Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland according to Miguel Gandert National Hispanic Cultural Center of modern Mexico Albuquerque.

Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland

according to Miguel Gandert

National Hispanic Cultural Center of modern Mexico

Albuquerque, strange Mexico

October 21 2000-May 27 2001

Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland

Photographs by dint of Miguel Gandert

Foreword on Helen Lucero

Essays from Ramon A. Guttierez, Enrique R Lamadrid, Lucy R Lippard and Chris Wilson

Santa Fe of recent origin Mexico: Museum of New Mexico Press

177 pp/$5000 (hb) $2995 (sb)

Miguel Gandert's exhibition "Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland" forms an inaugural statement for the just discovered National Hispanic Cultural Center of recent Mexico. The center opened onward October 21, 2000, with three harmonizing exhibitions, and Gandert's extensive point out of photographs offers a commendable beginning. "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" consists of 114 images from eight different series of rituals, dances, performances and pilgrimages that take place along the Rio Grande corridor from Colorado to Mexico. Gandert's mission has been to meticulously document these dramatized expressions of a omited Indo-Hispano culture, and he has chosen the familiar aesthetic of gritty black and white documentary, undiminished with the black edges of full-frame negatives, to record the boisterous performances of a living history. The tension between a dying fashion of faithful representation, which the authenticating trademarks of documentary photography have reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point to represent, and the annual revitalization of a cultu re in evolving historical plays makes this exhibition the one and the other problematic and rewarding. Dust stirred up by means of dancing feet has perceptively settl in the monochrome grain of representation, and this contrast between choreographed passing and statuesque air extends to the fundamental possibilities of cultural formation. Shaped by means of participants and audiences on multiple horizontals the dynamic interface of remembrance and realization within the staged dramas of documentary photography and ritualistic performance originate at play in this exhibition merits one further reflections.

The Indo-Hispano bring under rules performing to the beat of Gandert's shutter belong to a cluster of people with a mixed heritage. When Coronado traveled north along the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1540 he was followed from a steady trickle of Spanish Mexican colonists and these occupants of subjection would gradually be influenced from the cultures they sought to transform. Interbreeding of customs and genetic stocks evolv into the unique cultural expressions Gandert has labeled "Indo-Hispano" to account for a intermingle of Indian and Hispanic ancestry. United by way of the hyphen that testifies to its compages origin, this offspring of historical motions along the Rio Grande has been largely ignored for the sake of racial purity and cultural uniqueness. When Edward Curtis toured just discovered Mexico as the chronicler of a vanishing race in 1907 and 1913 he sought the exotic control of an original Indian to build forward the idealized myths that support our tourist industry to this day. Coupl with the degradation of Hispano refinement following th e American annexation of 1848 the stories of Indo-Hispano descending threatened to corrupt the ethnocentric desire for a "noble savage" with what was regarded an inferior influence. Caught within these opposite connotations, Indo-Hispano became the subdue of a necessary silence. "Nuevo Mexico Profundo" search fors to breach the mute status of a cultural conglomerate where any notion of origin and identity is inextricably caught up in centuries of domination and repression.

Against this extensive backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that Gandert's combined opus of cultural circumstances encompasses everything from horseback battles between Christians and Moors to Commanche raids enacted in the northern villages around Taos. principally aspects of the beliefs and customs that might conceivably constitute an Indo-Hispano agriculture have successfully been brought into play. In image after image captured along the Rio Grande Valley, from the spire on the horizon at Alcalde to the drawn out processions of Apache dancers filing between the sides of Juarez, the anticipated variations of native style of dress and Christian customs recur again and again to reassert the collective spirit of an Indo-Hispano identity. garnered in such a uniform statement, however, this near faultless blend of binary nomenclature present the appearances to reiterate the operational principle that initially bridleed (just as it continues to purposefully ignore) the overwhelming existence of cultural and genetic crossover Seen as an edited whole, the exhibition explicitly as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but presumes and suggests that race and character, or the scientifically evolv fusion of gene and behavior, are intertwined with a biological determination that forces bodies to act in genetically prescribed ways. by means of select symbolic acts brandishing the feather and the cros in eight distinct exhibition sections, Gandert has sought to give the IndoHispano agriculture a recognizable face with the same features that Edward Curtis was seeking in his admit portraits. Curtis followed the eugenic trail onward his rescue missions for a vanishing bre according to documenting what he believed to be rapidly depleting gene from carefully orchestrating an expressive surface, he perceptively salvaged the internalized characteristics and secur them for posterity between the sides of the act of photography.