A Criollo Mestizo Mosaic

A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic:

Crossing Indigenous, European and African representations, images and murals

A paper on Latin American Anthropology

By

Nadia Arbelo, PhD Candidate

Philosophy & Theory of Visual Culture

A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic

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Introduction

Anthropology, the study of human beings from origin to the present, divides into many sub-

disciplines, often disparate, at times convergent. As a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary

Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture program, with a limited anthropology background, this

paper will necessarily only touch the surface of that discipline. When its philosophical groundings,

and theoretical approaches cross over into other humanities and social sciences, this research will

seek to find and use such convergences. It also assumes that anthropological studies of Art divide

into subfields of both Social and Cultural Anthropology. Focusing on primary and secondary

source readings from literature on Latin America as a whole, to specific geographical regions, and

with relevance to visual culture, this research will take a holistic and reflexive approach. It will

draw on sources from across disciplines with direct relevance to cultural, social, and political-

economic backgrounds of Latin American Arts.

The work will focus on constructing a solid foundation of background knowledge necessary to

examine public arts, murals in particular (wall arts) as images intended to represent a cross section

of historical, socio-cultural, and political-economic issues. Such art works also assume a high

degree of relevancy to specific peoples, times and places, but may also relate to broader global

issues, such as race, class, colonialism, and oppression. The Revolutionary Cuban concept of

Tricontinental, exemplifies the symbolic alignment of the peoples of Africa, Asia and America del

Sur, still struggling for independence or liberation from under neo-colonial hegemony. While the

study must necessarily address aspects of pre-colonial indigenous imagery and their impacts on

post-colonial murals, it will only take a surface look at archaeological or anthropological work on

what they represent, as more would exceed the research frame. This study will, therefore, only

examine such historical elements that have impacts on contemporary production of mural art. To a

lesser degree it will examine influences from the colonial era, but primarily focus on post-colonial

and national production of public arts, particularly murals, but also some sculpture. It will also

include limited references to literary, theatrical, and cinematic arts as they refer to, or are relevant

to, public visual art. From the colonial era on, artistic production throughout the continent and

surrounding regions has predominantly used European art traditions, methods and materials, with

only limited indigenous influences other than in symbolic content.


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Identifying key Anthropological elements in this work, it draws primarily from, cultural, symbolic,

and political praxis, but particularly sensitive to visual aspect of such sub-disciplines, using

qualitative, descriptive methodologies to deconstruct and re-interpret complexity within an

existential-phenomenology. The text will first focus on deconstructing a Anglocentric symbolic

Black Box approach that packages a simplistic stereotype of the histories and geographies of the

Southern Americas as “Latin America”. The text will then proceed to explore the regions of

Central, South, and Caribbean Americas, to re-interpret their cultural, social and political linkages,

similarities and differences, within a geographical-historical framework. It will use both a

hermeneutic appraisal of selected regions, and a comparative approach to assess continuities of

colonial, post- and neo-colonial dynamics of European and North American influences. One

finding will emphasize an underlying historical dynamic of ethno-national-religious conflicts

pitting a Protestant Anglosphere against a rival set of Catholic Colonial powers — France, Spain,

Portugal. This ongoing contest over power, language and ways-of-knowing (Foucault), impacts all

relations including migration patterns, and majority-minority status. Here a theoretical triptych of

Geertz (Weber), Turner (Durkheim) & Levi-Strauss (de Saussure), that links interpretive symbolic

interaction to structural explanations of how discourses evolve from real world events, and

converge through what Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) labels courte durée (short span), histoire

événementielle (a history of events), and the longue durée approach that “stresses the slow and

often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human

beings”. Derivative of this model and of particular intellectual importance to South America has

been World Systems Theory, in particular the label attached to the current globalized Modern World

Capitalist System (Wallerstein, 2004).

This approach to a holistic analysis of historical developments that involve unequal center-

periphery relations has been immensely popular among South American intellectuals in their

studies of how the USA has structurally undermined indigenous national development throughout

the Hemisphere. Most notably, teoria de la dependencia, based on the Singer-Prebisch Thesis of

unequal exchange, emerged in the 1960’s to be developed as a research paradigm across economic,

political, social, and cultural spheres of activity. While a somewhat conjectural metatheory in this

research, it seems that nominally Roman Catholic cultural systems exhibit decidedly greater

socialist tendencies than what Max Weber labeled as cultural systems imbued with a Capitalist


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Protestant Ethic. In his visual center-periphery model of thick description, Clifford Geertz depicts a

hierarchal circular structure that progresses outward, from values to rituals, heroes, and symbols,

each ring dividing into opposing behavioral traits. Applying this model to successive cultural

divides, South/North, Catholic / Protestant, Socialist / Capitalist, Color / White, Hybrid / Pure, etc.,

creates a roughly approximate description of both Anglo-American and Southern (Latin) American

differences. Such divides might be crudely labeled Brown/White (Mulatto y Mestizo vs. Blanco) to

represent current American political struggles, from the Cuban Revolution to a divided Venezuela,

with popular support for Chavez’s Bolivarian Socialism opposed by a largely “white” upper and

middle classes.

In Mexico’s Chiapas State, the 1990 census recorded 50% of the population as indigenous, after a

large Mestizo influx the 2000 census showed a drop to 35%. The indigenous population divides

into 56 different language groups, 35% of whom do not speak Spanish, and is further divided into

widely diverging syncretic cultural religious practices. Social divides include a large Mulatto-

Mestizo minority descended from 16th century African slaves, while among the relatively small

minority of whites original Criollos share power with late 19th century European immigrants

benefiting from land grants to establish plantations. Late 20th century Protestant missions, mainly

Evangelicals from the USA, have made inroads into a syncretic Catholic majority, and increase

tensions among and within indigenous and Mestizo groups by capitalizing small enterprises to the

exclusion of other group members, or those belonging to other denominations, or not having

converted. Even among Catholics strong divides exist between 1960’s through 1970’s exponents of

Liberation Theology, with its strong commitment to social equity and justice, and more recent

Vatican conservatives aligning with local elites in competition for power with a growth in

Protestant supported local capitalism. In this mosaic of tension and conflicts, including loss of

locally owned agricultural lands to both ecological degradation and incursions of well capitalized

industrial plantation systems, symbolic capital and images predominate in public visual spaces.

From local resistance to global media and symbolic cultural icon status, the indigenous Zapatista

movement (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), emerged in 1994 coinciding with

implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with its charismatic leader

Subcomandante Marcos, cleverly using contemporary social media to propagate an anti-

Globalization message. Zapatistas takes their symbolic identity from Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919),


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Mexico’s revolutionary agrarian reformer and leader of the Southern Liberation Army, who

remains an iconic hero and cultural icon throughout Mexico and beyond.

Following power struggles in the aftermath of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, Pancho Villa organized

peasant resistance in the north while Zapata organized peasant in the south, that grew much wider

following a corrupt political subversion of the 1917 Constitution. In 1916 the US Army invaded

Northern Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa’s forces that had staged cross-border raids, heightening

popular resistance to a power elite largely assumed to be subservient to US capital interests in

Mexico and expanding anti-Yankee sentiments. Similar military invasions and occupations by the

US to support puppet regimes and protect commercial interests between 1900 and 1925, include:

Guatemala (1910), Honduras (1911-1912, 1919), Panama (1912, 1918-1920), Cuba (1912, 1917-

1922), Nicaragua (1912-1925), Haiti (1914, 1915-1934), Dominican Republic (1914, 1916-1924),

Mexico (1913, 1914-1917, 1918-1919), to list the major interventions south of the US borders in

the first quarter of the 20th century.

Mexico stands at a pivotal point between USA, Caribbean and Meso-Americas, so too, its symbolic

national identity pivots around its revolutions, first to liberate itself from Spain, and subsequently

from both indigenous and external dictatorial regimes. Deeply etched into symbolic identity is a

military defeat to the USA that lost 50% of its territory, and imposition of a border that separated

former citizens from their national culture and symbolic homeland.

NOTE: the Mexican Republic’s official name is Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which translates into

English as The United States of Mexicans, so to always use the term US instead of USA, as well as

using the term American / America when only referring to the USA and its citizens displays an

arrogance, that can trigger symbolic perception of being Othered, and thus raises indignation

among the rest of countries and peoples of the Western Hemisphere’s second continent, Caribbean

and Meso-America.

Iconic images of Zapata and Villa are part of the Mexican symbolic repertoire of identity shared by

all, except perhaps a tiny minority of elites whose conservative politics, economic values, and racist

attitudes parallel those of their peers across the northern border. Mexican culture, like most of the

Americas evolves from within a mosaic of indigenous, and Spanish or Portuguese Catholic, images.


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But an evolving multicultural includes more than European colonists, settlers and immigrants,

significant minorities of Japanese and Chinese have been part of the ethnic mosaic for well over a

century, as have smaller communities of Arabs and Filipinos, the latter sharing in a Spanish

colonial heritage. Beyond the iconic images of Villa and Zapata, to which has been added Che

Guevara and Subcomante Marcos, popular cultural icons now permeate the visual culture

landscape, perhaps starting with the clown Cantinflas, then during the media and cultural revolution

of the 1960’s, iconic status grew to encompass, actors, musicians, and celebrities, and currently

gangsters and druglords have attained celebrity icon status. The contemporary status of Tattoos has

morphed from gang icons, to celebrity sports and music figures as popular mosaics of images may

emblazon totalities of visible skin. Paradoxical imagery mixes revolutionary icons with Mexico’s

patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Aztec leader Montezuma, and other iconic, indigenous,

and hybrid symbols.

Contemporary Mexican visual culture has no borders, its images, iconic representations and

symbolic display sprawls across into all of neighboring Meso-America, Guatemala and Honduras

being even more impoverished, violent and gang infested than Mexico, with graffiti and Tattoos.

Across the walls of Mexico, Central America, and the USA, segregated communities (barrios), of

hyphenated hybrids (Mexican-Americans) and Central Americans, display a somewhat seamless

visual landscape of murals, low rider muscle cars, iconated sports gear (symbolic brand logos of

Adidas, Nike, Puma, etc. mixed with sports team insignia — Mexican national soccer team jerseys,

or Tigres de Monterrey as often as LA Dodgers), and as much tattooed skin as permissible to

display. It is probable, therefore, that the Chicano Movement (USA born Mexican-Americans) is

producing more than its numerical weight in visual and cultural imagery, particularly in cities

where they represent significantly large segments of the population. In that sense, and as some of

the movement’s leaders claim, the prominent display of Chicano visual culture promotes identity

leading toward a goal of Reconquista. Not intending to return these lands to Mexico, but by

outbreeding the Anglos in much of the Southwestern USA, they would have the demographic

power to create a semi-independent, autonomous political-cultural unit Azatlan that would sprawl

across existing state boundaries. So many of the images displayed in the murals parallel both the

revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera and his artistic contemporaries, and aside from discreet

references to 1930’s USA government sponsored WPA social realist murals, they blatantly draw

from more recent revolutionary murals of Cuba and Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Thus a distinctly


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collective consciousness of revolutionary struggles against el Gigante del Norte (USA) pervades

visual culture across Hispanic MesoAmerica, with an iconic language weaving together symbolic

images representing demands for social, economic, ethnic and racial justice.

With a common language, and repertoire of shared intellectual and cultural heritage, including

literature and other arts, a question arises about the strength of public visual imagery around South

America, especially given similar times of revolutionary fervor and struggles against oppressive

regimes. Each and every South American nation has experienced genocide of indigenous peoples,

suppression of their culture, socio-economic class hierarchies based on Spanish, Portuguese or

other European ancestry and continued divides between haves and have-nots (Brown/White

conflicts). Nearly all continue to suffer from external exploitation by global corporate investors that

control much of their natural resources, while having to stave off overt, indirect, and clandestine

pressures from the USA seeking to influence their internal political processes, economic and

ecological sustainability. But while Argentina has a vibrant literary, visual art, cinema, music,

dance and theatre cultures, iconic displays of identity their public arts lag far behind Mexico. Brazil

also hosts dynamic movements across cultural sectors, including a vibrant cinema industry, and

perhaps with a great need to find expression for some common visual identity through public arts

that display cohesive iconic representations, not much can be identified across the nation’s diverse

regions. Yet the upcoming Olympic and World Cup events may stimulate some attempts, but even

if government sponsors such a production of public arts, where are the people in creating their own

representations aside from traditional folk arts. Aside from graffiti, very little of Brazil’s mural arts

explore significant social themes or stray far from individualistic 1960’s references to global styles

of quasi-psychedelic, op or pop genres, yet the modernist architectural traditions of Brasilia host a

treasure of sculpture, which only government workers and tourists can appreciate. Brazilian Social

realism seems not to have succeeded in popularity, perhaps due to periods of military rule that

veered away from Fascist or Socialist representation, steering a pro-USA capitalist course, with

little resistance expressed in public arts. But images of carnival, samba, football, beaches, bikinis,

and capoeira that absorb creative energies along the coast contrast to the interior’s vast tropical

jungles and arid plains, dominated by gross poverty and violence. Life in the interior changes little

from a long lasting colonial era, unimaginably enormous plantations, cattle ranches, mining and

forestry operations, all rapaciously extract natural resources and profits as quickly as possible, with

little concern for either ecology or the people. Only the absurdity of Brasilia, a Corbusier inspired


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modernist layout of isolated and isolating grand open spaces amidst signature architectures, differs

from the rest of the interior, which exists in conditions like Oscar Lewis’ often quoted “cultures of

poverty and poverty of culture” (Lewis, 1959).

