The elements of ritual and nature-centered theology prominent in the Fetish works were a synthesis of the investigations (by artists like Betsy Damon, Mary Beth Edelson, and Jane Ellen Gilmore) into goddess-centered spirituality, her own Cuban heritage, and the aesthetics of disappearance. The synthesis that Mendieta attempted in the Fetish series achieved its fullest expression in perhaps the best known of her sculptural works, the Rupestrian Sculptures, which she executed in the Escaleras de Jaruco outside Havana in 1981. She carved these relief figures in and around a large cave accessible only through dense jungle. The reliefs were inspired by her readings of Lydia Cabrera's books about the Taino (native Indians of Cuba). Mendieta invokes the Taino culture, religious beliefs, and language in the Taino words with which she titled the carvings. Like the Taino, Mendieta's sculptures are destined to live and die with the earth to which they are connected. While I will pursue the gender implications of her earthworks in subsequent chapters, it is important to note from the outset that Mendieta's work also provoked goddess spiritualism and troubled her female colleagues' undifferentiated notion of the feminine. In her recent reexamination of the trend, Gloria Feman Orenstein (an important early exponent of the movement) explains:
"In the seventies, women artists reclaiming the Goddess were looking for a unity beyond the pluralism of culturally specific symbols. It was important to them to learn that Goddesses once existed everywhere, and that their presence tended, on the whole, to give women higher status in their societies. At the time, feminists did not realize that this retrieval of a worldwide Goddess civilization was largely being done by white, middle-class women for the sake of what some have called an "essentialist" theory until it was pointed out to them."
Although Mendieta was sympathetic with this movement's goals, she distanced herself from what she called "white feminism" and the interests in the body, goddess culture, and the earth maintained by her white colleagues. Mendieta did express an interest in the earth as goddess, leading Orenstein, along with other writers such as Christine Poggi, Monica Sjōō, and Barbara Mor, to see her art as evidence of a growing trend among early second wave feminists to find empowerment in primordial female archetypes. But what Orenstein and the other white critics overlook is the extent to which Mendieta's notion of the earth as goddess was culled from her knowledge of Santeria and her readings about the beliefs of the Taino. Not recognizing the critical difference between their own and Mendieta's fascination with the earth, they appropriate Mendieta to a white goddess model and dis-locate her understanding of the earth from its origins in specific Cuban cultural traditions. It is difficult not to read this dis-location as a "whitening" of the image of the earth goddess, as a way of purifying it of its roots in African and indigenous cultures.
Jane Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta?: Identity, Performativity, and Exile
