Frida is a lightning rod because her multiple identities and her self-fashioning make her highly visible, but the entirety of Mexican culture is predicated on that same appropriation. It isn't just that Frida is particularly egregious; Mexico is a colony.

Throughout various periods of Mexican art the taste for indigenous motifs and subjects has shifted, but the project of "mexicanizing" the children of settlers has always relied on that appropriation. You're as guilty of it as Frida is, as am I, as are all non-indigenous Mexicans.

The question is, for me, again, because this discourse happens every day, what is it about Frida's huipil and traje de tehuana that elicits particular scorn? Why is someone like Gerardo Murillo—who renamed himself Dr. Atl—or Diego Rivera not subject to the same?

I have always suspected it's been misogyny and misunderstanding the context of Frida Kahlo's life in the long arc of Mexican art history and popular culture, but the last few years really have cemented that opinion for me.