Visions of Utopia V

The Mexican Revolution, Surrealism, Muralism

The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920+)
• TheMexican Revolution is one of the great two revolutions of
the post-Independence period that redefines the Latin
American collective imaginary; the other one being of course
the Cuban Revolution.
• Byredefining the cultural imaginary I mean that it became a
singular event by virtue of which Latin American nations
reconceived of their own possibilities and destiny.
• Itwas not only marked by a long process of political revolt
and emancipation, but crucially with the emergence of new
artforms and intellectual production.
 Beginning of the Mexican Revolution, 1910.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images from The Latino American Experience database.
It depicts Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South (Ejército Liberador del Sur)
The Mexican Revolution
• In particular, the Mexican Revolution was the distinctive
moment in which the influence of surrealism became
determinant for Latin American culture, which as we shall
see determined not only the emergence of painting and
literature, but also continues well after the 1920s eventually
the emergence of magical realism, and other forms of literary
and artistic practice in the 1940s-1960s.
• Indeed, as we saw with indigenismo, there was a
‘cosmopolitan’ spirit of exploration with new forms of thinking
and practice, in philosophy, arts and politics, which together
compose the singularity of the Mexican Revolution not only as
an event but as a process.
Brief Historical Periodization
• The wellspring of the revolution is
the collective uprising against the
31 year rule of dictator General
Porfirio Diaz (El Porfiriato 1876-
1911). Diaz was himself a national
hero, protagonista in the Battle of
Puebla in May 5th 1862.
Francisco Miranda’s
Representation of the
Battle of Puebla, 1872
 Brief Historical Periodization
• There was political opportunism and
an outraged peasantry.
• The landowner Francisco Madero
ran against him in 1910 but he was
jailed before the election; he escaped
and wrote the Plan de San Luis de
Potosi, which announced the revolt.
He took power in November 1911
after a new electoral period with the
aid of the Zapatistas and Pancho
Villa, expanding into the middle
class and agrarian populations.
Brief Historical
Periodization
• Madero kept the Federal Army, which
would lead to his demise. He was
assasinated in 1913 by the plot of the
reactionary Victoriano Huerta, who
comes into power with the aid of the
Federal Army.
• The failure to consolidate a new power
led Mexico into Civil War in 1914. In
1915 General Venustiano Carranza from
the Northern Constitutionalist front took
power, defeating Pancho Villa and
Emiliano Zapata in the Battle of Celaya.
He disbanded the Federal Army.
Brief Historical
Periodization
• The
armed conflict ensued
until 1917, when the
Mexican Constitution was
drafted. The period from
1917-1940 is the process of
consequences and
implementation of the
revolution.
1917 Mexican
Constitution
 The Three Great Generals
Venusiano Carranza Francisco “Pancho” Villa Emiliano Zapata
Muralismo
• Since the opposition to Porfirio Diaz took shape, an
intellectual group of thinkers, activists and artists
began at once cultural revolution: above all, Antonio
Curo, Alfonso Reyes and José Vasconcelos, together
with artists José Guadalupe Posada, and Gerardo
Murillo, also known as Dr. Atl: the creator of the first
Modern mural, which was at first a depiction of the
Mexican rural landscape.
«No nací pintor, nací caminante y el caminar me ha
conducido al amor por la naturaleza y el deseo de
representarla» - Murillo
Muralismo
• The mural should then shift as the revolutionary
movements developed to a social realist and indeed
socialist register, aiming to become a representation of
Mexican everyday life and indigeneous culture,
revolutionary struggle, and the Latin American ethnic-
social tensións, adorning buildings, schools, offices... The
muralist movement, which would become concentrated in
the 1920s, but would continue for decades, until today.
• Thethree most famous names in the movement (“los tres
grandes”) include: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco,
David Alfaro Siqueiros...
Muralismo
“The muralists portrayed the Aztec warriors battling the
Spanish in their fight for the independence, humble peasants
fighting in the Revolution, common laborers of Mexico City
using fresco, encaustic, mosaic of glass, ceramic and metal, and
sculpture-painting. They worked in the country’s urban areas
and were prominent political activists overall, dedicated to
creating modern Mexico. Their communist backgrounds and the
respect for Marxism and class struggle, however, were often
visible in their murals, although always subtly and never quite
radically...” – Angie Kordic, 2016
Los Tres Grandes: Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros
• Diego Rivera was the most famous and traditional, influenced by European Modernism in his
work, particularly Cubism. Rivera represented Mexican people as grandiose, paying tribute the
hard workers in the most respectful way.
• Drawing from the European expressionism, José Clemente Orozco emphasized human suffering
and cruelty and the horrors of the Mexican Revolution, in which he fought. His murals were
often defaced and even threatened to be whitewashed by the government for their explicitly
straight-forward content, and he himself was proclaimed “sick” by a number of art critics.
Another aspect of Orozco’s work is the fear of mankind’s ever-growing dependency on technology
and the incredible power it will have over us in the future.
• The youngest and the most radical, David Alfaro Siqueiros was also the most innovative, having
used unusual techniques such as pyroxlene, a commercial enamel and Duco, a transparent
automobile paint. He was also among the first to experiment with acrylic, resins and asbestos. A
fan of “accidents” in his painting caused by color or the very act of creation, the artist
incorporated science, technology and machinery into his work while still holding on to the
primary task of conveying a message to common people. The art of Siqueiros evoked speed and
progress, but also the kind of political vision that was not well received by the authorities in
Mexico, or the United States – which is why today most of his murals can be found in South
America.
Diego
Rivera-
El Hombre
en la
encrucijada
La Historia
de Mexico,

