The Shattered Chains of Memory: Reframing the Conquest

This reimagining of Diego Rivera’s  The Colonization of Hernán Cortés abandons the static historical tableau in favor of a living, breathing storm of resistance and memory, titled  The Shattered Chains of Memory . In this piece, colonization is not rendered as a mere chapter of history—it becomes a cycle of domination and liberation, unfolding through fragmented bodies, broken chains, and the ghostly echoes of struggle. Rivera’s monumental depiction of conquest and resistance provides the foundation, but here, it is fractured and reassembled into a visual invocation of ancestral endurance. 

The foreground still anchors itself to Rivera’s recognizable figures—armored conquistadors, bent indigenous laborers, pack animals burdened with spoils—drawn in Rivera’s distinctively grounded and earthy style. Yet as the eye travels upward, this ordered narrative dissolves into chaos: great hands, sculpted in monumental black stone, rise and tear themselves apart. Chains disintegrate mid-air, symbolizing the violent rupture of civilizations and the aching birth of new hybrid cultures. The hands—anonymous, colossal, and textured with cracks—embody both the oppressors and the oppressed, suggesting that colonization scars all sides in different ways. 

Behind the ascending hands, a burning sky roars with ghostly images of battleships, spears, and fleeing figures. This sky, simultaneously metallic and organic, serves as a reminder that conquest was not a clean line from victory to domination, but an ongoing storm of destruction, survival, and adaptation. Flying creatures—half-birds, half-fish—twist through the air, symbolizing lost mythologies and the fractured spiritual worlds that once thrived in pre-Columbian America. 

The color palette weaves an emotional map through this turbulence. At the base, Rivera’s tones dominate: warm ochres, dusty terracottas, deep umbers, and muted reds. These colors, baked into the earth itself, symbolize the indigenous bloodlines and soil uprooted by conquest. Their heavy, matte texture reinforces the idea of weight—the crushing physical burden imposed upon those who toiled under colonial rule. 

Ascending through the broken chains, the colors shift dramatically into deeper blacks and bruised greys, wrapped around the rising hands. These darker hues represent both the obliteration of ancient cultures and the overwhelming grief carried through generations. They create a somber, almost funereal atmosphere, yet within this darkness is the first shimmer of something else: resilience. 

At the highest points of the piece, light invades. Flames of amber, scarlet, and copper tear through the scene, representing not just destruction but transformation. These searing colors evoke both violence and the raw energy of resistance. They are the hues of both fire and sunrise—signaling that even amidst conquest and erasure, rebirth is possible. The broken chains glow like embers, suggesting that freedom, once torn from the body, continues to burn in the memory. 

The scattered mythic creatures—rendered in silvery blues and pale alabaster—act as fragile emissaries of lost cosmologies. Their cool, spectral hues provide a mournful counterpoint to the heated drama below. They shimmer like mirages, signifying the persistence of indigenous spirits even when their empires fell. 

When I created  The Shattered Chains of Memory , I did not want to simply retell the conquest narrative. I wanted to suggest that colonization is not a finished act sealed in history—it is an echo that continues to ripple through identity, art, culture, and the land itself. Rivera painted the conquest with weight and gravity; I sought to fracture that gravity into a living storm. In doing so, I hoped to show that every act of remembering, every act of artistic creation, is also an act of resistance against erasure. 

The vertical movement of the piece is intentional. It draws the eye from the weighted figures of Rivera’s earth-bound conquest up through the grasping, fracturing hands toward the burning heavens. The eye journeys from submission toward rupture, from silence toward scream. There is no neat resolution; there is only movement—an eternal ascent of broken forms seeking sky.