Posthuman Destinations: Indigenous Cultures in Leonora Carrington’s Mexican Oeuvre

ABSTRACT

When surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) arrived in Mexico in 1943, she found herself in a post-revolutionary country seeking to steer its new identity away from colonial influence. Carrington’s orientation away from Europe resonated with Mexico’s quest for a new cultural identity, no longer inflected by colonial powers. This article examines the extent to which Carrington’s Mexican oeuvre exhibits an immersion within its post-colonial identity in a way which synthesises with her own revolutionary, feminist politics. I consider how her embrace with Mexico’s indigenous past in her mural “El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas” (1963) connects with a culture which eschews the centrality of the speciesist human for a more balanced ecology, giving voice to the more-than-human sphere and thus loosening European colonial ties. I suggest that Mexico’s embrace with its indigenous heritage is one that aligns with Carrington’s feminist exploration of a pre-patriarchal past, where Goddess figures emerge, and a non-Eurocentric culture of myth and magic is evoked. Examining her evocation of Chiapas Indian culture, Goddess motifs, and images of indigenous flora and fauna, this article suggests that Carrington demonstrates how indigenous philosophies guard against human exceptionalism, thus providing a perspective and portal outside of Western cultural imperialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Posthumanism
• feminist ecologies
• Mexico
• indigenous philosophy

Surrealist Leonora Carrington was born in Lancashire, but she spent over five decades of her life in Mexico and came to consider the country her home, encouraged by the people who embraced her as their own. This Latin American locale was a space with which Carrington immediately felt a deep sense of kinship where, as Janet Kaplan notes of both her and her counterpart Remedios Varo, ‘magic was part of daily reality’ (Kaplan 1988, 72). This instinctive connection to a country that was forging a new post-colonial identity known as Mexicanidad coincided with Carrington’s own departure from the European surrealist coterie as she similarly sought an aesthetic of her own. In this article I show how Leonora Carrington’s Mexican oeuvre exhibits a palpable disconnect from a Eurocentric orbit and the dominance of Andre Breton’s Parisian circle. More specifically I suggest that Carrington’s work during this period adopts Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s call to ’stop importing Greek myths and the Western Cartesian point of view’, and instead ‘root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent’.¹ Her calls to abandon a Cartesian perspective resonate with Rosi Braidotti’s critique of humanism’s Eurocentric bias; humanisms, as Tony Davies notes, that have ‘been imperial’, representing the human ‘in the accents and interests of a class, a sex, a race, a genome’.² To this end, Braidotti argues that ‘feminism is resolutely anti-humanist to the extent that it rejects Eurocentric humanism in the light of its “methodological nationalism”.’³ In this article I consider how Carrington’s turn to indigenous culture in Mexico demonstrates a feminist and posthuman politics in her work that resonates with the country’s own eschewal of European bias. The long tradition of the fantastic, embedded within indigenous Mexican culture, was both a method and a strategy that Carrington already synchronised within her instinctive recourse to myth, magic and human-animal relationships. I examine how Carrington’s own feminist exploration of a pre-patriarchal past in her mural “El Mundo Magico de los Mayas” (1963) and her poster for Mexico’s feminist movement “Mujeres Conciencia” (1972) coincides with Mexico’s deliberate reconnection with its indigenous heritage, one where Goddess figures emerge and a non-Eurocentric culture of myth, magic and death is evoked, anticipating a more ecologically balanced milieu.

