Quotes About Mexica

My [art]work attempts to recapture a history never written or narrated visually before. I reaffirm my identity as a Mexica-Tejana and assert a new system of existence through visual manifestations of the oral history, myths, legends, and more of the borderlands.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school.

Sahagún is known as the first American anthropologist, for he labored for decades to understand the Indians he sought to convert. With other missionaries, he amassed an archive on the Mexica and their neighbors—dynastic histories, dictionaries of native languages, descriptions of customs, collections of poetry and drama, galleries of paintings and sculpture—unequaled by that on any other Indian group, even the Inka.

Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real. Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way.