Travels thru Latin America: Murals

I hadn't realised that after independence from Spain in 1810, Mexico suffered another century of revolution, with the new epoque beginning more or less in 1910. It was at this time that there was a great interest in exploring the archeology of the pre Hispanic times in order to construct a unifying national narrative. Murals and images were seen as the best way to reach a largely illiterate population. To the left, Diego River's mural of the conquest in the Palacio Nacional, showing battles, book burnings as well as Autos de Fe. in the mural at the Museum dedicated to it, there is a pantheon of historic personalities, including the sad bloodstained and conical capped figure of Mariana Violante Cabrajal a Jewish lady falsely accused of heresy and the grandson of Moctezuma II, both burned (at different times) in the gardens of the Alameda, which used to be a site of an Aztec market and is now a buzzing garden full of trees stalls and street performers.

The Alameda

The Alameda View from Torre Latinoamericana

Diego Rivera won a competition to decorate the Secretaría de Educacíon Publico and this visual narrative extends up the 3 levels of the building with the exploitation of the poor by the church, the capatalists and the landowners (spaniards who had enslaved the Indians for 300 years or more) ending on the top level with represntations of literacy, emancipation of women and cooperation with food for all. Rivera was an admirer of Mao and friends for a while with Trotsky. He did not live long enough to be disillusioned with the reality and ruthlessness of the new state sponsored socialism, which he probably would have equated with Nazism which he also loathed.

Secretería de Educacion Publico - Courtyard of murals

Exploitation in the mines. Note the allusion to carrying the cross to calvary in the bottom left.

Arming the people for the revolution... At bottom left is an image of a worker crushing a fellow artist who dared criticise Riveira's ideology.. pretty ironic given the turn of events in Stalin's Russia and later during the Cultural Revolution in China Also Frida on the right exchanging the worker's broom for a weapon