Leonora Carrington arrived in Mexico in 1943, scarred by her experiences of war-torn Europe and the mental breakdown she had suffered as a result. Her hospitalisation at a sanatorium in Spain is documented in her surrealist memoir Down Below (1944). They are events she eventually escaped from after an opportune marriage to Mexican Renato Leduc which enabled her passage to the country André Breton labelled the ‘Surrealist place par excellence’ (Chadwick 1991, 9). In many ways, Carrington’s arrival in Mexico marked an emancipation of sorts: she was free of her father’s dominance and similarly liberated from her relationship with Max Ernst. This romance was a relationship that Carrington always spoke of positively, but at the same time, it reductively typecast her as his ‘femme-enfant’ due to the twenty-six-year age gap between them. Only once she was separated from Ernst and his influence did her work begin to assert a confident power of its own, as her Mexican oeuvre demonstrates. Indeed, as Whitney Chadwick discusses, both she and Varo found their escape from the stranglehold of male-dominated European Surrealism to be creatively fruitful. As she explains, ‘For the first time in the history of the collective movement called Surrealism, two women would collaborate in attempting to develop a new pictorial language that spoke more directly to their needs’ (Chadwick 2021, 244). Joanna Moorhead also identifies the significance of the female artists’ alliance in Mexico when discussing collaborations between Carrington, Varo and Kati Horner. She explains that these women ‘reinvented Surrealism in Colonia Roma, and this time round it was their own brand of equal-share and genuinely women-centred Surrealism’ (Moorhead 2017, 78). I suggest that Carrington’s turn to Mexico’s indigenous culture, which the country was in the process of rediscovering, was key to the way in which she asserted the new and feminist aesthetic of her own that Chadwick and Moorhead identify. Moreover, I argue that this shift in subject matter demonstrates her prescient posthuman sensibilities. Carrington’s work of this period exhibits a nuanced understanding of the intrinsic interconnection between human and nonhuman worlds, a key principle that underpins the indigenous philosophy Mexico was itself turning toward.

Mexico suited Carrington, not because she was intoxicated by its otherness in the manner of Breton, but because it was a magical world with which she was already synchronised.⁴ She was not therefore appropriating Mexicanidad for her own purposes but rather engaging with it in a manner which chimed with her own inherent sense of connectedness with nonhuman worlds, alchemy, magic and goddess figures. Such an approach is one she discusses with reference to her own Irish heritage which resonates with the themes that run through Mexico’s ancestry, one which she learned about through her maternal grandmother which she outlines here: ‘My love for the soil, nature, the gods was given to me by my mother’s mother who was Irish from Westmeath, where there is a myth about men who lived underground inside the mountains’.⁵ Carrington’s belief in this entwinement of soil and nature, pre-patriarchal gods and magic, via her grandmother’s tales, are themes which resonate with the pre-colonial past that Mexico was attempting to recover. This past is one which draws upon Mexico’s pre-colonial heritage — a heritage that takes forward a rich indigenous cultural history and a philosophy clearly communicated in the first principle of the Treaty binding The United League of Indigenous Nations:

The creator has made us part of and inseparable from the natural world around us. This truth binds us together and gives rise to a shared commitment to care for, conserve and protect the land, air, water and animal life within our usual, customary and traditional territories (Bignall and Rigney 2019, 159).

This principle speaks to the post-Eurocentric Humanism that Braidotti outlines where the Indigenous nations commit to an egalitarian and collective stance rather than a divisive one. The above statement exhibits an understanding of the balance and care required in response to the nonhuman world and nature rather than viewing it and its peoples as a resource to be mined in the manner of colonial imperialists. Simone Bignall and Daryle Rigney identify more explicitly how posthuman and indigenous philosophies align:

Posthumanism describes features also at the heart of internationally shared indigenous conceptualisations of their humanity as being constituted in inextricable relations with the nonhuman world. Such philosophies include a refusal of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism; a genealogical and constructivist account of identity; and an acknowledgement of species interdependence and co-substantial inter-subjectivity in interactive ecologies shared by human and non-human beings (Bignall and Rigney 2019, 159).

