TWO
WORLD'S FAIRS AND MEXICO AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1910

Eleven
Toward Revolutionary Mexico

The images of Mexico displayed in world's fairs after the Revolution of 1910 prolonged the Porfirian symbolic infrastructure, along with its contradictions. In this part of my analysis, however, historical continuities and breaks are seen within the specific limits of the creation of a homogeneous, dominant national image in the immediate postrevolutionary period. Nationalism is too much of a universal and long-in-the-making phenomenon to be explained solely, for example, by the Mexican Revolution. And the Mexican Revolution itself is too much of a many-sided happening to be reduced to the formation of a national image by various intellectuals and politicians in changing circumstances.

Before jumping to the 1922 Exposição Internacional do Centenario in Rio de Janeiro, it is necessary to briefly examine the development of Mexico's image at international fairs up to the 1900s in order to understand the changing nature of twentieth-century world's fairs in comparison with their nineteenth-century counterparts.^[1]

The Finale of the Aztec Palace?

In January 1890 Parisian officials began to demolish the structures of the 1889 world's fair. The facades came down, and what once seemed to be a complete, universal, and harmonious cosmos vanished in a matter of weeks. Paris, however, maintained the great monument to industrial architecture, the Palace of Machines, until 1910, along with the Eiffel Tower, which endured to become the very symbol of Paris. While the French went about their demolition, the Mexican exhibition team was deliberating the destiny of the Mexican Aztec Palace and also planning the next performance, analyzing the best possible scenario: Glasgow? Madrid? Chicago?^[2]

The Aztec Palace was dismantled and shipped to Mexico by the company of Furet and Rousseau.^[3] At the same time, portions of the Mexican government's exhibit were sent to libraries, museums, and permanent exhibitions throughout Europe. The original plan had been to make the Aztec Palace into an archaeological museum, and, in fact, Antonio de Anza purchased heavy machinery to reconstruct the palace in Mexico.^[4] But the palace, though shipped home, was never rebuilt, either in Mexico or anywhere else. It returned to its beginnings as assorted stage props for the drama of the Mexican image of a modern nation. All of its components were subjected to the vagaries of Mexico's political, social, economic, and cultural life, in addition to the corrosion of time.

Explaining why the Aztec Palace was never completely reassembled provides a clue to the dynamics of Mexico's modern nationalism. Many explanations can be posited. First, by the 1890s the discussion about a national architecture had moved toward a more radically cosmopolitan fashion, and it was simply impossible to keep alive the aesthetic experiment that was intrinsic to the Aztec Palace. Furthermore, even from a technical standpoint, reassembly of the Aztec Palace would have been difficult, for evidence indicates that major parts of the building suffered irreversible damage during the trip from Paris to Mexico.^[5] Or possibly it was just because the pavilion was imprisoned in the cage of bureaucracy, left to corrode until it was impossible to reconstruct.^[6]

The Aztec Palace was not destroyed, however; ostensibly it was only stored for a better use. By 1895 Contreras's sculptures were located in the main patio of the Museo Nacional de Artillería, where Cuauhtémoc, Itzcoatl, Netzahualcoyotl, Totoquihuatzin, and Cuitláhuac remained as the patrimony of Mexico's military strength during the Porfirian era.^[7] But history is ongoing, never past. In 1940, during the heyday of postrevolutionary official indigenism, some of Contreras's sculptures that had graced the Aztec Palace were refurbished to crown Luis Lelo de Larrea's monument to La Raza in Mexico City—a postrevolutionary pyramid to honor Mexico's Indian origins, a symbolic break from the old regime's Francophilia and history of Indian exploitation (see Fig. 30.)^[8] Ironically, the monument utilized both the symbolism and the actual material created by the Porfirian years of experimenting in modernity, and nationalism.

In the same way as the indigenist anthropologists of the 1930s and 1940s obtained their training and basic research from the Porfirian anthropological infrastructure, a concrete pyramidal monument to La Raza adorned the intersection of the freeways of a hypermodern Mexico City. This time around the city claimed to have reached the final version of modernity and nationalism. The monument borrowed not only Contreras's sculptures but also the eagle originally designed to crown the Porfirian Opera House designed by the Italian architect Adamo Boari.^[9] A replica of a pre-Hispanic pyramid

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30.
Jesús Contreras's sculpture Totoquihuatzin and the eagle designed for the Porfirian Opera House,
 now at the Monumento a la Raza (designed by Luis Lelo de Larrea, 1940).
 (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

crowned by late-nineteenth-century figures of the Aztec rulers in Roman garb and a quasi-imperial eagle, the monument achieved an irony comparable only to imagining French kings rising from their graves and using guillotines as elegant shelves on which to store their crowns and capes.^[10]

Porfirian Images from Chicago to Saint Louis

The type of nationalistic symbolism and ideological infrastructure found, for example, in Philadelphia 1876, New Orleans 1884, and Paris 1889 was recreated by the wizards of progress for many international expositions during the 1890s and 1900s. For Mexico, the most important exhibitions of these decades were Chicago 1893, Paris 1900, Buffalo 1901, and Saint Louis 1904. Although Mexico planned an extravagant exhibition for the monumental 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition, the economic crisis of the 1890s forced the wizards of progress to lower their sights (see Appendix 2). In contrast, both for the 1900 Paris universal exposition and the 1901 Buffalo pan-American fair, Mexico constructed important but makeshift buildings—the first in a neoclassical conservative style, the second in a Spanish mission style.

In Chicago, Mexico won 1,195 awards;^[11] mining and agriculture were once again especially welcomed. The Mexican artists were not so successful, however; it was later argued that the poor locations in which Mexican paintings and sculptures were placed were the cause of such meager response. In addition, in Chicago, as in other American fairs, Mexico had some presence at the women's exhibit. In the same way that the American women's commission for Chicago exhibit was headed by the daughter-in-law of the president of the United States, the Mexican women's commission was headed by Carmen Romero Rubio, Porfirio Díaz's wife.^[12] But of course the Mexican government was not truly interested in the modern social concerns with women. The aristocratic women's groups of Porfirian Mexico were part of the exhibition team, especially in the American fairs, where women had an important role to play. Generally Mexican women were represented only through their traditionally assigned domestic work. Nonetheless, one of the most significant aspects of the Mexican art exhibition in Chicago, according to the Mexican delegate M. Serrano, were the paintings by Gertrudis Gar-cía Teruel.^[13] In addition, José María Vigil prepared a collection of Mexican women's poetry, in order to show that Mexican women's poetic capacities were compatible with those of American and European women.^[14]

The Mexican mining exhibit in Chicago was, as it had been throughout nineteenth-century exhibitions, very impressive and included an elaborate display of gold, silver, copper, steel, lead, opals, onyx, granites, and marbles. In addition, a Carta estadística minera de la República Mexicana was created and exhibited. Once again the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora displayed natural history samples and scientific work; the Comisión Geológica Mexicana

presented a collection of fossils and maps.^[15] The newly created Ministry of Communication exhibited replicas, designs, and miniatures of monuments (Columbus and Cuauhtémoc), architectural plans, and improvements for the National Palace.

Mexico's presence in Chicago was especially notable for its ethnographic views. In the department of ethnology, numerous Mexican antiquities were exhibited, both by the Mexican government and by American anthropologists and ethnographers, together with pictures of ruins and models of tipos populares , Indian cloth, and Indian skulls (see Fig. 31).^[16] In addition, reproductions of the architecture of exotic countries were constructed near the Dairy Building. These were replicas of the ruins of Uxmal, the House of Nuns, and the Labna group.^[17] All of these replicas were made of papier-mâché and were the result of research conducted by the American archaeologist and diplomat E. H. Thompson, American consul in Yucatán, and of scientific studies by the American anthropologist F. W. Putnam.^[18] This was part of the so-called Midway Exhibit that was, as historian James Gilbert has described, "a unitary exhibit of ethnic variations tied together by concepts of evolution and movement through stages of civilization."^[19]

In terms of architecture, Chicago was destined to be an important point of departure. In general, the architecture of the Chicago exhibition was dominated by the aristocratic neoclassicist, Beaux Arts style of the Eastern architects. However, such innovative architects as Louis Sullivan constructed modernist buildings—the Transportation Building, for example—at the edges of the fair.^[20] More importantly, the exhibits of exotic architectural styles nourished the emerging modernist architecture. Hence Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan's student, first saw Japanese and Mayan structures in Chicago, and from that inspiration he developed ingenious modern, functional buildings with Maya and Japanese influences (sometimes combined) in the modernist 1910s and 1920s.^[21] That was the case, for example, with the Imperial Hotel he constructed in Tokyo in 1916 (a structure that combined traditional Japanese architecture with Maya motifs). In 1929, Mexico followed the same steps in its pavilion for the 1929 Ibero-American fair in Seville (see chapter 13).

After Chicago, and before 1900, Mexico participated in various American fairs, most of which were of regional importance and to which Mexico's private exhibitors and government sent the customary displays of raw materials, antiquities, and archaeological pieces. Two of these fairs were the 1895 Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta and the 1898 Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha. Special envoys of the Atlanta exhibition traveled to Mexico to encourage participation in this rather modest fair,^[22] and more than 160 Mexican exhibitors eventually attended. The Mexican commission for this fair was headed by Gregorio E. González, who eventually sent to the Ministry of Economic Development a list of American entrepreneurs interested in investing in Mexico. He also reported his diffi-

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31.
Maya ruins in Chicago. 
Source: Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair:
 An Historical and Descriptive Presentation of the World's Science, Art,
 and Industry, as Viewed through the Columbian Exposition at Chicago 1893, vol. 4 (Chicago, 1893), 633.

culties with the Mexican Village Company, which was negligent in paying the salaries and return tickets of the people from Tehuantepec who had been brought to the fair to make up the human circus of the "Mexican Village."^[23] This exhibit was described as a village that "included many of the characteristic types of that country, with much of the local color for which Mexico is famous."^[24] Ironically enough, although exhibiting people from Tehuantepec in what amounted to a human zoo (and not paying their salaries) caused no problems, the organizers of the "Mexican Village" were forced to cancel the originally planned "bloodless" bullfights after popular protest in which it was argued that "the terror of the horses would be cruelty in its worst form."^[25]

The 1898 Omaha international fair was an echo of the 1893 Chicago fair for the states west of the Mississippi River. In it, Mexico occupied 3,000 square feet, exhibiting agricultural products and raw materials. In addition, "in one section historical articles were displayed showing articles and implements in use during Aztec days."^[26] As in many other American fairs, Mexico's display in Omaha was directed by Albino R. Nuncio of the Ministry of Economic Development and the main member of what might be termed a second group of wizards of progress. This second group was often in charge of Mexico's displays at the many small American world's fairs, such as Atlanta 1895, Omaha 1898, Nashville 1897, Saint Louis 1904, Boston 1908, and San Antonio 1909.

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32.
The Mexican pavilion at the 1901 Buffalo world's fair. 
Source: México, 
Comisión de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos para la Exposición Pan-Americana 
de Buffalo, Nueva York, A Few Facts about Mexico (Mexico City, 1901), 57.

After Mexico's major performance at the 1900 Paris fair, its next relatively large-scale participation in international fairs took place at the 1901 Buffalo exhibition. Mexico sent a total of 860 exhibitors and was the most important foreign presence.^[27] For this fair, Mexico constructed a Spanish colonial style pavilion to house its mining, artistic, and liberal arts exhibits (see Fig. 32).

