Art and the legacy of the ancestors.

• Position: Essay

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Salvadoran artist Carlo Mejía has exhibited his work with great success around the world for many years now. He is a stalwart of Latin American culture and an artistic bridge between the rich cultural past and the contemporary realities of the Americas. As we celebrate the Inter-American Year of Culture and the bicentennial year of the first cry for independence in El Salvador (November 5, 1811), it seems the perfect time to take a look at the cultural heritage that underlies so much of Mejía's work.

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One could say that Mejía became a painter at the tender age of five when the family patriarch took him to visit an old village in El Salvador where his Aunt Isabel was still using natural indigo to dye the threads that she wove into fabric on her loom. Carlo was dazzled by the bright, exotic colors and by the woman whose skin had taken on a tinge of blue from daily contact with the indigo. Years later, she was the inspiration for a painting he called La mujer azul (The Blue Woman).

"My origins became my work," Mejía confirms. "Isabel the blue woman and other personalities from my childhood left their mark on my heart and gave me the key to painting my own universe."

Mejía's elders, the guardians of the native oral tradition, helped him to understand his origins more clearly. Papá Lucio, the patriarch, was originally from Totonicapán, Guatemala, a settlement of the ancient Quiché people and the birthplace of the Mayan Bible, El Popol Vuh. Papá Lucio told Carlo that in the year 1900, he moved to the town of Chalatenango, El Salvador, where he met and married a Nahuatl indigenous woman with whom he had five children. One of those children was Carlo Mejía's grandmother, Mercedes Mejía. In 1932, during the peasant uprising that resulted in the massacre of thousands, Papá Lucio's family was forced to leave their land and everything they owned in Chalatenango and take refuge in the outskirts of San Salvador. They also had to leave behind their indigenous languages and clothing, identifiers that made them suspect in the mind of the Salvadoran dictator of the time. It was in these marginal areas of San Salvador, the last sanctuaries of the country's ancestral culture, where Carlo Mejía was born thirteen years later in 1945.

The young artist's natural talent opened doors for him in the various art schools where he eventually received his professional training. One of those schools was...