making Mexico
On August 13, 1521, the last Aztec ruler of Mexico, Cuauhtemoc, was captured by the Spaniards under Hernán Cortés, and the last defenders of the capital of Tenochtitlan (today, Mexico City) surrendered. This event signaled the fall of the Aztec Empire, the inception of the Spanish empire in the New World, and the beginning of a new identity for a new people—the Mexican nation. Traditional narratives have emphasized, depending on their point of view, either the triumph of European Christian culture or the destruction of Native American culture.
However, a new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has made it its business to “subvert the traditional narratives” of the Spanish Conquest and focus on the resilience of native Mexicans in the face of massive cultural challenges. Timed to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the transformative event, the exhibition, “: Space, Time, and the Indigenous Origins of Mexico” (through May 1, 2022) tells its story through a carefully curated selection of 30 works, ranging from Pre-Columbian art objects to colonial maps and documents to contemporaneous European artworks. The exhibition is paired with another, “Mixpantli: Contemporary Echoes” (through June 12), that explores Indigenous cultural resilience not only in today’s Mexico but also in Los Angeles.
