Three Museums: “Border Arte’s” Multiplications

Abstract

Beyond nepantla, Gloria Anzaldúa’s close relation to the visual arts is documented in “Border Arte.” The essay recounts her visit of Aztec: The World of Montezuma at the Denver Museum of Natural History on September 26, 1992, Anzaldúa’s fiftieth birthday and the monumental exhibit’s opening day. Aztec ran for five months, until February 21, 1993, and counted 721,000 visitors. On 35,000-square-feet, over three galleries on two floors and an atrium, it displayed more than three hundred artifacts from different museums of Mexico and the US, most importantly from the Templo Mayor and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (Nein 1993, 286). In her autobiographic, conceptual essay—another autohistoria-teoría, Anzaldúa links the museum space and Aztec material culture to visual border art and synthesizes them in her own conceptualizations. She approaches the exhibit’s monumentality critically, asks for the ethical entitlement of the US museum landscape to display Aztec artifacts, and ties it to questions of race and ethnicity of the viewers’ positionalities. Within the framework of native cultural memory, Anzaldúa discusses art work by Yolanda López, Marsha Gómez, Santa Barraza, Liliana Wilson, Malaquías Montoya, Irene Pérez, R.C. Gorman, Robert Arnold, Judy Baca, Juan Dávila, and Rafael Barajas. The entanglement of historic and contemporary art nurtures and sustains her notions of nepantla and Coyolxauhqui, which reciprocally explain the ambiguous in-between space where Aztec materiality and Chicanx art collide.