03.24.24

La Madre Malinche

In Mexican culture, “Mestizos” are a racially mixed people of Indigenous ancestry, who account for roughly 60% of the population, while a little over 10% of the total population identifies as 100% “Indio” (Native Mexica). To get some perspective on these numbers, only 2.9% of the overall U.S. population identified as Native in the 2020 census. However, Indigeneity is not federally recognized in Mexico the way it is in the U.S., which arguably makes our nativeness to the land less visible and largely under-considered. At one point, ten of what are now known as U.S. states belonged to Mexico, and the largely indigenous Mexican people of that land suffered Manifest Destiny the way many indigenous people had, and still do. They were either exploited for labor, run off their own land, or in the worst cases they were lynched. Some families were stripped of their property and then forced into labor working the same land that had been taken from them just a generation earlier.

My Big Nana (great-grandmother), Cirila Chavez, was 100% Indio; her husband Marcel Chavez was Mestizo. Marcel was French, Spanish and Mexican and 19 years her senior. He was a widower with young children—his wife had died giving birth to twins—and he was in need of a muchacha (nanny) to help him care for his children. Marcel was a train engineer who drove a big steam engine back and forth across the US/Mexico border, and his job took him out of the home for several days at a time. A neighbor family who knew her recommended that he hire Cirila. She was an 18-year-old girl with no family to speak of, and according to her telling, she arrived at his home a dark-skinned “indio” girl, hair parted in braids “la ranchera fea/the ugly farm girl” is how she described herself. She lived with Marcel and cared for his children while he was away. On one occasion, a carnival had arrived in their pueblo, and Marcel wanted to take his children. He asked Cirila to join him and insisted on taking her to a salon before they ventured out in public together. The beautician at the salon cut off her braids and set her hair in a way that would have been fashionable for the time, finishing off her look with lipstick.

When my Nana tells me the story of her mother’s transformation, she says “Suddenly my mom was so beautiful, he could not believe it. She wasn’t a Ranchera anymore.” Marcel married her soon after, and together they added nine more children to their family.

I never got to meet my grandfather Marcel; he died tragically in a train accident when my Nana was just 15 years old. My Nana adores him still and speaks of him often when we are together. I have a picture of him that we put on our ofrenda each year for Dia de Muertos. In the photo, he is a shockingly handsome man, proudly dressed in his train engineering uniform (freshly pressed overalls) with a suit coat and a nice fedora. Cirila joins him at his side, my Nana in a fresh white baby gown sits on her lap.

I was lucky to know my Big Nana though; she lived well into her 90s and always fed us the most incredible fried tacos and menudo each time we visited her in National City. Her home always smelled of cooking, and her pet cockatiel was always nearby waiting for her to scoop him up and kiss his pink cheeks. We changed the channels on the TV set with a pair of pliers, we chased chickens in the yard, and there were often so many family members visiting that they spilled out the front door and onto the steps. Her living room was painted a light turquoise blue (a color that always brings me back to her), and above the sofa, on her living room wall, hung a beautifully painted portrait of a young Cirila that Marcel had commissioned soon after they married. In the painting, she looks how I imagine she looked emerging from that fabled salon. Her hair is set, she is wearing pearls, and lipstick, and her embroidered jacket is the same color as the living room wall. I spent the majority of our visits staring at this portrait while the grown-ups prepared food and spun the chisme at the kitchen table.

At the beginning of each visit, we would greet her, and she would say “¡Aye Dios! Estoy poniendo vieja! Tan fea!” (“I’m getting old! I’m so ugly!”) and we would laugh. The getting old part was funny because I had heard her say this for the 25+ years that I got to spend with her. “Nana! You were old ten years ago!” we would say.

The part where she called herself ugly always made me so sad. When I looked at my Big Nana, I could still see that face from the painting, a beautiful young girl sitting just below the surface of time that had graced her skin with the finest of wrinkles, and tinted her soft black hair with streaks of silver. In both of these manifestations, she was beautiful to me. Her colorful vestidos and aprons, and her delicate hands, folding and pinning tortillas with toothpicks were all a part of her special brand of feminine mystique. She cooed “!muchachichachita!” in my face and taught me to speak Spanish. “Te-a-mo-a-bue-lita!”

Eres muy bonita abuelita.

In Spanish the word “Malinchismo” is used to describe a Mexican person who prefers Eurocentric attributes, beauty standards, goods, and culture above those belonging to the Indio. People who express this internalized racism are described as Malinchistas, a derogatory word derived from the name of the dark skinned Indio woman Malinché who was sold into slavery by her family to the Mayans, and again sold to the Aztecs, and eventually handed off to the Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés to be his concubine.

The maligning of Malinché’s name also contains a heavy dose of machismo. Within Mexican histories, she is often blamed for the fall of the Aztec empire, her role as his translator is often cited as Cortés’ great advantage. The truth is that the Aztec empire began to fall when one group developed a greedy appetite for power that was fueled by a “holy commandment” to unify the Mexica people under one religion. They began by removing women from positions of power. They waged “holy wars” in which their opponents had no beef with them, and no chance of winning. This dominant group murdered, raped, and subjugated their own people—and they taxed whoever was left. They divided their culture by gender, and then by wealth as a means to consolidate power. (Humans really be really on brand with this scenario.)By the time Cortés arrived in the 1500’s the Aztec rulers had so deeply disenfranchised the populace that they refused to fight for the preservation of the empire when the Spaniards marched in.