This research paper cannot validly examine symbolic cultures, artistic traditions, and public arts in

each nation across the Southern, Central, and Caribbean Americas. Thus, after a brief surface

description, it may be more enlightening to focus mostly on one country, Mexico, as it has been

claimed that Art in the Americas turned on the Mexican Revolutionary Mural tradition of the

1920’s, and has extended into the present. The Mexican murals were the first to significantly

include the ethnography of the country’s indigenous peoples, and later on its immigrants from

Spain and beyond. While revolutionary in form and content, the murals borrowed heavily on

imagery read from pre-Columbian Arts and integrated with elements from familiar religious frescos

commonly found in city cathedrals and trickling down to every village church. It is even said by

some critics, that Mexico’s most iconic female artist, Frida Khalo, was greatly influenced by the

country’s legacy of 18th century religious and portrait arts. But continuing the holistic approach, the

paper now begins a further overview of factors that influenced a generalized ecology of symbolic

representation across the cultural interfaces of social, political, and economic life from colonial

through current eras, with an emphasis on the more contemporary. But as stated earlier,

geographical factors greatly influence and limit historical continuity and shifts.

Cultural Ecologies within Symbolic and Social Anthropology

The label Art represents a symbolic, and an economic product, its production and consumption, and

the values that each society and cultural ensemble places on different Art forms. While some

indigenous artistic and crafts production have continued unabated from Pre-Columbian histories

and geographies, the overwhelming impact of European colonization destroyed many live

indigenous practices, especially those connected to large advanced political economies and their

respective religious practices and imagery. Furthermore those impacts divided indigenous folk arts

from imported European arts and crafts systems, many of which were absorbed and hybridized

within local indigenous cultures. As well, talented and skilled indigenous artists were increasingly

integrated into the colonial arts and crafts production systems, especially in the production of

religious artifacts. This latter manufacture garnered support and training through the missionary

system of social and economic organization as an integral part of a civilizational Christianizing


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process, which in some times and places protected indigenous peoples from rapacious and

genocidal exploitation by governmental and private sectors. Thus whatever the level of local

production, importation, and/or consumption of art, or the degree of Europeanization of indigenous

peoples and their cultural economies, arts were critical to symbolic self-identity, social cohesion or

conflict, and represented transformations into modernization and globalization.

An Overview of Historical Geopolitical Factors: Anglo versus the rest

Complex tensions between England, France and Spain, heightened after Henry VIII (1491-1547)

withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church to found an independent (Protestant) Church of

England. While not the centerpiece of Europe’s ongoing religious, political and social turmoil these

conflicts created a pervasive distrust and conflict that continues today. While less volatile in a

relatively secular England, its violent specter continues to consume Northern Ireland and remains

most decisively active in the United States of America. A core WASP (White Anglo-Saxon

Protestant) population of the USA and its Puritan ethos assumes a belief in being God’s Chosen

People, and North America their Promised Land (Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril

and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006). Constructed

as a political-religious ideology extending to encompass the entire Western Hemisphere, and was

reinforced as a national hegemonic policy by the Monroe Doctrine (1823) stating that any further

interference in the Western Hemisphere would be construed as an act of aggression against the

USA, and result in the USA intervening (Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe

Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Duke University Press, 2005).

The 20th century success of the US has engendered a further belief in their God Given Right to a

Hegemonic Global leadership and arrogance toward all outside of a Protestant Anglosphere.

Furthermore, Anglo America occupied a continent already partly explored, conquered and settled

by Spain, perceived as the Anglosphere’s archrival for world power. By later seizing territory from

Mexico thus bringing a sizeable Hispanic population and cultural ethos inside of their borders, the

US has consumed a restive Hispanic/Latino minority with cultural memories embedded in linkages

to a larger Hispanic world. Resulting conflicts are expressed in both preferences for use of their

native Spanish language and demands for social and economic justice, and a grater share in

domestic US political power. The Mexican Revolution and its political mural arts have now

reemerged in the US and are being reinterpreted as Chicano identity in solidarity with opposition to


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the US hegemony over the rest of the Americas. Those murals are the ultimate topic of this

research, which will construct a framework to interpret them as iconic expressions of a Hispanic /

Latino visual cultural that symbolically represents the entire non-Anglo Western Hemisphere.

Contesting the Label Latin America

Why it is important to contest the label Latin America? Although seemingly useful more often than

not, given its predominance in that label represents both a Western Hemisphere and global

demarcation of what the French label Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and what the Anglo-Americans

acknowledge as that same demarcation of a White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant (WASP) world view

encompassing both Anglosphere and predominantly Protestant nations, and their colonial or neo-

colonial possessions worldwide. This brief historical excursion will help to elucidate current

dichotomies and conflicts continuing throughout South and Central America, and the Caribbean, as

well as socio-cultural and political issues in a increasingly divided United States, and less so in

Canada. As a bi-lingual nation, Canadian official documents are published in both English and

French, the latter interchangeably uses two French terms, Amérique latine and Amérique hispanic,

but also cites the origin of those terms, first used in 1856 by a Colombian poet. However, to quote

Yves Lacoste, Le concept d’une Amérique catholique et latine s’opposant à une Amérique anglo-

saxonne et protestante a été repris par l’entourage de Napoléon III. Still today, the French

construction and its more preferable Amérique Hispanic are used interchangeably throughout

Europe, as the later term covers all the southern hemisphere except Brazil, Francophone and Dutch

territories, (Lacoste, ed. Dictionnaire de Géopolitique, Paris, Flammarion, 1995).

Irrespective of its origins, both terms in English, Spanish America and Latin America remain

geographic misnomers because of the range of linguistic diversity, especially when including the

Caribbean. However, correct the assumption of Latin origins for Spanish, Portuguese, and French,

contradictions abound in such a label. Perhaps Amérique catholique might also be contested as no

longer so relevant as it was until more recent changes. But the main contention, which also

somewhat validates the label, concerns the hegemonic use of the term by an Anglo-American ideal

of a WASP world system. This ideal extends a religious-political entitlement to a North American

conquest and settlement by deeply religious North European Calvinists. But it also implies a

conflict within which WASPs are entitled to hegemonic power over Roman Catholicism, Spain,

and all those nations outside of the Protestant sphere.


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The European Protestant Revolution (Reformation, in their own terms), not only separated from a

Universal Catholic Christian church, but tore apart countries, communities and families causing

millions of deaths and untold destruction. As the most powerful state in 16th century Europe,

staunchly Catholic Spain was the iconic representation of evil in the minds of rules and ruled in an

expanding Protestant Europe. English Protestantism in particular, who were to launch both civil

wars, and colonial expansion contesting 16th century Spanish and Portuguese domination of the

nautical world and newly acquired economic control over the resources of Asia, Africa and the

Americas.

As WASP settlement expanded in North America the French-British conflicts were viewed as part

of a need for a mushrooming British Empire, it focused on the necessity for also leveraging its

power throughout the Western Hemisphere. Conflicts raged on land and sea. British Privateers were

given Royal contracts to attach Spanish shipping and settlements, while Royal Charters were

granted for both new colonies and conquests of formerly Catholic held islands, whether French,

Spanish or Portuguese. The American War of Independence from the British Empire, changed little

in mentality and politics between the newly independent USA and the rest of the Hemisphere,

except that not only did that State continue conflict with the Spanish and French colonies, but also

against the remaining British Colonies. Deeply embedded within the American WASP psyche was

an Evangelical New Covenant, an identity as God’s Chosen People for the New Testament like the

Jews of the Old Testament, and likewise, all the Americas were a God Given Promised Land, as

Israel had been given to the Jews. From inception through the present, this WASP American

mentality, often labeled as American Zionism, predominates as a subtext throughout the American

identity, even permeating the cultural substructures of non-Protestants and ethnic minority

immigrants. Furthermore, this sense of righteousness and God given entitlement to dominate,

permeates the American political, economic and cultural attitude toward the entire Western

Hemisphere, and extends beyond to a somewhat arrogant attempt at global hegemony (Phillips

2006, Brownson 2008).

Without delving too far into this history of USA as a hegemonic power dominating all of the

Western Hemisphere, grouping and “branding” all the other non-WASP countries as Latin


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America, it should suffice to point out that the most frequently observed graffiti throughout the

Hemisphere over the past century was “Yankee Go Home!”

The colonial era, which began with Columbus’ 1994 voyage, erased most of the pre-Columbian

indigenous religions, state and economic systems, and imposed a political economic system of

slavery, extraction and exploitation of natural resources and indigenous labor. Indigenous labour

declined in many areas due to a genocidal combination of forced labor, punishment for resistance

and imported disease. The Portuguese and Spanish had initiated the Atlantic African slave trade,

with colonization and extermination of the indigenous populations of the Canary Islands and

Azores. The Canary Islands were close to both Iberia and the African coast, with excellent

conditions for valuable sugar plantations, slavery raids into Africa were thus initiated to replenish

labor for Canary Islands plantations. As slavery also proved both profitable and useful to replace

indigenous labor in the New World, the Atlantic Slave trade, plantation and mining systems grew

more widespread and diffused throughout the Tropical and warmer regions of both Caribbean

islands and mainland Americas. A profitable system only outlawed by the last slave empire of the

United States through a Civil War (1861-1865), yet illegal trafficking continued into the Caribbean

and South America, completely dying out by the end of the 19th century.

Thus we must acknowledge a Triple Heritage of European Colonialism in the Western

Hemisphere: 1. Genocide of indigenous peoples along with European colonization and settlement.

2. Appropriation of all lands and natural resources, amidst territorial conflicts between European

States and later inclusion of the USA in the competition.

3. The African Diaspora of Atlantic Slave Trade, and historical discrimination following abolition

of slavery.

Perhaps we can include a fourth heritage of Mestizo / Mulatto or creation and expansion of a mixed

race population. Mexico, for instance, received at least as many African slaves as the USA, yet it is

nearly impossible today to find any significant percentage of Mexicans with overwhelmingly

distinctive Black African physical features, whereas de facto racial segregation continues in the

USA even after the end of legal segregation, and opportunities for integration. Perhaps the

difference has mostly to do with culture and religion, and a uniquely American class structure,

however much denied and attempts to ignore its existence. As the USA still uses racial


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classification for official identity purpose, a majority of Americans classified as “white” the most

prevalent and commonly preferred cultural self-identification is WASP. Other racially “white”

immigrants from Southern and Eastern European, South and East Asians, and still today, Jews,

Hindus, Muslims, and even Roman Catholics, are identified as not quite “real Americans” however

long their arrival, social and economic integration, and citizenship.

While socio-cultural attitudes change over generations, at times rapidly, other more deeply held and

less exposed attitudes continue as subtexts to dominant prevailing values. Although unproven, one

commonly heard anthropological truism is that it takes three generations to establish a trait, which

then only lasts for three generations.”

Deconstructing Latin America as both label and black box

However unfortunate or bizarre, it is difficult to establish a label other than Latin America, for the

entire continent of South America and the Middle American connector to the North, and often even

incorporating the Caribbean. This identity bizarrely, fails to differentiate nationalities, ethnic

origins, race, and even language, which widely differ over a vast geographical terrain of high

mountains, swamps, deserts, tropical rainforests, temperate forests, and islands. Although

threatened and near extinction, hundreds of indigenous languages manage to survive, however

fragmented, creolized or reduced to a pidgin dialect. Of the predominant European languages,

Portuguese is limited to Brazil and a handful of islands, whereas Spanish is recognized throughout

both the South and Central mainland, many Caribbean islands, and is the second most spoken

language in the USA, which claims a Hispanic population officially 18 %, over 55 million residents

(US Census Bureau, 2011) equal the entire population of Mexico. Of these immigrants, a small but

significant number lived in territory originally Mexican, the entire undifferentiated Hispanic /

Latino population includes immigrants of all nationalities, ethnic and racial origins and mixes from

throughout the Hispanic world, not including Portuguese speaking immigrants. The number and

percentages of Hispanics / Latinos doubled between 1990 and 2010, and now exceeds Black

Americans on both counts, and as the fastest growing US population is estimated to reach 30% of

all US residents by 2050.

This rapid growth from both immigration and birthrate merges with deeply embedded historically

ethnocentric fears of Latin language, peoples and Roman Catholicism pushes Anglos (WASPs)


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fear. The decline of “real Americans” who claim WASP status and largely mythic lineage to the

nation’s founders of nation, and again mythically, the largest ethno-religious population, generates

right wing politics and demagoguery. Statistically at the end of the 18th century there were more

German than English speakers residing in the 13 colonies. South Florida, now home to 15% Latino,

largely immigrants from Cuba, the Caribbean and Northeastern corner of South America –

Venezuela and Columbia, contains the third largest, and most diverse Hispanic population of all the

US States. But special Anglos have a particular concern over the Southwestern region, originally

belonging to Mexico prior to the US-Mexican war, including seven states accounting for over 30%

of the land area of the US excluding Alaska. After the 1846 US annexation of Texas war broke out

lasting until Mexico surrendered in 1848, also losing about 40% of its territory to the US.

The US-Mexican war was not a very even contest. Mexico was in shambles beginning with a

decade long struggle for independence, which culminated in the 1821 Treaty of Cordoba. But civil

strife followed with the country was fractured and disorganized. One event that has recently raised

attention was the defection to Mexico of a small but significant number of US troops, mainly recent

immigrants from Europe, a large percentage who were Roman Catholic, including an all Irish, Saint

Patrick’s Brigade. The Mexican Army also included a number of recent European immigrants and

volunteers, especially within the officer classes, with whom American defectors found more ethnic

and religious resonance, whereas they had faced discrimination and ill treatment from a WASP

ethos that dominated the US government, army and civilians.

