Rhonda Taube
I am a professor of art history at Riverside City College and currently a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego's Visual Arts program, where I also completed my PhD in Latin American Visual Culture. Before going to UCSD, I completed an MA degree in Pre-Columbian art history at Northern Illinois University.
My research interests include ancient, colonial, and contemporary Mesoamerican ceremonial pageantry and public performance. I am currently conducting fieldwork in the highland Guatemala community of Momostenango concerning K'iche' Maya dance and ritual. One of my recent research topics involves the Maya response to neoliberalism, transnationalism, and globalization as enacted through community festivals and performance.
My research interests include ancient, colonial, and contemporary Mesoamerican ceremonial pageantry and public performance. I am currently conducting fieldwork in the highland Guatemala community of Momostenango concerning K'iche' Maya dance and ritual. One of my recent research topics involves the Maya response to neoliberalism, transnationalism, and globalization as enacted through community festivals and performance.
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the time of Spanish contact in the sixteenth century, many figurines emphasize female secondary sexual characteristics and local ideas regarding gender-based roles and responsibilities, including a plethora of nubile and comely females with enlarged breasts, voluptuous hips, and appealing or suggestive poses.
Durante las fiestas anuales de sus santos patrones, los mayas y ladinos de los altos occidentales de Guatemala llevan a cabo danzas con vestuarios basados en el cine, la televisión, el ámbito musical y el Internet. Ambos grupos adaptan la vestimenta de acuerdo a sus intereses y la tensión entre ellos se hace evidente en el tipo de ropas que rentan y compran. Los vestuarios ladinos identifican a sus portadores como consumidores modernos, mientras que los K’iche’ enfatizan un sentido de comunidad, añadiendo imágenes prestadas que se conectan con formas de subsistencia y vida indígena a la vez que comentan sobre formas sancionadas de comportamiento y males sociales. Los fabricantes de vestuario fungen como intermediarios culturales, produciendo tanto el contexto como el significado de las danzas y permitiendo que tanto participantes como espectadores construyan diversas identidades a través de éste.
community, the other made for a domestic and possibly foreign setting, suggests the Creole creation of a narrative visual paradigm of Nahua society. The production of a fantasy physical environment allowed the dominant culture to construct and authenticate the imaginaire of Mexico as an earthly paradise and gateway to heaven."
In this presentation, we explore the relationship of early colonial open chapels to the spaces of Mesoamerican cave worship, including the presence of cave temples in pre-Columbian architecture. As a solid structure, the open chapel did not have a parallel in European church architecture. From sixteenth-century trials for idolatry, the persistence of cave worship in the early colonial period is well documented over much of Mesoamerica. We argue that the early Colonial mendicant friars recognized the symbolic significance of caves and certainly adapted their form to the New World open chapel complex. In addition, we suggest that as massive stone constructions with cavernous interiors, churches were regarded as symbolic mountains, the natural home of caves. Thus, the occurrence of churches on top of pre-Columbian mounds was not simply a banal statement of Christian dominance, but rather such structures were indeed sacred hills and cave-like spaces of communication with the honored dead and the ancestral past. Moreover, they afforded native peoples a conduit through, or passageway between, the converging cultures in New Spain. As Elizabeth Wilder Weismann (1985, 18) notes, the “Church was the gate through which the Indians…could enter the Western European world.” The open chapel served as a setting for these rites of passage.
the time of Spanish contact in the sixteenth century, many figurines emphasize female secondary sexual characteristics and local ideas regarding gender-based roles and responsibilities, including a plethora of nubile and comely females with enlarged breasts, voluptuous hips, and appealing or suggestive poses.
Durante las fiestas anuales de sus santos patrones, los mayas y ladinos de los altos occidentales de Guatemala llevan a cabo danzas con vestuarios basados en el cine, la televisión, el ámbito musical y el Internet. Ambos grupos adaptan la vestimenta de acuerdo a sus intereses y la tensión entre ellos se hace evidente en el tipo de ropas que rentan y compran. Los vestuarios ladinos identifican a sus portadores como consumidores modernos, mientras que los K’iche’ enfatizan un sentido de comunidad, añadiendo imágenes prestadas que se conectan con formas de subsistencia y vida indígena a la vez que comentan sobre formas sancionadas de comportamiento y males sociales. Los fabricantes de vestuario fungen como intermediarios culturales, produciendo tanto el contexto como el significado de las danzas y permitiendo que tanto participantes como espectadores construyan diversas identidades a través de éste.
community, the other made for a domestic and possibly foreign setting, suggests the Creole creation of a narrative visual paradigm of Nahua society. The production of a fantasy physical environment allowed the dominant culture to construct and authenticate the imaginaire of Mexico as an earthly paradise and gateway to heaven."
In this presentation, we explore the relationship of early colonial open chapels to the spaces of Mesoamerican cave worship, including the presence of cave temples in pre-Columbian architecture. As a solid structure, the open chapel did not have a parallel in European church architecture. From sixteenth-century trials for idolatry, the persistence of cave worship in the early colonial period is well documented over much of Mesoamerica. We argue that the early Colonial mendicant friars recognized the symbolic significance of caves and certainly adapted their form to the New World open chapel complex. In addition, we suggest that as massive stone constructions with cavernous interiors, churches were regarded as symbolic mountains, the natural home of caves. Thus, the occurrence of churches on top of pre-Columbian mounds was not simply a banal statement of Christian dominance, but rather such structures were indeed sacred hills and cave-like spaces of communication with the honored dead and the ancestral past. Moreover, they afforded native peoples a conduit through, or passageway between, the converging cultures in New Spain. As Elizabeth Wilder Weismann (1985, 18) notes, the “Church was the gate through which the Indians…could enter the Western European world.” The open chapel served as a setting for these rites of passage.