Afterlives of the Manila Galleon: Lacquerware and Tin-Glazed Pottery in Modern Mexico

“Arte Popular Mexicano” is a category created by artists and cultural agents in the 19th and early 20th centuries to encompass a range of objects produced in Mexico. Nevertheless, these objects have diverse origins and belong to different artistic traditions. In this presentation, I compare two groups of these objects: lacquerware and tin-glazed pottery. Although these objects began to be produced in the context of the circulation of Asian and American goods during Spain's colonial rule of Mexico and the Philippines, they were later incorporated into discourses of national identity. My aim is to address the afterlives of these objects, and the artistic discourses attributed to them once Mexico gained its independence from Spain and the Manila Galleon route was interrupted.

Lacquer pieces and techniques were the subject of a series of debates that, on the one hand, argued in favor of an Asian origin and, on the other, defended their pre-Hispanic origin as the continuity of an indigenous technique through the centuries. Unlike lacquer, tin-glazed pottery was considered a foreign technique that some felt could be incorporated into a national expression, but others rejected. I argue that, if looked closely, lacquer and tin-glazed pottery conflict with the compulsion to find an “original” and “uncorrupted” source of Mexican art. This compulsion has hindered our capacity to really look at the objects as the product of a complex, multiracial, and transpacific artistic circulation.