In short, working south from the middle of the US one encounters predominantly Spanish place

names in states with Spanish names, and while not yet more than one quarter of the population is

Mexican and increasingly also refugees from Central American poverty and conflict, one does not

even have to leave the US border to be in Hispanic America. But just as the South American

continent is an enormous mosaic of greatly differentiated ecosystems and human ecology, so even

the largest of the border states, Texas, is both a melting pot and enclaves of peoples and

ecosystems. On the West Central escarpment the grandchildren of 19th century German settlers still

occupy the same plateau lands and harvest water from the aquifer that their great grandfathers made

fertile with hard work and agricultural know how they brought with them from Europe. That same

set of German communities sprawl across the border into Mexico, where they also still speak their

original German dialect, but Spanish instead of English. Not wanting to get involved and take sides


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in the US Civil War, they crossed into Mexico where they were welcomed and granted land and

citizenship. Today’s Northern Mexican music with its Bass, Accordion, and horns, blares out a

slightly off-key version of German Polka rhythms.

The landscape on both sides of the Rio Grande river border, runs from arid short grass prairie to full

blown desert, its pre-Columbian indigenous peoples lived meager lives clustered around water

sources yet still were mainly semi-nomadic or fully nomadic. Only in the northern Arizona and

New Mexico mountains were more permanent settlements established and corn (Maize) based

agriculture practiced. Spanish explorers and a rather meager stream of settlers brought new crops,

and most importantly domestic animals, pigs, sheep, goats, cattle and horses. This last animal, the

horse would transform the entire Americas, but especially the great plains stretching from middle

North America south into most of Mexico until hitting the Tropical jungles. Like in many parts of

the world, the Horse became more than a vehicle to ride of pack goods, its presence and image was

absorbed as a totemic animal. To the indigenous peoples, it was both a icon of fear resonating with

the brutal Spanish conquest, but to other tribes a liberation and symbol of power and prestige

around which they reorganized their ways of life and livelihood. For the Spanish Hildagos (nobles)

and peasant settlers, the open prairies were much like the Mesta and arid lands of South Central

Spain, where they could range their cattle and sheep.

Cowboy Hats and Boots, Blue Jeans and Silver Belt Buckles

Some cultural and symbolic artifacts cross borders, nationalities, ethnicities, race and class along

the Rio Grande and share a regional culture deep into both countries. A drive through urban Los

Angeles, far afield on the Pacific coast of California, one sees groups of men similarly garbed, most

all Mexican, some having only exchanged a ubiquitous American baseball cap for their Texas

sombrero. These same men and manner of dress can also be seen portrayed on the walls of

buildings around central and eastern LA, murals depicting the current and the ancient, Aztec

warriors, Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata in their wide sombreros, Fra Hidago, priestly icon of

Mexican independence, portraits of young men in muscle shirts, tattoos covering their bare skin,

low riders in red or blue bandanas. So much of the mural icongraphy reflects what you would see

on the streets in front of the tableau, and yet no Chicano LA mural would be complete without

some iconic image of the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. Which you can

also see tattooed on the bodies of young men and not so young vatos locos (crazy guys), often with


16

Pachuco crosses emblazoned in the middle of their foreheads, warnings, these men are dangerous,

they have killed others and have no fear of death, a grinning skull that permeates Mexican culture,

even celebrating a day of the Dead parades with marchers dancing in macabre costumes, masques,

and breaking open skeleton piñatas.

Mexico is the pivot of Central (Meso) America, its cultures, from Indio / Mestizo / Mullato / Criolo

to varied Europeans, reaching down into the steamy tropical lands, peoples and countries to their

south. At a vague point below Panama the South American continent proper shifts political

geography, but with minimal impact of the cultural geographies. Both coasts, Atlantic and Pacific,

grow further apart, the central Cordillera rises more steeply toward the clouds and the snowmelt

runoff rages down gorges filling enormous river basins on the Eastern slopes, and less toward the

Pacific, and a thin coastal stretch of desert plains.

Both coasts were important to Spanish exports. From Atlantic ports its fleets of bulky silver and

gold laden Galleons sailed more directly to Europe, wending their way through the Caribbean. A

sea of islands mixing safe ports with contested waters and ports, dodging English privateers and

multiethnic pirates laying in wait for those treasures. The most heterogeneous region of all the

Americas, then and now, is the Caribbean sea, its islands and neighboring mainland. The American

Atlantic coast stretches from North America’s icy Arctic waters along rocky headlands, proceeds

south to stretches of sandy beaches and swampy coastal lowlands. From its Caribbean middle a turn

south encounters a mix of jungles and beaches, sweeping past vast, powerful tidal flats of the great

Orinoco and Amazon rivers, around the Brazilian headland’s reach toward Africa, and into

Antarctic cooler waters.

Along this enormous stretch of Atlantic coast human settlements mushroomed from European

colonization, mixing peoples; indigenous, immigrants from all of Europe, and the African diaspora.

Still today, the Caribbean islands are a mélange of Spanish, English, French and Dutch languages,

often in creole and pidgin dialects. The only North American Atlantic ports of any long term

historical importance, Charleston and Savannah, collected the majority of their Atlantic slave

traffic, and until the 20th century was as much a Caribbean as North American port, its English

owned plantations sprawling across mainland rice, cotton and sugar estates across the narrow

waters to the islands, creating an Anglo-American-Caribbean culture quite distinct from the


17

mainland’s WASP majorities. Anglo Black, Mulatto, Creole, merged with Spanish and French

cultures as islands changed ownership and inter-island trade competed with island to mainland,

while most shipping remained pointed toward Europe until the post-Civil War boom of a newly

resurgent United States of America, launching its trajectory towards world power with the war

against Spain and conquest of both Caribbean Islands, most importantly, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and

the Philippines.

The arc of Caribbean islands nearly touches the Florida peninsula in the north, and stretches xxx

Kilometers south to Trinidad and Tobago off the Venezuelan coast. A stone’s throw southeast

along the same coast, Dutch Surinam and French Guyana challenge the notion of an Iberian

language domination, although French Guyana’s border abuts Portuguese speaking Brazil. Adding

anomalies, the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus first landed, divides between cruelly

impoverished Haiti, its population 99% French patois speaking Black, and relatively prosperous,

largely white and mestizo Spanish speaking Dominican Republic. Still another divided island St.

Martin, belongs amicably to both France and Holland. Thus the Caribbean Island chain connects

the tip of Florida, once Spanish, now a US State, to Spanish speaking Venezuela, a distance of

1,700 sea miles. Although this insular arc includes over 7,000 islands, only about 150 are inhabited,

of which 22 are independent island nations.

