Pathway Ecologies
Pathway Ecologies: Jackie Amézquita's Retracing Migrations, Mesoamerican Cosmology, and Futurity
An Essay for Amézquita’s solo exhibition, Nuestro Norte siempre a sido el Sur, at Charlie James Gallery By Lili Flores Aguilar, Ph.D.
Photos of select pieces from Amézquita’s solo exhibition, Nuestro Norte siempre a sido el Sur, by Charlie James GalleryNuestro Norte siempre a sido el Sur, an exhibition by artist Jackie Amézquita, navigates ecologies of migration, encapsulating the journeys not only of humans but of more-than-human animals, plants, and spirits across the U.S.-Mexico border. The title of the exhibition extends from América invertida (inverted map of South America c. 1944) by late 19th century artist Joaquín Torres-Garcia (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1874-1949). Through ambiguity and refusal of Cartesian logics, Joaquín-Torres states, “el Sur era nuestro Norte,” challenging Eurocentric systems. By extension, Nuestro Norte siempre a sido el Sur, reorients people through an analogical syntax informed by Indigenous aesthetics.
Amezquita’s aesthetic analogies are informed by Mesoamerican ways of being and relating–specifically informed by the Maya Indigenous diaspora residing on occupied Tongva land (Los Angeles, California). Amézquita’s gestural soil paintings retrace persisting practices of Indigenous migration, futurity, and their contingent Mesoamerican cosmology and philosophy, delineating themes of regeneration and the constant transformation of life. Her pieces are created through fundamental semiotic processes of ritual and iconic representation that embody fissures within societal and environmental landscapes, while also illuminating paths toward Indigenous survivance. The forms in her soil paintings are ambiguous due to the agency of the soil and its ability to expand, shrink, or break.
Central to Amezquita’s process of making is ritualistic sourcing, and alchemical transformation of biomaterials, which reimagines fissures and ruptures as moments of liberation where regeneration can exist. Utilizing sourced soil from migration paths along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, her paintings are constructed through chemical processes of baking and oxidation–a physical and metaphorical deterritorialization that speaks to the mending of divided landscapes and peoples. In this sense, moments of liberation are reimagined through depictions of peoples being in community despite borders associated with extractive and exploitative industrial and capitalist regimes.
bajo el cielo sobre el mismo suelo, transcends a human-centric narrative to encompass the journeys of more-than-human animals, plants, and spirits. Her biomaterial paintings elucidate ephemeral tectonic forms, through gestural incisions, depicting collective displacements due to violent ongoing political processes of division and separation as inheritances of empire and colonialism. Amézquita chooses to draw from the adaptive journeys of multiple entities, portraying a shared struggle of maintaining pathways that traverse political, physical and psychological borders and boundaries since time immemorial.
Amezquita’s work is deeply rooted in the strata of mythologies and philosophical tenets of Maya traditions, which emphasize vital cycles of construction, transformation and decay. As told in the oral traditions of Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples, and more specifically, the culturally syncretic text of the Maya Ki’che, the Popul Vuh, creation and death are intrinsic to cosmological processes and vital to life itself. navegando las veredas del despojó, features etched Maya Classic iconography on obsidian, depicting paddlers on a canoe; Amézquita’s work makes legible rites performed in caves associated with voyages to and through the watery depths of Xibalba. According to Maya cosmology, caverns, caves and cenotes intertwine, serving as places for ancestors to transmute and reside after death.To the left of navegando las veredas del despojó lies an obsidian etching depicting la Osa Mayor, while to the right rests the constellation of la Osa Menor, guiding earthly movements of people and spirits migrating.
Similarly, subterranean spaces known as choltun, serve as sacred and quotidian repositories, and as such, Amézquita’s spatial logic of the downstairs gallery performs as an archive of mnemonic relations. Soil, rainwater, crushed fossilized shell along with copal, bee pollen, cochineal, achiote, and lava rock make present multidimensional pathway ecologies of Maya peoples and their repertoires. Maya cosmologies inform Nuestro Norte siempre a sido el Sur, foregrounding relationships between the ancestral past and contemporary migration narratives. The simultaneity of symbolic meaning-making and material embodiment express an aesthetic vernacular of Mesoamerican indigeneity.
In her performance, como el agua que fluye, Amézquita walks a choreographed pedestrian route. Acts of walking in Mesoamerican codices are often represented with symbols of footsteps, indicating paths of origin and movement. Amezquita’s body retraces her own pathways of memory and migration embedded in urbanity and borderlands. Synchronistically, Amezquita’s choreography includes the linguistic plurality of her web of friends and artists who count each step. Amézquita’s poly-synchronous community is made present through digital communication devices which are vital for maintaining connections amongst diasporic peoples.
Inviting people within her web of relations, and attendees of the exhibition, Amézquita challenges people to consider their own relationship in supporting migrant place-making practices in global systems of migration.
Her choice of biomaterials and performance embodies the liminal space of potential for recovery and renewal amidst disruption and decay–embracing the interconnectedness of all life forms through webs of relations through movements via land, water, or air. The concept of fissures—both literal and metaphorical—is prevalent in Amézquita’s pieces. These allude to political dimensions of deterritorialization that neoliberal capitalism and subsequent environmental destruction have on migration and movements, that also serve as sites of potential rhizomatic growth and rebirth. Through her exhibition, Amézquita visualizes these breaks as starting points for conversations about regeneration, showing how damaged realms, be they ecosystems or communities, might be crystallized back together, reflecting a wound–a scar’s presence as a form of teachings.
Nuestro Norte siempre a sido el Sur profoundly retraces and embodies the fluidity of movements across borders—geographical, biological, and conceptual. Amézquita’s exhibition serves as a spatio-corporeal-temporal site for expressing narratives of collectivities, the cosmologies of Mesoamerican people, and the transformative power of materiality. This exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the ongoing cycles of movement and change and to participate in supporting a future where these cycles foster not fragmentation but Indigenous futurity and the persistence of their collective memories. Her artworks and performance propose a world in which regeneration from past disruptions paves the way for connections and shared futures, urging a rethinking of borderlands not as divides, but as spaces ripe for collaboration, and reimagining growth and Indigenous self-determination.
References:
Belshaw, John Douglas Sarah Nickel, and Dr Chelsea Horton, (2016) “3. ‘Since Time Immemorial.,’” https://histindigenouspeoples.pressbooks.tru.ca/chapter/3-since-time-immemorial/.
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“Joaquín Torres García, el hombre para el que el Sur era nuestro Norte,” January 16, 2023, https://www.tiempoar.com.ar/cultura/joaquin-torres-garcia-el-hombre-para-el-que-se-sur-era-nuestro-norte/.
Vernon L. Scarborough, “Ecology and Ritual: Water Management and the Maya,” Latin American Antiquity 9, no. 2 (June 1998): 135–59, https://doi.org/10.2307/971991.
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