1934, - deconquista
la

Palacio-de-
al futuro,
1929-1935.

Bellas Artes-
Mexico-City
Diego Rivera-
El Hombre en la
encrucijada 1934,
-Palacio-de-Bellas
Artes-Mexico-City
José Clemente
Orozco
Zapatistas –
Moma, 1931
José Clemente
Orozco
El Banquete de los
Ricos
David Alfaro
Siqueiros
La Marcha de la
Humanidad,
1971
Surrealism and Disappointment
• Just like Muralism was the visual form of a new kind of Latin
American modernism that coincided with the Mexican
revolutionary experience and its aftermath, so the surrealist
literature became the form to describe the effects of the
revolution and Mexican history.
• Like Muralism, surrealism is interested in the distortion of the
world of representation, the deformation of the body and the
landscape, the saturation of the world by a chaotic flux of energy
that disturbs it or chaos.
• Above all, surrealist writers aimed to think of the consequences
of the revolutionary process, its disappointment, and the
coldness of the world which the poor inhabit. This would become
hugely influential in the coming decades in constructing the
magical realist imaginary.
Cesar Moro (1903-1956)
• He was the first poet to publish in André Breton’s
journals. He spent a large fraction of his life in Paris, and
was both a writer and painter.
• While he sought to follow Mariátegui and Vallejo, who
had themselves written about surrealism as a progressive
artistic movement, he distanced himself from indigenismo
and the depiction of Peruvian reality.
• He conceived of his poetic and visual art as part of an
integrated practice, Following Breton’s suggestion that
collage in painting was analogous to poetry in literature.
• He brought and organized many surrealist exhibitions in
South America and Mexico, supported by Breton himself.
 Untitled 1927
Collage, Getty
Research
Institute
 Photograph of Moro
Buried in Sand, 1939
Juan Rulfo (1917-1986)
• It was with Juan Rulfo that we see the surrealist form of artistic
expresión reunite itself to the mission of social realism.
• Rulfo’s two major works were a collection of short stories (El
llano en llamas, 1953) and arguably the most influential novel of
Latin American fiction before the Boom: Pedro Páramo (1955).
• A precursor to García Marquez’s Macondo from One Hundred
Years of Solitude, Rulfo’s novel takes place in the ghost-town of
Comala, to which the wanderer Juan Preciado arrives in search
for his father, Pedro, who is the figure of a abusive landlord,
who impregnates women and devastates the town. Comala is
haunted by spectral figures of the past, which haunt Preciado
with the shadow of the failed revolution, the barren countryside,
forgotten, with its dead carried as a burden on the living.
Juan Rulfo (1917-1986)
• Luvina is one of the most celebrated stories from El llano en
llamas; another sordid tale of what appears as a haunted
landscape, the town in the mountain of Luvina.
• It is flagelating by a destructive wind which, however, also
mitigates the punishing sun. Luvina is an arid land, haunted by
desolation, in which the women await their husbands as they
become impregnated, and in which the youth leave.
• The story is told in the form of a dialog: two ‘professors’ are
drinking; it begins in medias res, as one of the professors
narrates to the other, who remains quiet throughout the
narration, about the punishing reality of Luvina, beginning with
its arid topograpy and weather, and ending with a description of
its fractured society. Another ghost town.
• “You will see”, he repeats again and again.
Juan Rulfo (1917-1986)

“But if we leave... Who shall carry our dead? They live

here, and we cannot leave them alone”

"Pero si nosotros nos vamos, ¿quién se llevará a

nuestros muertos? Ellos viven aquí y no podemos
dejarlos solos.”