Evidence Mythic Journey

Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor are standing in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art amid packing material, wooden crates and half-filled glass cases. Around them, scores of artworks and artifacts are being assembled, hung and displayed for exhibition.

When it’s all done, a piece of burnished black Pueblo pottery from 1997 will grace one gallery, while examples of 1,000-year-old pots will fill vitrines in another. On one wall, Santa Barbara will appear wearing feathers in her hair; in a nearby showcase will sit the legendary founder of Mexico City, the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, rendered in jadeite with plumes at his forehead and a hummingbird flattened on his back. And separated by hundreds of years but just a couple of rooms, a copied fragment of the Aztec pictorial history, the 16th century Codex Boturini, will complement a Chicano artist’s 20th century version--one that mixes Aztec gods with comic-book heroes.

Fields and Zamudio-Taylor are co-curators of “The Road to Aztlan: Art From a Mythic Homeland.” The goal of the ambitious exhibition, which opens at LACMA today, is to trace elements of an indigenous and evolving culture that has linked the American Southwest and Mexico since ancient times.

“Some think our relationship with Mexico started with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo [in 1848], but in fact there’s a great depth to the history of this region,” says Fields, LACMA curator of pre-Columbian art. “That’s what we’re hoping people will get out of this exhibition.”

The title and organizing principle for the exhibition were suggested by UC Riverside anthropologist Karl Taube to Fields a decade ago. Aztlan, which means “place of whiteness” or “place of herons,” is the Aztec’s mythical homeland and, says Fields, it also stands for “a concept of place, where cultural identity is rooted.”

Fields and Zamudio-Taylor began their collaboration six years ago. Along the way, they brought together a wide range of scholars and artists at two workshops to help shape the exhibition’s underlying ideas. To illustrate the interconnectedness of the region’s material culture, art and cosmology, the curators culled 250 objects from 75 collections throughout the United States, Mexico City, Berlin, Paris and Vienna for the exhibition; they also assembled essays from artists, archeologists and historians into a 424-page companion catalog.

Because most pre-Columbian records were destroyed by the invading Spaniards, what little is known of the ancient Aztlan story is found mainly in colonial sources. They convey the tale of Huitzilopochtli leading his followers from Aztlan to a spot where an eagle, grasping a serpent in its beak, perches on a cactus. That site became the capital city of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan--today’s Mexico City--and Aztlan, somewhere to the north, became a longed-for place of origin.

The story continues in the mid-15th century, when Moctezuma I sends emissaries north to find the fabled homeland. As legend has it, that expedition succeeded, its members met with the goddess Coatlicue, mother of Huitzilopochtli, and returned with gifts of roses, corn and cloth, which were enshrined in a temple in the Aztec capital.

Although archeologists have never agreed upon the existence, let alone a site, for Aztlan, they have found plenty of evidence of south-to-north and north-to-south exchange and trade. Current scholarship traces the connections as far back as 1500 BC, when the cultivation of maize spread from Mesoamerica north to the Four Corners area and beyond.

In the 16th century, the Spanish conquistadors had their own reasons for traveling north from Mexico City into the Southwest. Heeding the Indians’ tales of a fabled paradise, they sent several expeditions in search of “seven cities with streets of silver,” or at the very least, another metropolis like Tenochtitlan, ripe for conquering. What they discovered instead were Indian cultures, clustered in what is now the American Southwest. The invaders claimed the region by 1598, and Spanish colonization began to tighten the ties that already bound the territories now called New Spain and New Mexico.

Then, 41/2 centuries after the fall of the Aztec empire, the quest for Aztlan reemerged--this time in the form of the Mexican American civil rights movement. “[W]e the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan,” reads a 1969 manifesto, “declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.”

“What was important for pre-Columbian cultures,” says Zamudio-Taylor, an independent curator whose specialty is modern and contemporary art of the Americas, “was an idea of a center place that organized the cosmos. For the Aztecs, Aztlan was that place.”

In our times, he says, in the “quest to answer the question of what is Chicano or Mexican American identity, Aztlan becomes reworked again.”

“The Road to Aztlan” is organized chronologically into three major sections--pre-Columbian (300 BC to AD 1521), colonial (1521-1848) and contemporary (1848-present). The objects are arranged by date and, to some extent, place, but they also reveal recurring themes and symbols, reflecting a tenacious continuity of ideas.

The curators point to some of the major connections. There is the importance of maize agriculture, which not only transformed ancient economies in the region, but also is the source of ritual practices that persist today. The iconic Aztec plumed serpent has a counterpart in Utah petroglyphs, not to mention Chicano posters nearly 2,000 years later. Turquoise, mined originally in the north, shows up on 15th century Aztec masks; copper bells made in west Mexico are found in archeological sites in Arizona.

