Making Mexico

An innovative exhibition reveals the complex ways in which indigenous Mexicans redefined themselves and preserved their culture after the disaster of the Spanish conquest.

By John Dorfman

On August 13, 1521, the last Aztec ruler of Mexico, Cuauhtemoc, was captured by the Spaniards under Hernán Cortés, and the last defenders of the capital of Tenochtitlan (today, Mexico City) surrendered. This event signaled the fall of the Aztec Empire, the inception of the Spanish empire in the New World, and the beginning of a new identity for a new people—the Mexican nation. Traditional narratives have emphasized, depending on their point of view, either the triumph of European Christian culture or the destruction of Native American culture.

Head of Xiuhtecuhtli, 1250–1521, Mexica, metamorphic stone, 4.29 x 3.18 cm.
Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City, Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropologia. INAH-CANON

However, a new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has made it its business to “subvert the traditional narratives” of the Spanish Conquest and focus on the resilience of native Mexicans in the face of massive cultural challenges. Timed to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the transformative event, the exhibition, “Mixpantli: Space, Time, and the Indigenous Origins of Mexico” (through May 1, 2022) tells its story through a carefully curated selection of 30 works, ranging from Pre-Columbian art objects to colonial maps and documents to contemporaneous European artworks. The exhibition is paired with another, “Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes” (through June 12), that explores Indigenous cultural resilience not only in today’s Mexico but also in Los Angeles.

The word mixpantli is in the Nahua language and means “banner of clouds.” Aztec scribes used it to refer to the first omen of the Spanish conquest that was seen in a vision; it appeared alternately as an Aztec battle standard in the sky or as a European-style column wrapped in clouds. The fact that this symbol could be perceived in either of two existentially opposed ways testifies to the duality in post-colonial Mexican identity and in LACMA’s exhibition itself. The curators—Diana Magaloni and Virginia Fields, deputy director and curator (respectively) of the art of the ancient Americas at LACMA, and Alyce de Carteret, postdoctoral fellow in the department—have designed the exhibition to show and explain the ways in which indigenous Mexicans, especially members of the elite class, reoriented themselves in the new post-conquest era by combining Nahua and Christian conceptions of the world and thereby salvaging important aspects of the past and preserving them for the future.

“This exhibition creates an opportunity to re-examine traditional narratives of ‘conquest’, focusing instead on Indigenous Nahua artists and knowledge-keepers who tell a different story,” says Magaloni. “The show puts pre-Columbian and early colonial works in conversation to showcase the creative resilience of Nahua artists under Spanish rule and the centrality of Nahua worldview in shaping modern Mexico.”

Xiuhtecuhtli, 1250–1521, Mexica, basalt stone, 80 x 33.5 x 17 cm.
Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City, Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropologia. INAH-CANON

The mixpantli itself, while it is the guiding theme of the exhibition, is an elusive presence in the artworks on view, glimpsed rather than seen clearly, which is perhaps fitting for a supernatural vision. A 16th-century chalice cover decorated with a rare feather mosaic technique depicts a merging of the Christian with Nahua iconography: The waters of creation sustain a cornfield from which rises an upright hoe, which is reminiscent of the mixpantli. Surrounded by a halo of yellow feathers, the entire image is both a glyph of the Mesoamerican cosmos and an evocation of the Eucharist.

A fantastic vase from Nayarit in West Mexico, from circa 1350–1500, before the conquest, portrays Mesoamerican myths that later sustained the Nahua in their hour of defeat. The slip-painted ceramic is called a “codex-style” vessel, meaning that the illustrations and decorations incised on its surface are done in a manner that suggests the illuminated manuscripts or codices written by Aztec scribes. Pots such as this one are really books in clay. The scene here, which densely covers every square inch of the surface, shows two creator deities conversing on a mountaintop; the act of creation in which they engage results in the birth of a culture hero who receives his soul when his is baptized in sacred waters. The hero is portrayed as having yellow hair, which post-conquest Aztecs took to be a prophecy of the coming of the Europeans.

The Aztecs found ways to subsume the new Spanish order in the larger cosmic order that they had inherited and developed from older Mesoamerican cultures such as the Olmec. A Mexica solar disk from Xochimilco in the Valley of Mexico, dated to the two centuries before the conquest, shows the sun moving across the horizon in the course of one solar year. The four cardinal directions are represented, as are the solstices, and in the center is the glyph for Nahui Ollin (Four Movement), the era which ended with the coming of the Spaniards and the fall of the Aztec empire. This complex diagram gives meaning to the passage of time and to the changeover from one world order to another.

