Exvotos Within and Beyond the Pictorial Experience of Migration

• In Event: Persistence and Resistance in Mexican Art

Abstract

“Ex voto suscepto” means “from the vow made”. It can be, thus, a ready-made object, a promise, or an action. In the specific kind of exvoto fashioned as a painting, the icon of a super-terrestrial being is always recognizable. It is an offering of thanks to the deity who has fulfilled the petition in exchange for the vow: a creative solution to overcome a struggle.
The exvoto as such has origins as old as the need it satisfies, yet, during the most recent decades, it has been rearticulated in accordance with the new context(s) in which it has been produced and displayed. This paper offers a study of a votive object that deals with migration within the realm of visual culture, giving an overview of the history of the painted exvoto and of the most important scholarship regarding the Mexican exvoto and its particular relation to migration. Being that the concepts of place are extremely important for painted exvotos in general, and for exvotos of migration specifically, I analyze the significance of places of production and display, both in Mexico and in Mexican neighborhoods in the US. I provide a corpus of twentieth and twenty-first century examples to show how exvotos depicting migration can be considered a transnational product that articulates specific discourses of inclusive identity. Furthermore, I focus on the written narrative that has become a stylistic cypher granting authenticity to these artifacts, even in their transnational derivations, which re-appropriate a cultural product otherwise doomed to disappearance.

Author

• Lorella Di Gregorio