NOTICIAS DE NEPANTLA

Between 1990 and 2001, George O. Jackson de Llano dedicated just over the last decade of the second millennium of the Gregorian calendar to recording more than 330 festivals in 23 different Mexican states. This journey covered more than 60 distinct cultures and generated a collection of over 75,000 color images capturing dances, masks, costumes, and ancestral rituals.

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The selection exhibited at the Querétaro Museum of Art comes from this long journey across the country by a passionate observer. The word nepantla comes from Nahuatl and is related to San Miguel Nepantla, the birthplace of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Beyond its geographic origin, the word nepantla condenses the idea of being in the middle, between two societies that are antithetical to one another.

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Nepantla describes a Mexico that navigates "between two waters":

• The imaginary Mexico desired by economic elites since the Conquest 500 years ago.

• The pre-Columbian Mexico, heir to the millennial Mesoamerican civilization, as discussed by Guillermo Bonfil Batalla in his iconic 1987 text, México Profundo: Una civilización negada (Deep Mexico: A Denied Civilization).

Jackson de Llano captures this intermediate world born of a historical syncretism, which added the symbols introduced by Christian colonization to its ancestral ones.

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Rituals of Abundance and Chaos

Although these festivals supposedly have a religious inspiration, there is no doubt that one of their declared objectives is a pagan rather than a prudish way of fostering the abundance and quality of the next harvest. These popular festivals are heirs to:

• The Saturnalia of ancient Rome dedicated to Saturn, god of agriculture.

• The Bacchanalia offered to Bacchus, god of wine.

• The festivals of the donkey and the fools.

• The thunderous charivari of the Middle Ages.

 

These collective celebrations have always served as a release for populations subjected to restrictive organizational rules and lives of toil. During these totally unrestrained popular revelries, participants mix without distinction of class: renewal and regeneration are the order of the day.

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During the famous Saturnalia of Roman Antiquity, the order of things was disrupted and inverted: fools assumed power and anarchy reigned for several days in Rome. The photographs taken by George O. Jackson de Llano at the end of the last millennium bear witness to the vitality of cultures that adapt to the perpetual movement of societies without losing the essence transmitted since time immemorial.

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- Michel Blancsubé

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Artist’s Acknowledgments

• Prof. José del Val Blanco

• Saúl Millán Valenzuela

• Dr. Marion Oettinger

• Jorge Pellicer López de Llergo

• Margarita Orellana

• José Manuel Pellicer

• Rodrigo Rivero Lake

• Alberto Ruy Sánchez Lacy

• Miguel Sánchez-Navarro Redo

• Marta Turok Wallace

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Acknowledgments

• Ministry of Culture of the State of Querétaro

• Fabián Arnaud

• Javier Gómez Mexican Image Laboratory (Laboratorio Mexicano de Imágenes)

• Museum Professionals of Mexico (Museográficos de México)

• David González Chirino

• Iván Lomelí

• Enmarcados México (Mexico Framing)

• M108 Curatorship

• Staff of the Querétaro Museum of Art

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