Considering Anxiety and Abjection in Rufino Tamayo's Watermelons

The renowned Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) was known by friends and colleagues as Señor Sandía (Mr. Watermelon) as a result, in part, of the dozens of paintings and drawings of the fruit he rendered throughout his career. However, considering Tamayo’s indigenous Zapotec heritage, the sobriquet also seems to broadcast—perhaps crudely—Tamayo’s “humble Indian” roots. Tamayo himself frequently invoked watermelon as a visual focal point of his compositions while simultaneously refuting claims that the fruit bore ties to his indigenous, working class upbringing as a fruit seller. Originally of African origin, watermelon has been coopted by Mexico since the nineteenth century, when its colors—red, white, and green—became signifiers of the Mexican flag, thus supplanting watermelon’s Afro-diasporic roots with the reductive nationalist trappings of mestizaje. By the twentieth century, the fruit increasingly connoted conflicting sentiments of nostalgia for a fictive indigenous past and anxiety toward the informal economies of fruit vending in Mexico City’s industrialized urbanscape. This paper thus addresses the understudied yet symbolically complex role of watermelon—a socially constructed product of racial and gendered difference—in Tamayo’s oeuvre, and uniquely emphasizes the relationship of this foodstuff to the capitalist era of the “Mexican Miracle” (circa 1940s-60s), in which US tourism and commerce heavily impacted Mexico City’s visual, agricultural, and geopolitical landscapes. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how Tamayo invoked watermelon as a multifaceted signifier of urban belonging and abjection through the culturally marked act of consumption or, in the words of feminist scholar bell hooks, “eating the other.”