After yesterday's young Chinese American channeling Mayan aesthetics in animé doodles, here are some works by Mexican school children channeling Kuanyin, the Chinese version of the bodhisattva of compassion Avalokitesvara. I saw these today outside El Cubo, the new state-of-the-art addition to CECUT, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana. It's not insignificant that "Buda Guanyin" - El Cubo's first international exhibition - offers treasures from museums in China. (The models for the students were from Tibetan art included among the "tesoros de la compasión, de la República Popular China," also not insignificant.)I'd never been to CECUT before (in fact, it's been years since I've been to Tijuana, for all its being just across the border), so it was also my first visit to their ethnographic-historical Museo de las Californias. It was eye-opening to experience the history of California not only starting with indigenous peoples, but, once Europeans show up, from Baja's south very slowly north. Look at Andrés Marcos Burriel's Noticias de la California y de su conquista temporal y espiritual (Madrid, 1757):
You see what's now the US state of California? That's right - it's not there! What's at one point in the exhibition called "continental California" was an afterthought, rendered by the California current more distant and less interesting than the Philippines. Just the way our California's famous twenty-one Franciscan missions are just the tail end of a series of sixty-one missions started 86 years earlier near present-day Mulegé - and by Jesuits. (We only got Franciscan missions because the move into Alta California - as it's also sometimes called - came after the suppression of the Jesuits. Alta California here seems a gratuitous and perhaps regrettable accident, a late child which has turned against you. I was reminded of the curiously edifying historical vertigo induced by the map of North America - with francophone-named places only - inscribed in the floor of the Musée de l'Amérique Française in the city of Québec.[The picture of the old map's from Arqueología Mexicana vol. XI, no. 62 (2003), 15]