Asked to trace one link through the show, Fields and Zamudio-Taylor choose the rich visual motif of feathers and birds.

Among the pre-Columbian objects in the show, the references are plentiful. That’s because birds play a key role in many Aztec myths. The god Huitzilopochtli’s name means “hummingbird on the left” and, Fields points out, he “was born of feathers in a sense.” Coatlicue, his mother, was said to have been impregnated when a ball of down entered her breasts.

The stylized plumed serpent shows up on pots and has counterparts in Utah petroglyphs. Parrots are common images as well--macaws were kept as living treasures among the Aztec elites and traded to the north. Labrets--lip ornaments--were made in the form of eagle heads in Mexico, and shell and turquoise pendants from the Hohokam culture of Arizona were also made in bird shapes. Among the colonial objects are paintings that depict Aztec warriors and kings in feather headdresses, cloaks, skirts and shields.

After the defeat of the Aztec rulers by Hernando Cortes in 1521, the emphasis on feathers didn’t die, it was transformed. The depiction of Santa Barbara wearing feathers is an example, created in New Mexico in the early 19th century. The curators are especially pleased to have located two rare 16th century Mexican images--one depicting the Madonna and child and one of San Jose--that are made entirely of bits of colored feathers, cut and glued to paper. The value of such works to the Spanish conquerors is clear, says Zamudio-Taylor, in that they were sent as treasure to Europe.

More bird-and-feather imagery is based on the eagle-serpent-cactus symbol of Tenochtitlan. The catalog shows numerous instances of its use in pictographic Mexican histories, and it is familiar as the central image on the Mexican flag. In the colonial galleries of “The Road to Aztlan,” its symbolic importance to the Spanish overlords is also clear. Two striking paintings borrow it to bolster the new history of Mexico. In a large 1778 work, the Virgin of Guadalupe hovers in her golden aura above an allegorical pre-conquest Indian and Juan Diego, the 18th century Indian to whom she miraculously appeared. At her feet is the Tenochtitlan image. In another painting, Mexico’s patron saint, San Hipolito, is borne on wings of an eagle above a cactus.

Once the exhibition enters the 20th century, artifacts and iconography give way to more self-expressive explorations--what Fields calls the attempt to “maintain, negotiate and redefine” cultural identity and the pre-Columbian and colonial past.

She points to the self-conscious revival of ancient traditions--basket weaving and pottery, for example. The exhibition includes a 1960s plate by Maria Martinez and her son Popovi Da, of the San Ildefonso Pueblo near Santa Fe, N.M. The plate’s design of stylized feathers radiating from a central disc echoes a bowl in the pre-Columbian section of the exhibition, from the Mimbres culture of southern New Mexico, circa AD 1000-1150. The similarities are no accident: Martinez studied ancient designs and deliberately incorporated them into her work.

Contemporary Chicano artists have also looked backward, claiming emblems of an ancestral cultures--Aztec warriors, eagles and cactuses--even emblazoning the word “Aztlan” across their works. “When artists evoke Aztlan,” says Zamudio-Taylor, what’s also being evoked are relationships between myth and history, between spirit and mind, or between person and nature.

History is much on the mind of artist Enrique Chagoya, who has written an essay for the catalog in which he describes how he appropriates the pictorial style of the colonial codices to express his political point of view. In his work “Uprising of the Spirit,” Superman meets the Aztec king Nezahualcoyotl, outfitted in feathers and wielding a double-bladed sword. Superman soars out of a corner panel drawn in the style of 16th century European prints, this one depicting pillaging conquistadors. “My intent,” Chagoya writes, “is to provoke reflection on history--its continuities and discontinuities.”

Mexican contemporary artists are included in the exhibition as well. Zamudio-Taylor points out that their relationship to the past tends to be more ironic and less direct than that of Chicano artists. A double portrait by Javier de la Garza, “Mexica Sobre Fondo Rojo,” evokes ancient stone carvings found in Mexican jungles. Silvia Gruner’s giant necklace made of volcanic rock, “500 kilos de impotencia (o possibilidad)” suggest both the primordial and the industrial.

For both sets of artists, Zamudio-Taylor says, it’s the concept of Aztlan as a center point that ties the ancient to the contemporary.

“I don’t think it’s so much a return to a paradise-like place,” says Zamudio-Taylor, “but it’s the importance of having a center where you’re anchored, which is what I think makes this exhibition resonate in many contemporary issues.”

UCLA critical studies professor Chon Noriega defines the end point of the road to Aztlan as “those places where Chicano culture flourishes.” In short, it is no longer a destination, but the place where we already are.

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* “The Road to Aztlan: Art From a Mythic Homeland” runs through Aug. 26 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Open Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Adults, $7; seniors and students, $5; children 6-17, $1. (323) 857-6000.