Gold

Viewing the towering twenty-five foot tall altar layered and lacquered in gold, La Virgen's solemn eyes and bronzed face at the focal point, I can only think of how this gold was mined on the backs of the indigenous peoples of sudamerica and centroamerica, of africanos imported to die deep within mine shafts, and how this colonial culture still pulls us deep into it's mineshafts replete with poisonous thick air and carefully carved tunnels.

Haiti. Cuba. Puerto Rico. Jamaica. Mexico. Perú. Bolivia. Y tantos más...Drained of gold, of lives. The placard for the museum's display avoids the whole history and says that the contents of this room signify the melding of cultures during the Spanish occupation of the americas from "discovery" until the 1820s. There is no mention of the constant rebellion, the strategies used to protest and counteract colonization, or of the millions of people used as extinguishable labor while colonial New Spain flourished and shipped tons of gold into the banks of Europe and into the churches and into the crucifixes hanging on the walls, gold leafed onto statues, into the immense altar standing before me.

I feel disturbed and almost sick yet compelled to inspect every object captured under museum grade glass to find the indigenous patterns, the local histories carved into the figures of saintly statues forcibly introduced into the homes of so many populations. I imagine the secrets in each piece, the histories I cannot scrap together with the investigation of each creation and a history of books alone. There are indigenous faces in the carvings of christian saints. There is the brown skin of jesucristo, the mahoghany image of San Martín de Porres, the indigenous symbols woven into the cloth for an altar...There is a history of resistance.