In many ancient burials in what is today the Mexican state of Colima, canine figures serve as guardians of the afterlife.
The red clay vessels, posed sitting or standing at attention, are replicas of the dogs that people kept as companions in life. Indigenous people living 2,000 years ago included the small figurines among their ritual burial objects.
Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum houses several of these Colima dogs.
To Julio Medina, assistant professor in the Dance and Movement Studies Program, the figurines are much more than museum pieces. They evoke his personal history.
Medina grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by his family’s chihuahuas — descendants of the ancient breed that inspired the statues. The Colima dogs also remind him of his ancestors and an Indigenous identity whose practices and beliefs he has recently begun incorporating into his life.
Specifically, these guardians of the afterlife make Medina think of his late grandmother, who lived in Colima and died in 2023.
He didn’t get to say goodbye to her.
And so, when he learned about a Carlos Museum exhibit inviting local artists and Emory faculty and staff to create responses to objects in the museum’s care, he was drawn to “Vessel in the Form of a Standing Dog.” He knew his artistic response would bid farewell to his grandmother.
‘Calling’ across space and time
“Call and Response,” on display at the Carlos Museum through June 22, features five cultural objects from disparate eras and locales. These include a Colima dog, a mask of the Mende people of Sierra Leone, a Palmerian funerary relief from Syria, a Jain pilgrimage map from India and a letter to the dead from ancient Egypt. The exhibit is funded by the Charles S. Ackerman Fund and the Christian Humann Foundation.
Canine figurines like “Vessel in the Form of a Standing Dog” guarded the afterlife in one preclassic region of Mexico. Image by Michael McKelvey.
The corresponding “responses” by community artists, faculty and staff curators include interviews and cultural performances as well as video installations. The voices of Mende descendants, Syrian women and members of Atlanta’s Jain community foreground the cultures represented by the artifacts on display.
“The object is calling across generations, across time and place, informing us about its context, its history and the way it was used within the community,” says Masud Olufani, an Atlanta artist, educator and writer who is also head curator of the exhibit. “And the curators are responding to that creatively.”
The term “call and response” comes from African American music tradition, which in turn, Olufani notes, hails from a West African tradition in which an individual calls out a musical line and the community responds.
The result is an “oscillating energy between the lead singers and the people responding,” he says, drawing a parallel to the energy between the “call” of a cultural artifact and its curator.
Henry Kim, director of the Carlos Museum, says this approach is “an important first step in changing the narrative of how we talk about museum objects and culture in general. ‘Call and Response’ places community collaboration at the center. We are discovering fresh perspectives on familiar objects and creating a dynamic new model for storytelling.”
A personal ‘response’
Medina, who completed a bachelor’s degree in dance and movement studies as a QuestBridge Scholar at Emory, secured a research grant in 2023 to study the cultures and belief systems of ancient Mexico in and around Colima.
In the video performance “Nosihtsin: a Farewell Dance,” Julio Medina travels through the afterlife in search of his departed grandmother and his Indigenous heritage. Image by Felipe Barral and IGNI Productions.
It was a way to connect to the Indigenous part of his heritage, which he says he didn’t acknowledge for many years.
Like many people of Mexican ancestry, Medina identifies as mestizo, or mixed-race. But growing up in Los Angeles, he says, “I identified as Hispanic or Latino in the context of living in the United States, always aspiring to the American dream, so not really learning about my ancient ethnic culture.”
What launched him on this journey of reflection and study, he says, was hip-hop, which Medina has taught for years.
“There’s this idea in hip-hop called ‘knowledge of self,’” he says. “If you know yourself in every way, then you can really express yourself and dance to the fullest.”
He was thinking about this in 2020, during the racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd. “That’s what set me on the journey to learn: ‘Who am I?’”
In September 2024, his research resulted in “return//de vuelta a los ancestros,” a dance performance at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts.
“It really did feel like a return to a knowledge that was already in my body,” says Medina. “It’s this very deep knowledge and it’s all rooted in observance of nature.”
But Medina knew there was more to learn. After his grandmother died, he found himself curious about Mictlan, which means “place of rest” in the Indigenous Nahuatl language.
His contribution to “Call and Response” includes a video of a performance titled “Nosihtsin: a Farewell Dance.” Nosihtsin, Medina explains, is a Nahuatl word for “grandmother.” The video shares a room with the Colima dog and an altar Medina made to honor his grandmother.
A dance of farewell and reunion
Her name was Guadalupe, but they often called her “Ama Lupe.” “Ama” is short for “Mama,” because his affectionate grandmother was so like a mother to everyone.
“She had this loud, cackling laugh,” he says, “and she loved to dance.” Her favorite music was cumbia, a style of music and dance originating in Colombia.
In his own dance performance, Medina travels through six levels of the afterlife, seeking both his lost grandmother and his Indigenous identity.
He begins the dance by calling to each of the six cardinal directions recognized in what is known as Mexican concheros dancing, which evolved from pre-Columbian religious ritual. In his performance, Medina dances with a conch shell from Colima given to him by his father.
Each section of the dance represents a different trial of the afterlife. Mountains, stiff winds and harsh cold all face our traveler.
“I was asking myself, ‘Okay, well, how would I move with the landscape?’” recalls Medina. “That was ultimately what drove my choreography,” a combination of movements inspired by Aztec dance, hip-hop, modern dance and styles like cumbia.
The dance is, enthusiastically, an amalgamation, “because that’s how I feel the world,” he says. “These cultures come together in one body. Yes, I identify as Mexican; yes, I identify as Indigenous, and I also identify as American. So, all these movement cultures are present inside of me.”
He says he hopes “Nosihtsin: a Farewell Dance” feels like a reverent space for visitors, adding, “I appreciate the work that that Emory and the Carlos are doing to support me as an artist of color, an Indigenous artist, especially in my journey to reclaim that.”
In the performance’s final stage, the recorded voice of his grandmother joins composer Jorge Reyes’ soundtrack — which melds ambient and traditional music — as she says, “Mijo,” short for “my son” in Spanish. It’s a response to the “call” embodied by Medina’s performance and, for the first time in the dance, we see him smile — a wide, childlike grin.
“I feel like this is a childlike or adolescent version of myself,” he says, making the dance something like a coming-of-age story. In reuniting with his lost grandmother, he finds his heritage, too.