Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Latin American Left and the Contribution of Diego Rivera to National Liberation

2005; Routledge; Volume: 19; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09528820500381715

1475-5297

Alberto Híjar Serrano,

Politics and Society in Latin America

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Originally published as ‘Diego Rivera: contribución política’ in Diego Rivera Hoy: Simposio sobre el artista en el centenario de su natalicio, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes [National Institute of Fine Arts], Mexico City, 1986. Translator’s note: Due to the length of the original text, this translation has been edited to fit the restraints of Third Text. 1. For more on these concepts see Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus, various editions. My references to discursive forms arrive by way of Michel Foucault, El orden del discurso [Archaeology of Scientific Reason], Archivo de Filosofía, no 4, Populares, Mexico City, 1982. Also see Michel Pecheux, Lingüística y Marxismo: Formaciones ideológicas, aparatos ideológicos del Estado y formaciones discursivas, Archivo de Filosofía, no 4, Populares, Mexico City, 1981. 2. Científicos were members of the elite class that prescribed to a rational, scientific belief in liberal progress. 3. Post‐revolutionary President Alvaro Obregón appointed José Vasconcelos to serve as the Secretary of Education. In turn, Vasconcelos selected Rivera and other radical muralists to produce educational murals inside public buildings. Vasconcelos’s politics were far from revolutionary. In fact, his most respected project, the publishing of La Raza Cósmica, was an extremely ethnocentric diatribe against indigenous peoples. 4. Although campesino may easily translate as ‘peasant’, I feel that it does not carry the level of condescension often apparent in its English usage. Throughout this translation, I have kept campesino in its original un‐translated form. 5. Muralist José Clemente Orozco is self‐critical of this problem by establishing three forms: the political militancy of the artist who should be on one side or the other; the ignorance of the ‘pueblo against others and the myths and rites imposed by their readings’. See José Clemente Orozco, Autobiografía, Era, Mexico City, 1970. 6. Carlos Gutiérrez Cruz, Obra poética revolucionaria, Domés, Mexico City, 1981. 7. ‘Fíjate Trabajador’, El Machete, 2, March 1924, cited in Tibol, p 37. 8. ‘La inercia del Gobierno da pie a un nuevo golpe reaccionario, cuestión de vida o muerte’, El Machete, 3, April 1934. Cited in Raquel Tibol, Diego Rivera: Ilustrador, SEP, Mexico City, 1986, p 39. 9. ‘La pintura de las pulquerías’, Mexican Folkways, 7, June–July 1926. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 65. 10. ‘Los retablos: verdadera, actual y única expresión pictórica del pueblo mexicano’, Mexican Folkways, 3, October–November 1925. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 35. 11. ‘Mardonio Magaña, campesino, el más grande escultor mexicano contemporáneo’, Mexican Folkways, March–April 1930. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 85. 12. El Libertador 12, June 1927. El Libertador was the organ of the Continental Organizing Committee of the Anti‐Imperialist League of the Americas. Rivera served as its director, while Salvador de la Plaza was its administrator. 13. Ibid. 14. ‘La pintura mexicana: el retrato’, Mexican Folkways, 5, February–March 1926. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 59. 15. ‘Abraham Angel’, from the 1924 portfolio printed by the Talleres Gráficos de la Nación in homage to the painter Abraham Angel. Angel was born on 7 March 1905 in Mineral del Oro and died in Mexico City on 27 October 1924. 16. ‘El dibujo infantil en el México actual’, Mexican Folkways, 10, December 1926–January 1927. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 75. 17. ‘La nueva arquitectura mexicana: una casa de Carlos Obregón Cantacilia’, Mexican Folkways, 9, October–November 1926. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 71. 18. ‘Sobre arquitectura’, El Universal, 28 April 1924. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 41. 19. ‘Exposición de motivos para la formación del plan de estudios de la Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas de México’. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 87. 20. In El Nacional Revolucionario, 26 May 1930. Cited in Tibol, ibid, p 99. 21. Samuel Ramos, ‘El estilo indígena mexicano’, in Diego Rivera, UNAM, Mexico City, 1958.