Tlalli (; land or earth; Spanish transliteration: Tlali) is a sculpture of the head of a Indigenous woman by Mexican contemporary artist Pedro Reyes. A large-scale version was intended to replace the Monument to Christopher Columbus on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma, while a smaller version was exhibited at the Lisson Gallery in New York City in May 2021. In April 2026, a similar sculpture named Tlali, will be installed at a new wing opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The version intended for Paseo de la Reforma was inspired by the Olmec colossal heads and was meant to honor 500 years of the resistance of Indigenous women. The mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced on 5 September 2021 that Tlalli would replace the monument to Columbus, which had been removed from its plinth in October 2020, officially for restoration.
The announcement, design, name, and selection of Reyes as the sculptor, as well the undiscussed removal of the Columbus statue, received mixed opinions. Days later, following criticism, Sheinbaum said that a committee would determine the project's future, and in October she stated that a copy of The Young Woman of Amajac, discovered earlier that year, would be placed there instead.
Although the city government never formally declared the project canceled, journalists and scholars have generally regarded it as such. As of 2022, the proposal remained under consideration, but The Young Woman of Amajac had been given priority.
In the context of the commemorations of the 500th anniversary of the Fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire and present-day Mexico City, the city government announced several changes and celebrations to take place in 2021.
Tlalli was set to replace a monument honoring the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, originally located on a roundabout along Paseo de la Reforma, in Cuauhtémoc, Mexico City. The statue of Columbus was removed on 10 October 2020, prior to an attempted demonstration to topple it two days later, on Columbus Day. According to the city government, it was removed amid a series of restoration works carried out by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). The head of government of the city, Claudia Sheinbaum, said public debates would be held in 2021 to determine the future of the monument. On the other hand, the Committee for Monuments and Artistic Works in Public Spaces (, COMAEP) is responsible for evaluating, approving, and overseeing the installation, relocation, and conservation of monuments and public artworks in Mexico City.
On 5 September 2021, International Indigenous Women's Day, Sheinbaum announced that the statue of Columbus would not be returned to its original site. Instead, it would be relocated to Parque América in Polanco, in the city's borough of Miguel Hidalgo. She also said that Tlalli would replace the statue of Columbus, to honor 500 years of the resistance of Indigenous women, and that the relocation was not intended to "erase history" but to "deliver social justice". She also mentioned that the decision was taken after receiving 5,000 signatures from Indigenous women who called to "decolonize Paseo de la Reforma".
Tlalli was designed by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Reyes explained that the government had chosen him because there were few sculptors in the country specializing in monumental stonework and that the project had to be completed before March 2022.
Tlalli was planned to be made of volcanic rock and, before the project was canceled, was being sculpted in three workshops located in Iztapalapa, Chimalhuacán, and Coyoacán by women artisans and sculptors. In Coyoacán, where Reyes also lives, 150 of them were working on the sculpture.
Reyes said he felt honored to be selected to sculpt it, as there are no monuments honoring Indigenous women in the country, who, in his view, "have supported the country". The sculpture was named Tlalli (sometimes spelled Tlali), which means "land" or "earth" in Nahuatl. He stated that the sculpture reflected the common association of the Earth with "Mother Earth" rather than "Father Earth".
The sculpture was based on Olmec art, created by the Olmecs, a pre-Columbian civilization that developed during the Mesoamerican Preclassic Era. Reyes was inspired by the Olmec colossal heads and said he had difficulty transforming Tlalli into a female figure since the original heads were based on men.
Tlalli was projected to be a head high, supported by an additional tezontle base. Its diameter would have been with an approximate weight of . The eyes were inspired by those of a jaguar, and the lips were modeled on two snakes. For the hair, a pair of braids that converge at the occipital region were chosen to form a symbol of Nahui Ollin, the Earthquake Sun. According to Reyes, he first designed the figure to have a bun but anthropologists told him that pre-Hispanic cultures used braids that imitated the appearance of ears of ergots.
The announcement, the proposed design and name, the selection of Reyes as sculptor, and the removal of the Columbus statue without prior public discussion all drew polarized reactions. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador supported the decision to install the sculpture.
