Dichos Mexicanos.
Dichos Mexicanos are sayings or proverbs that are handed from generation to generation as a way to preserve and teach important aspects of cultural wisdom, insight and philosophy. Mexican dichos are a big part of Mexican traditional culture. Often they rhyme, and sometimes humor makes them more memorable.
DICHOS are in-situ performances variables that mediate on the philosophies passed down by one generation to another.
Andamos Como Zopilotes
“We’re moving like vultures”
This dicho was used by my grandmother, it means that we’re moving like vultures, in other words, we’re going in circles.
She often used this dicho when my mom and I would take her out shopping and/or to the grocery store and we couldn’t find a parking spot, so she’d say with a giggle, “andamos como zopilotes!” because we were scavenging the parking lot and driving in circles in search for a parking spot. I wanted to draw connections between this dicho, Mexican culture, car culture, and the phenomenon of circular movements during meditation.
The Zopilote, also known as a Black Vulture,
The car is not just a mode of transportion, it's an emblem of achievement, community and cultural connection. Buying a car means a huge sacrifice. Lowrider cars had their origins in the 1940s, when Mexican American veterans began customizing vehicles to run "low and slow”. During the Chicano Movement in the 1970s, lowriders formed car clubs that sought out to help their community by using these cars for fundraising. In the 1990s, low riders became strongly associated with West Coast Hip hop and G-Funk culture and were often featured in music videos.
A doughnut or donut is a maneuver performed while driving a vehicle while rotating the rear or front of the vehicle around the opposite set of wheels in a continuous motion, creating (ideally) a circular skid-mark pattern of rubber on a carriageway and possibly even causing the tires to emit smoke from friction. Doughnuts performed in dust or mud are colloquially referred to as “circle work". Similary to this “circle work”, smoothly walking in a circle while moving through specific energy-enhancing postures creates a powerful current of internal Qi. Rotating and walking harmonizes the body’s energies with the cyclical, circular movements of the earth, stars, and planets, connecting us to the natural forces of which we are an intricate part.
For this dynamic drawing, I used a 2013 VW GTI coupe as a drawing tool.
The vulture is an important creature of symbolic and ritual value for the Maya. Strong powerful birds known as “garbage” eaters, they are indispensable to daily life.
Ancient Mayan culture considered that the vulture, by consuming the dead, cleans the earth, thereby renewing and transforming it. The black vulture appear in a variety of Maya hieroglyphs in Mayan codices
The black vulture has special legal protections under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in the United States, by the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds in Canada and by the Convention for the Protection of Migratory Birds and Game Mammals in Mexico.