Mexico's next appearance was at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase International Exposition in Saint Louis. Once again, Albino R. Nuncio headed the Mexican exhibit, together with Maximiliano M. Chabert and the engineer Luis Salazar.^[28] For this exposition, Mexico constructed a modest building in the colonial style with a central patio, surrounded by gardens with native Mexican plants (see Fig. 33). Among the many Mexican exhibits, anthropological and archaeological studies had a significant presence. Alfredo

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33.
The Mexican pavilion at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase International
 Exposition in Saint Louis, Missouri. 
Source: J. W. Buel, Louisiana and 
the Fair, vol. 6 (Saint Louis, 1905), 2189.

Chavero and Antonio Peñafiel sent their respective studies.^[29] The Ministry of Justice and Public Education exhibited a large collection of Mexican antiquities, not only Aztec objects but also artifacts from the Maya, Toltec, and other pre-Hispanic cultures. In the ethnography section Mexico displayed numerous collections of photographs of "pure" Indians. In addition, as in Atlanta 1895 and Buffalo 1901, there was an exhibit of Mexican tipos populares that was called 'Aztecs and Their Industries," featuring live artisans who worked in Mexican brick, pottery, and copper (see chapter six and Fig. 9).^[30] This exhibit was part of "The Pike" or, as a guidebook explained, a "story-book Land. All creeds and customs are there. Six thousand nondescript characters have stepped from the leaves of history, travel and adventure fiction to salute you in reality."^[31] This display was complemented by a large exhibit of Philippine people (Igorrote Indians), which fascinated such distinguished visitors as the young T. S. Eliot.^[32]

After the Saint Louis fair Mexico sent minor exhibits to such fairs as the 1908 food fair in Boston and the 1909 San Antonio fair.^[33] But no new comprehensive performance was staged until 1922, and even then the extravaganzas of the nineteenth century were never repeated.

The 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition

Mexico's presence at the 1900 Paris universal exhibition was almost equal to its participation at the 1889 Paris fair.^[34] Sebastián B. de Mier, the director of Mexico's exhibition at the 1900 fair, estimated that whereas Mexico had spent nearly 1.3 million francs just in the construction of the Aztec Palace, the cost of the 1900 Mexican pavilion was around 600,000 francs.^[35] The 1900 Paris Universal and International Exhibition was larger than that of 1889; in fact, it was the grandest of the entire nineteenth century. Accordingly, Mexico planned an enormous presence, but a monetary and agricultural crisis kept expenses under control.

From the outset the Paris exposition had neither a clear justification nor an implicit theme. The 1889 Paris world's fair had an unparalleled leitmotiv: to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution. In contrast, the 1900 fair had as its only excuse the need to conclude the century with yet another universal exhibition, one that would "reflect the refulgent genius of France and show that, as in the past, we now stand at the vanguard of progress."^[36]

The 1900 Paris exhibition was a diagnosis of the state of modern culture. Above all, it echoed three characteristics of fin-de-siècle modernity—overall grandiosity, cultural retrogression, and what we know as fin-de-siècle spirit. That is, the exhibition took place at almost the same site as the 1889 fair. It was larger, occupying all of Champ de Mars, Trocadero, the Esplanade des Invalides, the Cours de la Reine, and the banks of the Seine River between the Pont de l'Alma and the Place de la Concorde: nearly 5 million square feet of exhibition space. Over seven months, 39 million people visited the fair, three times the entire population of Mexico. Seventy-five foreign pavilions were constructed, mostly along the Quai d'Orsay, including those of the United States, Denmark, Austria, Portugal, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Peru, the United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, and Mexico. Three traditional Latin American fair participants were absent—Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. As in the case of most nineteenth-century world's fairs, the 1900 Paris exhibition was an expression of the conviction that the ideals of modern times could be represented only through grandiosity.

The 1900 exhibition displayed a particularly retrograde tone: a return to conservative cultural features. Whereas the 1889 universal exhibition was characterized by the technologically innovative architecture, as epitomized by the Eiffel Tower, the 1900 exhibit had as its main attractions the massive use of electricity such as in the Chateau d'Eau palace and in a building known

as "The Hall of Illusions."^[37] In addition, two symbols of architectural innovation housed grandiose exhibitions of modern painting and sculpture (the Petit Palais) and French arts and crafts (the Grand Palais). Art nouveau has often been linked to this architectural innovation, but overall the fair was marked by neoclassical forms and canonic art. What also marked the 1900 fair was a pompous new bridge over the Seine that was inaugurated to honor the Russian Czar Alexander II, marking the rapprochement of Russia and France in the context of growing hostilities among European powers. The political arena was characterized by conservatism and retrograde nationalism after the Dreyfus affair.

Above all, the 1900 Paris fair, with its merging of retrograde art with art nouveau, of Bohemian Paris with the optimism of a modern ideal of city and world, was a prototypical fin-de-siècle event: a snapshot of ambivalence expressing both enchantment and disenchantment of modernism. The fair concluded not only the nineteenth century but also the "era of greater exhibitions."^[38] The exhibition was, like the famed Rodin sculpture that was exhibited there, at the "Gates of Hell," at the entrance of total modern uncertainty. It enacted modernity at the "Gates of Hell," first, because it showed "the persistence of the old regime"; that is, despite progress and innovation, the fair showed that, as Arnold J. Mayer has maintained, "in form, content, and style the artifacts of high culture continued to be anchored and swathed in conventions that relayed and celebrated traditions supportive of the old order."^[39] The 1900 fair showed that modernity was tradition tamed. Second, a posteriori we can acknowledge that the fair was indeed at the gates of the hell of radical uncertainty, violence, and destruction that swept Europe after 1914. It was the final edge of what George Steiner called the "imagined garden of liberal culture. . . the myth of the nineteenth century"—the fair was held at the brink of "a season in hell."^[40] Third, it represented a sarcastic naming of the unnaming, as in Rodin's gates: cultural gates crowned by the Thinker-Poet "poised at the edge of the two worlds. . . the spectral no-man's-land where 'certainty dissolves into mystery.'"^[41] That is, it was a conscious self-defeating, an awareness of progress, and a self-rumination about an ongoing cultural shift. These are the characteristics we assign to the notion of fin-de-siècle culture, and that is precisely why 1900 was the first and only fin de siècle in Western history.^[42]

Mexico's presence at the 1900 Paris fair showed, on one hand, the increasing proficiency of the wizards of progress, who articulated a more selective and efficient modern image of Mexico, and, on the other hand, how Mexico adapted to the trendy nature of modernity: Mexico selectively echoed the grandiosity, retrogression, and, to some extent, the fin-de-siècle spirit of the fair.

Sebastián de Mier explained that, following a long process of learning

about international fairs and owing to economic difficulties, Mexico's display in 1900 was bound to be less comprehensive than that of 1889 had been. In 1889 Mexico's display "was exhaustive and extended to all. . . human activity, in an attempt to demonstrate Mexico's potential. By contrast, Mexico's presence at the 1900 fair needed to be limited to assert what we have accomplished in practice."^[43] Specific products and aspects were therefore emphasized: mining, tropical fruits, coffee, tobacco, cereals, fibers, wood, textiles, medical substances, paper, arts, liberal arts, and education.^[44]

Overall, Mexico's presence at the 1900 fair was better organized and involved fewer people and less money. Instead of one director for each group of exhibits, individuals were in charge of three or more groups. The display included fewer exhibitors but earned more awards—51 percent of the 1,088 exhibitors won prizes.^[45] One of the greatest moments in Mexican art was the grand prize awarded to Jesús Contreras's sculpture Malgré-Tout . Many exhibits, including those of the Comisión Geográfico-Exploradora, of tobacco, mining, and textiles, and of the Superior Sanitation Council, were essentially the same as those used during the previous twenty years.

What best exemplified Mexico's adaptation to the changing nature of modern times, to the fairs' renewed conservatism and spirit of fin de siècle, was the discussion about the pavilion to be placed along the Quai d'Orsay, near the palaces of War and Peace. Although no public contests were held for a construction design, throughout 1899 and 1900 two perspectives prevailed and conflicted: the officially supported project of engineer Antonio de Anza, and various projects supported by Jesús Contreras's artistic view. De Anza seemed to have the support of Minister Fernandez Leal—who had substituted for Carlos Pacheco at the Ministry of Industrial Promotion—and Porfirio Díaz. Contreras was favored by the Mexican minister in Paris, by the French authorities, and, apparently, by de Mier. In coming to a final decision, Mexican artists, bureaucrats, and architects took into consideration—as usual—the internal balance of power of the wizards of progress, economic and technical limitations, and the maxims and tendencies of cosmopolitan nationalism, as these last were expressed in the 1900 Paris fair.

By 1900 Contreras had consolidated himself as the master of the statuary needs of Porfirian Mexico. He was an influential personality in both political and intellectual circles (see chapter 7). His lobbying to obtain the contract for the 1900 Mexican pavilion was overwhelming. Contreras hired French architects, and thus, once in Paris, de Anza proceeded to undo Contreras's contracts.^[46] French organizers argued that de Anza's design was unharmonious with the nearby buildings, though in fact they were trying to put pressure on Mexican authorities to respect Contreras's French deals.^[47] In response, de Anza's design was modified to match the standards of the nearby palaces of War and Peace (see Fig. 34).^[48]

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34.
The Mexican pavilion at the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition. Source:
 Gustave Gostkowski, Au Mexique: Études, notes et renseignements 
utiles au capitalistes, a l'immigrant, e au touriste (Paris, 1900), frontispiece.
 (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

Two of Contreras's sketches of a Mexican pavilion were especially elaborate. The first was formed by two buildings linked by a modern, French romantic style, "the triumphant arch of peace."^[49] The two structures merged various architectural styles in an attempt to depict the national history: the bottom part in pre-Hispanic Mitla style, the main corpus of the facade in Spanish colonial fashion, and the frieze in modern French romantic style. The second design added two allegorical compositions in the lateral facades of this intricate blueprint: on one facade, figures representing Mexican independence; on the other, La Reforma (Mexico's liberal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century). The second design also included a tower that encompassed what were, for Contreras, the priorities of modernity in natural order: "figures in the arts and industry that serve as bases for the symbol of science, which in turn ends in the tower of peace" (see Fig. 35).^[50]

The collage of architectural styles comprising these designs aimed to depict the mature awareness of the evolution of the nation from pre-Hispanic times (the basement) to a Spanish colonial era, and finally to peace and cosmopolitanism (the frieze in romantic French fashion). This iconoclastic endeavor was a hazardous venture in such a retrograde fair as the 1900 Paris exposition. Instead, the wizards of progress decided to be cautious by con-

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35.
Jesús Contreras's model of the Mexican palace for the 1900 Paris
 Universal Exhibition.
 Source: Jesús Contreras's personal papers, 
reproduced courtesy of Carlos Contreras. (Photograph by Carlos Contreras)

structing a standard neoclassical pavilion, designed by the builder of the 1889 Aztec Palace, Antonio de Anza, whose know-how was used to serve modern trends.^[51]

De Anza's project was the result of a conscious decision following a domestic discussion regarding the achievement of a national architectural style. As we saw in chapter 7, the main issues in this debate were the appropriateness of pre-Hispanic features as the essence of a national style and the lack of a real modern national architecture. The 1900 pavilion came to be an aesthetic and political statement in the debate: the national style could not be copied from pre-Hispanic forms, and a definitive Mexican architectural style was not yet attainable. Thus the 1900 pavilion seemed to claim that there was no option but to keep following cosmopolitan trends until a real national style emerged. De Anza explained that the pre-Hispanic forms were inadequate for modern standards and that the Spanish colonial style was already decadent when Spain conquered Mexico. Thus, "until today in Mexico we cannot point out a single building with an entirely national architecture. . . . It was impossible for a [national] school to emerge; we lacked the adequate

environment and that set of circumstances that today are finally surfacing and that hopefully will become a favorable environment."^[52]

