White is Not Neutral: Accounting for a Personal Ritual in My Studio Practice

The history of Mexico is that of the human who is looking for his [or her] parentage, his origins. He [she] has been influenced at one time or another by France, Spain, the United States and the militant indigenists of his [her] own country, and he[she] crosses history like a jade comet, now and then giving off flashes of lightning. What is he [she] pursuing in this eccentric course? He [she] wants to go back beyond the catastrophe he [she] suffered: he [she] wants to be sun again, to return to the center of that life from which he was separated one day. (Was that day the Conquest? Independence?) Our solitude has the same roots as religious feelings. It is a form of orphanhood, an obscure awareness that we have been torn from the All, and an ardent search: a flight and a return, an effort to re-establish the bonds that unite us with the universe.

—Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude (1985, p. 20)

A traditional Mexican garment, the Nahua Blouse serves as a site for interrogating my cultural identity through contemporary art practice. As suggested in the opening quote, through this blouse, I now seek my origins. Conceptually, my studio inquiry is founded on material culture theory (Grassby, 2005). My approach has been to study the historical context in which this blouse has emerged and to respond to it with the creation of an installation piece (still a work in progress) that shows a critical response to it.

The Nahua Blouse is a handmade Indigenous textile that emerged during colonial times (1521–1820). Nahua is the name of one of the largest Indigenous groups established in central Mexico. It is also common knowledge that the Aztecs belonged to this group and that Nahuatl was their language. The dramatic transformation Indigenous attires underwent during the colonization of Mexico reflected the needs of the newly established Spanish society. Pomar (2005) states that these changes responded to “the morality inherent in religious and cultural notions brought by the conquerors” (p. 90). This author explains that Indigenous “women wore a type of wrap-around skirt known as cueitl and generally went with their upper body bare; in some cases they used a belt to hold up a wrap-around skirt called an enagua” (p. 90). Indigenous women were then forced to cover their torso with white blouses. From observing diverse clay sculptures (in cultures such as the Mayan, the Otomi, and the Nahua) made throughout pre-Hispanic times, I noticed that females were often depicted with a bare torso and necklace adorning their necks and chests. It is my interpretation that Indigenous communities adapted their adornment traditions to the new garment to wear: the colonial blouse. Generally speaking, these blouses were hand woven and embellished using diverse embroidery techniques. This means that the creation of the garment involved a merging of design, techniques, and technologies. The concept of the blouse came from Europe and so did embroidery-based embellishing. The Nahua communities adopted cross-stitch. Furthermore, the motifs and color combinations found in these blouses are unique to the Nahua people. Their iconography includes geometrical patterns, trees, flowers and birds. In Bordados de Heycuatitla. Iconografía Textil Nahua, Bonilla Palmeros (2009) explains that in the Nahua vision, flowers are used to represent those who “have made outstanding achievements socially and artistically” (p. 8). Bonilla Palmeros continues to explain that flowers are signs of fertility, life cycles, and good harvest. Therefore, flowers as well as textile making are associated with the Nahua deity of love Xochiquetzal¹.

In response to the historical context, I decided to create a large-scale (1.8 × 2.5 meters) white blouse to begin my inquiry into identity construction within a hierarchical Mexican context, which reflects a class system based on ethnicity. In this system, people of Hispanic descent are at the top, then come the mestizos (or the mixed race, which are the majority of Mexico’s population) and, at the bottom, there are Indigenous peoples. My piece...