Frida Kahlo, Mexicanidad and Máscaras: The Search for Identity in Postcolonial Mexico

Abstract

Frida Kahlo has been called a surrealist, a communist, a feminist and a bad painter. But who was the real Kahlo, why was she so obsessed with her Mexican identity, and how should we assess her as an artist? This paper investigates Kahlo's quest for selfhood in the context of her Aztec heritage and Mexico's double experience of colonization by Spain and the US. The problem of mexicanidad is approached via Paz's analysis in El laberinto de la soledad (1952), while it is seen to resonate also with Bhaba's view of the stereotype in postcolonial discourse as elaborated in The Location of Culture (1994). Relevant, then, is Paz's view of la Chingada, or the prostituted state of Mexican heritage, his concepts of máscaras and murallas that both reveal and conceal identity, and which are especially indicative of Kahlo's pictorial treatment. Outwardly, Kahlo exhibits herself as a Mexican icon, yet her long dresses hide a maimed body, a masking process apparent too in her self-portraits. The stereotyped image of herself, projected with irony as well as pride in paintings like My Nurse and I (1937), The Mask (1945) and Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932), reveals the artist's quest to understand her mixed cultural identity, consistent with Bhabha's notion of the contradictory psyche of the colonized.