Chicome Itzcuintli Amatlapalli is a Mexican-American artist, originally from Los Angeles, although he has long resided in Mexico City. He is mixed race, with a white American father and a Mexican mother who is also Wixarica, an Indigenous nation from the state of Jalisco. He practices conchero ceremony, which is an Indigenous spiritual tradition from Central Mexico.
Chicome’s Wixarica grandmother was taken away from her mother as a small child and raised in a Mestizo family. In her generation, Indigenous language and culture were lost. But the racism she faced as an Indigenous person remained with her all her days. This racism and subsequent lack of opportunity led to her emigration to the United States as an undocumented immigrant.
Chicome’s work explores the detribalized experience. What does it mean to look at the face of your mother and see an Indigenous face looking back at you? To have heard family stories about Indigenous experiences, and yet to be cut off from it, living fully immersed in a Western culture that robbed your ancestors of their language and culture? How do we return to our roots and honor our ancestors once more?
Mesoamerica, a region stretching from Costa Rica and Nicaragua to Northern Mexico, produced one of the great spiritual traditions of the world, although this fact is often buried under the Colonial gaze. Religion, when practiced by Indigenous people, is called “folklore,” art becomes “folk art,” sacred narratives become “myth.” In Chicome’s work, the great spiritual traditions of Mesoamerica are freed from the patronizing lens of the West. His work explores sacred narratives from both pre-Colonial times and the present; meticulously researched, his paintings speak in the language of ancient glyphs and writing.
They posit an art that imagines what might have happened had the Europeans arrived in Mexico and treated us respectfully, with a desire to learn and share, rather than disdainfully, with no interest beyond the extraction of our material goods. They seek to restore our stories to us, on our terms, as a detribalized people, and to celebrate them as profound repositories of human knowledge.
We were formed to shape a world in balance with us. Our ancestors were tasked with farming, with burning forests to make them healthy, with hunting to maintain balance in nature. We are not apart from that balance, but an integral part of the system which the Teteo created.
Through ceremony and the traditions of Anahuac, we integrate ourselves with nature, for we are one with it. To be Indigenous is to live as though the well-being of nature matters. It is to live in balance with Tlaltecuhtli, Our Mother the Earth. It is to tend the garden She has given us, and in tending it, to heal ourselves and our communities.
To return to our Indigenous selves is to remember the gifts we have been given by the Teteo, and to remember that the plants, trees, and animals who are our teachers and kindie for our sake, and we must therefore honor them for their sacrifice. In returning to the spirituality of our ancestors in Anahuac, we move toward healing five centuries of colonial rule and reuniting ourselves in the loving embrace of Tlaltecuhtli.
