Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts

José María Velasco’s Pastoral Landscapes and the Politics of Seeing: Technologies of Colonial Violence in Indigenous Geographies

In this essay I address the complexities of the political geography of race in Mexico by discussing the research processes and methodologies used in the making of my video installation ‘Portrait of a Nation’. Mexican landscape painter José María Velasco (1840-1912) is considered to have made geography a symbol of national identity through his artwork. His pastoral landscapes act as a mechanism for colonial subjugation, perpetuating Eurocentric artistic values, meanwhile concealing Indigenous genocide and colonial violence. Velasco’s pastoral landscapes aptly depict subjugation and colonial violence as normalized instruments of dispossession. I examine the ways in which colonial violence has been enacted through cultural and artistic nationalistic projects, hopefully gaining a better understanding of the function of Mexican colonialism.

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