Aside from continental South America, the sheer cultural diversity of the Caribbean islands would

keep an army of Anthropologists busy for lifetimes documenting all the cross cultural linkages

juxtaposed to uniquely isolated communities, which can and does simultaneously occur on many

islands. One fact, however, distinguishes relations between islands and the countries of their

colonial past and present. While the USA probably hosts the most diverse Caribbean immigrant

population, with numbers matching or exceeding those islanders who migrated to Mexico, Central

or South American mainland, Europe also has its share. The first large Black population in the UK

arrived with WWII, mainly from Jamaica, but also from other British Colonies. This British

Caribbean population remains today largely than Black African immigrants to the UK from all their

former African colonies. Holland hosts as many Guyanese and other Caribbean immigrants as they

do immigrants from Indonesia. Guyanese come in a mosaic of racial origins and mixes, South

Asians and Africans being the largest number, but also smatterings from other Dutch colonies

around the world, non-Dutch Europeans, and Latinos from neighboring countries. France, with the


18

most diverse immigrant population of any European country, maintains colonies, officially

Overseas Territories, worldwide, from Tahiti to Guyana, with a constant flow between France and

their Caribbean and South American territories. Again the ethnic populations of those French

territories are a mosaic of European, African and a smattering of other ethnic mixes representing Le

Monde Francophone.

After defeat by the USA in the 1895 war, Spain ceded all its New World possessions to the USA,

primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico, the rest of its former colonies were by that time already

independent following the Bolivarian model of Criollo (American born Spaniards) led struggles

inspired by the American War of Independence (1776-1783), the French Revolution (1787-1789),

and the early Napoleonic era with its radical Enlightenment oriented changes in European political

geography and state systems. Rousseau and Voltaire were as widely read in America’s Southern

lands as by Jefferson, Franklin, and others in the North, perhaps even more so, as the French,

Spanish, and Portuguese colonies contained as large if not larger proportion of educated elites

spread more widely and in more well established cities than existed in British North America or the

United States.

But not all revolutions and independence movements were led by intellectuals, the first of such

outbreaks following American Independence and French Revolution was in Haiti, a revolt of Black

African Slaves (1791-1804) turned more political and independence by the Mulatto classes,

including well educated children of white masters and Black African slave women. Throughout the

Catholic colonies, race and class, differentiation between European and American birth, and

European nations of origin, were specifically ranking categories that were relatively structured. The

complex mixes of racial origins and mixtures, ethnicity, social class, education and occupation

almost required some classification system of categories for administrative purposes.

Cultural Shifts and Symbolic Transference to the American Colonies

Original Spanish Conquests and exploitation of indigenous human and natural resources was brutal,

causing great upheavals and decimation of indigenous state systems and cultures, and while fully

committed to replacing indigenous religious with Christianity, the missionary priests and monks

often contested the brutality of government and commercial interests. As part of a civilizing

mission, these clerics also brought agricultural, construction, and crafts skills to indigenous peoples


19

under their care. Many scholarly clerics and a very few intellectuals among a largely soldier class

of administrators, began to record what they found among these ‘primitive’ indigenous cultures,

finding many of them not so primitive, but rather civilized with various advanced political and

cultural systems. One thing, however was ubiquitous and that was a collective European

consciousness of the supremacy of their civilizational systems, most emphatically religion. It was

the arts that arrived from Europe that were diffused throughout the colonies, with scant respect paid

to indigenous imagery and representations of strange symbolic systems. Thus colonization was a

cultural transformation at the core of which was attempts at a wholesale shift in symbolic

representation, whether in language, art, manners, material and non-material cultural artifacts.

As the 19th century began, Europe was in a political, social, and intellectual turmoil that quickly

spread to its colonial elites then trickled down through urban lower socio-economic classes, and

through the Jesuit and Franciscan missions, even to indigenous villages. These events activated

Enlightenment ideals and transformed concepts of identity triggering an emergent idea of belonging

to a nation as an icon for people of shared geographical territory of birth, ethnicity and language

(Herder & Rousseau). It was not only the settlers of the British 13 North American Colonies who

were seized by these ideas and emotions, particularly those well enough educated to read or to

gather in public or secret places to hear tracts read and to discuss implications for their

communities, families, affiliated associations and circles, and individual selves. Tracts from France,

quickly translated and published in Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, circulated almost as

quickly in the New World Colonies as in Europe. But it was not only philosophical essays and

political writings, but also literature, poetry, and proto-novels that circulated world wide throughout

and across European linguistic communities. Beyond the written word, music and art circulated,

both popular and folk forms for the lower classes, and varied continuously evolving fusions among

popular secular, religious and Royal Court music. But with the ethno-cultural fusions of the New

World and Europe’s Afro-Asian colonies, it is possible to claim that today’s World Music

originated in the late 16th century. At times, European Court music and musicians were absorbed

into the palaces of Ottoman elites, with such fusions transferring back to further inspire European

musicians and composers of varied forms from court to popular. Previous fears of ocean crossings

rapidly changed with Europe’s 16th century expansion, trade and colonization. As with literature

and technology, ocean crossings between Old and New Worlds became viewed as normal part of a

Eurocentric imperialist worldview. All manner of plants and animals were transported around an


20

increasingly well-known world system, changing lifestyles, economies, agriculture, cuisine and

diets, and the health of peoples. But disease also followed as bacteria, viral and other forms of

infection, insects and parasites now crossed barriers that had previously been secured by oceans,

climates and distances.

Turning from music and literature to visual art, what Ferdnand Braudel labels and analyses as the

Long 16th Century was a transition from Renaissance to Baroque, or what art historian E. H.

Gombrich critiques as a spilt between the Counter Reformation of Catholic Europe versus the

emergence in Holland of “The Mirror of Nature” coinciding with new philosophical and socio-

political thought. While 17th century Catholic Europe and much of Germany basked in luxurious

ornate cultural artifacts, pomp and ceremony, French thought and English revolutions were paving

the way for an era of Enlightenment, and emerging power of Protestant Europe over a declining

Spanish and German Hapsburg Empire. Ironically, it was Spain’s wealth in New World silver and

gold, along with exile of its industrious Jewish and Muslim populations, and interest on short-term

borrowings from Amsterdam bankers that brought down the Western Hapsburg Empire, and

loosened its control over the American colonies.

One other factor must be calculated into the overall equation of realignment among European

powers and migration to the colonies; Europe’s disastrous Little Ice Age (1550-1850), with extreme

lows around 1650, 1770 and 1850, causing famines, crop failures, diseases, population decline and

political unrest. Around the Northern Hemisphere, British and French North America also suffered

similar difficulties. South America, it seems was also effected by severe cold and snow along the

Cordillera ranges running North-South dividing the continent’s eastern from western watersheds.

Little historical evidence from this period in South America has been found to corroborate overall

impacts or links among specific geographies, nor from local indigenous records.

So, geological and ecological diversity, humid tropics and hot deserts, seemed to have buffered

much of the Southern Americas from the ravages of the Northern Hemisphere’s Little Ice Age, but

spurred migration when possible from Europe to the warmer Americas. While such migrations

included many different individuals and groups from across the socio-economic class spectrum, it

would be evident that the lower classes, especially peasants, were unable to afford such relocation,

thus more affluent, industrious and talented immigrants would have predominated. Spanish


21

immigration laws, prevented Protestants from immigrating into the colonies, along with 16th

century regulations against Moriscos or Conversos (Jews and Muslims who had converted to

Christianity). Despite restrictions, a trickle of foreign (non Spanish) mercenary soldiers, priests,

merchants and artisans made their way to Spanish America from mid 16th century onwards. The big

leap in 19th century immigration brought sizable numbers of Germans, mainly Catholics who were

warned away from the US because of WASP prejudices. While German immigration into Dutch

and British colonies faced little opposition, providing they were Protestants, French immigration

divided into Catholics who were welcomed into their colonies, along with a trickle of Jews, but

distinctly differentiated from Huguenots (Protestants) who were much less welcome and generally

opted for Dutch or British colonies.

