In our efforts to understand historical figures, whether they are artists, politicians, or literal agents of chaos, we sometimes lack nuance in the modern lenses we use to analyze them. It is important for me to state that I see great importance in pointing out when someone, whether it be now or decades ago, appropriates culture from marginalized groups, especially for profit.

However, I am getting ahead of myself. So, I will explain the chain of events that led a twenty-something girl to write an opinion piece on the hypothetical cancellation of an artist who is possibly the only Latina woman that has transcended time as an icon in art and culture. All of the thoughts I want to discuss arose over a simple TikTok video about the Mexican painter and feminist portrait cup frequenter, Frida Kahlo. While the video is now deleted (shocker), it simply credited an article and talked about how Frida Kahlo “appropriated culture” from indigenous groups in Mexico for her art, style, and public image during the time she was alive and creating.

Specifically referencing her 1943 painting, Diego on My Mind (Self-Portrait as Tehuana) where she paints herself as an indigenous woman from Tehuantepec. From the information presented in the sixty-second video, it seems pretty cut and dry. Frida Kahlo is not from Tehuantepec, so she shouldn’t be painting herself in their garments. Frida Kahlo is an appropriator that made great art; we should just celebrate the indigenous women who inspired her. This, of course, has no real cultural implications; now we can all move on to cancel whoever is next. Honestly, I wish it was this simple, but of course, it never is.

Commenters on this video stated they would no longer go to her art exhibitions and got into arguments about the intricacies of her race. They cited their distain for her use of indigenous culture due to her father being German and her mother being Mestiza. They said that her not being fully Mestiza is a big part of the issue. For those of you who may not know, a mestizo person is defined by Merriam-Webster as a person of mixed blood, specifically a person of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry. This video and its comment section sent me into a black hole of questioning my own interactions with my race so I did what any other girl my age would do. I copied and shared the link with a few of my smartest friends and asked for their opinions, which then led me to form my own.For those of you interested, here are a few quotes from the article cited. For context, the article is a transcription of a conversation between the curator of a Frida Kahlo exhibit and an interviewer.

The interviewer states the following:

"Self Portrait as a Tehuana," Kahlo painted herself as an indigenous woman from Tehuantepec. She said this to a magazine once: “I’ve never been to Tehuantepec, nor do I have any connection to the town, but of all Mexican dresses, it’s the one I liked the most, and that’s why I wear it.” If a non-native artist posted a similar photograph of themselves with similar reasoning on Instagram today, they would be “canceled” immediately. We would call it cultural appropriation.

Now, after reading the full article, it no longer seems simple. It seems complicated, and it is. Frida Kahlo was born in 1907. For the vast majority of her life, she was seen simply as Diego Rivera’s wife, and while she was successful, the base of her fame arose after her death. She used a lot of indigenous symbolism in her art and style. Knowing what tribes inspired her is important, but does her usage of these symbols and styles diminish her talent or her message? What was her motivation for her use of indigenous heritage? McKellgian Hernandez responds to the interviewers by saying, “(Frida Kahlo) inserts/ indigenous imagery into her work as a way to celebrate that heritage, which had long been marginalized in Mexican culture and Mexican art. So, in terms of the original audience for those paintings, no one in post-revolutionary Mexico would have read the image as Kahlo presenting herself as a Tehuana. It would have immediately been understood as part of that political celebration of indigenous culture to transform the national identity of Mexico. So I think it’s important not to lose track of the larger structural conditions in which that imagery emerges. It’s very different from this kind of discourse of appropriation that makes it all about the individual choosing to profit, exploit imagery.”

Another great article on the Legacy of Frida Kahlo is written by Joanna Garcia Cheran, An Indigenous Perspective on Frida Kahlo. She states, “Kahlo’s image and likeness will continue to be printed on everything from swap meet t-shirts to department store cosmetics. More nuanced discussions about the fraught nationalism to which she contributed, as well as the flattening of race, ethnicity, and nationality in Mexico are needed. While indigenismo was the creation of indigeneity without Indigenous voices, there are now opportunities to create a more inclusive dialogue about Kahlo by allowing Indigenous perspectives to reevaluate her legacy.” It needs to be said that Frida Kahlo pushed nationalism and mestizaje, which left indigenous people at the outskirts of culture in Mexico. We can see the impact of similar movements in the Colorism we see in Latin America today.

