Between Art and Artifact: Archaeological Replicas and Cultural Production in Oaxaca, Mexico

Notes

CHAPTER ONE 1. SEDETUR is the Spanish acronym for the Secretaría de Desarrollo Turístico. 2. The creation of the term “alebrije” has been credited to Mexico City papier-mâché artist Pedro Linares (1906–1992). Linares reportedly made up the term to describe his fantastical, monsterlike papier-mâché creations inspired by his dreams (Masuoka 1994). The word “alebrije” has been widely appropriated by the state government and the art establishment in the promotion of Oaxacan wood carving, apparently because some of the wood carvings exhibit fantastical designs similar to those of the papier-mâché alebrijes. Few wood-carvers actually use this term in reference to their own work. 3. The same individuals may also refer to their objects as ídolos (idols), a curious invocation of Spanish colonial discourse that casts native peoples as idol worshipers. 4. The pícaro is a specifically Iberian tradition, but is analogous to the trickster and clown figures that are found in narrative and performance genres throughout the world. 5. Since Benedict Anderson’s seminal work Imagined Communities (1983) was published nearly three decades ago, there has been a proliferation of works on nation-states and national identity that address this topic from both generalist and region-specific perspectives. Some have focused on the role of archaeology in nationalist ideology (e.g., Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996; Jones 1997; Meskell 1998; Smiles 1994), while other have explored folklore’s relationship to nationalism (e.g., Abrahams 1993; Handler 1988; Herzfeld 1982). 6. Under Díaz, Mexico developed modern infrastructure such as oil refineries , railroads, and factories. However, the rural peasantry bore much of the cost of modernization, as capital and land became increasingly concentrated in Notes the hands of the elite. The ensuing revolution of 1910 was in part a response to the rising civil unrest brought about by Mexico’s growing social and economic divide. 7. The porfiriato is the Spanish name given to the period of the Díaz regime. 8. “Lo mexicano” refers to things that are “typically Mexican,” and may encompass everything from material goods to perceived aspects of the national character, such as the inherent fatalism described by Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in his classic text The Labyrinth of Solitude (Paz 1985); the original text was published in Spanish in 1950. 9. His Consideraciones sobre el problema indígena was published in 1948 by the Interamerican Indigenist Institute. 10. Such negative stereotypes were undoubtedly bolstered by journalistic and literary representations of the oppressive Díaz regime and the bloodshed of the subsequent revolutionary period. Here I am referring to works such as John Kenneth Turner’s Barbarous Mexico (1911) and D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926). 11. Kahlo was especially fond of textiles from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, and many of her self-portraits feature her wearing indigenous clothing from this region. 12. Mexican Folkways was a bilingual English-Spanish journal published by folklorist Francis Toor, an expatriate who lived in Mexico City and published extensively on Mexican popular culture. 13. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was formed in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and controlled national political life for more than seventy years. The PRI lost control of the presidency in 2000, with the election of rival PAN candidate Vicente Fox. 14. In addition, in 2009 Robles García was named as the head of the INAH Consejo de Arqueología, the national archaeology council. She served as the director of Monte Albán during the time that I carried out the fieldwork for this project. The archaeologist Miguel Angel Cruz González succeeded her in this position. 15. This scholarly neglect likely stems, in large part, from the fact that tourism itself only became a legitimate anthropological topic in the late 1970s, with the publication of Valene Smith’s now-classic text Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. 16. Barbash does discuss the endemic poverty he encountered in Oaxacan wood-carving communities, particularly in the early days of the craft in the 1980s, when few artisans had attained substantial economic success. His subsequent publication (2007) on wood carving in Arrazola and the other Oaxacan wood-carving communities sensitively portrays the socioeconomic transformations and challenges facing residents after the wood-carving boom of the preceding decades. 176 | Notes to pages 9–21 THE SKULL OF BENITO JUÁREZ 1. “Gringo” is a commonly used and at...