Today, a loose ethno-linguistic network of German identity exists throughout South and Central

America, incorporating many disparate groups of different backgrounds and lengths of residency in

their respective countries. In some cases, such as Mennonite and Anabaptist sects, their religious

community networks are worldwide incorporating groups and even individuals, with varying

degrees of orthodoxy. While many individuals with German surnames are involved in artistic

communities throughout the Americas, it would be difficult to single out any specific representative

genres such as have long been integral to ethnically Spanish artistic and literary endeavors. In fact,

it is possible to identify certain Spanish language writing genres such as the mid 20th century

Magical Realism in literature, film and visual arts, as unique to any specific Latino-American

ethnic group, other than requiring a certain familiarity with indigenous cultures, Spanish literary

history and European surrealism as dominant influences. Although the European educated,

Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges (1889-1986), is often credited with being a progenitor of the

Magic Realism genre. Borghes’ background represents some of the complex ethno-national threads

weaving through South America. From his Uruguayan Criollo mother (purebred Spanish), Jorge

Luis inherited a distinguished lineage, while his father’s mixed Spanish and Portuguese paternal

lineage contrasted with his English maternal heritage. While not wealthy, the family frequently

travelled to Europe, spoke both English and Spanish at home, with an extensive library replete with

English literature. The family moved to Switzerland in 1914 where Jose Luis continued his

education in French and German, taking a degree in 1918, and due to WWI remained in

Switzerland, also living in Italy and Spain.


22

While this research has no specific interest in Borges, per se, he is introduced to represent the

prevalence of multi-national, multi-lingual, and cosmopolitan cultures of much of South America’s

well-educated urban middle classes. Another example comes from noted Mexican artist Frida

Khalo (1907-1954), the daughter of Guillermo (Wilhelm) Khalo, a German speaking Hungarian

Jew who immigrated to Mexico at age 19, and after a few years opened a professional photography

studio. Guillermo married Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez (1879-1932), who was the daughter of a

Criollo mother and a mestizo father, and was a strict and devout Catholic, while Guillermo was an

avowed atheist.

Without overly discussing Frida in this paper, both her family background and her marriage to

famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), represents some of what this research attempts to

portray as a relatively common pattern of ethno-cultural mixing throughout all the Americas,

perhaps even more common in the Southern than in the Northern Americas.

An equally if not more important figure in Mexican heroic iconography, Diego María de la

Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (yes, that

is his full name), also came from a mixed background as his mother, Maria del Pilar Barrientos de

Rivera (1862-1925) was from a Converso family, Jews forced converts to Christianity, but she had

retained much of her Jewish culture, which she passed on to Diego. His Father Diego de la Rivera y

Acosta (1847-1922), was from an old upper class Criollo family of Hidalgo (Spanish noble)

heritage, a propertied teacher, newspaper editor, government inspector. Studying art at the National

Academy before moving to Europe in 1907, Rivera joined a circle of pioneering modern artists,

poets and intellectuals, until returning to Mexico in 1920.

Not all of the important cultural icons of the Southern Americas were born into such “exotic”

families, but fewer were from fully mestizo and/or mulatto backgrounds, and fewer still from fully

indigenous ethnic roots. But whatever their ethnic backgrounds, the tools, modalities, and manners

of arts and culture were European in origin. Simultaneously, a hybridization process called

mestizaje, which then gave way to an era of creolization of the literature produced from the late

colonial period onward.


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Culture challenges politics and vice versa

As the 19th century began, Europe was in a political, social, and intellectual turmoil that quickly

spread to its colonial elites then trickled down through urban lower socio-economic classes, and

through the Jesuit and Franciscan missions, even to indigenous villages. These events activated

Enlightenment ideals and transformed concepts of identity triggering an emergent idea of belonging

to a nation as an icon for people of like geographical birth, shared ethnicity and language (Herder &

Rousseau). From this surge of identity shifts across Europe and the Americas, a sense of nationality

and nationalism began to unify groups around symbolic identities, while at the same time dividing

them over territorial possessions, and establishing new borders to demarcate new nations differing

from previously rather flexible boundaries to colonial administrative units. We social theorists

Benedict Anderson proposes that shared symbolism and language attract a psychological desire for

being part of a larger whole, resulting in syndrome of Imagined Community, which in the case of

the countries and conflicts throughout Iberoamerica, may be considered an Achilles Heel.

Mestizo Mosaic Conclusion:

In developing a discourse on Latin American Art from an anthropological perspective, this

research has covered a broad historical-geographical background,

This research also takes a cue from Cuban writer, curator, art critic, Gerardo Mosquera, one of

the most salient critical thinkers on Art in Latin America. According to Mosquera, Latin

American Art has evolved beyond its historical and geographical stereotypes to position itself

in the global Art World as Art from Latin America (Mosquero, 2003). Earlier, this research

developed Mosquera’s critique of the label Latin America, examining the complexities and

contradictions of that label, from a linguistic, ethnographical, and geopolitical perspective. In

retrospect, it would have been more appropriate to appropriate the label Iberoamerica, less

commonly used term favored by Mosquera, which erases the Spanish-Portuguese divide to

encompass the cultutal-linguistic majority throughout the Southern Americas. Any region will

always have minorities, whether linguistic or otherwise, but few if any places in the world host

a perfectly balanced and integrated multiculturalism. Anglo-America, a term primarily applied

to the USA and Canada, hosts its own contradictions in multilingual populations, especially

Canada with its Francophone bi-lingual federal system, and the USA, as Mosquera points out,


24

hosts a Hispanic (Latino / Chicano) population that has already grown to be second only to

Mexico as a country with the largest numbers of Spanish speakers in all the Americas.

In this research Mosquera’s writings were only discovered in the final stages, thus without

rewriting the entire paper, will have to suffice as elements in this conclusion, although it seems

that much of our two approaches coincided.

As an impassioned thinker about the legitimacy of a newly emergent Global Artworld outside

the Anglo-American-European core, and with a focus on Latin America, Mosquera uses the

09/11 NYC attack as a metaphor to deliver a powerful address that should persuade us of

having arrived in a new age in which;

… old post-colonial theories must be retaught and replaced by a concept which is more

appropriate for the present situation. In that respect he proposes to speak “from here” that

artists are entering the global stage: “The challenge is to be able to stay up-to-date in the face

of the appearance of new cultural subjects, energies and information bursting forth from all

sides.” (Editor (Anon), Global Art Museum. Berlin 2011).