o how does any of this impact current interactions with race and heritage for Latino Americans and Latinos in general? Well, Frida Kahlo seems to simply have been trying to process her understanding of her identity during a time where one couldn’t simply order a 23-in-me. She saw herself in different aspects of Mexican culture she had no direct connection to, but don’t we do that now? Don’t Latinos all over the country, myself included, flock to any crumb of Hispanic representation we see? Personally, as a Colombian-American who has lived in the continental United States for a vast majority of my lifetime, it can be difficult not to try and connect with any aspect of Colombian culture I interact with. When visiting any city in Colombia, no matter how far or how foreign it is in culture from the city I was born in, I feel that I see a small glimpse of a heritage that I may have zero connection to or that I may not know I have a connection to. This longing to connect to your culture is exacerbated by the fact that in Latin America a vast majority of the population is Mestizo or mixed race. In Colombia, an estimated 53% of the population is Mestizo. In Mexico, an estimated 70%. Being Mestizo in Latin American countries comes from decades of mixing so many different backgrounds of European and indigenous blood that the one true label you probably identify with is Mestizo. You can have a hard time tracing your heritage back and even if you are able to, you may be multiple different types of indigenous and European. So Latino people seemingly cling to the aspects of their heritage they are able to relate to.

The Latino Community seems to have a clear understanding of cultural appropriation when it comes to other races appropriating Latino culture. The most recent example being white creators trying to popularize the “brownie lip” trend, which is simply the use of brown lip liner and lip gloss which had been previously called ugly and ghetto by the same group of people that now finds it to be trendy. However, the lines blur when it comes to conversations within the Latino community. I can’t speak for everyone, so here are a few questions we would all benefit to have opinions on. How do we within the Latino community define cultural appropriation within our own countries? Where do we draw the line, and should we even draw a line, when our races and heritages are already so hard to define due to the colonization of our bloodlines? Does a lack of awareness about the percentage of our blood that is truly indigenous affect how we should interact with aspects of culture we want to celebrate as our own? Should it?

All of this to say, I don’t care to defend Frida Kahlo. If it comes off that way, let me be clear. She was born so long ago that the thought of her perspective brings me to near hallucination, she supported a movement that eventually led to the alienation of indigenous tribes and she dated sketchy men. She also made interesting art that brought to light her interpretations and experiences with race and womanhood. She allowed the world to take minority artists more seriously during a time where the art world needed perspective more than anything. I simply think that what we may see as appropriation now may have been the same search for a connection to an ambiguous heritage that so many Latinos yearn to find today. On top of this, we sometimes jump to using a moral framework in every aspect of culture we try to examine in the U.S. Art is a hard medium to pass judgment on from an ethical lens, and I wonder if we always benefit from trying to cancel people for their art. When, in this specific instance, we should instead be talking about her legacy. She helped create a nationalism that pushed indigenous people out of conversations. Indigenous people should, of course, be at the forefront of talking about the impact that Mexican nationalism left in their country today. However, can we blame the lasting negative impact of an entire movement, that was trying to resolve the aftermath of years of war, on a singular artist? We would benefit more from full conversations about race and the impacts of a culture that caters to lighter-skinned Mestizos in Latin America. I also think that the way Latinos interact with our heritage and race is so incredibly complicated due to the majority of us being so mixed in race. It doesn’t help that American-centric views on race and heritage can leave those in the United States lacking a critical amount of scope for issues that occur outside our borders. A conversation such as this one would look different in a Hispanic country because there are different views on what it means to share culture. As Latino-Americans, we should be more careful to make blanket statements on people from other countries and the roles they played within those countries without a clear explanation. We should all aim to understand our heritage and our unique experiences within our race. We shouldn’t penalize people for how they choose to do that. We should also never shy away from expressing how we see our race, especially in a medium as limitless as art. I find that passing judgment on how anyone tries to understand where they come from does more harm than good. Minimizing issues such as “Indigenismo” in Mexico that still impact real people today by calling Frida Kahlo an appropriator with no real explanation helps no one. It usually ends the conversation, and if it doesn’t, we just see people going back and forth in comment sections arguing about whether or not they should attend the exhibition of an artist that has been dead for more than 50 years. It doesn’t allow any of us to try and understand how we got to our current understanding of race in Latin America. Frida Kahlo and her alleged TikTok cancellation are an example of a good subject that could lead to complex conversations about race but instead becomes a sixty-second internet judgment call.