“The Mexican Picturesque: Nineteenth-Century Sentimentality and the Visual Construction of the Nation

In this presentation, I will explore the function of the picturesque in Mexico during the late nineteenth-century. Picturesque landscapes, through their seemingly innocent charm, create a superficial diversion, which veils their political function. In 1880 an image titled “Calendario Mexicano” by Luis Garcés appeared in Mexico Pintoresco Artistico y Monumental. The lithograph depicts an indigenous boy contemplating the Aztec Calendar, while a city couple observes the boy. Garcés thus constructed several “encounters”— ethnic, regional and temporal. The presence of indigeneity is signified by a child who imagines a grand Aztec past, while the hope of a civilized future is embodied by the beholding couple; a false unity of nationhood. A few years later, El ahuehuete de la noche triste (1885) by José María Velasco depicts an encounter between an indigenous spectator and a grand tree, which according to sixteenth-century conquest chronicles, witnessed the tears of Hernán Cortés after his army’s defeat in 1520. His composition transformed the violence of the conquest into a placid encounter between native and historic monuments, revealing the function of the picturesque in Mexico: to hide the murderous encounters of empire and amplify nationalism. Indigenous contemplation becomes the activating agent in the Mexican picturesque. Garcés and Velasco captured a perfectly sentimentalist moment where time stands still, and the grandeur of the historic monuments promoted national pride. By understanding the picturesque as a byproduct of sentimentality, we can easily recognize nation-building images celebrating a sanitized history, and the justification of modernity by appealing to human emotions.