Yvette Mayorga’s Magic Grasshopper sits outside of the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida. The thirty-foot sculpture is a marzipan coated marvel, a baby pink carriage with team of white horses loaded with piles of pink luggage adorned with smiley faces and neon-bright flowers. On the carriage’s wheels is flowing delicate white script which reads “Where Dreams Are Made.” The carriage doors are embellished with swooping arcs of piped acrylic, like floral garlands or cake frosting. A small painting on the doors depicts the same image: two pink figures merging while standing upon a field of green crops under a powder blue sky.
According to the exhibition’s text, the work’s title is reference to the Nahuatl, an indigenous Mesoamerican language, word “chapultepec”, which means the “hill of the grasshopper.” The image conjured by the figures on the carriage’s doors bring to mind a grasshopper’s own angular appendages, their joint body pointy with limbs, rising into the blue sky. Mayorga is an artist deeply invested in Latinx histories and diasporas, considering her own family’s early migration from Jalisco, Mexico, to Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. She is an artist committed to understanding how origin stories transform through retelling. It makes sense then that Mayorga’s Magic inspiration isn’t necessarily the Nahuatl relationship with grasshoppers or the natural world writ large, but rather how this piece of history, embodied in a single word, lives on in Mexico City’s Castillo de Chapultepec. The castle was the imperial residence of the Emperor and Empress during the Second Mexican Empire in the 1860s. The carriage itself is then modeled after the imperial carriage, which was styled after the French King Louis XVI’s coronation coach at the palace of Versailles.
To describe her practice Mayorga coined the word “Latinxoco”, a portmanteau of Latinx and Rococo, to articulate what she sees as the shared proclivity for maximalism, decadence, and adornment present in both the royal courts of France and the colonial palaces of Mexico. However, Mayorga doesn’t just use Latinxoco as a framework to think through the complexities of this particular transcultural exchange, but allows for it to exist as something supple and playful: an aesthetic theory, a shared joy, a colorful flag firmly planted that encapsulates kingdoms and piped acrylic homages to her mother’s early work in Chicago bakeries. Pleasure then is Latinxoco’s eldest daughter and sister in arms, for Mayorga’s work is also an ode to the pleasure. Under Mayorga’s gaze there’s a glory to the tangible, the tactile, this is the stuff from which dreams are made.
Mayorga’s care with histories, memories, and items both small and large allows for Magic Grasshopper to function like a Trojan Horse. For under the shiny exterior of ponies and pink shoes, Hello Kitty backpacks straight from a girlhood dream, exists a vehicle with a powerful intellectual engine. The carriage transverses time, histories, kingdoms, and cultures. Here too exists the presence of migration, luggage from home intended for someplace else, someplace new, and the memory of another life’s green hills. This carriage then is not just a carriage, but something older, something magical.
