Poster Children of the Sun

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between the Utah artist George Martin Ottinger’s Mesoamerican history paintings and Mormon beliefs and missionary efforts in northern Mexico. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) did not share prevailing nineteenth-century U.S. attitudes toward pre-Columbian peoples. While most U.S. artists and writers emphasized Aztec warfare and rituals of human sacrifice, Ottinger depicted Mesoamerican society as inherently peaceful and refined. Analyzing his paintings in relation to U.S. legal prosecution of LDS polygamous practice and contemporaneous Mormon settlement in Sonora and Chihuahua, I posit that Ottinger held a contradictory conception of Indigenous populations, simultaneously proclaiming LDS group affinity with a noble pre-Hispanic past and perpetuating disparaging settler-colonial tropes in his depictions of gender and race. His paintings operate in the cultural periphery of Mexico and the United States, yet in dialogue with the nationalist discourses of both countries to offer mainstream audiences a nonthreatening introduction to LDS scripture as well as a racial justification for Mormon spiritual and territorial expansion.