La movilidad del paisaje mexicano decimonónico

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Mexico offers a confluence of factors that have received critical attention: visuality, public display, order, progress, consumer culture, political consolidation, and modernization. During this period, the proliferation of landscape references by institutions such as the Academy of San Carlos and the National Institute of Geography and Statistics in the form of paintings, postcards, maps, and statistics links the fields of aesthetics and science, which, in their emerging stages and shared role as agents in the creation of a modern Mexican culture, served as instruments for measuring progress at the national level and status at the international level. While the great master of Mexican landscape painting, José María Velasco, has been recognized in several studies for his creation of a visual language for Mexican landscape heritage that registers the increasing speeds associated with modernization, his works also obscure a darker reality: the privatization of Mexican land under the Porfiriato. In this article, I first explore the conceptual frameworks through which the interfaces between land and landscape can be understood as parallel representations. Next, I consider the development of a Mexican landscape aesthetic and its implications for the creation of a class of consumer-citizens who are apparently at odds with the surrenderist land policies of the Porfiriato. Finally, I explore the connection between Velasco’s works and correspondences during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876) and the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) and the incorporation of the Mexican landscape into the surrenderist politics of national land that marked Mexico’s entry into the modern era.