2003 / Oil on canvas / Artist: Alfredo Esquillo Jr / Kim and Fely Atienza collection

Esquillo turns an otherwise cloying motif of the mother and child to play up the roles taken in asymmetrical colonial relationships. The painting was one of the most cited pieces in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2003 exhibition The American Effect: Global Perspectives on the United States 1990-2003. In turning the iconic image on its head, Esquillo deliberately renders the visages in MamaKinley as put-on or appended with the face “seams” showing, thus making transparent the performative aspect of the pairing. In the painting, maternal tenderness is subverted when one of the encircling hands of the parental stand-in, American Gov-Gen William McKinley, is turned into an eagle’s claw and a rifle’s edge peeks out of another sleeve. In the painting, McKinley coddles an infantilized colonial subject whose face arguably passes off as a young Emilio Aguinaldo. MamaKinley, along with other works in the exhibit, may be faulted for cliché demonizing of an already much-caricatured imperial power, yet the painting still emotionally resonates in the way the metaphorical adult figure keeps the toddler-midget in check even if appearing unhappy in his arms. Esquillo further paints stern rather than endearing expressions on both the parent’s and child’s faces. Even on the count of dress, the voluminous fabric physically outfitting the baby only subtly disguises a still very readable American pennant that practically swaddles, if not smothers, the child into submission.

MamaKinley was shown in America at a time when post-9/11 critique of Unites States retaliatory measures done in the name of its “war on terror” was hushed if not suspected of being unpatriotic under a heightened homeland security context. Esquillo has since painted a sequel to the work, which is less faithful to the paper doll cutout character of the figures in MamaKinley. This sequel, MamaKinley 2, 2008, would inevitably be read against global realignments where the United States is no longer seen as the impregnable imperial power that it used to be.