A unique feature of the Mexican Revolution has been the way in which artists, rather than writers, emerged as the intellectual vanguard in the 1920s.
Alistair Hennessy, 1991301
Mexico’s first Secretary of Public Education, Jose Vasconcelos, conceived of education and culture as instruments of nation building—the means of incorporating the peasantry and urban workers into the reconstruction of Mexico. Under Vasconcelos (1921—1924), painters were assigned a central role in the process of national regeneration, legitimizing revolutionary politics by fusing the myths of the national past with visions of the revolutionary future. Under Vasconcelos’s patronage, three artists—Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who became known simply as the Big Three—were put on government salary to paint murals.302
The Big Three began their work at the National Preparatory School and in the process launched an artistic movement that would dominate Mexico for a generation. The muralists, who would embellish dozens of public buildings in Mexico, celebrated the mestizo, Mexico’s Indian roots, and the long struggle for social justice against rich Mexicans and foreign imperialists. Not only were their murals politically charged but, unlike Mexico’s previous Eurocentric artistic creation, they depicted people who looked like most Mexicans—brown-skinned peasants—rather than idealized Greek figures. Their murals incorporated scenes from everyday life, landscapes, the Revolution, patriotic heroes, and religious celebrations. A final element of the mural movement was a faith in progress. Rivera’s biographer Bertram Wolfe commented on government art policy, “It spread out magnificent frescoes before the gaze of a people to which it could not offer sufficient books or literacy, nor guarantee a wage sufficient for the purchase of a daily newspaper.”303
As with most sweeping changes, controversy swirled around the shift from reproducing European fashions in easel art to depicting Mexican-looking figures in murals while at the same time attacking the economic status quo. Egged on by a conservative press, students at the National Preparatory School defaced some of the murals and demanded that the work at the school cease. The writer Salvador Novo called the murals repulsive and designed to awaken in the viewer not an aesthetic emotion but “an anarchistic fury if he is penniless or, if wealthy, to make his knees buckle with fright.” The vilification of mural art only ceased after critics in Paris and New York began to praise the murals. By the end of the 1920s, the muralists had emerged as cultural heroes, much as movie stars of a later generation, and just as with movie stars, their turbulent private lives became highly public.304
After Obregon and Vasconcelos left office in 1924, official sponsorship of the muralists ended and each of the Big Three went their separate ways. Only Rivera remained in government employment, painting 235 panels in the building of the Secretary of Education. These murals form only a small part of his enormous artistic legacy, which despite his focusing on Mexican themes, brought in the latest European influences.305
Rivera’s legacy includes murals at the National Agriculture School at Chapingo and scathing visual representations of the new political class in his mid-1930s frescos in the National Palace. Rivera left behind not only a wealth of great paintings but also the very idea of a people’s art, inspiring others to paint with a social consciousness. Rivera’s biographer commented, “It was Diego’s hope that an illiterate people who had been told the stories of the saints through the painted image would respond to this new secular myth of the Revolution and its promises for man’s life on earth.”306
During the 1920s, the mural renaissance, with its static visual imagery, could still exercise a compelling effect on Mexico’s population, since both cinema and radio were in their infancy. By the 1930s, radio and cinema were the harbingers of mass media. Their impact during the Cardenas administration far outstripped the static visual didactics of the revolutionary muralists, whose work was seen only by a relatively small fraction of the population.307
Despite their critiques of capitalism in general (both Rivera and Siqueiros were members of the Mexican Communist Party) and of the revolutionary nouveau riche in particular, by the end of their careers the Big Three had been firmly embraced by the political establishment. In 1949, a fifty-year retrospective of more than 1,000 Rivera art works opened at the Palace of Fine Arts. At its inauguration, Mexican President Miguel Aleman referred to Rivera as a national treasure. In 1956, the government declared Rivera’s seventieth birthday as a day of national homage. When Rivera died the following year, he was buried in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City’s Dolores Pantheon. Upon his death in 1949, Orozco was also accorded high honors. Siqueiros was the last of the Big Three to be embraced by the establishment. He was jailed from 1960 to 1964 for his efforts on behalf of political prisoners and his criticism of the government. His fate shifted between 1967 and 1971 when he was commissioned to decorate the massive exterior panels and the interior dome of the Polyforum, part of a privately owned development project—today’s World Trade Center in Mexico City. At the 1971 inauguration of the Polyforum, President Luis Echeverria hailed Siqueiros’s work as a fitting monument to fifty years of muralism in Mexico.308
