Recovering Mestiza Genealogies in Contemporary New Mexican Art: Delilah Montoya’s El Sagrado Corazón (1993)

Abstract

Recovering Mestiza Genealogies in Contemporary New Mexican ArtDelilah Montoya’s El Sagrado Corazón (1993) Stephanie Lewthwaite (bio) A portrait should be more than a topographical likeness. It should point to the historical, social and economic status of the subject. Delilah Montoya, 20131 Our lived reality had never been expressed artistically. We were drawing on a collective memory, a memory of absence. We’re trying to discuss things that have never been discussed. Delilah Montoya, 20002 In her El Sagrado Corazón (Sacred Heart) series from the early 1990s, photographer Delilah Montoya replays the colonial history of New Mexico in order to reveal the mixed Indo-Hispano heritage of her mother’s birthplace. In a vital portrait from the series, Montoya addresses the neglected role that Genízaros or captive Native peoples played in shaping Spanish-speaking Hispano culture and society in New Mexico.3 By depicting a captive Native girl in La Genízara, Montoya rewrites the colonial past as a history rooted in the slavery and oppression of indigenous women and children. From the sixteenth century onward, colonial rule in New Mexico shaped the creation of distinct hierarchies of race, class, and gender, which became tied to systems of caste, servitude, and patriarchy. Vestiges of colonial power and myth making continue to determine the status of New Mexico’s Hispano population today. In contemporary New Mexico, old colonial hierarchies and caste systems play themselves out through the state-sanctioned myth of tricultural harmony, in which Hispano, Anglo-American, and Native American populations remain distinct from one another, with Hispanos identifying as “Spanish” rather than as mixed or mestizo in origin. Yet contemporary female artists such as Montoya have questioned the colonial narratives that deny mestizaje and privilege [End Page 118] racial purity, social inequality, and patriarchal authority. Drawing on a “memory of absence” in order to “discuss things that have never been discussed,” Montoya recuperates the figure of La Genízara as the basis for an alternative mixed or “mestiza genealogy.” This genealogy reveals patterns of oppression, ethnic affiliation, and gender solidarity that question the colonial heritage and its legacy of female disempowerment. In deconstructing colonial narratives, Montoya’s series also reworks modes of visual representation that have long supported colonial power relations, including colonial casta painting, ethnographic portraiture, and narrative and documentary photography. Montoya transforms these modes of visual representation from tools of colonization into a foundation for critique and activism in the present. colonialism and colonial myths New Mexican artists have had to unravel several layers of colonial history: Spanish colonialism from the sixteenth century and US rule from the mid-nineteenth century following the war between Mexico and the United States from 1846 to 1848. Between the arrival of Spanish colonizer Juan de Oñate in 1598 and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Viceroyalty of New Spain subjected New Mexico’s Native peoples to violent rule and coercive evangelization. Under the banner of a “just war,” Spanish colonizers also enslaved unpacified Native peoples, whom they called indios bárbaros and gente sin razón (literally, “people without reason”). Although the enslavement of Pueblo Indians lessened after the Spanish “Reconquest” of New Mexico in 1693, Spanish settlers could legally buy or “rescue” Native captives taken in war on condition that they Christianize and “redeem” their subjects. The practice of ransoming captives intensified during the eighteenth century when Spanish conflict with the Navajo, Apache, and Comanche increased.4 These captives were known as Genízaros or detribalized Native people. Most were women and children who would produce mixed-ancestry offspring from their position as slaves and servants within Spanish households. In response to the growing numbers of Genízaros and a broader mestizo population, Spanish colonists established a casta system in which honor and social status were linked directly to racial purity. The casta system operated differently in frontier regions such as New Mexico, where the existence of Pueblo and nomadic Native tribes shaped interethnic encounters and gave a distinctive meaning to the term Genízaro. The fluctuating social conditions and scarce administrative resources associated with frontier life led to inconsistencies in the use and recording of casta categories by local populations and...