Venus Envy Chapter III: Cihuatlampa, the Place of the Giant Women (1997)
Word count: 163
Paragraphs: 2
Installation view: Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2024. Featuring Amalia Mesa-Bains, Cihuatlampa with Mirror, 2024.
This piece remarked on my experience of never fitting, not just as a large woman physically, but as a large spirit and personality; passionate, outspoken, boisterous, and unruly. The wall text included terms such as “unruly,” “unmanageable,” and “excessive.” Cihuatlampa designates the space in the Aztec afterlife, where women who die in childbirth go and carry the sun each day to its setting, which was part of the irony, since I was never able to have children, nor did many of my peers including Judith Baca, Carmen Lomas Garza, and Patssi Valdez. The installation presented an archeological site, large-scale, disruptive, and dangerous with the vestments of copper dress and feathered cape as well as a reclining female figure of the Cihuateotl (the spirit of an Aztec woman who died in childbirth) as a mountain and a shell-covered, large-sized hand mirror with the image of the Black Madonna of Monserrat, all references to the wild expressions of a mother nature.
Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist and cultural critic who has worked to define Chicano and Latino art in the United States and in Latin America. Mesa-Bains is best known for her large scale installations and interpretations of traditional Chicana altars and ofrendas. Her work explores Mexican-American women’s spiritual practices, addresses colonial and imperial histories, the recovery of cultural memory, and their roles in identity formation. She also uses aesthetic strategies as ways to express experiences historically associated with Mexican American women and as sites for Chicana feminist reclamation. Mesa-Bains was born in Santa Clara, CA.