Sandy Rodriguez presents her new exhibition, *Tierra Insurgente*, at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in Washington Heights, featuring her hand-painted maps on amate paper alongside historic codices and globes from the institution's collection. Her works blend Mesoamerican and colonial-era imagery with contemporary symbols of state violence and resistance, such as riot police, calavera-style surveillance helicopters, and references to the 2020 racial-justice protests in New Orleans. Rodriguez uses natural pigments like cochineal and hand-processed minerals on bark paper, a material once outlawed by Spanish colonizers, to create a dialogue between past and present.
This exhibition matters because it foregrounds Indigenous and mestizo perspectives on history, resistance, and cartography, challenging dominant narratives of colonization and state power. By placing her contemporary maps alongside 16th-century codices—including the *Map of Tequaltiche* (1584) depicting a Caxcan rebellion—Rodriguez asserts a continuity of defiance and cultural survival. Her material choices, from amate paper to cochineal pigment, carry political and historical weight, linking ecological knowledge, colonial violence, and contemporary activism. The show exemplifies how contemporary art can engage critically with museum collections to reframe historical memory.