Throughout this research, however, two elements were less well treated; firstly, contemporary

arts of indigenous and underrepresented minorities, and secondly, arts of the Latin America’s

Women and Feminist critiques. To address both, Mosquera notes that the Arts in Latin

America have grown beyond the label and realities of Latin American Arts to shift into a truly

global Artworld, and no longer representing older stereotypes such as nativist, social realist, or

politically revolutionary. But in this globalization certain artists and genres may have

specificity, not to any stereotype, but to specificity, a relevancy to time and place of their

conceptual and actual production.

As has been noted, so many artists from Latin America have always shifted back and forth

between their countries and Europe, not only Spain or Portugal, but in Colonial times mainly

among any or all Catholic countries. From the onset of a Postcolonial era, their horizons

widened to encompass a broader reach, inclusive of the Gigante del Norte, as the USA became

a significant player in the late 19th century world of Art and its and commercial markets.


25

Although from ethnically mixed indigenous-European family backgrounds, both Frida Khalo

and Diego Rivera were artistic celebrities in Europe and the USA, Rivera having developed

much of his conceptual oeuvre in Paris among pioneering modernists. But what was developed

in this research was a primary ethno-religious conflict between Anglo-WASP and Latino-

Catholic world cultural systems, and woven into an Iberoamerican ethos evolving to permeate

much of its arts. That said, the revolutionary culture of independence movements throughout

the Southern Hemisphere was as deeply indebted to the Anglo-American ideals, which fostered

that war of independence, as to the French Revolution. Both movements, however, as was

pointed out earlier in this research, were even more indebted to the Humanistic ideals of

Rousseau and Voltaire, and Nationalist ideas of Herder. But while Anglo-America sided with

their British cousins against Napoleon, Iberoamerica was inspired by Napoleonic ideas,

although turning away from his aggressive militarism, especially after his conquests of Spain

and Portugal. But the Bolivarian wars for independence from Spain also followed a Napoleonic

model, although supported by British and American gold, weapons and mercenaries.

Did Iberoamerica’s postcolonial era immediately transform its arts? The answer is a shift to

heroic representation of male leaders, much in the former lineage of portraying their Iberian

rulers, and especially iconizing their Hispanic forbearers, the Conquistadores. But by the 19th

century, after 300 years of colonization, the European population was ethnically and

linguistically diversifying. As has already been discussed, refugees from Europe’s ongoing

wars and religious conflicts boosted both general populations and the industrial-technical

capital with engineering, manufacturing, and agrarian expertise. Although Protestants were still

few and far between, inspired by Europe’s Napoleonic and nationalist movements, Masonic

orders were proliferating among the elites.

Here it is noteworthy that these Revolutionary ideals and representations of heroic figures,

battles, political and national insignia, coincided with ongoing ideological, political, social,

cultural, and territorial conflicts among and within these emergent nations. While arts in the

early postcolonial era changed little in either form or content, religious and secular

representations remained as before except that strong anti-clerical iconoclastic movements had

arisen, and would continue to haunt regional political revolutions and civil wars well into the

20th century.


26

Although many critics speculate on the role of a conservative Catholic culture as the reasons

that female artists were latecomers as producers and having a voice in Iberoamerica’s

Artworld. But a subtext begins to emerge as to the roles of women in consuming art and setting

aesthetic styles, especially among the elites, as families often journeyed to Europe, even

sending some daughters abroad for education, which was still lacking in these new countries.

The older educational systems were exclusively male establishments, predominantly founded

by religious orders, especially Jesuit universities. With traditions of the elites and emerging

bourgeoisie sending their sons to Europe for university education, and occasionally a few

daughters, founding public education was a low priority among these nations struggling to

develop their resources, industries and commerce. Among the elites, home tutors were the

norm for educating females, although convents also offered more advanced education, albeit

not in a very broad range of subjects beyond religion, literature and history.

When observing the limited number of female artists in modern times, Frida Khalo stands out.

While a universal Mexican public education was equally open to girls up to and including

university and academies (music and visual art), few female graduates were involved in the

production of Arts, a good marriage being the preferred norm until well into the mid-20th

century. Among the political-artistic circles frequented by Frida Khalo, more females were

accepted as companions of male artists or political activists, than in their own right. During the

1920’s, however, women’s rights movements in European and USA, spread to Latin America,

especially as those movements succeeded in winning women the right to vote.

While the 20th century social and economic changes established a wider market for arts and

artists, entrance to arts education still largely served a privileged social sector, now open to

sons and daughters of the petty bourgeoisie, and with occasional scholarships to support

talented individuals from less well off families. The idea of making a living as an artist was

only emerging for males, and less attractive to females without financial support from families,

husbands or patrons, the latter usually having strings attached such a concubine status. An

instructive example of the independent woman artist, is Coco Chanel, who as the pioneer

female fashion designer, provided a model for talented, creative, ambitious and assertive,

females, as without her series of patron-lovers, it is doubtful if she would have had entrée to


27

the necessary client circles. Even more difficult that a successful career in fashion design,

however creative and radical Coco, was unassisted access to the circles of arts production and

commerce, and full acceptance.

Whatever the uphill struggle for women artists, even more difficult was coveted entre into the

closed circles of male art historians, experts, critics and writers, as exemplified by the ratios of

female graduates in art history, criticism or curatorial fields, to academic and professional

employment and publications. While those ratios are changing to the greater equity and

opportunity for female expertise, both within feminist theory , and outside of that self-

constructed gender ghetto, the global sphere divides into differential degrees of opportunities

among unequal national distributions. The ration of female arts experts, curators and university

appointments in Latin America lags behind most of Europe and the USA.

As this research paper intends to establish a background for the PhD dissertation research on

Frida Khalo, it has hopefully covered most of the geo-historical, social, economic, and political

arenas that impacted on Mexico at the period of time that Frida emerged as, arguably, the most

significant woman artist in all of Iberoamercia. This preliminary work has set a framework

within which a mosaic of multi/inter-disciplinary approaches can be applied in the study, to

interpret both her existential career as artist-writer, and subsequent emergence as a cultural

icon. It is difficult to compare Frida among either a historical or contemporary population of

female Latin American artists, a slim minority, especially working outside of conventional

portraiture, pictorial, and religious forms. Therefore, as my academic intent is to produce a

doctoral dissertation of scientifically valid work, out of which will result publishable material

within the fields of philosophy and theory of visual culture, my focus will take more of a

hermeneutic than comparative approach. That said, Frida Khalo was not only a unique and

uniquely female artist, but considerably ahead of her time, which is in part why her work has

achieved current iconic status. Frida’s work represents an integrative approach that

encompasses numerous indigenous, Mestizo/Criollo, and European elements, from within the

history and diversity of Latin American art, but from a uniquely Mexican viewpoint, and yet

equally global in its forms and contents. From within an existential phenomenological

framework, my intent is thus to closely read both woman and work, and subsequent iconic

status and commodification


28

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A Criollo Mestizo Mosaic