In view of the conservative nature of the 1900 Paris fair, it seemed adequate for Mexicans to search for classicism in their own country. Thus the works of architect Ramón Rodríguez Arangoity, who had died in 1884, were rediscovered. Rodríguez Arangoity had taught various Porfirian architects and had traveled to Italy and France to study the classical forms of Rome and Pompeii. In fact, he had some experience in world's fairs, for he participated in the 1859 French imperial world's fair. In 1864 Emperor Maximilian appointed him as director of the works for the Chapultepec Castle. His works often combined modern iron structure with classicism.^[53]

The classicist conservative architecture was revived by the 1900 world's fair, which prompted de Anza in Mexico also to rely on a classicist architect who had served Mexico's ephemeral, French-supported empire. Thus he resorted to Rodríguez Arangoity, the architect who, according to de Anza, had brought the "neo-Greek" style to Mexico (see Fig. 36). This style was canonized as the Napoleon III style and had already been represented at the 1889 Paris fair by such architects as Garnier and Formigé. It prevailed during the 1900 Paris fair, albeit with some innovative exceptions. Thus Mexico decided that because the country had no national architectural style that could represent its nationality—unlike Italy, Spain, or Norway—it needed to "adopt a serious style that could reveal the character of the government that rules Mexico's destiny. . . . The neo-Greek style, which fulfilled these conditions, was therefore adopted."^[54] A truly modern national image had to be parsimoniously modern, as if modernity were a natural gift. Accordingly, Mexico's national image in Paris 1900 was epitomized in a building of "notable sobriety."^[55] Mature modern nations used cosmopolitan forms and avoided lavish displays.

The neo-Greek pavilion included allegories of Mexico's historical eras (Independence, Reform, Peace). Fully illuminated with electric light,^[56] it was built, as were all pavilions, of iron, plaster, and material that could easily be demolished.^[57] During the fair, almost one million people visited the building.

Mexico's presence at the 1900 Paris fair also aimed at putting an end to the tortuous path of Mexico's nineteenth-century history. As a modern nation-state ruled by an enlightened authoritarian government, Mexico sought to participate in the spirit of fin de siècle in order both to prove Mexico's universalism and to end its uncivilized past. The nineteenth century was over, and so was Mexico's past chaos and instability. However, Mexican intellectuals and artists were ambivalent about what the spirit of fin de siècle actually symbolized. The debate that surrounded the construction of the 1900 Mexican pavilion was part of a wider debate of modernism as a suitable trend for Mexico. The decision to echo the return to classicism was a safe cultural

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36.
Construction of the Mexican pavilion in the Quai d'Orsay, Paris, 1900.
 Source: EXP, Box 31, Exp. 9; reproduced courtesy of the Archivo
 General de la Nación, Mexico City. (Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nación)

decision in an exhibition that was at the "gates of hell," but Mexican intellectuals and artists were nonetheless experimenting with the enchantments and disenchantments of modernity that the fair both displayed and tried to conceal.

With a neoclassical pavilion, in a fair organized in the "Remington" era,^[58] Mexican intellectuals in Paris and Mexico debated all of the directions modernity could possibly take. Latin American intellectuals were experiencing their own modernism, which in a way echoed that of European intellectuals. The guru of such a movement, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, like Yeats in Europe ("Many ingenious things are gone. . ."),^[59] expressed his awareness at the end of the century of the radical and sudden change that characterized modern times: "Yo soy aquel que ayer no más decía / el verso azul y la canción profana. . . y muy siglo diez y ocho y muy antiguo / y muy moderno; audaz, cosmopolita; / con Hugo fuerte y con Verlaine ambiguo, / y una sed de ilusiones infinita."^[60]

The Mexican fin de siècle had to be as experimental and innovative as the European one, but less tragic. It was revolutionary and retrograde at the same time. It brought together the group of thinkers that was represented in La Revista Moderna , and it signified a return to Hispanism, spiritualism,

antipopulism, and strong anti-Americanism in view of the 1898 Spanish-American war. In La Revista Moderna , where Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Kipling, Wilde, and Japanese poets were translated, the poet Jesús E. Valenzuela could claim: "La Ciencia ha hecho bancarrota! Un grito / del siglo moribundo lo proclama, / hay que empuñar de nuevo el oriflama / del ensueño en el tér-mino infinito."^[61] But was Mexican modernism to reach the radical standards of European disenchantment? A Mexican literary critic and journalist, Victoriano Salado Álvarez, believed that modernism was a decadent literature which was at odds with a country that was not yet modern. The poet Amado Nervo, then in Paris reporting on the 1900 fair, rejected this idea, because in fact "all good things that we have in the nation are artificial and antithetical in relation to the environment, and thus everything has been accomplished without considering the people's criteria."^[62] In effect, by 1900 the debate over Mexico's national image included even the modern reactions to modernity itself. And although the nation epitomized from the 1870s to the 1900s seemed to be consolidated, the idea of a Mexican nation was still an elite collective aspiration and had yet to be fully implemented.

The Persistence of the Wizards of Progress

The 1915 San Francisco world's fair can be seen as a transition between the great nineteenth-century exhibitions and the new twentieth-century fairs. After 1910 the new revolutionary government attempted to take part at various international fairs, most notably at the 1915 San Francisco world's fair. Mexican preparations for San Francisco can be seen as evidence of postrevolutionary adjustments in handling the national image.^[63]

Although the construction of the Panama-Pacific exposition started in 1911, the newly elected president, Woodrow Wilson, did not finally sanction celebration of the San Francisco world's fair until May 1913. Only then were invitations sent to foreign nations. The United States encouraged the participation of Latin American countries in part to smooth over its hitherto rather harsh relationships with that bloc. This effort, combined with the Mexican government's interest in obtaining official U.S. recognition, made Mexico's great effort to join the 1915 Panama-Pacific exposition inevitable.

At the beginning of 1913 Madero's government attempted to contact the Porfirian exhibition team in order to organize Mexico's participation at San Francisco. Madero's regime needed U.S. approval, and the Porfirian wizards of progress knew how to organize a performance that would demonstrate Mexican progress and stability. But the assault on the presidential palace by Felix Diaz and Bernardo Reyes and the consequent alliance with Victoriano Huerta, which ended in Madero's overthrow and assassination, ended the Maderistas' attempts to organize Mexico's presence in San Francisco.

During the first months of the Huerta regime the counterrevolutionary

faction attempted a policy of reconciliation, especially toward Madero's followers. Thus Huerta not only endorsed Madero's intention to participate at the 1915 world's fair but also emphasized its importance even more with a view to finally securing official U.S. recognition. In June 1913 Albino R. Nuncio was appointed chief of the commission for Mexico's participation in the Panama-Pacific exposition. As we have seen, he had long been a member of the Porfirian exhibition team and had been in charge of Mexico's participation in Buffalo 1901 and Saint Louis 1904, among other fairs. He commissioned Carlos Velez as one of the San Francisco organizers. Velez wrote to his relative, Maximiliano M. Chabert, a long-time member of the Porfirian wizards of progress, saying that "it seems that in the government itself there are not many people experienced in this regard."^[64]

By the end of 1913 a full commission was formed, with Albino R. Nuncio as chief. The commission for the 1915 fair followed to the letter the Porfirian manner of structuring and organizing a Mexican display. From mid-1913 to mid-1914 this organizational machinery worked despite all odds, and numerous reports and statistics reached the Ministry of Economic Development. Efforts to secure industrial exhibitors were accompanied by an attempt to utilize the traditional national symbols and descriptions. However, the Porfirian artistic, historiographical, and political infrastructure was dismantled, partly because of political and social unrest but mainly as a result of generational factors and an uncertain international intellectual environment. The long-time artistic producers of the national image and epic, such as the painter José María Velasco and the sculptor Jesús Contreras, had died, and it was uncertain whether their styles were still considered cosmopolitan enough to merit an international showing. The new generation of artists was considered too avant-garde for a world's fair in which, it was assumed, nineteenth-century modernism would still set the tone. Hence, neither Julio Ruelas nor Diego Rivera were appropriate for the exhibit that Mexico was planning. In contrast, photography was now more important as a means of reporting on the status of Mexico's politics, art, and culture. Such long-time photographers as Guillermo Kahlo, Melchert, and Waite were therefore requested to furnish samples of their work.^[65]

Only two weeks after Madero was assassinated, on March 4, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated, and the unfortunate diplomacy of Victoriano Huerta and American Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson suffered a change of direction. Attempts by Huerta's government to gain U.S. recognition now seemed doomed, and the strength of the constitutional alliance was growing. President Wilson's ambivalent position ended with the invasion of Veracruz in 1914 and, finally, with the debacle of the Huerta regime.^[66] There is no official, documented explanation for Mexico's subsequent withdrawal from the San Francisco exposition, but there is no real need for one. By the end of 1914 Mexico's economy had touched the bottom of a serious depression.^[67]

The various factions of the constitutionalist cause were about to enter Mexico City to start negotiations for a new balance of power, and U.S. troops were still in Veracruz. There was no way for Mexico to attend the festivities in San Francisco.

Mexico's aborted attendance at the Panama-Pacific exposition constitutes one of those untaken paths with which history is replete. However, the very attempt exemplifies the construction of the national image in troublesome times. It shows how, regarding Mexico's national images, there are deeper continuities in the past. An official historian of the San Francisco exhibition observed: "It was an ambition of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition management to produce in San Francisco a cosmos, so nearly complete that if all the world were destroyed except the 635 acres of land within the Exposition gates, the material basis of the life of today could have been reproduced from the exemplification of the arts, inventions, and industries there exhibited."^[68] If the world had been destroyed, and if the only world and the only Mexico that could have been reconstructed had come from the ruins of the fair and from the records of Mexico's failed participation, what emerged would have been a picture of idealized progress and order, a world to which the whole fair belonged—as did the nineteenth century.

From the Eiffel Tower to Disneyland

Between the 1890s and the 1930s world's fairs underwent a fundamental transformation in their very essence as comprehensive pocket pictures of the world. In 1893 Henry Adams visited the Chicago exhibition, where he "found matter of study to fill hundreds of years, and his education spread over chaos." For Adams, "The exposition itself defied philosophy. . . . As a scenic display, Paris had never approached it, but the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at all. . . . No such Babel of loose and ill-joined, such vague and ill-defined and unrelated thoughts and half-thoughts and experimental outcries as the Exposition, had ever ruffled the surface of the lake."^[69] Along similar lines, in 1900 the acclaimed Mexican poet Amado Nervo described the 1900 Paris exposition as the great ending of the nineteenth century. For him, to visit that fair was "like entering the country of miracles and of the ineffable." For Nervo, the Gallery of Machines was "large enough to contain two tempests."^[70] Decades later the Russian-American novelist E. L. Doctorow related the experience of a first-generation New York Jewish boy at the 1939 New York world's fair. Commenting on one of the main parts of this Great Depression fair, the so-called Futurama, and on the whole fair as a perfect representation of an ideal world, Doctorow's main character observed: "In fact, this is what I realized and that no one had mentioned to me. [The fair] was a toy that any child in the world would want to own. You could play with it forever."^[71] In effect, world's fairs had passed

from absorbing universal amazement to conscious material amusement that could be possessed; from a symbolic and spatial, if ephemeral, universe that seemed to contain all visitors, to conscious, purchased entertainments; from the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower to Disneyland; from pictures of a utopia to a "degenerated utopia"—an ideology clothed as a myth.^[72]

I examined the nature of this global change in my introduction. The nineteenth-century type of world's fair changed because the essence of the nineteenth century had dissipated along with its chronological passing. By the 1920s the production of forms, values, tastes, and ways of life of a large portion of the population of European cities had changed radically. The change was both qualitative and quantitative, and it affected the forms of social organization, the action of governments, the poles of cultural development, and the fashions and tastes of the Western world. By the 1930s, efforts to organize a world's fair along nineteenth-century lines was supported by new economic and symbolic bases. On one hand, tourism, mass consumption, and corporate power had become the basic economic supports of world's fairs. On the other hand, the pragmatic goals of fostering recovery from economic depressions, or just imperial hangovers, resulted in nostalgic appeals to the ideal expressions of a mythical golden age of modern times: the nineteenth-century world's fairs.

