not a self-portraitist, at least not professionally, but I am a self-explorationist, and will continue to walk the streets wherever I am with attention, appreciation and introspection.