Crafting Mexico

Abstract

C t ion Nation Formation, Popular Art, and the Search for a Mexican AestheticIf you know in advance that the African or Iranian or Chinese or Jewish or German experience is fundamentally integral, coherent, [and] separate . . .you first of all posit as essential something which . . . is both historically created and the result of interpretation-namely the existence of Africanness, Jewishness, or Germanness. . . .And second, you are likely as a consequence to defend the essence of experience itself rather than promote full knowledge of it and its entanglements and dependencies on other knowledges. edward said, Culture and ImperIalIsmAn oversized lacquered dowry chest, or baúl, identified as "the Baúl of the Future," sits in the atrium of El Papalote, the Mexico City children's museum (plate 1).In 1998 El Papalote invited children from across the nation to fill the trunk with letters, drawings, photographs, paintings, and videos.In 2050 children from a new generation will reopen the sealed chest to commune with their predecessors from 1998.But this baúl is no mere time capsule.Exquisitely lacquered by the artisans of Olinalá in the rayado (etched) style for which the community is famous, the container itself is part of the dowry.The meter-and-a-half-tall lacquered chest and the distinctive aroma of chia oil that will infuse the objects within stand as a cultural legacy in their own right.Through them the children of 2050 might situate themselves as inheritors of a cultural nation that traces from the preconquest era when the artisans of Olinalá high in the Montaña de Guerrero lacquered gourds for the Aztec lords of Tenochtitlán to our

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