For Mexico, the chronological, political, and cultural border between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century seems all too obvious: the Revolution of 1910. But Mexico's presence at sundry international fairs after the revolution was marked by this comprehensive historical mutation that included world's fairs, the Western world, and Mexico itself.

Twelve
The 1922 Rio De Janeiro Fair

If only we were from the first generation of men, when even the most common and trivial places abounded with irresistible virginity.
JULIO TORRI, "DE LA NOBLE ESTERILIDAD DE LOS INGENIOS" (1917)

Mexico's attendance at the 1922 world's fair was the first Mexican participation in an international exhibit after the revolution that commenced in 1910. Throughout the nineteenth century, Brazil participated in most of the major world's fairs: London 1867, Vienna 1873, Philadelphia 1876, and Paris 1889 (although as a private Brazilian-French company). Emperor Dom Pedro II himself inaugurated the 1876 Philadelphia fair. Hence, in an era of centennial celebrations, it seemed a natural idea to commemorate the centenary of Brazil's declaration of independence from Portugal in 1822 with a world's fair. Despite Brazilian efforts made during the nineteenth-century world's fairs to look like a modern, progressive country, Brazil could not overcome European stereotypes.^[1]

The 1922 Exposição Internacional do Centenario was held in Rio de Janeiro, then the nation's capital.^[2] Originally planned to be a national exposition, the Rio fair, held from September 1922 through July 1923, gradually took on the structure and organization of the typical nineteenth-century-style universal exposition. In common with many nineteenth-century expositions, Rio's fair was tightly linked to the urban transformation of the city, which had passed from the artistic and monumental concerns of a belleepoque urban center to the more modern preoccupations with sanitation and tourism. The fair had a strong emphasis on hygiene and included campaigns against tuberculosis and venereal diseases, and it represented an international effort to change the city's reputation as an unhealthy tropical port.^[3] The sanitary focus was evident in the exhibits of countries like the United States and Portugal, but not that of Mexico, to which the fair was a matter of the spirit, not sanitation and industry.

Rio's world's fair included national and international sections. Argentina, Japan, Mexico, Great Britain, the United States, Italy, Denmark, Czechoslo-

vakia, Norway, Belgium, France, and Portugal were among the countries with significant displays. The whole fair was characterized by the Portuguese colonial style in galleries and buildings, so the foreign pavilions followed rather conservative architectural styles. The United States constructed a large building in Portuguese colonial style, meant to be transformed into the American consulate in Rio de Janeiro after the exposition.^[4] France built a replica of the 1766 Petit Trianon of Versailles, which was afterward donated to the Brazilian academy of letters.^[5] Overall, the architecture of the Rio fair left a mark of neocolonialism in the city: foreign pavilions in neocolonial or traditional styles and new Brazilian buildings in neocolonial Portuguese style completed this exercise in nostalgia.

The Year 1922

Rio's fair attracted national and international attention, and more than 3 million people visited the exposition. Yet it was a very expensive enterprise in both economic and political terms. The fair appeared to be an island of harmony and consensus surrounded by political turmoil, economic crisis, regional rebellions, social unrest, and intellectual controversies. For Brazil itself, 1922 was a year of radical changes, especially regarding the definition of the history and identity of a nation that was pompously commemorating a de facto independence by default.

It was an election year in the weak Brazilian republic, and the regime of President Epitácio Pessoa was threatened by strong regional conflicts and military rebellions. Historically, however, politics and universal expositions have found ways to be mutually complementary, and Pessoa's position vis-à-vis the exposition was similar to that of French President Sadi Carnot during the 1889 Paris world's fair in the no-less-fragile French Third Republic. Both found relief from their political troubles in the expositions, and a way to show political and economic vitality. For Pessoa, the fair was also a way to reinforce the centralization of power amid regional conflicts,^[6] though the fair did not help in the regime's attempts to diminish the charges of corruption and waste leveled against it, of which the fair itself was a major example. This was evident even for Alonso Torre Díaz, Mexican minister in Brazil, who wrote home in 1922 about Brazil's precarious financial situation and the profligacy of Pessoa's government, which only exacerbated the already difficult political situation that had led to the declaration of a state of siege.^[7]

The year also marked a watershed in Brazilian cultural life. The Modern Art Week was held in São Paulo, and Brazilian modernism was consolidating and acquiring recognition within the nation's intellectual life, with writers and artists such as Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, R. de Carvalho, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. They articulated an irreverent view of traditional Brazilian naturalist and conser-

vative official culture, of which Rio and its exposition was the capital. In 1922 Brazilian modernist intellectuals were redefining the traditional language of national literature and culture, as was Mexico's intellectual group known as the Contemporéneos, albeit more profoundly and more nationalistically. They sought an "ideological and ironic modernity. . . to face the cosmopolitan and the national."^[8] For Brazil it was in 1922 that the Antropofagia came to stay.^[9] In contrast, the centennial exposition of Rio exhibited the art of order and progress—the motto that appears on the Brazilian flag—the neocolonial architecture and an overall pro-Iberian environment very much fostered by a city, already in the belle epoque style with a growing Spanish and Portuguese immigrant population. The exposition constituted a rather traditional civics lesson.^[10] While the modernists were articulating the Paulicea Desvairada , Rio was organizing a neocolonial patriotic event. Industrial Silo Paulo was the center of rejection of the traditional Portuguese legacy, epitomized by the attempt to create a uniquely Brazilian language; it was the future of the nation. For the progressive cultural and economic sector of São Paulo, Rio was the antination.^[11]

To this exposition, to this Brazil, President Álvaro Obregón sent not only a noteworthy Mexican exhibit but also a very special delegation headed by the then minister of education, José Vasconcelos, and by the influential Gen. Manuel Pérez Treviño. This constituted the first Mexican presence at an international exposition since the departure of Porfirio Díaz. The circumstances that had prevented Mexican attendance at the 1915 Panama-Pacific world's fair had changed radically, and Obregón's government had achieved a certain level of economic and political centralization among the revolutionary factions. With Carranza's assassination in 1920, the northern generals—basically Calles and Obregón—had achieved political and military victories over the numerous revolutionary groups. Mexico was still marked by the legacy of years of violence and political unpredictability, however, and in 1922 nothing seemed to signal the end of those years. Not only was a political balance still being negotiated with arms, money, and words, but also the concepts of nationalism, national culture, and education were in a state of flux. In this uncertain scenario the significance of random historical circumstances, as well as the virtu of the historical actors, stands out under the historian's scrutiny. When uncertainty reigns, and when the formation of a national image is at issue, the symbols and forms are likely to come about through decisive action on the part of one faction or another. This is what the Mexican Ulysses, José Vasconcelos, did in 1922.^[12]

In that year, two of the fundamental preoccupations of Obregón's government were U.S. recognition of the new regime and rehabilitation of Mexico's international financial reputation, lost after years of violence and economic chaos. Adolfo de la Huerta, minister of finance, had tried to negotiate old and new loans with American banks, but he found it difficult to over-

come the international image of Mexico as a violent and generally unstable country. Simultaneously, an international intellectual and artistic admiration for the achievements of Mexico's popular revolution was growing and was even shared by some financiers who were art connoisseurs.^[13] In this context, for Obregón's regime the Brazilian fair of 1922 offered an opportunity to revitalize Mexico's international reputation by offering the works of a revolutionary Mexico, a nation that was economically and politically stable and secure, but now revolutionary and popular.

The 1922 Brazilian centennial exposition proved to be of importance to the United States and Europe as well. The image of Brazil as the land of the future, though as idealized as that of any other Latin American country, seemed to have great appeal for the world. The importance of this event for the United States was demonstrated both by U.S. expenditures for the fair and by the presence of Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes,^[14] though it might be said that the United States was only returning the visit of Dom Pedro II to the 1876 centennial fair in Philadelphia. Still, the official American presence was very significant, and it also included an important private component.^[15] Militarily, given the regional alliances already established by the United States in Latin America, the Brazilian exposition was an excellent occasion for consolidating the agreement with its most important ally in Latin America. What was sought in this instance was a treaty with the Brazilian government to reconstruct the Brazilian navy. The Mexican minister in Brazil related his private conversation with President Pessoa and explained the Brazilian president's strong pro-Americanism, which, he advised, ought to be considered with great suspicion.^[16] In fact, the American interest in attending the Brazilian fair made the exhibition all the more appealing for the Mexican government.

Reciprocity was an additional and elegant diplomatic excuse: Brazil, it was officially argued, had had an important presence in both the centennial celebration of Mexico's independence in 1910 and in the commemoration of the conclusion of Mexico's independence in 1921.^[17] Furthermore, Brazil had declared Mexico's official anniversary of the consummation of independence a national holiday and had even named one of Rio de Janeiro's main thoroughfares the Avenida Mexico.

Mexico Joins the Fair

In 1921 Obregón's government began to plan Mexico's presence in Brazil. Little is known about the budget assigned for this purpose, but it seems to have been administered in a disorganized fashion. Obregón himself decided to send a military battalion and an old navy boat, the Nicolás Bravo . As chief of this military delegation, he appointed the influential Gen. Manuel Pérez Treviño, chief of the president's general staff and eventually a prominent

supporter of Plutarco Elias Calles.^[18] A military delegation was customary at this kind of celebration, but for Mexico in 1922 this decision was rather surprising. It constituted an expensive gesture that contrasted with the economic difficulties the country was then experiencing.

President Obregón named Vasconcelos the special Mexican delegate to Rio de Janeiro to give the impression of stability and political unity, not, as Vasconcelos himself later wrote, to remove Vasconcelos from the political controversies surrounding the presidential succession of 1924. Indeed, Obregón was maneuvering with Calles over the military and political formulas to continue in power, but this he could do with or without Vasconcelos in Mexico. Although Vasconcelos was very helpful to Obregón in dealing with revolutionary intellectuals, in the final analysis he was quite dispensable. Mexico was a country of caudillos, and regardless of how indispensable the intellectuals considered themselves, they were largely irrelevant to the postrevolutionary political status quo.

Obregón's decision to appoint Vasconcelos was, in fact, influenced by Vasconcelos's own lobbying (within political circles, Vasconcelos clearly expressed his intentions of being appointed special delegate to Brazil) and also by Vasconcelos's intellectual prestige among the Latin American intellectual elites.^[19] Vasconcelos had been in South America before 1922, and he wished to return to continue his thinking and writing about the emergence of Latin Americans as a leading race in the world. Indeed, from his 1922 trip to Brazil and Argentina came his most renowned book, La raza cómica (The Cosmic Race ), published in 1925—though for all its reputation, the book is merely the ruminations of a traveler in South America. Obregón was aware of Vasconcelos's fame and sent him not only to Brazil but also to Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Washington, D.C., as the intellectual voice of the new, revolutionary Mexico.

