ARTH 529
Muertos: Ancestral Mexican Arts of Mortality Spring 2025
Division I

The Mexican Días de los Muertos, which coincides with the Catholic holy days of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on November 1 and 2 of each year, numbers among the most widely recognized holidays practiced in contemporary Latin America. Available scholarly accounts of this holiday’s historical origins, which tend to minimize the degree to which it reflects ancestral Indigenous Mexican religious practices, typically draw their earliest evidence from the Mexica (Aztec) capital of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) of c. 1300-1521 CE. However, the Mexica–well known for their practices of human and animal sacrifice, as well as other social practices that implicated mortality–were themselves the inheritors of a millennial tradition that venerated death. This course considers the theme and actual practice of death over the Mexican longue durée. It begins in the first two centuries CE, which saw a substantial population collapse in central Mexico that was followed soon thereafter by the first known mass-human sacrificial event in Mesoamerica. It then follows the social construction of death in Mesoamerica through early modernity when the importation of Eurasian pathogens into the Americas alongside the atrocities of European colonization led to the death of an estimated 90% of Indigenous Americans. The final weeks of the course will consider how modern artists have responded to ancestral artistic and historical precedents. Artworks to be considered include the Temple of the Feathered Serpent of Teotihuacan, the sarcophagus of Pakal the Great of Palenque, the Great Ball Court of Chichen Itza, and the novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo.