Indigenist romanticization in the Good Shepherd

The maelstrom of the current city of Barcelona is the product of a speculative biopolitics and a clientelistic urban praxis that, in the name of a precarious and domesticated citizenry, has the power to articulate and conceive public spaces, such as the roundabout de Monterrey, located in the Bon Pastor neighborhood. A clear example of the beautification of the public road, through the formation of the colossal sculpture 'I, America', made by the Mexican sculptor Alberto Cavazos, during the municipal government of Pasqual Maragall.

First of all, the roundabout in Monterrey is a space reserved for the regulation of road traffic and impassable for the most curious pedestrians which, according to the anthropologist Marc Augé, could be classified as a non-place. In the middle of the roundabout is the large red metal sculpture that symbolizes the twinning between the cities of Barcelona and Monterrey, through the representation of a Txiximeca warrior, from an indigenous people in the north of Mexico A twinning that celebrates the romanticization of a colonial past and common cultural legacy, hiding other apocryphal stories in the official discourse, related to cultural and human genocide, slavery or the extractionist plunder of the Spanish crown.

From a second point of view, Cavazos' sculpture, without doubting his technical mastery, responds to an altered subjectivation of the naked body of the warrior in a sort of post-cubist geometric forms, as it reduces the symbolic world, the ethnoracial identity and the contemporary problems of the indigenous Txiximeca people in a primitive and mythic imaginary, close to Rousseau's theory of the good savage. A plastic imaginary reinterpreted in the name of progress and the good aesthetic taste of the European artistic avant-gardes.

Finally, it must be added that the problematization of sculpture would lie in its biased interpretation and lack of a more indigenous perspective centered, as a postcolonial consequence, on a natural assimilationist process that belittles indigenous artistic practices as luck of folklore and popular art.