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Aztlán as a metaphorical place to call home
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT/The Herald Mexico
El Universal
Lunes 29 de mayo del 2006


In better bookstores, like Gandhi, you can still find this hefty, illustration-rich collection of art and English-language essays exploring the great Mexican myth/mystery of Aztlán.

Schoolchildren - and not just Mexican schoolchildren - learn early of the ethnically Nahua peo ple known as the Mexicas (with the "x" pronounced as "sh") who wandered from their ancestral home in the Land of the Herons (Aztlán), mustered in a place called the Seven Caves (Chico mostoc), stayed temporarily at the Curved Mountain (Culhuacán, but not the Culhuacán in the south of present-day Mexico City), and eventually settled in the Valley of Mexico, after perhaps two no madic centuries.

What nobody has learned with any certainty is where those places actually were, or are. Researchers have placed ancient Aztlán as near to Mexico City as Querétaro and as far north as what today is the U.S. southwest. That last possibility, the popular if not the scholarly favorite, best fits the overarching theme of the book - the historic and cultural connec tion between Mesoamerica and more northerly lands.

That connection was a political reality from the 16th century to 1848, when the breadth and width of those lands made up the nation of Mexico, and before that New Spain. But as several of the book's essays show us, Aztlán/Mexico oneness pre-dates the Conquest. It's as old as the Aztec empire it self, indeed as old as Mesoamerican civilization.

"Plenty of archaeological evi dence proves the existence of trade between Mesoamerica and what is now northwest Mexico and southwest United States," writes the Mexican historian Miguel León Portilla in an early chapter. That evidence includes similar artifacts, shared crops, clear relationships between deities from Colorado to Coyoa cán, as well as the Uto-Aztecan family of languages, including Náhuatl, that spread throughout the areas.

Most of the 250-plus art repro ductions in the book explore this evidence, giving us such visual treats as breathtaking pre-His panic ceramic works and stone carvings from both sides of to day's border. The revelation is that you need to read the captions to know which side.

We also get views, sometimes from aerial shots, of ruins on post-1848 U.S. soil (Chaco Canyon, for example) that look like they're straight out of the Mexican Museum of Anthropology and History. In fact, space at the museum is given to these former civilizations in the farthest reach es of "Aztlán," notably the Anasazi in Arizona and Mexico.

In many cases, the north-south subject range seems to serve as a mere excuse to include much-loved Mexican art for U.S. citizens to appreciate, including the obli gatory Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. But that's not something to complain about.

"The Road to Aztlán: Art from a Mythic Homeland" served as the catalogue for an exhibit of the same name in Los Angeles in 2001. Like all good exhibit catalogs, it's a book to read and a book to look at, with each of those efforts enriching the other.

In its second, shorter section, the book takes a hard and wel come turn toward modern no tions of Aztlán. León Portilla fore shadows things in his essay as he noted that the Mexica were not the first, or the last, to make the jour ney. "The road to Aztlán has already been traveled and would continue to be for centuries," he writes, "even up to the present day, in both directions."

You can see where this is head ing. It's not much of a stretch, metaphorically speaking, to think of Mexican migrants seeking work stateside as heading back up the old Aztlán Highway. But the emphasis of this illuminating section of the book is not on migrants, per se. It's on what the concept of Aztlán can mean to the vast population of Mexican-descended Americans and Mexican-born U.S. residents.

A TOOL OF LIBERATION What it has meant, in short, is an inspirational tool of liberation - a "metaphoric center place" in the words of the book's two lead authors - for a Chicano popula tion historically repressed at worst and ignored at best. Reviv ing the idea of Aztlán in the 1960s and 1970s not only reinforced for Chicanos a sense of where they came from, it allowed them to still be there.

Aztlán, then, is today not so much a mapable geographic location as it is an allegorical construct that, as lead authors and the exhib it's curators Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, tell us, "represents a place of origin, a point of emergence from the past, and a focus of longing." Aztlán's rediscovery coincided with early Chicano activism, which was led by (but not limited to) Cesar Chavez's efforts to organize Cali fornia farmworkers.

"Aztlán - as a symbol, an alle gory and a real and invented tradition - served as a cultural and spiritual framework that gave Chi canos a sense of belonging and a link to a rich and extensive history," Fields and Zamudio-Taylor write. As valuable as the point is, the language used to make it is unfor tunately typical of much of the text in "Road to Aztlán," with its ten dency to hide insight in unneces sarily dense academic prose. Some of the artists who contributed essays are the worst culprits. Don't be scared off; the writing isn't impenetrable. But one sus pects that some art analysts worry they won't be taken seriously if they make their points clearly. But the artwork doesn't have that problem, and the sampling of Chicano art in the second part of the book makes for a pretty good appetizer for newcomers to the table. That's a reason I was pleased to see this catalog on sale at Gand hi. Most of us on this side of the border have been exposed to our share of Oaxaca pottery and the Mexican muralists. But how many have seen the Mexican-born U.S. artist Enrique Chagoya's depic tions of Superman bursting through a codex-style panel, or in a panel in the same work Aztecs fighting off conquering Spaniards borne on 20th century tanks? The very idea of Aztlán is red meat to U.S. nativists who inter pret immigrant rights and Chi cano identity as opening salvos in a war of reconquest. Not much will work to calm those folks down, but "The Road to Aztlán" makes it clear that for most Chi canos, the power of Aztlán is not as the true name of a stolen land but as a metaphorical cultural space that informs their lives in the United States.

In the title song of the Los Lo bos album "Good Morning Aztlán," which came out shortly after the exhibit closed, songwriters David Hidalgo and Louie Perez don't deal with Aztec or even Mexican themes in the title tune, but instead describe everyday neighborhood scenes in what pre sumably is their hometown of East Los Angeles. There's the "sharp- dressed man playing something on a fiddle in a back yard right next door," and "every body's mother cooking something in the kitchen."

There's also, though, the Aztlán citizen's sense of belonging that fields and Victor Zamu dio-Taylor referred to: "When I get lost and don't even have a nick el there's a piece of dirt I call my own." And the repeating chorus brings the power of Aztlán home: "If you're long down that highway, no matter where you are, you're never really far. Good morning, Aztlán."

kelly.garrett@eluniversal. com.mx