ABSTRACT
For Frida Kahlo, the 21st century Mexican adelita (female warrior) of art pedagogy, the painted canvas refl ected the domain of self-knowledge. Her retratos, self-portraits, and surrealist paintings dealt with the fracas of the spirit, that horror vacui between mind and body where one attempts to reconcile the perceived discrepancies between conscious thought and action. Frida’s art refl ected her spirit in many forms. Self-portraits claimed life aft er trauma, naturaleza viva (still life) dealt with the fear and inevitability of death,1 and Mexicanidad was revealed in the confl ictive narratives that characterized works such as Self-Portrait of the Borderline.2 In the Borderline, the mythic quality of the sun (Logos) and the moon (Eros) cast their rays and shadow upon contested territories. Mexico rests under the moon, with cultural artifacts rooted in indigenous soil emerging from the postcolonial rubble of Tenochtitlan, the United States burns under the sun, with symbols of industrial “development” and human “progress” fl ogging its murky skies, and Frida, draped in a soft pink dress and sugar-laced gloves, stands at the border, with a cigarette in one hand and a Mexican fl ag in the other, demonstrating how the human psyche and spirit are never self-defi ned entities; they are fi rmly grounded in the vestiges of the past and the varnished possibilities of the future.