In her role as the mother to Cortés son Martin (the bastard), Malinche is also known as the mother of the Mestizos, aka “La gran Chingada” if you’re feeling big mad. (Have fun googling the translation on that one.)When you know the story of Malinche, it’s not hard to understand why my Big Nana spoke so disparagingly of herself. She was a dark-skinned native woman married to a lighter skinned Mexican man of Spanish and French lineage. When you know the story of Malinche, it’s not hard to understand why there is so much Machismo, colorism and malinchismo within Mexican culture at large. It’s woven into the folklore of who we Mestizos are as a people. Culturally, we have accepted ourselves as a people of shameful origin.

Along with the loss of one of the greatest empires on earth, we have lost our true knowing of ourselves.

In truth, we are the descendants of a brilliant and crafty survivor. Malinche was betrayed by her own family when she was sold into slavery to the Maya. She quickly learned their language, and when she was handed to the Spanish, she learned their language as well. Malinche spoke three languages, and she used her knowledge to keep herself alive. She increased her value in a system where she had become a commodity, and as Cortés pursued dominance, and increased his power, she did what the most powerful and holy women of the Aztec Empire had done before they were marginalized—she coded her own DNA into his successor, ensuring it would be passed down to us. As the Aztec Empire suffered the spoils of its corruption, Malinche was preserving and guaranteeing a place for the Indio in this new epoch of Mexican history.

How liberated might we be if we venerated Malinche, instead of cursing her name? What if we began to attribute our own ability to survive and adapt to hers? Maybe if we loved La Madre Malinche, we would love ourselves more. Perhaps we would be less vulnerable to the rampant exploitation that is intrinsically connected to the color of our skin. Maybe if we preferred our own hair, skin, eyes, and bodies above those of the güeritos—La Morena would be the standard of Mexican beauty, and I would never have to hear the women I adore call themselves ugly.

03.04.24

Imago DEIsign Essay

Gooping the Center

“Isn’t this the purpose of education? To learn the nature of your gifts and how
to use them for good in the world?” — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Have you ever wondered what happens inside a cocoon as a chubby caterpillar transitions into a fully formed winged butterfly? The answer is goop. A complete deconstruction of the previous body produces a liquid pool of “imaginal cells” that are now responsible for forming the new body of a fully formed butterfly. Our pedagogical practices have much to gain from considering the process of melting down our old bodies, and harnessing the full potential of what can be formed from the resulting goop.

The historical structure of the teaching space is centered on the educator, who carries the privilege of being the expert, the power to assess student performance and effort, and the responsibility of being the gatekeeper to knowledge. Within art and design education specifically— where critique is a vital part of the learning process—it is often the instructor who is at the center of dialogue, where their feedback is given the most authority and occupies the critical center of discussion.

This form of design education is rooted in an era where designers had less agency, and less ay in the creative process of making visual communication. The role of the designer was to transmit communication generated by a “message sender” aka your employer as quickly, and efficiently as possible—without question or creative contribution. This was an era in which the designer was an aesthetic wrist. For Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus class of 1925 alum, this meant his career position as a designer for the German government included creating campaigns for the Nazi party when they came into power. Bayer refers to this period of his career as his time in “purgatory.” At the same time, he was working on graphics for these early Nazi campaigns he was also being blacklisted for being a degenerate modernist, and plotting an escape for himself, his Jewish wife, and his daughter.

Thankfully the role of the designer has long since evolved. We sit at the table of creative meetings with an equal stake in the process. We have become an integral part of story development and visual message sending, and in the best of design environments our critical thinking skills, sensitivity to culture, and ability to articulate our well-informed thoughts and opinions are considered assets, not impediments.

Regrettably, many of our learning spaces continue to operate as though the designer’s role remains outside the nucleus of storytelling. Which brings me back to the concept of goop: perhaps if we began to think of learning spaces as bodies undergoing evolution, safely and securely held inside a chrysalis, what gorgeous thing might emerge?

Students are imaginal cells when they enter the learning space. They are full of the potential to create, learn, and especially teach. Their uniqueness and divine purpose make them subject matter experts of diverse life experiences, ancestral knowledge, and cultural wealth. At a time when visual culture is being called to answer for its participation in the perpetuation of systemic oppression, the cure lies close to the cause—the classroom.

The opportunity for learning in a 'goopy' classroom is exponential, as each person takes turns being a novice, an expert, a student, and a teacher (professor included). While the professor may consistently hold expertise in areas like fundamentals, production methods, the use of semiotics, color, and typography, the collective holds the breadth of expertise in cultural literacy, competency, and sensitivity—elements of design message-sending that have been sorely lacking in the visual landscape since its beginning.

Design is storytelling, and not every message or story is meant to be understood or received by everybody—which includes professors and design experts alike. When the core of a critique is liquid, and many voices and perspectives can move through it—the creator of the work who is often seeking expansive feedback that considers cultural semiotics as much as typographic hygiene—has a greater chance of finding it. When an educator decenters themselves, they are at once unburdened by the expectation to “know everything” and they empower students to mine knowledge they may have previously undervalued. Even students who may seem passively engaged are still absorbing information, and learning to become successful design citizens who enter the workforce of visual message-sending with the tools needed to act as responsible design citizens. With each cohort taught the educator will also increase their cultural literacy and find themselves, over time, better equipped to offer the expansive critique feedback their students are seeking. Move ahead, it’s not too late—to goop it. Goop it Good.