Unlike the Porfirian displays, the Mexican exhibit in Rio de Janeiro was not under the direction of a single group. The military delegation reported directly to the president.^[20] The display of Mexican products and manufactures was supervised by a special agent assigned to the Commerce Department of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce.^[21] And the special Mexican delegation was headed by Vasconcelos. It was Vasconcelos and his team who gave a coherent rhetorical and ideological shape to Mexico's display in Brazil. If there was an image of Mexico displayed in Rio, it was that constructed by Vasconcelos.

From the beginning, the diverse agents involved in Mexico's displays in Brazil suggested various ways of showing Mexico to the world. The bureaucracy had no experience in these matters, but it had its own idea of what Mexico was like. This idea was a complex combination of revolutionary popular discourses and patriotic elements rooted in the historical, anthropological, sociological, and artistic arguments synthesized by Porfirian intel-

lectuals and politicians. For instance, Alonso Torre Diaz recommended at the end of 1921 that Mexico send to Brazil reproductions from the National Museum's collection of Mexican antiquities—the collection that had been doggedly copied and recopied by the Porfirian exhibition team. He also recommended the construction of a pavilion in the Aztec style.^[22] He even spread word of this possibility to the Brazilian media, leading the Jornal do Commercio to announce in November 1921 that Mexico's pavilion was to be an Aztec building.^[23] Obregón, with the same motivation, inquired about the cost of a bronze replica of the Cuauhtémoc monument on Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma. As a result, the 1880s Roman-style Cuauhtémoc, the main relic of official Porfirian indigenism, was once again copied to be shipped to Rio, as it had previously been sent to Paris, Chicago, and countless other places. A contract was signed with the prestigious Tiffany Company of New York in July 1922 for the manufacture of this replica.^[24] Ironically enough, Tiffany offered a discount to the revolutionary government because, after all, Porfirian Mexico had been a trustworthy old customer.^[25] Tiffany had long been associated with Mexico's symbolic devices, and on this occasion it was employed to make not only the Cuauhtémoc replica but also the commemorative gold and bronze medals for Mexico's display at Rio's fair.^[26]

Vasconcelos appointed his own team to accompany him on this trip. This team constituted a gathering of intellectuals, artists, and musicians who followed Vasconcelos throughout his tenure as minister of education and, later, as presidential candidate in 1929. Using the Porfirian model, Vasconcelos aimed to form a professional team able to produce the different effects involved in presenting a complete picture of a modern nation. His team comprised the professional diplomats Pablo Campos Ortiz and Alfonso de Rosenzweig, both as advisers; the painters Roberto Montenegro and Gabriel Fernández Ledesma; and the poets and writers Carlos Pellicer and Julio Torri.^[27] In Brazil the team was joined by the Dominican writer, literary critic, and long-time resident of Mexico Pedro Henríquez Ureña.

Once Vasconcelos took control of Mexico's display, its ideological direction began to clarify. Vasconcelos could do nothing to nullify the reproduction of the Cuauhtémoc monument. He argued: "On the eve of my trip to Rio de Janeiro, Pansi [sic ] informed me that a replica of the statue of Cuauhtémoc from the Paseo de la Reforma had been cast and that this would be Mexico's gift to its sister republic on her centennial anniversary. I had neither choice nor influence over his decision, and any protest on my part would have been useless."^[28] He did not agree with the idea of reproducing the image of an Indian hero of a nation that was, he thought, fundamentally Hispanic. However, he assumed control of the rest of the Mexican exhibit, making the image of Mexico the expression par excellence of the cosmic race of which he dreamed.

Hence, owing to Vasconcelos's influence, a contest was held for the con-

struction not of an Aztec building but of a colonial-style pavilion. In December 1921 the contest took place, with fifteen different plans entered.^[29] Two young architects, Carlos Obregón Santacilia and Carlos Tarditti, won this contest, and for the former this was the beginning of a successful career as the architect for the needs of the postrevolutionary governments. (The Benito Juárez school—1923-1924—was his main neocolonial work à la Vasconcelos.)^[30] Although Obregón Santacilia eventually converted to the functionalist modern Le Corbusier type of architecture, for the Mexican pavilion in Rio de Janeiro he designed a Mexican colonial baroque building that echoed the new building for the Ministry of Education, under construction at the time. It was a building of 600 square meters, located between the pavilions of Denmark and Czechoslovakia. In it, Vasconcelos sought to epitomize his whole conception of a new Mexico (see Fig. 37).

While Obregón Santacilia and Tarditti worked on the construction of the building, Montenegro and Fernandez Ledesma designed the mural paintings that decorated the walls of its second floor. Whereas Vasconcelos criticized the mural paintings on the walls of the British pavilion in Rio for being classic examples of English imperialism,^[31] an American art critic judged Montenegro's murals as rather colorful but traditional allegories and scenes of Mexico: "On one wall two women in natural dress stretch their arms toward a pile of natural products."^[32] These were colonial scenes, panels from eighteenth-century Mexico. In fact, Montenegro had just returned from Europe and was being promoted, along with many other artists (including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco), by Vasconcelos's cultural crusade. But Vasconcelos especially liked Montenegro's postacademic, modern, but not aesthetically or politically radical paintings.^[33] As a whole, the building and its interior were presented as an example of the optimal synthesis of the essence of Mexico—the Spanish spiritual legacy—and the particular expression given it by the Indian influence, as exemplified in the Mexican baroque.

Obregón Santacilia was only a 26-year-old architect eager to obtain contracts, and his infatuation with the neocolonial style would not last long.^[34] But in 1922 he was fulfilling the influential—in both architecture and political thought—pro-Hispanic understanding of Mexico. Not surprisingly, a U.S. visitor described his building as a "mingling of Spanish and native styles with polychromatic decoration."^[35] The Brazilian press also thought that the Mexican pavilion was quite distinguished because it merged pre-Colombian and medieval Spanish architecture.

These characteristics were not random but, rather, a conscious allegorical exercise. As we have seen, since the 1890s architecture had been the crystallization of the intellectual and political debate about the nation and its modern future.^[36] Vasconcelos himself had a great concern with architecture. For him it was a perfect art because it combined aesthetics and social functions. Buildings and monuments were the chief components of his cultural

Image not available.

37.
The Mexican pavilion in the 1922 Centennial Exhibition of Rio de Janeiro.
 Source: Jornal do Commercio, O Livro d'Ouro, Edição Comemorativa,
1822-1922 (Rio de Janeiro, 1922), 170.

campaign as minister of education.^[37] He claimed that he sought to summarize his conception of Mexican nationhood in architecture, as he indeed attempted to do in the new Ministry of Education building, the construction of which he promoted. In this building, he explained, his goal was to demonstrate that "America will be the first continent on earth to witness the realization of a race of men derived from all of the superior aspects of previous races—this will be a final race, the cosmic race."^[38]

Vasconcelos's conception of a hybrid but fundamentally neocolonial architecture epitomized the cultural synthesis he himself represented in Mexican cultural life. By the 1920s he had introduced the most influential synthesis of his time for conceiving what it meant to be Mexican and what Mexico ought to be like in the future. To find parallels to his position, one would have to go back to Lucas Alamán and his pro-Hispanic but complex and rich synthesis of Mexico's history.^[39] If, as Manuel Gómez Morín has argued, a new Mexico was born out of the chaos of 1915,^[40] it was in the early 1920s, with Vasconcelos at the Ministry of Education, that a group of intellectuals had the opportunity to give shape to that new nation.

A Building for the Cosmic Race

The new shape of the nation did begin to be reflected in architecture, and so did the realization of how old Mexico was. In the Porfirian period the Cuauhtémoc monument had synthesized the proindigenist tendencies of some political and intellectual circles, just as these trends had been expressed architecturally in the Aztec Palace constructed for the 1889 Paris world's fair. However, the pro-Hispanic architectural tendencies began to acquire significance in Mexico after the turn of the century. As I explained in chapter 7, Jesús T. Acevedo, an architect trained in the last decade of the Porfirian period and a good friend of Vasconcelos, making use of a biological metaphor, claimed that it was colonial architecture, the main matrix of evolution, from which a real national architecture could emerge.^[41] Also in 1913, Federico E. Mariscal criticized the attempts to re-create pre-Hispanic architecture and pointed out that it was in colonial times that the elements of Mexican nationhood were combined, and thus "this colonial architectural style is the one that has to suffer all the necessary aesthetic transformations to reveal through contemporary buildings the actual historical modifications that Mexican life itself has suffered throughout time."^[42]

What was important about this postrevolutionary neocolonialism in architecture was not its pro-Hispanism per se—this had been present throughout Mexican history—but the conception of it as a democratic, popular, and natural direction for the country to follow. As such, it was maintained by both indigenists and Hispanists. The prominent postrevolutionary indigenist Manuel Gamio believed that in order to escape the vicious circle of European imitation, all too common during the Porfirian period, Mexican architecture ought to rediscover Spain.^[43] Gamio disliked the American-style suburbs of Mexico City, such as the Colonia Juárez, and although he was willing to consider some architecture inspired by pre-Hispanic styles, he favored the Mexican colonial styles that seemed to include the hybrid synthesis for which he was looking.^[44] In the same way, Vasconcelos favored the neocolonial style as the fortified merger of Indian hands and Spanish techniques and intelligence. Indeed, his pro-Hispanism in architecture echoed J. E. Rodó's type of pan-Latin American nationalism—and anti-Americanism.

In constructing a colonial building in Rio de Janeiro in 1922 Vasconcelos was not only fulfilling his ideas but also following a continental tendency. Since the 1890s Hispanism had emerged in Spain as a conservative, Catholic, anti-American ideology that maintained the belief in the uniqueness and superiority of the Hispanic race. This ideology was echoed throughout Latin America, often supporting a conservative, Catholic, nationalist populism.^[45] In Spain, the consequences of Hispanism could be seen in the emergence of the Spanish Falange and in the official attempts to reestablish, at least spiritually, the Magnae Hispaniae—the great Hispanic empire. Shortly after the

1922 Brazilian fair, the 1929 Ibero-American exhibition would best epitomize this Hispanism. (See chapter 13.)

Consequently, whereas in São Paulo the Modern Art Week threatened the old aesthetic understandings of Brazil, Rio became the bastion of a new discourse based on the recovery of Brazil's colonial legacy as part of a continental ideology. The avant-garde nationalist Brazilian intellectuals of the 1920s eventually favored Le Corbusier functionalism, as Obregón Santacilia did in Mexico. But the no-less-nationalist official architects of Rio's exposition found in the neo-Portuguese colonial architecture a way to redefine the national personality of the capital city after the belle epoque. This tendency dated back to the works of Ricardo Severo, a Portuguese architect who lived in São Paulo and whose influence would enrich all of the major architects of modern Brazil, especially José M. Carneiro da Cunha Filho in Rio de Janeiro. As a reaction against the traditional neoclassical styles, and as a way to follow the international tendency of eclectic revival, Brazilian neocolonialism was best immortalized in Rio de Janeiro's centennial exposition.^[46] Therefore, among the conservative Brazilian republican faction, Mexico's neocolonial building, together with the American neo-Portuguese pavilion, was the best liked of the foreign pavilions. Even President Pessoa expressed to Ambassador Torre Diaz his satisfaction that the two Latin American countries with distinctive colonial styles were Mexico and Brazil.^[47]

The neocolonial styles that supposedly synthesized the various national tendencies with the basic Spanish matrix did indeed represent the real first beginning of the new cosmic race. Vasconcelos described the Brazilian buildings at the exhibition as "colonial-style Portuguese buildings. . . [reflecting] all of the splendor and luxury of the conquering nation of Portugal. . . . However, the Brazilian architects have enlarged the constructions, bestowing upon the buildings a spacious and attractive quality. This corresponds to the new Brazilian nation that has improved upon the older colonial traditions."^[48] In truth, for thinkers like Vasconcelos, the neocolonial (Hispanic or Portuguese) style meant the renovation of the Iberian race, which, he believed, would come to lead Western civilization. Thus, in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, he stated: "I regard European contributions to Latin America to be no longer important in the present. . . . I believe that in the next few decades Europe's role will be that of an observer of our development. They will describe the things we will have accomplished."^[49]

The pro-Hispanic movement was as well established as the proindigenist trend in the discussion about nationalism in Mexico. By 1922, despite Vasconcelos's notoriety at the Ministry of Education, postrevolutionary indigenism had been redefined by the convergence of several phenomena: the popular mobilization of the Revolution of 1910; the metamorphosis of cosmopolitan aesthetics (more innovative and avant-garde, yet more socially en-

Image not available.