Chalice cover (modern copy), 16th century, Mexica, feather mosaic, overall diameter 27.46 cm.
Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City, Archivo Digital de las Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropologia. INAH-CANO

The indigenous rulers (tlatoani) of Mexico imagined themselves as divinely ordained. The mythical figure of Xiuhtecuhtli, the young “Turquoise Lord,” gave them the power they needed to reign and fulfill their responsibilities, among which was the actually make time move forward. (The Nahuatl word xihuitl means not only “turquoise” but “year.”) Xiuhtecuhtli is the subject of several depictions in the LACMA exhibition, including a basalt stone full-figure sculpture and a head of metamorphic stone. A carved basalt stone box known as “Moctezuma II’s Box,” from Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico, has a crown carved on its inner lid, symbolizing the power the ruler receives from Xiuhtecuhtli, while other iconographic elements emphasize the ruler’s role as “world axis” connecting heaven and earth. A five-dot figure (four corners and a center) carved on the box’s facesrefers to the fundamental cosmic order anchored by the tlatoani.

While the box may not have belonged to Moctezuma at all, Moctezuma himself acquired profound meaning for indigenous Mexicans after the conquest. While he was not the very last Aztec king, it was during his reign that the first contact between Spaniards and Mexicans occurred, and indeed he initially welcomed Cortés to Mexico. Eventually he was taken hostage; later he was in the fight against Cortés’ soldiers and was killed. One of the fascinating things about the LACMA exhibition is that it shows how indigenous artists drew upon European models when they portrayed Moctezuma and his sufferings. For elite Nahuas who had been educated in Spanish-run schools, his betrayal and martyrdom resembled the Passion of Christ, and consequently they painted him in a way that closely resembles traditional Christian imagery. The curators of the exhibition have located a number of Albrecht Dürer prints, including a 1512 Ecce Homo, that were used by Nahua scribes and painters as graphic inspiration. (Printmaking was the only way in which art could be circulated widely in the 16th century, so it provided indigenous New World artists with their first glimpse of the work of artists on the other side of the Atlantic.)  The analogy between an Aztec tlatoani and Christ functioned as a way to create meaningful continuity between the old order and the new; both Jesus and the tlatoani were conceived of as solar deities, so the continuity became not only national but cosmic.

Alcalde Martín de Salinas, Tlaoli Ramírez Téllez, Facsimile of map of Tezontepec, Hidalgo, 1571; copied 2021 by Tlaoli Ramírez Téllez, mixed media, acrylic, ink, and watercolor on paper, 40 x 43 cm.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Courtesy of the artist, commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, © Tlaoli Ramírez Téllez

One of the most astonishing and beautiful objects in “Mixpantli” is an obsidian mirror, a shiny though uneven black stone that entices the eye to lose itself in its swirling and shimmering depths. The Aztecs believed that mirrors did much more than simply reflect what was in front of them; they granted special sight, the ability to view the other world, or distant parts of this world. The Florentine Codex, a book that contains the fruits of a massive ethnographic project to document Aztec culture that was conducted by a Spanish Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, recounts the omens that preceded the Spanish invasion. The seventh of omen was a crane with a mirror in the middle of its forehead, and when Moctezuma looked into it, he saw the starry sky above and below it the ceremony in which Xiuhtecuhtli imparts fire to a new ruler. In the distance, he saw an army mounted on horseback approaching.

An important way in which the Aztecs retained meaning and resisted cultural erasure was through the making of maps. Mapas de merced were maps filed with the colonial government as documentation of petitions against Spanish royal land grants, intended to prove Aztec rights to the land and illuminate their historic connection to it. For the exhibition, Mexican illustrator Tlaoli Ramírez Téllez created facsimiles of rare mapas de merced that are housed in Mexico’s General Archive of the Nation. In the Map of Tezontepec, Hidalgo (1571) and the Map of Zolipa Misantla, Veracruz (1573), traditional Mesoamerican imagery coexists with European-influenced cartographic techniques and Spanish-built landscape features. In the map of Tezontepec, a sacred mountain and an Augustinian convent are both represented in the same shade of pink, as if to indicate that as holy sites they are both imbued with divine power. In the map of Zolipa, the blue river is drawn to look like a serpent, as if it were a Mesoamerican deity still asserting domination over its ancient lands.