These principles of interconnection and entanglement that unite all life forms with the earth are a philosophy that provides the foundation for Carrington’s work in Mexico. It is conspicuously evident in the recurrent themes of entanglement that are manifest in her visual oeuvre of this period, and it is precisely the subject matter that the Mexican government wished to celebrate in a mural it commissioned for Mexico City’s new Museum of Anthropology in 1963. By the 1960s, following successful exhibitions in the country, Carrington was well-known in Mexico and the government chose her as the artist to create a mural that captured its post-colonial and post-revolutionary identity, overriding the European conquests and appropriations it had endured in recent history.⁶ Recognising Mexico’s post-European direction of travel as well as her natural inclination towards the magic and ecologies of a pre-conquest culture meant that Carrington chose to base the painting “El Mundo Magico de los Mayas” (1963) on the belief system of the Chiapas Indians who were descendants of the Ancient Maya people. She drew upon the ancient Mayan text Popul Vuh combined with trips to Chiapas where she stayed with the Swiss anthropologist Gertrude Blom who introduced her to traditional Chiapas healers, known as curandos.⁷ In this way Carrington forges a work cut adrift from European bias, turning towards images and philosophies that chime with Mexico’s indigenous ancestry, but which also anticipate a posthuman approach. It is a syncretic work: one that not only melds Mexican’s rich ancestral cultures together, but also merges with Carrington’s own visionary symbols where magical and mystical animals — seen in her earlier work in Europe — blend with Mexico’s own iconographies.

“El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas” (1963) Leonora Carrington.

The earthy colours of El Mundo Magico de los Mayas highlight its magical components as if Carrington wishes to draw attention to both a grounded ecology as well as an other-worldly cosmos. Spanning four metres by two metres, it is a vibrant multi-verse of human and more-than-human ontologies depicting a dynamic and cultural locale unfettered by a Eurocentric influence. The painting is populated by indigenous animal life, articulating the Chiapas belief that people are born with an animal companion who stays with them throughout their life, a belief that Carrington shared and exhibited frequently in her artwork and writing. The lower strata of the painting depicts an underworld where animals live in apparent harmony, overseen by a jaguar god on the left and suggestive of their foundational relationship to the overall scene that speaks to an animal heritage.⁸ A flock of owls wind their way down to the ceiba tree rooted within this foundational section of the painting. It is a tree that was sacred to the Mayan people because they considered it a conduit of communication between the three levels of the earth, thereby suggestive of the entanglements that Indigenous cultures live by. Above this animal underworld, Carrington etches tiny human figures, derailing an anthropocentric approach and speaking to a wider agentive power beyond humanist hierarchies and choreography. The curandos or Chiapas healer in the small house beneath the rainbow is not privileged either, painted as one tiny detail in an amalgam of human-animal components that brim within the painting. Those which are of larger stature are the white sheep on the left of the landscape, deemed sacred to the Chiapas people, as well as the striking turquoise blue serpent who infuses the painting with magic, distancing it from the institutionalised religious practices embedded within Eurocentricism.

Such a magical, other-worldly approach is further demonstrated in the entanglements exhibited in the painting where an animal underworld operates concurrently with the day-to-day bustle and custom of the Indian people above ground. Carrington embraced the Mexicans’ belief in the re-circulation of life celebrated in cultural events such as Dia de los Muertos where life and death are recognised as entangled phenomena rather than binary opposites in the manner presumed by European thinkers. Jonathan P. Eburne explains this inter-connective approach:

… the experience of death featured in Carrington’s work from this period is no longer the death envisaged by post-war European philosophers – as a limit, as dissolution, as absolute disappearance – but a death recast in terms of a pre-Columbian funerary culture that figures it as a mode of recirculation (Eburne 2011, 20–21).

Eburne outlines above how Carrington’s oeuvre speaks to a continuity, where the cult of life becomes inseparable from the cult of death, invoking instead cosmological systems that intervene between humanism’s presumed being and nothingness. His analysis of such earthly, entangled visions in Carrington’s work here resonates with Braidotti’s posthuman theory on death, where she suggests that human life, and death, are in fact a ‘creative synthesis of flows, energies and perpetual becoming’ (Braidotti 2013, 131). “El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas” exhibits precisely such a ‘synthesis’ in the plethora of magical motifs and themes which emanate from its scenes, where the serpent is a deity, whilst the rainbow which soars between the church and the Indian house with the curandos, acts as a bridge between the two mediums, alluding to the earth mother. These motifs mark cultural cross-overs and forge a co-mingling between belief systems and human-animal ontologies. They estrange the work from the divisive praxis of European colonisation to present a more harmonious posthuman vision of life cycles across species and cultures. The diverse beliefs of the peoples populating the painting are presented as a dynamic collective, where Carrington portrays these differing religions and practices as a continuum instead of binary opposites.

