Indigenous peoples in Latin America are caught in a constant struggle and state of resistance. This can be seen in their own images and creative practices, as well as in the ways in which these peoples have been and continue to be represented. In El Salvador, works like those of the artist Mario López Vega offer a platform that invites us to reflect on the colonization of visual languages. These reflections also reaffirm the resistance of Indigenous peoples in the reclamation and revalorization of their own traditional methods of production, eschewing the privileged assimilation of Western forms of production. Mario López Vega's work is located in a complex environment. Despite the fact that many peoples on the "American" continent share a similar history of colonization and oppression, each region’s experience is characterized by its own particular nuances. Therefore, it is important to begin this discussion by revisiting the history of the country and the peoples Indigenous to the territory occupied by the Salvadoran state. Before Spanish colonization, the region that is today called “El Salvador” was previously known as Kuskatán and was inhabited mainly by the Nahua, Lenca, and Cacaopera peoples. The history of these peoples has been strongly marked by the systematic elimination and whitewashing of their culture. In 1932, a genocide was carried out in El Salvador that left between 5,000 and 35,000 victims of Indigenous descent.^[1] This act was perpetrated by the government, then led by General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, president of El Salvador from 1931 to 1944. The state systematically denied and minimized the extermination to the extent that the exact number of victims has never been able to be determined. The genocide was accompanied by coercive policies that led to the collective abandonment of many cultural practices and Indigenous customs throughout the population. As a result of these events, according to the country’s most recent census, only 0.23 percent of El Salvador’s population considers themselves Indigenous.^[2] This incredibly low figure in a region that clearly has a strong Indigenous heritage reveals the efficacy with which the government implemented its strategy of internalized racism within the Salvadoran population.

Concepts of indigeneity and of Indigenous identity have also been heavily manipulated by the state, and this has contributed to the construction of a skewed image of the Nahua, Lenca, and Cacaopera that ignores their history, conditions, and current needs.^[3] During the twentieth century, certain artists and artworks were promoted over others in order to solidify and reaffirm the Salvadoran state’s hegemony over the cultural imaginary. One example of this—among many others—is the case of the “Altacatl Indian,”^[4] a figure who supposedly fought against the Spanish invasion of Central America. This character, however, is fictional and lacks a basis in historical truth. Nonetheless, he was continually represented in artwork that was often sponsored by the government. Sculptures of his likeness were placed at important governmental sites—on the façade of the Palacio Nacional (carved by Joaquin Aguilar Guzmán) or on the Avenida Independencia (sculpted by Valentín Estrada and later relocated elsewhere). Using this strategy of monumentalizing a fictional character, the Salvadoran government contributed to the construction of the idea of an “Indigenous hero” consistent with the agenda of the Salvadoran state.

His representation focused negative attention away from the Salvadoran state onto oppression associated with Spain.

Worse still, the clothing that Atlacatl was represented as wearing was in fact more similar to the dress of Indigenous peoples living in the north of Mexico and the southern United States than it was to the apparel of Indigenous people in El Salvador, further contributing to the erasure of the particular cultural traits of Indigenous peoples.

It is out of this history and context that the work of artist Mario López Vega emerges. López originates from Panchimalco, a small village in the mountains south of San Salvador, the nation’s capital. This region has a long history that goes back to precolonial times. It is one of the regions historically inhabited by the Nahua people of El Salvador. López departs from this heritage and in his work explores themes related to the region’s history, culture, and identity, approaching them through his own experience and distancing himself from the stereotypical representations of “the Indigenous” that run rampant throughout El Salvador. He carves his sculptures directly out of stone, a practice tied to the techniques used to produce artifacts and architecture in precolonial America for thousands of years, and which persist to this day. In fact, his own grandfather carved stone, and though he only knew him briefly in his childhood, Mario López Vega notes that this relationship has had an important influence on his work.

Tracing aesthetic genealogies against the grain of Europe and the United States is a decolonial method of historicizing that allows us to imagine futures situated, in this case, around Nahua material memory.

López has mentioned that his grandmother was also a maker. She worked with the backstrap loom. This type of textile production, along with a good portion of the region's handcarved stone sculptures, is usually classified as a “handicraft” according to Western notions of art. This categorization is something López questions in his work, as in the piece Persistencia de la memoria [The Persistence of Memory], a traditional grinding stone that the artist has complemented with different products of the earth—corn kernels, pito seeds, and flower petals. This gesture is more than a simple act of placing a utilitarian object in spaces conventionally dedicated to artistic dissemination, it is the reappropriation of an object with the purpose of endowing it with aesthetic and sociocultural value, value which extends as much to the object as an essential part of a culture as to the people who have produced and continue to produce such objects for so many years.

This kind of reappropriation and revaluation of objects and materials is a constant in the work of Mario López Vega. He repeats it, for example, in the piece Piedra de la memoria [Memory Stone]. This work is a stone that López collected from the Sumpul River in El Salvador, a river well-known as the site of a 1980 massacre in which the armed forces of El Salvador, with the support of the Honduran army, murdered between 300 and 600 refugees. The artist traveled to the river, where a local person guided him to the specific spot where the events took place. It was from there that he selected the very stone he presents in his piece without any intervention in order to highlight the stone’s origins and therefore the events that occurred there. In the same way, this stone can be interpreted as a memorial to the victims of the massacre.

In another of his sculptures, Arma Prehispánica Contemporánea [Contemporary Pre-Hispanic Weapon], López took inspiration from the form of precolonial arrowheads. In this piece, López started with another object originally considered to be essentially utilitarian, styling it in such a way as to simulate the appearance of paper rather than stone and thereby creating a tension between the solid material and the fragile appearance. Through this tension, López succeeds at eliminating the conventional use of the object. The work’s title is also extremely interesting in the way it collapses two moments in history inside a single object, creating a seamless continuity between the “preColumbian era” and “the contemporary moment.” This piece can be linked to the work of other artists from El Salvador like Beatriz Cortez or Simón Vega, who detach their works from a linear reading of history in a decolonial strategy that evades the relegation of the Indigenous to the past as something crystallized and immutable in time.

This alternative reading of history-time opens the way for new possibilities in the conception of the Indigenous in El Salvador in the present.