Tenochtitlan Year 20XX

Envisioning an alternate history for the indigenous city of Tenochtitlan while also playing with the ignorant misconception that supernatural forces provided a means for the “primitive” Native Peoples of the New World to create the complex cultures that laid the foundations for this continent. On my visits to Mexico City as a child, I would see ruins exposed next to concrete structures side by side. Every time I go back, there is a sentiment of memory that lingers in my blood as I walk through the remnant infrastructure of Tenochtitlan much like the embedded Indigenous culture that sits vague but familiar within my heritage. I may have lost my true mother tongue through colonizing forces that perpetrated throughout generations , but my own mother continues the indigenous craft of cooking with maize flour . As I move forward in my studies as a physicist and astronomer, I intend to acknowledge Indigenous Knowledge as comparable to the western scientific paradigm to call out the false notions that poor primitive savages needed some fantastic outside force to aid them in technology and survival. In this painting, I want to argue that my culture and Indigenous roots are not mutually exclusive from science and innovation, but that it is intertwined with science and innovation.

2016