Recovering Mestiza Genealogies in Contemporary New Mexican Art: Delilah Montoya’s El Sagrado Corazón (1993)

Abstract

A portrait should be more than a topographical likeness. It should point to the historical, social and economic status of the subject.-Delilah Montoya, 2013 1 Our lived reality had never been expressed artistically. We were drawing on a collective memory, a memory of absence. We're trying to discuss things that have never been discussed.-Delilah Montoya, 2000 2In her El Sagrado Corazón (Sacred Heart) series from the early 1990s, photographer Delilah Montoya replays the colonial history of New Mexico in order to reveal the mixed, Indo-Hispano heritage of her mother's birthplace. In a vital portrait from the series, Montoya addresses the neglected role that Genízaros or captive Native peoples played in shaping Spanish-speaking Hispano culture and society in New Mexico. 3 By depicting a captive Native girl in La Genízara, Montoya rewrites the colonial past as a history rooted in the slavery and oppression of indigenous women and children. From the sixteenth century onwards, colonial rule in New Mexico shaped the creation of distinct hierarchies of race, class, and gender, which became tied to systems of caste, servitude, and patriarchy. Vestiges of colonial power and myth-making continue to determine the status of New Mexico's Hispano population today. In contemporary New Mexico, old colonial hierarchies and caste systems play themselves out through the state-sanctioned myth of tri-cultural harmony, in