at the Anahuacalli
In its cool stone halls, between trapezoidal doorways, beneath mosaics set by Rivera and O’Gorman, figurines and idols are arranged in glass cases set into the walls. The artifacts are arranged by theme and form more than period or region, their provenances and contexts unknown or deliberately withheld. A few signs, added more recently, give generalized explanations. After a while I stop reading them. They interrupt the structure’s underworldly effect. At the end of one hall, stairs descend to a stone altar and a stagnant pool filled with coins. A centipede lying dead amid the pesos. When Vita drops in a coin, the water barely ripples. A chthonic plunk.
At the entrance, we walked past a stone slab etched with Rivera’s words: “Devuelvo al pueblo lo que de la herencia artística de sus ancestros pude rescatar.” I return to the people what I was able to rescue from the artistic heritage of their ancestors. A magnanimous notion, but the building seems less an act of rescue than reinvention, with the distinctive signature of Rivera himself. The point is not for visitors to know precisely when these objects were made, or why, but for them to marvel at their strangeness, to re-imbue them with spiritual potency, and even to inspire a sense, however ahistorical, of national continuity. The Anahuacalli is not just a matter of la herencia but la herencia artística, not just pride in a country but awe at its forms. Something deeper and weirder than patriotism.
As we make our way upward, Vita keeps bringing up this idea of national aesthetics, emphasizing the second word as a way of differentiating the Anahuacalli from anything that might exist in the United States, a country more insecure and vengeful in its banishment of indigeneity and prehistory. She mentions her first visit to the Museum of the American Indian in D.C., which felt “more like a natural history museum.” Different museums in different countries with different mandates, but it’s no accident: American colonists long ago decided that natives were not men like them but part of the wilderness that would burn and recede with their settling.
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Take Mount Rushmore, which was completed some fifteen years before the Anahuacalli, those busts of American heroes blasted onto land seized from the Lakota people. Not that a more elegant aesthetic would have atoned for the historical crimes. But the US national aesthetic is one of erasure, with little need for even the pretense of history. Just tall tales and patriarchs, a New World made endlessly new. It is a mountaintop-removal aesthetics, blasting away at the land’s deep history until it tumbles like rubble into the valley fills of time.
Here, on the other hand, one is lowered into an imagined past. Both monuments are ahistorical, but this odd house of myth makes your mind go wild rather than blank. The lost context of these objects yields to their forms, which become both more familiar—here is a skull, a dancer, a snake—and more alien—who on earth could have made this? and why? and what does it mean? and 2,000 years ago? The building itself, a merging of midcentury functionalism and Mayan architecture, only intensifies the feeling.
Up the first flight of stairs, a large, well-lit room displays huge sketches of Rivera’s murals, including drafts of the mural that Nelson Rockefeller famously ordered destroyed (Rivera painted in Lenin and wouldn’t remove him). This room is the most unabashedly grandiose, perhaps excessively so. Rivera’s drafts hang above display cases that house animal-shaped urns and figurines, as if to suggest a kinship, a lineage, between the ancient world and the throngs of Rivera’s famous murals. I suppose one can’t make national myths without placing oneself toward the top.
However dubious Rivera’s motives, however appropriative or anachronistic his project, however much his gift to the people is in fact a monument to himself, it is nonetheless reflective of an attempt to conjure a new national aesthetic out of a region’s entire history. That there are hammers and sickles inlaid in the floor next to Mayan deities reflects an original attempt at syncretism, dissonant or propagandistic though it may seem. Here time expands and contracts. History feels linear and then cyclical and then entirely incoherent. The sacred vertigo of this weird, pyroclastic house.
When we reach the building’s summit, a tilted mirror reflects us, the sky, the view of the smoggy City. Standing atop this building, made of rocks created in the long-ago eruption of the Xitle volcano, Vita explains that some of this smog is actually smoke from Popocatépetl, a still-active volcano south of the City.
I linger a minute longer. As I descend, alone, two old American tourists with backpacks climb the stairs, clutching the railing. “The hard part,” one says, “isn’t going up, it’s coming back down.” It’s true. Coming back down, I feel lightheaded with timelessness. Have I been taught something? Have I been tricked?
When I walk out into the light, a stray cat sits at my feet. “Es Diego,” laughs Vita. We sit at the nearby cafe with our drinks, watching Diego leap onto a stone slab to preen in the sun. Everyone enraptured, taking photos. A little deity, his little altar.
ben tapeworm