Envisioning an alternate history for the indigenous city of Tenochtitlan while also playing with the ignorant misconception that supernatural forces provided a means for the “primitive” native peoples of the New World to create the large structures and cities that laid the foundations for this continent. My family is from Mexico City, and as a child I remember seeing ruins uncovered next to concrete structures side by side. Every time I go back, there is a sentiment of memory that lingers in my blood as I walk through the remnant infrastructure of Tenochtitlan much like the embedded indigenous culture that sits vague but familiar within my Mexican identity. I may have lost my true mother tongue through colonizing forces that perpetrated throughout generations in Mexico, but my own mother continues the indigenous craft of cooking with maize flour and sauce making with a molcajete. As I move forward in my studies as a physicist and astronomer, I intend to acknowledge indigenous knowledge as comparable to the western scientific paradigm for reasons like preventing false notions that poor primitive savages needed some fantastic outside force to aid them in their technology and survival. In this painting, I want to argue that my culture and indigenous heritage is not mutually exclusive from science and innovation but that it is science and innovation.
