DAY 38

UNEXPECTED ART FORMS

Painted Tennis Shoes of Mesoamerica

ANUAR ROSALDO AND THE UNITY OF ALL

The vectors of ancient Aztec legend, psychic introspection, and Chicano identity meet on top of a white sneaker.

Anuar Rosaldo paints each shoe as a personal gift for a friend, drawing from the artistic and spiritual traditions of pre-Columbian Mexico with which he personally identifies.

Anuar has represented the four cardinal directions using the traditional colors of Aztec cosmology—red, blue, white, and black—as a nod to the “embedded synesthesia” that existed in many Mesoamerican cultures, in which each color was associated with a particular deity, cardinal direction, animal, tree, and day of the year.⁴ (For more on synesthesia, see pages 86 and 245.)

The heavenly and the terrene are as intertwined in Anuar’s paintings as they are in the indigenous cosmology. The sun, Tonatiuh, and the earth, Tonantzin Tlalli, are revered as the givers of life and sustenance. The recurrent symbol of the flower, Xóchitl, represents beauty and creativity.

“In my paintings,” the artist states, “I have tried my best to represent how the ‘Grandfathers’ saw the world.”

Anuar integrates the ancient with the modern and the mundane with the sacred in an artistic expression of the Aztec concept of integral completeness, known in the Náhuatl language simply as cé... “one”. —DJS