38.
Indigenous motifs in tobacco advertising. 
Source: Ethnos. Revista Mensual para la Divulgación de Estudios 
Antropológicos sobre Móxico y Centro-América 1, 3 (1920).

gaging); the movement of disciplines like anthropology and archaeology toward a more culturalist (Boasian) paradigm; and the official policies to delineate by all available means (education, media, murals) the meaning of the new revolutionary nation.^[50] By the 1920s the combination of these factors had made Indian motifs into fashionable and acceptable cosmopolitan tokens. This trend can be seen in commercial advertisements that are always

prompt to recognize and advance new tastes. Thus one brand of cigarettes—El Buen Tono—which in Porfirian times had depicted French-style women in its publicity, by 1922 advertised its products in Manuel Gamio's indigenist journal, Ethnos , with pre-Hispanic motifs (see Fig. 38). In the same way, foreign businesses, such as the oil company El Águila, also turned to pre-Hispanic themes in its advertising.^[51] In fact, as a historian of Mexican archaeology observed, "Around 1920, for reasons that have little to do with archaeological research and more to do with changing aesthetic norms in Europe, ancient art forms came to be assigned a value and importance hitherto unknown."^[52]

Furthermore, and although he would eventually harbor regrets about the choice, it was Vasconcelos himself who championed the artists who became the masters of Mexican postrevolutionary official indigenism.^[53] He favored and sponsored the appreciation of popular arts, and he did not dismiss the significance of Indians in Mexico's history. In Indología , he maintained that the Latin American race contradicted Darwin's theory, because in Mexico and the rest of Latin America the races did not follow Darwinian natural selection, but rather lived in cooperation as expressed by theorists like Leclerc du Sablon in France and Georg Friedrich Nicolai in Germany.^[54] But Vasconcelos, however messianic, discussed nationalism in the language furnished by the Porfirian era; that is, in terms of race.

Vasconcelos articulated his understanding of race most clearly in a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in 1926.^[55] There Vasconcelos aimed to overcome the legacy of nineteenth-century racist theorists that left no room for the Spanish American hybrid peoples. He attacked Herbert Spencer and the Latin American scientists who copied the evolutionist racist theories, and he defended miscegenation on two grounds: by vindicating Spanish spiritual superiority that permitted the overcoming of racial differences (that is, through miscegenation); and by contradicting racial theories on their own terms. He then tried to prove that miscegenation is both a messianic and a biological conclusion of history: "If we observe human nature closely we find that hybridism in man, as well as in plants, tends to produce better types and tends to rejuvenate those types that have become static."^[56] He continued: "There is nothing left for us to do, but to follow the Spanish tradition of eliminating the prejudice of color, the prejudice of race . . . . No matter what our theoretical opinions might be, we have to start from the fact that the mestizo is the predominant element in Mexico."^[57] This combination of pro-Hispanism (linked to criollo patriotism) and (so-to-speak) scientific racist antiracism allowed Vasconcelos to defend the universal task of the new mestizo nations (that is, "bringing together all the races of the earth. . . with the purpose of creating a new type of civilization"). It also led him to expand the nineteenth-century racist theories into the twentieth-century postrevolutionary era. Thus he called for replacing Darwinism with Mendelism (in

which "we might find more racial hope and more individual strength and faith"), as well as for collaboration of races, in order to avoid being "overwhelmed by the wave of the Negro, of the Indian, or of the Asiatic."^[58]

Vasconcelos's understanding of race in the 1920s was, of course, different from the views articulated by nineteenth-century Mexican intellectuals such as Francisco Pimentel, Alfredo Chavero, or Vicente Riva Palacio. But it formed part of the same discussion, in the same terms, and it derived from the same basic assumptions. Furthermore, in common with the late Porfirian scientists, Vasconcelos in the 1920s was aware of the importance of science in this regard and of the ascientific strategies Mexicans and Latin Americans had to adopt in order to make science suit their special situation. He affirmed: "If all nations then build theories to justify their policies or to strengthen their deeds, let us develop in Mexico our own theories; or at least, let us be certain that we choose among the foreign theories of thought those that stimulate our growth instead of those that restrain it."^[59] He could not imagine the radicalism into which indigenism would fall in the 1930s; he only conceived a sort of romantic assimilation of the Indian aspects of Mexico into its great Hispanic essence. Nonetheless, he seemed to have been aware that to achieve this fusion, negotiations had to take place among and within Mexico's elites according to their varied social and economic circumstances. His inauguration of a tropical Cuauhtémoc in Rio de Janeiro was a demonstration of this awareness.

A Tropical Cuauhtémoc

On 16 September 1922, at the intersection of the Avenidas Beira-Mar, Oswaldo Cruz, and Rui Barbosa, the four-meter-tall replica of Cuauhtémoc's monument was erected (see Fig. 39). As I mentioned before, Vasconcelos could not prevent this extravagant Mexican display, which he considered an unnecessary expenditure. President Obregón and Alberto J. Pani had been its promoters, and Vasconcelos had no choice but to comply. Hence he articulated a masterpiece of rhetorical ambivalence and inclusion that stated his idea of a Hispanic Mexico without denigrating the advocates of indigenism and their tropical Guauhtémoc. And thus, through a combination of historical inaccuracies, classical metaphors, convincing allegorical images, and his well-known eloquence, Vasconcelos revived in splendid fashion Mexico's nineteenth-century rhetoric on the subject.^[60] In front of President Pessoa, Vasconcelos claimed: "the bronzed Mexican Indian is re-created in this polished granite base. We provide the bronze, while you furnish the rock foundation for mounting it. Together, these elements represent the complete creation of a strong and glorious race." This having been said, he also described Hernán Cortés as "the greatest of all conquistadors, the unrivaled one [who] vanquished with his sword and persuaded through his words."

Image not available.

39.
The Cuauhtémoc replica sent to the 1922 Rio de Janeiro exhibition.
 Source: SRE 7-16-67, II; reproduced courtesy of SRE.

He directed the flow of his ideas to the granite base, to which he constantly referred as the representation of the real new race, and to Cuauhtémoc, whom he depicted as the symbol of the end of Indian power, the hero "on whose behalf we request the hospitality of this city which is open to the ocean yet sustained by mountains. In other words, while at the open front there is the freedom to make any decision, there is at the base the granite through

which the new Latin race will forge its destiny in this continent." Cuauhté-moc meant "the certainty of our own consciousness and the hope of a glorious future." He explained that in Mexico the veneration of this hero suggested neither the rejection of progress nor the ambition of going back to Aztec times. Neither, of course, did it mean the dismissal of Europe: "We have assimilated European influences, and now it is our duty to create." As always, he contrasted the emerging Latin America with the already successful civilization of the United States, and in such a contrast Cuauhtémoc's arrow appeared to be heading to the future. In the foreseeable future, he believed, Latin American civilization would overthrow North American power. Thus he ambivalently, if eloquently, concluded: "Full of faith, we brandish Cuauhté-moc as our flag and announce from our borders across the sea to the Iberian race that: Iberian race, be as faithful with your identity as the Indian was, be yourself." What ought to be copied from Indian peoples was not their particular identity but the fact that they did have an identity which allowed them to be just that—themselves.^[61]

In Brazil, Vasconcelos's speech was welcomed for its eloquence but not really understood as a sample of how conflicting ideas about nationhood might be harmonized. After his discourse—Vasconcelos wrote to Obregón—President Pessoa "acted as you do when you are not content with official speeches: he talked and talked."^[62] In Mexico, the speech was received with overall approval. Vasconcelos's ideas about miscegenation may, as some authors have suggested, have been imposed on him by the mestizo condition of the nation, and undoubtedly it later gradually changed toward a more pro-European Hispanist position.^[63] But in 1922 Vasconcelos was minister of education and closer to power—that is, to the control of national symbols—than he had ever been before. At the time he believed that it was possible to build a universally accepted Hispanic, though mestizo, nation using a variety of political, representational, and rhetorical resources. Indeed, Vasconcelos was criticized for the numerous historical inaccuracies and errors that marked his Cuauhtémoc speech. Years later, he recalled the event as an irony of the times: he disliked very much the fact that the indigenist monument, interpreted by him as a flag for the new Hispanic cosmic race, was made by a Yankee company. More importantly, he dismissed those who criticized his historical imprecision and acknowledged that his speech was "a bit of a fantasy" because it was "symbolically embellished to convey our desire to be independent, not of Spain, but of Monroeism." Thus all his historical errors were irrelevant because, as he explained, "I don't intend to write history; I aim to create myth."^[64]

The proindigenist tendency was also present in the congresses that took place around the Rio de Janeiro exposition. Especially significant in this regard was the 20th International Congress of Americanists, at which Manuel Gamio's works were presented, together with those of the venerable Mexican

physician Nicolás León, a veteran measurer of Indian heads.^[65] The official Mexican delegates to this congress were Alfonso del Toro and José Raygados Vetiz. Both very much shared Vasconcelos's pro-Hispanic nationalism. Alfonso del Toro wrote some articles from Brazil for Mexico City's periodical Revista de Revistas , in which he displayed a cruder version of Vasconcelos's anti-Americanism and old-fashioned aristocratic notions: "North American influence is nonexistent in Brazil. Rather, the refinement and good taste of the French are here apparent." For him, there were no pelados^[66] in Rio de Janeiro, and there were fewer Blacks than in any American city.^[67] Although expressed with less subtlety, Toro's impressions of Rio reflected those of Vasconcelos.

A View of Mexico's Display in Rio

In addition to the neocolonial pavilion and the Cuauhtémoc monument, the Mexican display included a variety of products assembled by a commercial delegation headed by José Vázquez Schiaffiano and Luis G. Garfias.^[68] The exhibit included a scale reproduction of Teotihuacán, furniture from Mexico City's department store El Palacio de Hierro, samples of mineral products, and food products. There was also a special book commissioned by the Mexican government to honor Brazil.^[69] This book displayed Mexico's great ancient past, its recent material progress, and its natural beauty and wealth with statistics, paintings, and photographs. The images used in this book were exactly the same ones as those used by the Porfirian exhibition team in several world's fairs (paintings by Obregón and Velasco, photographs of railroads, and so forth). Two special exhibits were real innovations: a movie made during Vasconcelos's stay in Brazil,^[70] and an important exhibit of popular art.