Whitney Chadwick observes this representative entanglement in her commentary on Carrington’s The Mexican Years Exhibition: ‘Pre-Christian and Christian images mingle, much as they do throughout Chiapas; the forest of crosses on the hillside for example, represents Chac, who later merged with Christ in popular belief’ (Chadwick 1991, 26). Such a fusion of seemingly dichotomous forces, where pre-Christians and Christians are presented upon a continuum, is further signified in the rainbow bridging the scene as well as the co-appearance of the sun and the moon drifting alongside each other in a burnt umber sky. In this way, Carrington further muddles the categories that European humanism pivots upon, unsettling temporality itself in the way that “El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas” appears to elude any sense of chronological time. Whilst the swooping of the owls and the stirring of the underworld creatures speak to a nocturnal time frame, the daily routines of the Chiapas allude to a diurnal clock. Seemingly supernatural creatures traverse between mortal and immortal spaces both within the underworld section of the mural and amongst the snow-peaked mountains. The serpent is feathered, speaking to Carrington’s hybrid modes which are also suggestive of a slippage between worlds and are characteristic of Mexico’s pre-conquest past, entangled with magical and mythical symbols. The hummingbird above the ceiba tree is a similarly multi-faceted entity where a god-like visage radiates light from its body, whilst its peacock blue wings are outstretched as if poised for take-off. There is a sense of synchronicity between these diverse ontologies where the sacred sheep, serpent and hummingbird, as well as the supernatural beasts in the sky, all appear to be surging in the same direction despite their ontological diversity. Such a synthesis of ideas and beings that draw upon the rich tapestry of Mexico’s pre-colonial past is an affirmative counter-story to the country’s imperialist narrative, forging a realm which aligns with its indigenous principles that speak to a posthuman ethics.

The rainbow motif is a significant touchstone in the mural, acting as a bridge between worlds and functioning as a ‘reference to the many-breasted, bearded earth mother’ (Chadwick 1991, 26). The Mexicans’ recourse to magic and Goddess culture, symbolised by this rainbow bridge, was a key strategy in countering colonial narratives and I consider this movement further in Carrington’s increasingly political involvement in the country. Indeed, the rainbow motif signposts the feminist momentum in Carrington’s Mexican oeuvre, to which I now turn to consider further.

The revolutionary spirit of Mexicanidad provided a framework for examining identity and gender and corresponded with Carrington’s own feminist politics at the time. Tara Plunkett discusses the impact that Mexico had upon women artists during the 1950s and 1960s, considering how its ‘geographical distance from the Parisian world’ preoccupied the ‘surrealist imagination’. She explains: ‘Certain scholars have argued that in post-war Mexico, women artists such as Varo and Carrington finally found themselves with the freedom to develop an aesthetic that privileged the power of the female’ (Plunkett 2017, 72). Dawn Ades is one of the scholars to whom Plunkett alludes. She contrasts the European male surrealists constructing a female identity to suit their own gaze with the Mexican feminists who, instead, ‘invoked the Aztec goddess Malinalxochitl as a model of female independence and strength’ (Ades 1998, 106). This revolutionary feminist awakening in a country already attuned to the occult and marvellous provided fertile ground for a post-Eurocentric turn in Carrington’s work which synthesised these elements in what I perceive as posthuman realms.