The literary depiction of the Revolution began later than the artistic one, only gaining ground in 1924 with the “discovery” of Los de Abajo, which had been originally published in 1915. This novel by Mariano Azuela, a physician who served with Pancho Villa, described the suffering and killing of the Revolution by depicting the exploits of a band of peasant revolutionaries led by Demetrio Macias. In Los de Abajo, which was translated in 1929 as The Underdogs, one of the rebels declares, “The revolution is the hurricane, and the man who surrenders to it is no longer a man, he’s a poor dead leaf tossed about in the gale. . .” In addition to emphasizing the lack of clear motives behind the Revolution, Azuela focused on its cruelty, plunder, and betrayal of popular ideals. Some of Azuela’s later novels dealt with the middle and upper classes, of which he was also critical for their cynicism and venality.309
The other great novelist of the Revolution was Martin Luis Guzman, a journalist and one-time secretary to Pancho Villa. His 1928 novel El Aguila y la Serpiente, translated in 1930 as The Eagle and the Serpent, is a memoir of the author’s experiences with Villa. Guzman’s other major literary work La sombra del caudillo was not published in Mexico until 1938. Unlike previous novels of the Revolution, it deals with events after 1920, depicting an unnamed caudillo who employed treachery and murder to install his chosen candidate as his successor.310
There are two striking contrasts between the Revolution as depicted by the muralists and by novelists. The muralists, excepting Orozco, portrayed the Revolution as the dawn of a better tomorrow, made possible by harnessing machines in a new social order. In contrast, the novelists’ view of the Revolution was much more pessimistic. The other contrast is the impact of the two mediums. While the murals and the muralists became known internationally, the novels of the Revolution had a much more restricted audience.311
In addition to supporting the mural movement, Vasconcelos broadened the dissemination of books. Reflecting his admiration for the U. S. public library system, he charged the Public Education Ministry with the creation of public libraries. As a result, in the 1920s, thousands of small libraries were stocked with inexpensive editions of European and Mexican literature and works of social science. Rural school libraries stocked some fifty books, packed into specially designed crates that could be transported on the back of a mule. Under Cardenas, the founding of the Fondo de Cultura Economica further stimulated book publishing. This government-sponsored publisher made available books concerning a wide variety of subjects.312
Unlike many revolutions, the Mexican Revolution did not lead to a loss of press freedom, although the press had restrictions placed on it in the post-revolutionary period. The 1917 Press Law specifically prohibited criticizing the military—the largest government institution. When El Nacional published an editorial critical of militarism in the abstract, the paper was temporarily closed and its editor jailed.313
Despite restraints, papers such as El Universal, which began publishing in 1916, and Excelsior, which began publishing the following year, offered views independent of the government. Generally these papers were more conservative than the government and criticized what were perceived as its leftist excesses. However El Machete, the official organ of the Mexican Communist Party, criticized government conservatism.
Newspapers flourished during the Cardenas administration as is indicated by their annual sales rising from 140 million in 1935 to almost 200 million in 1937. Even though the Cardenas administration faced significant opposition, it preserved press freedom, which allowed many papers and columnists to endorse Almazan’s presidential candidacy.314
While post-Revolutionary papers were freer than they had been under Di'az, they were not demonstrably less venal. In 1940, German Minister to Mexico Baron Rudt von Collenberg-Bodigheim lamented that a lack of funds prevented him from getting Axis views aired in the Mexican press. He observed, “In this country all newspapers and most journalists expect cash for cooperation, as obviously the other side is offering plentiful.”315
World History