Popular art, both visual and vocal, became a significant aspect of Vasconcelos's educational campaign. Montenegro and Fernández Ledesma were prominent promoters of such art, as were the painter and writer Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) and the anthropologist Miguel Othón de Mendizábal. As minister, Vasconcelos emphasized the production and promotion of popular art, and he had a pragmatic awareness of the international receptivity to this type of art.

Contrary to what scholar Claude Fell believes, with this international promotion Mexican popular art did not lose its exoticism but, quite the contrary, attained full international recognition—and market—for precisely this quality.^[71] Mexican ceramics were especially appreciated in Brazil, as was a collection of photographs of Mexico by Guillermo Kahlo, the official photographer of the Porfiriato public works.^[72]

However, the popularity of Mexico's exhibit with visitors to the exposition was not especially reflected in the number of awards received. Mexico won a total of 561 prizes (only 80 grand prizes and 68 gold medals)—a poor showing for an expensive exhibit that included not only a building and a

four-meter-tall bronze monument but also 160 military men, 75 members of a military band, and 35 members of the Orquesta Típica Torrebianca.^[73]

In addition to all this, Vasconcelos lectured in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and, later, in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. Throughout South America, Vasconcelos's ideas were generally welcomed, in part because a pro-Hispanist stance was widespread in the criollo societies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. In Brazil his educational campaign was considered the core of the image of the new Mexico. In a conference at São Paulo's university, Victor Vianna compared Vasconcelos's work with that of Visher in England and Henriot in France. In turn, Vasconcelos praised the Brazilian educational system both in speeches and in his later writings (especially in El desastre and La raza cósmica ). Only in Chile was he criticized by the conservative media for an overemphasis on race at the expense of nationhood and because he repudiated militarism.^[74] In the Brazilian interior (Minas Gerais and São Paulo states) the Mexican delegation of poets, writers, singers, and artists was well received. However, at times the reality of Mexico seemed lost on the inhabitants of the Brazilian hinterlands, as when the Folha do Norte , a Belém newspaper, candidly declared that "two navy units from Porfirio Díaz's country visited Amazonia." Of course, historically, this was not an error but a lack of delicacy with Mexico's postrevolutionary and anti-Porfirist government.^[75]

Brazil's centenary of independence had been celebrated in Mexico City with various artistic and political events,^[76] and at the Rio de Janeiro exposition the favor was returned with a Mexican festival held on 14 September 1922. Once again, Vasconcelos organized the performance. The Orquesta Típica Torreblanca played traditional Mexican songs and some Mexican waltzes by Villanueva (which were notorious pieces of Porfirian nostalgia). Flora Islas, Abigael Bonilla, and Fanny Annitúa were the featured singers. Carlos Pellicer recited Mexican poems, though not those written by his generation, but the somewhat shopworn verses of Amado Nervo, Manuel Gutié-rrez Najera, Salvador Díaz Mirón, and a relatively new poet, Enrique González Martínez.^[77] In effect, at Rio, Mexico was represented by the same poems and music that had been performed at many other Mexican displays at world's fairs during the preceding century.

With the Nation at Hand at Guanabara Bay

Overall, the image that Mexico tried to convey at Rio de Janeiro was that of the spiritual leader of a continental push toward consummation of the cosmic race, an essentially Hispanic, anti-American, hybrid—and, above all, renewed—country. The industrial and touristic aspects of the nation were largely ignored, for it was a display of ideas and symbols based largely on Vasconcelos's thought. The ideal picture of the Mexico that Vasconcelos imag-

ined existed, if only for ephemeral moments, beside Guanabara Bay. It was made possible by various historical factors for which the Revolution of 1910 had been the fundamental catalyst. First, Mexico's display in Rio revealed a generational change that was significant for the construction of the national symbols. Second, Mexico's presence in Brazil constituted in certain respects a dressed-up, somewhat more pragmatic, reflection of Mexico's old regime—especially evident in its focus on race and Hispanism and its obsession with style.^[78] Finally, Mexico's exhibit showed a hitherto unknown—in Mexico's image at international fairs—single-minded character. The Mexico of Rio belonged to the unfolding of Vasconcelos's thought, and in Brazil he was not only exhibiting his conception of Mexico but also testing his own ideas. Rio in 1922 was an optimal scenario for doing this. It is not by chance that one of Vasconcelos's major books, La raza cósmica , is a report of travels in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.

Obregón's regime could not rely on the Porfirian exhibition team. Regardless of the ideological and political discrepancies—which the postrevolutionary government proved to be very willing to overlook—by 1922 the Porfirian wizards of progress were either dead or too old to serve. In the 1920s, Mexico's culture and education were led by a young generation of intellectuals and artists, most of them followers of Madero's democratic movement or just part of—or direct beneficiaries of—what historian Luis González called "the blue generation," a modernist generation between the Porfiriato and the revolution. Vasconcelos, Gómez Morín, Vázquez del Mercado, Lombardo Toledano, Antonio Caso, and others occupied official posts.^[79] They tasted power, and they liked it. Hence, in trying to create his utopia of a cosmic Mexico in Rio de Janeiro, Vasconcelos, as minister of education, incorporated members of the new generation that had been born in the era of great exhibitions, between 1880 and 1900. Vasconcelos (1881), the oldest, worked with artists and writers such as Julio Torri (1889), Fernández Ledesma (1900), and Carlos Pellicer (1896); architects and engineers such as Carlos Obregón Santacilia (1896) and José Vázquez Schiaffiano (1881); and professional diplomats such as Torre Díaz (1889) and Campos Ortiz (1898). They all belonged to a generation with no patriotic or technical training other than that of an urban middle class that came of age within and between the Porfirian era and the revolutionary years.

In Mexico's presence at Rio de Janeiro, the generational shift enlarged boundaries within which such concepts as nation, progress, cosmopolitanism, and modernity might be discussed on the political and cultural stage. New and old points of view that before were only marginally considered acquired the status of official positions. However, Vasconcelos's ephemeral command of the image of the nation constituted a continuity within the parameters of the old regime. At Rio the nation was defined by references to two fundamental dichotomies: race versus spirit, and universalism versus na-

tivism. Vasconcelos had a solution for these dichotomies, which he tried to depict in all forms of expression—architecture, the plastic arts, rhetoric—in order to reiterate his proposal and make it simultaneously a statement for the world to read and a lesson for Mexico to learn. In effect, his solution was a messianic Hispanism. In it, racial imperatives acquired explanation and balance with the spiritual aspects he aimed to emphasize.^[80] Also, Mexico's uniqueness was already included and formulated into a line of thought that was both a universal and a commanding course for the future.

Vasconcelos risked maneuvering Mexico's image in this single-handed fashion because he was a disenchanted positivist. "During the first century of national independence we were concerned with establishing the boundaries of the homeland. . . . The moment has arrived to strengthen the spirit of Mexico and provide her with a soul," Vasconcelos stated in a speech he delivered in Rio de Janeiro.^[81] Indeed, he always sought to allude to this realm of souls, spirits, and symbols as domestic (Hispanist) realms versus a material outside. Small wonder, for he was a master of styles and forms. Although he studied the positivist foundation for Mexico's nationalism—that is, racial, economic, anthropological, and sociological ideas—he perceived that nationalism, as much as cosmopolitanism, was a matter of form. Through forms, symbols, and style he offered in Rio de Janeiro an idea of Mexico as a universal but unique nation. Oddly enough, this had been the dream of the Porfirian displays at world's fairs. Unlike the Porfirian efforts, however, Vasconcelos did not believe that prototypes of modernity and cosmopolitanism existed. Rather, they had to be created. The model for the cosmic race was Hispanic, but the race was still in the making. As with the Porfirian displays, Vasconcelos was aware of the contingency of his proposal, of its experimental character. However, and again along with the Porfirian Científicos, he imagined his idea of a cosmic Mexico to be a Comtian third and final stage. Nonetheless, his was not a scientific but a deliberately messianic end of history.

It has been exhaustively argued that Vasconcelos's ideas were a reaction to Porfirian positivism, but at the same time positivist thought had given Vas-concelos the basic language with which to speak about his beloved term: race. Thus his ideas ought to be seen in the continuum of the discussion of race.^[82] In 1922 his image of Mexico constituted a continuation that did not deny previous empirical, scientific, and racist parameters but projected them toward a messianic spiritual goal. "Only through a spiritual leap, grounded in historical data, will we be able to achieve a clear perception of things which transcends the microideology of specialists," he argued in La raza cósmica .^[83] Once he projected race, with its positivist imperatives, toward a spiritual messianism (that is, Hispanism), the concept found a deep and fertile national ideological ground. Throughout Mexican history criollo patriotism had been a solid intellectual and political tendency. This meant that positivist understandings of race adapted to and reflected the notions of long-established

criollo patriotism (that is, of Francisco Xavier Clavijero or Carlos Maria de Bustamante) and nineteenth-century Mexican conservatism (that is, of Lucas Alamán).^[84] Therefore, what Vasconcelos did in Rio de Janeiro was to bring to the national and international debate an image of Mexico that had been in the process of formation since colonial times, armed with Porfirian positivism, and projected into the future by his own messianic spiritualism.

The idea of a messianic Hispanic Mexico passed the test in Rio de Janeiro, because Vasconcelos found in Brazil the nutrients to feed the cosmic race.^[85] His views on Brazil were merely the search for the utopian continent inhabited by the utopian race. But he was also betrayed by his nostalgia for order and progress, a counterrevolutionary yearning. Coming to the reconstructed Rio of the 1922 fair must have been idyllic for Vasconcelos: a city that had experienced a real architectural and urban belle epoque, that had reinforced its white ethnic look through an impressive Iberian immigration, and that had kept at least the facade of democracy. The Rio that Vasconcelos described never really existed, of course—he was carefully guided within the city, as he himself acknowledged. But the city he saw and invented to reinforce his ideas was a quasi-aristocratic, white, enlightened society that recalled the Mexico City of the Porfirian middle classes. Furthermore, his trip to São Paulo convinced him that industrial progress could be undertaken by Hispanic races. Four years later he again used Sã0 Paulo as the proof that "the fabulous rise of the American Middle West is being matched both agriculturally and industrially by the Latin Americans of Brazil."^[86] In Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto) he only saw the similarities with Mexico's great colonial mining towns: economic abandonment but bastions of marvelous architecture and national history. He saw political unrest but applauded the official government that maintained the impression of the order and progress he admired. In summation, Brazil became the perfect scenario for the performance of his image of Mexico. He never saw in Silo Paulo the Paulicea Desvairada .