The feminist posthuman approaches identified in Carrington’s “El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas” are also manifest in the poster she designed in 1972 for Mexico’s feminist movement. Two years before, Carrington wrote her feminist manifesto ‘What is a Woman?’ in Mexico, an essay in which she identifies herself as a ‘female human animal’. She designed and created the poster for Mexico City’s women’s liberation movement, Mujeres Conciencia as a visual realisation of her manifesto’s content, demonstrating how this Latin American location galvanised her increasingly political stance. Visions of magical Goddess cultures, which feature in paintings such as “The Giantess” (1947), and her poster “Mujeres Conciencia”, speak to a Latin American feminism that found kinship in their totemic eschewal of patriarchal power. Gloria Orenstein discusses the repression of female figures in Surrealism in particular, and examines how visions of the Goddess in their work were a key strategy in reasserting an autonomous female identity:

In the coded works of these Surrealist women, feminist scholars can actually discover a new kind of concern with time, a reclamation of 8000 years of lost history and an affinity with pre-patriarchal cultures in which the image of the Great Mother was revered as supreme creator of the Universe (Orenstein 1982, 48).

The Goddess motif is one that stands in opposition to religious patriarchs and European philosophers and appears as such in a number of Carrington’s Mexican paintings in the manner that Orenstein describes. It speaks to Carrington’s evolving feminism, galvanised by a Mexico embracing a growing sense of its own emancipation as it sought to unchain itself from European influence. Carrington’s feminism from the 1950s to 1970s was increasingly refracted through a wider political engagement with Mexico’s colonised peoples during this period, signalling further her estrangement from European male surrealist circles to forge art and writing that chimed with the post-Eurocentric principles of Latin America.⁹

“Mujeres Conciencia” [Women’s Awareness] (1972)

“Mujeres Conciencia”, forged in earthly green hues, features two Eve figures presenting each other with an apple whilst a winged creature flies above them, recalling the rainbow deity that bridges “El Mundo Magico de los Mayas”. In Carrington’s Mexican vision, situated in a pre-conquest locale, the apple does not signify sin but instead the sharing of knowledge between women in a gesture which eschews western religious epistemologies that impose androcentric dominance. Here the fruit symbolises fecundity rather than the forbidden, thereby fostering the themes of exchange, balance and growth that indigenous philosophies call for. As Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra observe, Carrington draws upon the ‘broader iconography of the era’ by employing the ‘imagery of pre-Columbian religion to access alternative belief systems’ (Eburne and McAra 2019). Hierarchical perspectives, which characterise Eurocentric, humanist trajectories as well as western religious thinking, are rewritten via the circular symbols of Carrington’s painting, restoring balance between ontologies which have been historically subordinated by patriarchal rule. Her recourse to Goddess figures in Mexico’s ancestral past to forge an ecological and feminist stance, is captured in the poster which features the sacred serpent from Aztec culture, Quetzalcotal. Most significantly, Carrington references the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl in the inscription she wrote to accompany the painting:

Winged Cihuacoatl (snake woman)

Quetzalcoatl sacred serpent hermaphrodite

rises again in the tree of life where

Eve gives Eve back the fruit

of Wisdom

Women take back the original wisdom (Eburne and McAra 2019).

Carrington’s reference to Eve returning the fruit here reconfigures patriarchal myth, speaking to her belief that something vital has been taken from women. She intimates here that Man’s quest for possession of the Earth, which she outlines in her ‘What is a Woman?’ essay, also entails a loss of women’s autonomy and voice. Eve giving back to Eve speaks to the theme of reciprocity evoked in her mural and most importantly the entanglement of women’s rights with the Earth’s. A feminism empowered by its kinship with Latin America’s pre-conquest culture is further enabled in Carrington’s reference to Cihuacoatl — a powerful midwife spirit who guards the souls of those who die in childbirth in Aztec mythology. According to this belief system, women in childbirth are considered to be soldiers in battle, thereby symbolising powerful images of both motherhood and fertility, speaking against western notions of a passive, mother earth. In Aztec mythology, this mother figure is a formidable force, both revered and feared in equal measure. She is an entity who works in tandem with the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, speaking to both Carrington’s preoccupation with hybrid forms, but also her interest in forging a sympoietic balance between ontologies. Recovering a dynamic of reciprocity between ontologies are key modes in disrupting the rapacious rule of ‘Our Masters’, as Carrington argues in ‘What is a Woman?’ and represents a move that is key to both women’s emancipation and the recuperation of the planet itself. In this way Carrington’s poster serves as powerful propaganda that unites those disempowered by a phallocentric order anchored by the mechanisms of humanism as Eburne and McAra explain: ‘Mujeres Conciencia is a work of agit-prop towards global overthrow of patriarchal systems: yet it is a call not to violence but to awareness […] Concentric and spiralling motifs recast the picture plane of male-dominated linear perspective as a field of recursion’ (Eburne and McAra 2019).

