Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution

Abstract

Beginning in the 1920s and extending up until today, Mexican elites have encouraged cultural production (including a variety of popular art and crafts) in promoting a larger, unifying sense of national awareness. Some, like cultural theorist Néstor García Canclini, suggest that Mexico is unique in this, claiming that local artisans achieved a sense of “national identity” even before mass communication and the tourism industry achieved maturity (p. 16).The first part of Crafting Mexico discusses several early state-sponsored or commercial events that helped forge the new cultural nationalism. Here, Rick López explores the role that Mexican popular art played in developing a fresh aesthetic by detailing the many individuals and expanding bureaucratic infrastructure needed to support such an undertaking. The latter half of the book offers a close case study of artisanal work in the village of Olinalá, Guerrero, where craftspeople have fashioned beautiful lacquered boxes, chests, gourds, tableware, masks, and other objects for hundreds of years.In his first chapter, López recounts the history of Félix Palavicini’s (founder and director of El Universal, a Mexico City daily) 1921 India Bonita Contest. Palavicini hired journalist Rafael Pérez Taylor to search high and low for indias bonitas (also called gatitas, or “little kittens”). At first, somewhat surprisingly, they found few. Expanding their gaze beyond the capital and its immediate environs, Pérez Taylor and his crew followed up on photos of possible contestants sent in by newspaper readers. They also sought out candidates in provincial places such as Xalapa, Oaxaca City, and Guanajuato, as well as various “peasant huts and the cane fields” in assorted “picturesque populations” (p. 35).Revealing the exploitative motivation underlying the endeavor, López notes that “when the newspaper published the photos, the accompanying profiles regularly listed the name of the discoverer before the name of the girl herself ” (p. 35). Not surprisingly, elite efforts to advance indigenous culture and identity through the India Bonita project proved superficial, as elite “policing of the indigenous female body” had more to do with mestizo male ideas than anything else.López continues his careful look at state-led arts programming with the Noche Mexicana (Mexican Night) and the Exhibition of Popular Art, both organized to coincide with the 1921 centennial celebration. These events proved part of a global trend seeking to “recast native craft industries from symbols of peasant backwardness into integral components of national identity” (p. 65). At a critical moment in this history, when national identity (re)formation represented a key requirement for capitalist development, several key players in Mexico’s cultural industry took center stage, including President Álvaro Obregón’s foreign minister Alberto Pani, education minister José Vasconcelos, Noche Mexicana head Adolfo Best Maugard, anthropologist Manuel Gamio, artist-intellectual Gerardo Murillo (aka Dr. Atl), and painters Roberto Montenegro and Jorge Enciso, along with a veritable who’s who of postrevolutionary Mexico. As their ambition was nothing less than a near-complete remaking of Mexican national identity, these individuals often clashed. Objectives for both this and other endeavors would prove exceedingly difficult, and success elusive. As López points out, “in the end, the Exhibition of Popular Art and the Noche Mexicana recognized neither indigenous people nor artisans as agents possessed of their own volition and able to define themselves, their art, or their destinies” (p. 94). For elites determined to distinguish their generation from what had existed before the revolution, their idea of native peoples rather than living native people was most often the cornerstone for Mexican national identity building. Bridging this vast chasm would prove difficult, to say the least.When marketing popular art became profitable in the 1940s, some criticized the Mexican government for exploiting artists and encouraging the production of inexpensive, mass-marketed goods. These charges do seem to have helped cause a mild correction starting during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As López summarizes, “promoters of popular art grappled with the tension between their desires to protect handicrafts as patrimony, on the one hand, and their commitment to addressing the social and economic needs of artisans, on the other” (p. 192). Indeed, dealings between business, government, and popular artists — especially after the inception of Fonart (Fondo Nacional para el Fomento de las Artisanías) in the 1970s — were highly contested, with clear winners and losers depending on time and place. One artist in Olinalá stated bluntly, “los ricos win.” But other times, as López argues, there has been an occasional “triumph from below” (p. 263). Outcomes vary depending on a variety of factors. In the end, Crafting Mexico reminds us that quality scholarship does not resort to sweeping generalizations but rather assesses what is often a complex situation case by case. It is an impressive interdisciplinary study that adds much to our appreciation of modern Mexican culture and society.