Tortilleras in space and time: a Mesoamerican staple in colonial and contemporary art

Abstract

In a pair of illustrations made four and a half centuries apart, a woman prepares Mexico’s staple food, the tortilla. The earlier scene belongs to the Codex Mendoza, a sixteenth century manuscript painted by Mexica artist scribes, and the latest image is a collage, Citlali: Hechando Tortillas y Cortando Nopales en Outer Space, by a Mexican-American artist, Debora Kuetzpal Vasquez. While the codex is a complex document embedded in the aftermath of Tenochtitlan’s Spanish invasion and mediated by colonial-era politics, it belongs to an ongoing
project of defending Indigenous futurity. The code presents tortilla-making as a sign of social order in an ethnology meant to sway the debate over Amerindians’human rights. In her picture of Latina astronauts’preparing the same food, Vasquez selectively cites Mexican tradition to convey her Xicanx perspective and a concern for her community’s heritage and health. In both images, the Mesoamerican association of the tortilla signifies a cultural continuity elided by Euro-American history.
Keywords: Codex Mendoza; Chicano; Xicanx; Tortilla; Decolonial art