The poster thus serves as an instrument of peace where a gynocentric realm symbolised by the reciprocal Eve figures bears out Carrington’s hope in ‘What is a Woman?’ that a decision by ‘Women of the world’ ‘to refuse war, to refuse discrimination of Sex or Race’ would ‘allow life to survive on this planet’ (Carrington 1970, 374). In this vision Carrington eschews humanism’s imperialist foundations to emphasize instead ‘other axes of analysis’ within its categories in the manner that Braidotti’s posthuman politics calls for (Braidotti 2019, 48). As Mujeres Conciencia demonstrates, Mexico’s quest for a post-imperial identity resonated with Carrington’s own feminist politics where the country’s recourse to indigenous belief systems served as a mechanism in asserting a post-Eurocentric voice.

Conclusion

Carrington does not simply refuse Eurocentric humanist mappings; rather, as I contend, her relocation to Mexico enables new posthuman vistas in creative work that is in synthesis with her own evolving feminist politics. She thus forges a pathway out of European humanism’s discriminatory and reductive praxis, speaking to a locational feminism and Anzaldúa’s call to ‘root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul’ of Latin America. Mexico’s reclamation of indigenous culture plays a key role in Carrington’s work where beliefs in ecological entanglement and a reawakened interest in goddess figures are evoked in “El Mundo Mágico de Los Mayas” as well as her political engagement in the country’s feminist movement. Her evolving feminism was galvanised by her involvement with the feminist group Mujeres Conciencia as well as her contributions to the Mexican periodical S.NOB. Carrington’s work in Mexico does not mark a dismissal of European influence altogether but rather brings it into conversation with Latin American culture in a manner that overrides the Eurocentric essentialism underpinning humanism. Carrington’s acute awareness of the country’s past and its indigenous heritage is perhaps best summed up by the artist herself here. She explains that: ‘Once you cross the border and you arrive in Mexico you feel that you are coming to a place that’s haunted’ (Aberth 2010, 62). Her respect for the country’s cultural past and the way in which it potentially maps an exit from the colonialist narrative performs an affirmative haunting in Carrington’s oeuvre from this period, where the ghosts of an indigenous and pre-patriarchal past are given voice in order to articulate its future. Her work is doubly posthuman, not only giving agency to nonhuman realms but also intimating Mexico’s own culture of death where to die is not synonymous with termination but rather triggers the recirculation of life. In this way Carrington’s turn toward Mexico’s indigenous past maps a future for both her and the country itself, one no longer caught within a Eurocentric orbit that dictates Humanism as the ruling principle.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Eckersley

Karen Eckersley has recently submitted her doctorate and passed her viva in December 2022. Her interdisciplinary project was funded by the Vice Chancellor’s Studentship award at Nottingham Trent University. Her thesis was entitled ‘Out of this World: Surrealist Practice and Posthumanist Ethics in the Writing and Visual Arts of Elizabeth Bishop, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning.’ She has articles on Bishop and Tanning published in peer reviewed journals, examining their work from an ecological feminist perspective. Her most recent essay was published in Gothic Nature, exploring dark ecologies in Bishop’s poetry of the shoreline. Her first book chapter on Leonora Carrington, investigating her hybrid creatures, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in the collection Beastly Modernisms, edited by Alex Goody and Saskia McCracken

