Engraving by Agostino Aglio of the 1824 Ancient Mexico exhibition
The process of the exhumation of Coatlicue Mayor, according to Octavio Paz, "(unfolds) a reflective process of European consciousness onto the civilizations of America like Coatlicue Mayor." He claims, "the difference was radical, a genuine otherness."
Ann de León rightly points out that the 19th-century European aesthetics “favored mimetic representation of the human body in art with correct proportion.”
Assumptions of Nanhua's incapacity for mimetic representation was regarded as barbaric in Eurocentric expectation. However, Coatlicue is not a mother, nor a beheaded woman like in the straightforward feminine rendering, but a grand creatrix.
Ann de León even asks why “she” should need to have a human head at all? Or, as Zairong Xiang writes in Ancient Queer Ways the Nanhua civilization simply "cannot be bothered with validation from colonial/modern knowledge but continuously opens to dimensions that remain closed to us."
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