IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The American Southwest, much like Istanbul, has long been a meeting point and space of transformation for artistic, architectural, and cultural practices. The region’s santos or “saint”-making painting and sculpture tradition emerged in the late eighteenth century through the blending of European and Native American aesthetics. Today, contemporary santeros (saint-making artists) add new layers of imagery and materials to this already syncretic artform. Both historical and contemporary santos remain deeply tied to the cultural and natural environments of the Southwest—not only in what they depict, but in how they are made. Their iconography and styles reflect the space of nepantla, an Indigenous term describing a powerful zone of cultural mixing. Literally meaning “the place between two rivers,” nepantla evokes placemaking, movement, and the dynamism of cultural contact. In santos, nepantla appears through blended iconographies and stylistic traditions, as well as through the use of agentive natural pigments, wooden supports, and other local materials that root the works in the Southwest landscape. Three centuries after the first examples were created, santo-making remains a vibrant artistic practice. As such, I argue that this tradition functions not only as a meeting place between cultural regions but also as a bridge across temporal divides. The santos legitimize syncretic artistic practice as a true artform—one that, by extension, validates mixed-race identities—while grounding contemporary communities in the enduring power of ancestral time.