Notes

1. Gloria Anzaldúa (2012), 90. Anzaldúa, like Carrington, equates the destruction of Earth with the subordination of women and calls for a turn away from a white ‘Anglo’ point of view that leads us towards violence and futility. Instead, she points to the fecundity of the land and cultures of Latin America in reorienting white human exceptionalism in a treatise that espouses the philosophy that underpins this chapter. She explains, ‘By taking up curanderismo, Santeria, shamanism, Taoism, Zen and otherwise delving into the spiritual life and ceremonies of multi-colored people, Anglos would perhaps lose the white sterility they have in their kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals, mortuaries, and missile bases […] Let us hope that the left hand, that of darkness, of femaleness, of “primitiveness”, can divert the indifferent, right-handed, “rational” suicidal drive that, unchecked, could blow us into acid rain in a fraction of a millisecond’, p.91.

2. Tony Davies ([1997] 2008), 141. Davies posits that humanism has powered the ‘imperial destinies of nineteenth-century Germany, France and, supremely, Great Britain’, p.23. Critiquing humanism as a movement and a philosophy he argues further that ‘It is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in the name of humanity’, p.141.

3. Rosi Braidotti (2013, 25). Braidotti’s eschewal of such nationalism in her quest to move beyond Eurocentric humanism speaks to Ades’ insistence that Surrealism is about geographies, not nationhood. It thereby further demonstrates the way in which the movement has the capacity to think beyond the human in its mobile iterations of space, place and geography.

4. While it is true that the European surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s were already interested in the occult and magic due to its perceived connection with the irrational and unconscious worlds, Carrington’s immersion in Mexico galvanised a more feminist trajectory. Whitney Chadwick explains: ‘[…] it was in Mexico that she [Carrington] defined a relationship to the ancient healing arts that was not circumscribed by Surrealism’s belief in a childlike sorceress as the medium for male creative liberation’. Chadwick (1991), 13.

5. Carrington further explains: ‘My grandmother used to tell me we were descendants of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political and religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold’, Aberth, Leonora Carrington Surrealism, Alchemy and Art, p.12.

6. Carrington painted the mural in her studio in Mexico City using casein paints on curved wooden panels. It was installed in the Chiapas section of the city’s Museum of Anthropology and was then later moved to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of the Chiapas State in the late 1980s.

7. The practice of curanderismo is a Mexican healing tradition that encompasses the use of alternative therapies and medicines including acupuncture and homeopathy. It is grounded in the belief that illnesses have both natural and supernatural causes. Anzaldúa, cites the practice as one of the potential ways of navigating our way out of what she calls a homogenous Anglo ‘sterility’ towards a more interconnected and broader understanding of the belief systems and cultures that also constitute our species, Borderlands p.90–91. Carrington’s time with the Chiapas Indians was an immersive one. Chadwick explains that ‘Carrington’s knowledge of and respect for traditional healing arts inspired such trust that the curanderos shared with her their healing lore and permitted her to attend their ceremonies’, Leonora Carrington The Mexican Years, 23.

8. Jaguars are indigenous to Mexico and are the only extant member of the genus Panthera which are native to the country. Significantly, in Pre-Columbian Central and South America, the jaguar was seen as a symbol of strength and power.

9. Mujeres Conciencia is a totemic example of Carrington’s investment in the country’s new political trajectory—a vision that chimes with the posthuman feminist ecologies she articulates in her essay two years before. Such posthuman feminist ecologies where women and nature unite as a powerful force that has the potential to reconfigure phallocentric, humanist hegemony. It speaks to a kinship between ancestral natures and contemporary feminist concerns in Carrington’s Mexican oeuvre, demonstrating how ‘Feminist theories, politics, and fictions … can “play nature” with a vengeance by deploying discourses of women and nature in order to subvert them’. In this way they destabilise the ‘nature/culture divide whilst constructing feminist alliances with postmodern natures’. Alaimo (2000), 136.