Video production, UI deseign | Vancouver

20th July 2011

Video with 1 note

Mestizo by Emilio Rojas

Mestizo is a word used during the Spanish Empire to refer derogatorily to people of mixed European and native ancestry. Later appropriated after the Mexican independence to consolidate a sense of national identity. The government depicted the country’s history as mestizo-driven, a term that carried a sense of pride of our native origins. In the murals of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, mestizaje is the leitmotif: The past is portrayed as a clash of civilizations, and the present as an attempt at balance. This exploration of duality is full of contradictions, what Octavio Paz refers as The Labyrinth of Solitude, work that inspired this piece. A nation whose citizenship lives in a constant search for identity outside of themselves, an unbalanced polarity. Thinkers like José Vasconcelos, Samuel Ramos, and Octavio Paz have contributed, each to his own pace, with the ideological purpose of mestizaje at stake an the complexities of the Mexican psyche. The work attempts to investigate these paradoxes as the artists embodies his own mestizo blood, in a physical form.