Regarding the removal of the Columbus monument, several commentators, including Reyes, noted that there had been previous attempts to topple it, including in 1992 by Indigenous groups, and that its removal aided its preservation and maintenance. For , then curator at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, the making of Tlalli exemplifies the process by which a work of a distinctly Mexican character is created by the government without public consensus, in which an author aligned with the administration in power is asked to reinterpret â in this case â an Indigenous representation, while historical elements are removed to assign them a new meaning favorable to political allies and tourists.
Art historian stated that even during the ruling of Porfirio DÃÂaz â which she described as authoritarian and patriarchal â monuments were installed following consultation processes. Deputy cited the removal of the Columbus statue of what he described as one authoritarian action performed by Sheinbaum. Journalist Eugenio Fernández Vázquez argued that within Morena â the ruling party of Mexico, of which Sheinbaum and López Obrador are members â critics are perceived as political opponents, which, in his view, fosters authoritarian resistance to dissent.
The choice of Reyes as the sculptor received criticism, namely because he is neither a woman nor Indigenous. More than 300 people associated with the arts and cultural sector signed a petition to Sheinbaum requesting the exclusion of Reyes from the project and the creation of a committee composed of women from Indigenous communities to choose a monument to represent them. Reyes said that the creator was not the most important part, as "nobody remembers who made the Statue of Liberty or the Angel of Independence "; instead, it is the artwork that prevails.
Other critics perceived Tlalli as a work intended to promote state-sponsored . The archeologist said the process reminded her of archaeological discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico region in the 1940s, the Olmec culture came to be regarded as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica. This interpretation was later adopted by politicians, who used reproductions of Olmec colossal heads in international exhibitions as symbols of a modern nation with a deep and rich cultural past. Josefa Sánchez Contreras, Zoque PhD candidate in Mesoamerican studies, called it an act of "desperate neoindigenism", which is added to other similar acts carried out by López Obrador during his presidential term, while in the rest of the country, infrastructure projects were developed on the lands of Indigenous peoples. Writers Gabriela Jauregui and similarly argued that the government attempted to use Indigenous women as an accessory while these are belittled, subjected to violence, silenced, disappeared, or killed for defending their lands.
Tlalli name received commentary, including from Mixe linguist and writer Yásnaya Aguilar, who questioned the Nahuatl name when Olmecs would have spoken MixeâÂÂZoque languages. She noted an inconsistency in selecting an Olmec woman to represent Indigenous peoples, arguing that, as a pre-Columbian society, Olmecs do not fit conventional definitions of Indigenous identity, which are often tied to communities that experienced colonization. Aguilar also criticized the generalization of women in public sculpture, in comparison to men who are individually honored. Similarly, researcher LucÃÂa Melgar commented that it represents women as "generic, mute and immobilized". Historian said Tlalli exemplifies an "essentialist view of Indigenous people as all the same".
In response to Tlalli, on 25 September 2021, a group of feminists installed Justicia, a purple wooden statue of a woman with a raised fist on the empty Columbus plinth. They symbolically renamed the intersection the (Women Who Fight Roundabout). Their project arose after the removal of the statue of Columbus but remained in the planning stages until the announcement of Tlalli. The decision to move forward with the installation was made after observing what they described as a series of missteps by the authorities.
Due to the controversy, Sheinbaum determined that the COMAEP would determine the most appropriate option to replace Columbus. On 12 October 2021, she proposed installing an enlarged copy of The Young Woman of Amajac, discovered in January, to replace the statue of Columbus instead of Tlalli. For Sheinbaum, the rejection of her proposal in favor of Columbus "revealed the classism and racism present in Mexico City".
Although the government of the city never announced the project's cancellation, journalists and academics have considered it canceled. According to Mexico City's Secretary of Culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, as of 2022 the project was still under consideration but The Young Woman of Amajac had higher priority.
A similar smaller version named Tlali (less than in diameter) was exhibited in Lisson Gallery in New York City in May 2021. Reyes exhibited Citlalli (Nahuatl for star) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey in March 2022, which, according to him, discusses decolonization as Tlalli does. The following month a six-meter-tall version of Citlalli was exhibited in San Antonio, Texas.
In spring 2026, a similar sculpture named Tlali was installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, United States. It took two years to complete and is tall. It was sculpted in Mexico and divided into sections to facilitate transportation. It was installed outdoors for the inauguration of a new building in April 2026.