Talk:Calafia

message: This topic has nothing to do with South America, Central America, or Brazil. It's a Spanish legend that was brought to North America. Lagringa 18:29, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, yes it does because they did come from South America  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.134.167.71 (talk) 22:29, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories 

message: I moved the article from Califia to Calafia because that's the spelling taken from the book by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. I removed a lot of text revolving around the hajj of Mansa Musa to Mecca in 1324 as none of it was supported by mainstream sources; it appeared to me to be original research. I added a great big section which describes the character and actions of Calafia in de Montalvo's novel. I added some text discussing the etymology of Calafia. Binksternet (talk) 04:11, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Major changes

message: The image for this article is called "aztec_man.gif" on the website it came from. I asked the uploader about this here (permalink). 107.215.218.145 (talk) 11:24, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The Aztec Man file name is wrong. The figure is the central character in a 1937 triptych mural titled "The Origin and Development of the Name of the State of California" painted by Lucile Lloyd. It is commonly called the Califia mural. Binksternet (talk) 14:24, 17 March 2023 (UTC)

text: I agree. The original triptych is on this page: https://capitolmuseum.ca.gov/exhibits/murals/ and if one looks at the whole image here: https://capitolmuseum.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/wpa_murals1.gif , the context is clearer. Renaming the image would be nice. Glennglazer (talk) 14:47, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Veracity of the depiction? 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
* 
Participate in the deletion discussion at the . —Community Tech bot (talk) 10:08, 8 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion 

message: I looked for the earliest instance of a writer connecting Rivera's Allegory of California with Calafia or Califia and found that none of them happened in the 20th century. During the first 70 years of people writing about the mural, none of them thought that the central figure was Calafia. A late-century example of this is mural expert Masha Zakheim (1931–2014) who wrote an essay about the mural included in her 1998 book Diego Rivera en San Francisco. Nothing in Zakheim's book connects the mural to Calafia. The 1997 book Rivera by art historian Andrea Kettenmann is a masterwork biography. On page 46 Kettenmann describes the mural without naming Calafia or Califia. Exactly the same as scores of Rivera studies preceding it.
The earliest instance of Califia/Calafia tied to Rivera that I found is this self-published webpage which Google search indicates is from February 2003. The author is Elisa Rolle, known for covering LGBTQ issues, but not considered an expert on Rivera, or art, or myth. Rolle writes that Califia is "the Earth Mother" which is wildly inaccurate. 
Another self-published webpage I found is identified by Google search to be from September 2009. It is a Diego Rivera biography published by the self-identified Rivera Experts who make money from evaluating Rivera artworks. The "Experts" write that Rivera "metamorphosed her [Califia] into Mother Earth, a goddess of abundance with her giant hands gathering up the rich plenty of the State of California." So if these unnamed folks can be considered actual experts of art and myth, they would be saying that Rivera ended up not painting Califia, but Mother Earth instead. 
After these appeared online, a few more showed up in blogs and public relations webpages. A photographer made the connection to Califia in 2010, and the City Club publicity team made the connection in 2011. Finance guy and magazine reader Kevin Moss of Berkeley was quoted by Sports Illustrated in July 2011. These folks are starting to prove the power of the internet to shape discourse. More such webpages are found in 2012 and later. The Woozle effect builds. People see the previous blogs and copy those ideas forward.
What I'm trying to do here is remind everyone that the first 70 years of literature on the topic represents the mainstream viewpoint. The mainstream viewpoint doesn't cite false words as belonging to Diego Rivera's autobiography. The mainstream viewpoint doesn't conflate a fictional black warrior queen with an allegorical light-skinned goddess of abundance. Binksternet (talk) 03:32, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: The historiography of this issue