Jiménez, Doña Luz, 1897-1965

Jean Charlot (1898–1979) and Luz Jiménez (1897–1965) each had an independent career: he as an artist and writer, and she as a model, informant, and author. They also had a long relationship that was important for the history of art and culture. They first met in late 1921 or early 1922, when Charlot was either twenty-three or twenty-four years old and Luz was a year older.[1] Luz became his model and visual inspiration. She also became his teacher of Náhuatl and Aztec culture, bringing him into her family in their village of Milpa Alta and taking him on their pilgrimage to Chalma. Eventually, Luz asked Charlot to be the godfather of her daughter Concha, which placed him in a compadre relation to the family, with important obligations for its spiritual and material welfare.[2] Charlot and Luz maintained that special connection throughout their lives, and their respective descendants remain close today.

The relationship of Charlot and Luz was, therefore, not the normal, unequal one between artist and model or researcher and informant. Luz was Charlot’s model but also his teacher. At times, Charlot employed her; at others, she and her family received him as a guest. Charlot was always aware of what he owed Luz:

She’s been a great influence on my art. She’s been a great influence in introducing me to what I could call my ancestors, that is, the Aztec Indians, because I am part Indian.[3]

Beyond his own debt to Luz, Charlot was well aware of her broad cultural contribution, which is being increasingly recognized:

[S]he was a person of importance in her Indian world, certainly, and this seeped out, I would say, to the other circles in Mexico, and she was considered like quite an important person. I think that when she died there was, by Anita Brenner, a sort of summary of her life in Mexico This Week [sic: Month] that suggests that she had put over that quality as a person that she had that was outstanding…She had certain things that were obviously important things, one of them the mastery of the Náhuatl language, so that she was considered by the ethnologists and archeologists as an important, we could say, "living link" with the Indian past. And as a person she was a grand person. That’s the only thing one can say.[4]

Luz most obviously transcended the role of artist’s model in her extensive work in language and culture:

She spoke beautiful Aztec. In fact, later on, when she was older, she was what is called an informant on Aztec languages in the School of Ethnology.

Jiménez, a Nahua woman from humble origins, posed for many of the greats of the Mexican mural movement: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and Fernando Leal, to name just a few. Thanks to them, her image adorns the walls of the national palace and other imposing buildings throughout the city’s historic center.

Despite this visibility, Jiménez lived in constant poverty and is scarcely remembered today. The story of how her image became so ubiquitous while she remained so obscure is as complex as the countless works of art in which she appears.
Born to a Nahua family in 1897 and christened Julia Jiménez González, Jiménez's early life and education were rooted in the small farming community of Milpa Alta, just south of Mexico City. Years later, she would recall how her relatively peaceful life was overturned by the Mexican Revolution. Of the violence that suddenly reigned in her once-tranquil home, Jiménez later told anthropologist Fernando Horcasitas: “The heavens did not thunder to warn us that the tempest was coming. We knew nothing about the storms nor about the owlish wickedness of men.”

A massacre at the hands of Venustiano Carranza’s army in 1916 took the lives of Jiménez’s father and all the other men of her village. Devastated and destitute, she was forced to move to Mexico City with her mother and sisters.

There, they struggled to make ends meet, selling bread and artisanal goods on the streets, according to her grandson Jesús Villanueva Hernández. Jiménez caught a break when she won an indigenous beauty contest in 1919. Shortly thereafter, she started going by “Luz” and began modeling at the outdoor painting schools that had sprung up across Mexico City as revolutionary violence transitioned into a decadeslong cultural revolution.