Rocks

José Clemente Orozco’s lithograph Rocks (1935) marks the moment when the Pedregal, a seventy-square-mile lava field that borders the southwestern edge of Mexico City, was transformed from “unworkable stone,” a geological zone of nonlife, to an atavistic zone of indigenized life and the “soul of Mexico.” Executed approximately one decade after archaeologists had discovered the Cuicuilco pyramid and approximately one decade before the development of the spectacular suburban neighborhood it is known for today was underway, Orozco’s print does something unusual: it juxtaposes the Pedregal’s iconic volcanic stone with the seated, seemingly immovable, bodies of rough-hewn, indigenized women. Rocks draws together the geological and biopolitical, alerting us to what was at stake in the early twentieth century as archaeologists, geologists, and anthropologists began exploring the Pedregal as a possible resource for development. This essay situates Orozco’s lithograph within a history of these early excavations, the evolving visuality of the Pedregal as a nationalized geological zone, and patrimonial law. I argue that its production as a symbolic resource mobilized what Elizabeth Povinelli describes as geontology, the legislation of the distinction between being/bios and nonlife/geos that subtends liberal governance in settler societies. “Geontopower” constellates carbon-based and Indigenous imaginaries to territorialize, extract, and delimit Indigenous political claims. I read Orozco’s print as an ambivalent image of the racialization of territory necessary for settler colonial extraction in postrevolutionary Mexico, and I make an argument for the cultural agency of his “subjunctive aesthetics,” to borrow Carolyn Fornoff’s term, in the postextractivist politics of today.