Displacing Water Rites: Contested Martial Mothers in the Assemblages and Architectural Arrangements of the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley

This talk explores key archaeological sites in Mexico's Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley, namely Olmeca-xicallanca sites and related Mixteca-Puebla artforms, alongside a critical ethno-spatial analysis of Indigenous-Christian visual and material culture from the Colonial Period. Its primary goal is to ascertain transformations in the ways that artists envisioned powerful women in public and private built environments and smaller scale assemblages. It first situates the complexity of indomitable archetypes of women—featured sites include ancestral Cholula and Cacaxtla-Xochitecatl—which were associated with both an existing warrior ethos and water and fertility rituals. Then, turning to Christianity's interventions in the region upon descendant communities of the valley, beginning in the 1500s, it situates the architectural projects of Indigenous-Christian builders and their European pedagogues as they worked to revise conceptualizations of women from the past. In this process, significant expressions of femininity were rearticulated into irascible and defeated foils to be contrasted against chaste icons in church ornamentation, but in the end these revisions were forced to compete with persistent local knowledge.

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