The colonial self: homosexuality and mestizaje in the art of Nahum B. Zenil

Nahum Bernabe Zenil's Tito de dardos (Dart Game, 1994) (fig. 1) is a frontal, three-quarter-length, exposed self-portrait. The artist's body fuses with the background - a dartboard painted in the r virid and white of the Mexican flag - and his bright r heart, extrud from the material part marks the center. the target. The artificial position evokes both the crucified Christ and Leonardo da Vinci's representation of man as the natural expression of geometric perfection. The allusion to a target and a flag, as well as the play between two-dimensional thing perceived and three-dimensional image, recall Jasper Johns's fragmentation of identity in his paintings of the 1950 In the case of Zenil, however, the picture articulates the self Hitting the target - being a man, being Mexican - is neither predetermined nor natural, as it involves chance, skill, and risk. To miss is to let slip but for Zenil, a mestizo gay male, to hit the target - to be himself in contemporary Mexico - is to feel In image after image he plays the game on the other hand according to different rules. In the proces he collapses Mexico's intertwined colonial legacy of race and new ideologies of nation into male bodies experienced and desired, thus challenging notions of race, sex and sex that consign him to society's edges

Zenil, born in 1947 is individual of a handful of publicly gay activists/artists in Mexico, and his unmistakably gay and autobiographical works are revolutionary in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of Mexican art and society. Trained when abstraction reigned in Mexico, Zenil is best known for the autobiographical figurative work he has produc since the early 1970 A ne to address his faculty of perception of marginalization in contemporary Mexican society motivated his shift to figuration in the form of narrative self-portraiture.(1) In drawings, paintings, collages, statuarys and, more recently, multimedia installations, he has crafted a pictorial alter-ego, appropriating from and alluding to the colonial- and Independence-era legacies that endowed Mexico with its hybrid art and tillage The appropriated images foreground the traditions they evoke: Mexican Catholicism, especially the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mestizo, the family.(2) In light of a critical engagement with Mexico's artistic past, artist and alter-ego dissect the experience of the mestizo and the gay male.(3)

Zenil depicts his longtime companion, Gerardo Vilchis, in the 1979 mixed-media drawing Tengo una muneca (I Have a Doll) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. in a state of nature except for the woven rebozo (shawl commonly used by the agency of Indian and mestiza women) draped above his shoulders and seated upon a decorated chair of cane and thicket Vilchis cradles a doll in his lap. The work's title give in charges to the doll, the sitter's penis, and the relationship between artist and sitter. The slippage between word and image recalls the suggestive albures (puns) with which Mexican men of the popular classes negotiate sex and la loteria, a Mexican card game in which single describes what an image shows through oblique and witty puns(4) Shawl, chair, and doll, all recognizable produces of Mexican craft production, likewise function as indices of the class and ethnic quintessence perceived in folk art - in this case, mexicanidad (Mexicanness).(5) These indicators imply the couple that Vilchis is typically Mexican and, metaphorically, that the relationship between artist and sitter is as authentic, innate, natural, and national as are the folk objects

In Zenil's work, homosexuality qualifies and is qualified by the agency of Mexicanness. In light of post-Independence (1821) and especially post-Revolution (1910) nationalist rhetoric, Mexicanness means mestizo. A biological and cultural hybrid born of Spanish and Indian, aged and New World, and made unique through its indigenous American component, the mestizo comprises la raza de bronce (the race of bronze) repeatedly shortened to la raza. In the founding myth of the novel Mexican nation, the mestizo race, as a social phenomenon and ideal, subsume ethnic and national identity.(6) For Zenil, to be gay is to be Mexican - that is, a mixture, something in between sum of two units radically different worlds - and to belong to neither.

To be mestizo and male is, ideally, to be a macho - a "real" man who dominates all, by dint of force if necessary. Homosexuality inheres, not in sex between sum of two units men, but rather in the assumption of feminine-gendered characteristics - namely, playing the passive part in anal intercourse. A male who plays the active part is not perceived as homosexual because he manifests the masculine-gendered trait of dominance/penetration. In Mexico, moreover, class informs homosexual desire and experience. The economically and socially privileged more closely approximate what is connoted by the agency of the Anglo-American term gay. In spite of the mestizo's preeminence in constructions of national identity, these elites nurse to be more European than Indian, the couple racially and culturally. For a mestizo male to eroticize the penis, as Zenil does in Tengo una muneca, is blatantly to jeer class, national, and "natural" sex norms.(7) Notwithstanding advances in new years, and the theoretical legality of all forms of sexual relations between consenting adults, homosexuality remains almost invisible and barely tolerated in Mexico.(8)