THE BURNING FLOWER: Color in Mexico

“Why was I given these hands full of color? - Carlos Monsivaís

Color is everywhere in Mexico. Street and market, food and dress, home and garden are suffused with it. Green of cactus, lime, cornstalk. Red of tomato, watermelon, bullfighter’s cape. Yellow of corn, cerveza, sunflower.

The colors come from nature, and from history. The Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo liked to point out that his pigments were drawn from the world around him: colors people see and use all their lives. Blue of indigo, water, sky. Orange of orange, purple of eggplant, white of plaster wall.

Sometimes the colors appear in arresting, even startling combinations. A green pickup truck passes by, brimming with bright orange blossoms, food for chickens so the yolks of their egg are a deeper yellow. Purple bougainvillea tumbles over a black wrought iron balcony against an eroding yellow wall, revealing layers of color beneath - traces of history and the passage of time. A woman in a turquoise blouse and red shawl, a bucket of pink roses on her head, pauses to look at riotously colored folk toys (juguetes) colliding on a market seller’s  blanket - a perfect example of what the Mexican writer Octavio Paz called “the fiesta of the object.”

In Mexico, every color goes with every other color - if you know how to do it. It is this “adventure in disorder”(in artist Chucho Reyes’ words) that determines the color in a striped serape, a Mexican kitchen, a market seller’s arrangement of multicolored plastic buckets. What counts is not abstract color theory but living affinities and relations. The Mexican architect Luis Barragán, when asked why color was the dominant element in his work, responded,”For the sheer pleasure of using and enjoying it!”

Brown of adobe, chocolate, coffee. Pink of conch, hibiscus, flamingo. The sun’s gold is an Aztec calendar, a church icon, a brass band in the plaza. A silver ingot from a Guanajuato mine is Taxco jewelry, a bayonet, fish scales…

Part of this visual affluence stems from Mexicans’ comfort with the idea of chance, luck, fortune. The lotería and other games of luck still thrive in Mexico. At some point, human effort must surrender before the capriciousness of fate, which may reveal the divine. “Chance,” the Mexican writer Gabriel Zaid has said, “is another name for God.” So colors freely combined become, in a sense, “an attempt to…give God a chance to intervene in my life.”

Visual color echoes a sense of color in all things. Sabor, sonido, salsa, sensación. Taste, sound, flavor, sensation. Mexican speech is rich with expletives and words of affection. This sensory profusion is understood to show generosity of heart and imagination. 

Sometimes color carries quite exact meanings. The Puebla dish chiles en nogada - green chiles, red pomegranate seeds, white sauce - transforms the colors of the national flag into a seasonal delicacy, coinciding with September’s patriotic festivities. Village walls or houses are painted a deep matte blue, azul añil, to protect against evil spirits. The richly colored woven huipiles (sleeveless tunics) worn by Mayan women bear information on village, rank, economic position, age, marital status, and occasion.

A strip of blue water, agua azul, glimpsed through green palms. A licuado (juice) stand proffering fat glass jars of papaya orange, horchata (almond drink) white, watermelon red, limón green, pineapple yellow…

Color also comments on its absence. The very sun that in Juan Rulfo’s famed novel Pedro Paramo “glowed on the stones, lit everything up with color” can also (in the same novel) burn, wither and destroy. Mexican life can be harsh, severe, scarcity stalks the land, crops fail, rivers dry up, children and animals die. Abundance is not to be taken for granted but celebrated. So color brings relief to the parched earth - the renewal of crops, water and life, birth and celebration: fiesta. The Huichol, people of peyote and the dry desert, chant: For we are all/children of a flower/a flower of brilliant color/a burning flower…

Excerpted from MEXICOLOR (Chronicle Books). Text: Tony Cohan. Photos: Melba Levick, Brenda Batthany, Masako Takahashi.