Recently, visual art from the Texas-Mexico border has evoked the region’s troubling history. El Paso artist Angel Cabrales has made important contributions to this story. But Cabrales’ new show of sculptures and resin wall hangings, The UnColonized: A Vision in the Parallel, presents a lesson in history not as it happened, but as it might have been.
On display at the Chamizal National Memorial until January 16, the show imagines a forked timeline. This dual chronology—half real history, half artistic license—takes the form of a two-headed serpent printed along one wall of the exhibition. The split occurs around the year 1511, just before conquistador Hernan Cortés arrives in what is now Mexico. Along the upper fork of the timeline, we see Western Hemisphere history as we know it: smallpox, Cortés’ conquest of the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), Pizarro’s defeat of the Incas, the North and South American colonies, slavery, revolution, world wars, and the U.S. empire.