Vasconcelos and his team acted as though they were starting from zero in Rio de Janeiro; from total chaos it was their honor and their right to create the cosmos they imagined. Yet they did not belong to the nonexistent first generation, to which Julio Torri aspired.^[87] They were not creating new images for the nation but reproducing, reinventing, and overlapping old and new images. In essence, the image of Mexico in Rio de Janeiro borrowed from the revolution the circumstances that put Vasconcelos in the unforeseeable position of having control over the nation's symbols—and a ticket to Rio de Janeiro. But his destiny, his suicidal lover wrote in her diary, "was to awaken concerns without ever achieving control of the tiller of the boat that carried him off."^[88]

Thirteen
The 1929 Seville Fair

One who follows blindly in a past generation's footsteps plunders that generation. One who creates a doctrine to be followed plunders future generations. Revolutionaries plunder the revolution. Nationalists plunder the nation. The avant-garde plunders its epoch. The exoticists, and the Mexicans among them, plunder what they find picturesque.
JORGE CUESTA, 1932

Seville and Imperial Nostalgia

Between 1929 and 1930 a twofold Spanish exposition took place at the same time in Montjuic in Barcelona and in El Parque María Luisa in Seville. Whereas Barcelona's exhibit focused on industry, Seville's fair was fundamentally cultural and artistic. Only European nations sent significant industrial and technological displays to the Barcelona exposition. In common with the 1889 Paris world's fair, which displayed a "History of Habitation," Barcelona's fair also included a display called "The Spanish Town," a collection of exact replicas of traditional towns from all Spanish regions—a major exercise in modern autoethnography.^[1]

In contrast, despite some controversies, Seville's fair was named Exposición Ibero-Americana and thus was joined by almost all Latin American countries, the United States, and Portugal.^[2] On the inauguration day, José Cruz Conde, general commissary of Seville's exposition, said to King Alfonso XIII, "Certainly, Sir, since October 12, 1492, there has not yet been a single day in the history of America of more importance and spiritual significance than today, when the great Ibero-American Exhibition begins."^[3] The fair was in fact the stage for the last act of the drama of imperial nostalgia and nationalism that characterized Primo de Rivera's era.

Plans to celebrate a world's fair in Seville had been in the making since 1905. In addition to interests of urban developers in Seville—who from the outset supported the idea of an exhibition in order to foster investment in urban transformation and sanitation—important ideological aspects favored the possibility of a world's fair in that city. This was an era of "decadent historical reality,"^[4] and to commercially and spiritually reconquer America was one of the main goals of the exposition, especially after the war with the United States and its consequence, the loss of the last Spanish American

colony, Cuba. Originally planned for 1911, and then for 1927, for numerous national and international causes the fair was deferred until 1928, and even then it was once again postponed to 1929. By then, the urbanistic needs of Seville had completely merged with the interests involved with the exposition. But "Ibero-Americanism was what motivated the central Spanish government itself to support the exposition in Seville."^[5] In truth, Seville's exhibit was, as a Mexican observer argued in Revista de las Españas , "an objective expression of Spain's wish to reincorporate the Hispanic spirit into our ethnic family."^[6]

La Plaza de España, designed in baroque Spanish style, was the center of the exhibit. In addition, there were galleries and pavilions from the various Spanish regions. Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Santo Domingo, Cuba, and the United States constructed original pavilions designed by their own architects. Colombia, Venezuela, and Guatemala hired Spanish architects to build their buildings.^[7] Some maverick structures contrasted with the prevailing Spanish styles, and all shared a common goal: to honor the Madre Patria (motherland). In those days, the favorite metaphor was the image of the madre piadosa (clement mother) who was visited by her grown daughters; no hard feelings, no rancor, no guilt, but all warmly united in the arms of the Hispanic spirit.

Seville was organized in the fashion of the great fairs of the nineteenth century. Not only did its architecture follow the structure of the great French world's fairs of that period, but it also used a similar classification of exhibits. The exposition was divided into eleven sections: history, agriculture, mining, heavy industry, paper and graphic arts, light industry, communications and public works, education, sanitation, sociology, and statistics. As in the 1900 Paris fair, Seville's history exposition included anthropology (that is, skulls), archaeology, and ethnology. But the ethnology exhibit was subdivided into "Aboriginal Ethnology" (samples of the various primitive races, their habitation and crafts, and their daily life) and "Colonial Ethnology" (historical racial types, buildings, costumes, and arts). Within this ethnological classification various Mexican items were exhibited. In turn, what in 1889 the French fairs had started to call social economy was now laid out in the section of sociology, which included displays on social economy, workers' conditions, "conflicto capital trabajo ," and salaries.^[8]

However, the aim of Seville's exhibit was not to portray the entire modern world but to modernize the idea of Hispanism, to give it a commercial and industrial connotation without losing its spiritual meaning. Therefore, in 1908 it had been proposed that the Americas' participation be limited to the "nations which were born into the world of civilization through the general collusion of conquistadores. "^[9] Nonetheless, and in spite of serious resistance, the United States was finally invited, as was Cuba.^[10] Indeed, Seville's exposition was a fiesta of Spain in every minute detail, from architecture to

the official rhetoric, from the majestic Plaza de España to the organization of a contest for the best book to be read by Hispanic American children, a volume that would teach "love for Spain to the children of the newer Latin American republics."^[11] Along these lines, in the interior of the neocolonial Peruvian pavilion were two sculptures, one depicting a Spanish conquistador and the other, a stylish Inca princess. In front of these two figures was a sculpture representing the Peruvian nation venerating both the Spanish warrior and the European-like Inca princess.^[12] In the same vein, a Mexican book produced for distribution at the fair claimed that the conquistador was "the seed for our nationality."^[13] A photographic collage depicted the rulers of Mexico as a natural line that went from Hernán Cortés to Emilio Portes Gil.^[14] And on the walls of the Maya-style Mexican pavilion, Mexican officials had drafted a legend for all Spain to read: "Mother Spain: because you have illuminated American lands with the brilliance of your culture, and placed the devotional light of your spirit in my soul, now both in my land and soul those lights have blossomed. Méjico" (with a "j," the better to please Spain).^[15]

Oddly enough, these were the Latin American homages to the Spain of Primo de Rivera, whose regime had organized the fair as part of a last-ditch effort to recover from an economic debacle—characterized by financial crisis, inflation, and unemployment—combined with political instability that included protests by workers, students, and intellectuals.^[16] As we have seen, world's fairs had historically found a way to be mutually supporting with the politics of the host country. But not this time in Seville.

In addition, the Seville fair was to that date perhaps the most notorious modern expression of Spain's Hispanism, a tendency that was adopted by Primo de Rivera's regime as an official ideology. Diplomatic and commercial delegations were sent to Spanish American nations to strengthen the links of the Catholic "Hispanic family."^[17] Hispanism consisted of a set of racial, psychological, historical, and strategic (geopolitical and commercial) explanations of the uniqueness and superiority of the Hispanic race. It was, incidentally, an ideology whose history was related to that of world's fairs. Since 1892 Spain had attempted to minimize the 1893 Chicago fair as the celebration of the "discovery" of America. The Spanish government commemorated the fourth centennial of the European presence in America with a historical exposition in Madrid that sought to show the greatness of Spain's civilizing historical role. In the same way, taking advantage of the 1900 Paris universal exhibition, the Spanish government requested the presence of all Spanish American envoys in Madrid to discuss the expansion of Hispanism in view of the recent Spanish-American War.^[18] That same year, 1900, the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó published Ariel —the emblem par excellence of Spanish American Hispanism.

But in 1929 neither the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera nor the international policy of Hispanism was especially supported in Mexico by Plutarco

Elías Calles, the "jefe máximo " of postrevolutionary Mexico. Of course, José Vasconcelos was a noted advocate of Hispanism, and in 1929 he included this ideology in his campaign for the presidency. But the strong Catholicism intrinsic to Hispanism, together with the uses of this ideology by Primo de Rivera's conservative and pseudomonarchist regime, made of Mexico's government an open, if soft, opponent of both. In 1929 Emilio Portes Gil's administration (1928-1931) finally gave official recognition to October 12 as the "día de la raza ": the commemorative day not of mere Hispanism but of mestizaje (miscegenation), the day to honor both Columbus and Cuauhté-moc.^[19] In turn, the crisis of the Spanish dictatorship was followed with great interest in Mexico. The poet Enrique González Martínez, then Mexican ambassador to Spain, eloquently described the situation: "I was blessed with the fortune of witnessing Spain still adorned with monarchic and traditional forms while republican sentiments spread among intellectuals and the Spanish community in general. These were moments of crisis which are convenient times for the awakening of popular feelings."^[20] In 1930 Primo de Rivera resigned and left Spain, and the struggle to consolidate the Spanish republic began.^[21] This turning point was saluted in Mexico even by a popular singer who composed a tune: "Spain! Spain! Your valor has crushed the monarchy / Spain! Spain! Your ancient history now has another glory thanks to your bravery."^[22]

Mexico and Seville, 1929

To this exposition and to this Spain, and despite its distaste, Portes Gil's administration dispatched a relatively large exhibit. Needless to say, the precarious political and economic environment that hampered Mexico's presence at the 1922 Rio de Janeiro exposition had scarcely improved in the intervening years, and, in fact, 1929 was a critical year in Mexico's postrevolutionary history. The more or less stable political status quo achieved by Obregón and Calles seemed to have been consolidated by Obregón's victory in the 1928 elections. But his assassination in the same year restarted the realignment of the revolutionary elites. During the provisional government of Portes Gil, Calles's growing power had to confront and negotiate, politically and militarily, with different factions. It was in this context that in 1929 Callistas and Obregonistas founded the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), direct antecedent of the long-lasting postrevolutionary Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). However, when the rather obscure minister of Mexico in Brazil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, and not Aarón Sáenz, who seemed to be Obregón's natural successor, was nominated as the PNR's candidate for the presidency, Calles's authority became all too evident. In 1929 the revolution made clear who was to be the caudillo who would form institutions.

But 1929 was also the year when the Cristero rebellion reached a critical point and forced the establishment of a new status quo between the Mexican government and the Catholic Church. Furthermore, it was the year of the Escobarista rebellion that put Calles back on the battlefield, while Vas-concelos began his quasi-messianic struggle for the presidency. All of this took place in an economy that had not yet recovered from the debacle of 1914 and 1915, aggravated by Mexico's recognition of its debt to American banks and by the international financial uncertainty that came to the surface in the black October of 1929. In such a context, it is rather amazing that the administration of Calles and, later, Portes Gil, joined Seville's fair, collecting Mexican products and manufactures, constructing a permanent building in Seville, and expending at least U.S.$125,000.^[23]

Mexico's attendance at Seville's fair could, of course, be justified by the customary excuse of diplomatic reciprocity. Spain had sent delegations both in 1910, to the centenary of Mexico's independence, and in 1921, to the centennial celebration of the consummation of Mexico's independence. More importantly, in joining Seville's exposition Calles's government saw a chance to change the image of Mexico as a violent and chaotic country. It was also an opportunity to promote Mexico's products and art and to gain international prestige as an economically well organized and peaceful country.

Most of all, the fair was an occasion to exploit curiosity about, and to foster favorable international opinion of, the Mexican Revolution. In effect, among some activists and intellectuals in Europe and the United States, the Mexican Revolution had become an example to watch. To be sure, there also seemed to be what an official Mexican book at the fair called an attempt to "discredit. . . the Revolution by the international press and capitalist propaganda" (for its violence and antipathy toward foreign capital).^[24] But among some progressive international intellectuals and politicians the Mexican Revolution was seen as one of those rare moments when people seize control of their destiny. This was so in the arts, literature, and political militancy.^[25] The Mexican government was willing to foster this body of opinion with new ideas and information. For instance, in 1929 González Martínez explained to the Spanish media: "While our sister countries in Latin America alternate periods of work with periods of rest, the Mexican people are obliged to designate half of their daily work to productive labor and the other half to the fight for liberty."^[26] These were the ways (it was thought) to nourish the international romanticization of the Mexican Revolution that was beginning in the late 1920s. All in all, considering the size and ideological scope of Seville's fair, and considering especially Mexico's circumstances, one may wonder what it was about world's fairs that made them so appealing to the Mexico of Calles. Perhaps this decision was the result of historical inertia that makes things move the way they have always moved, or perhaps it was caused

by a succession of ill-considered decisions that eventually made Mexico's presence in Seville inevitable.

In any event, from 1925 to 1927 there was a vigorous debate within the Mexican government about whether to take part in Seville's fair—and how. Among the participants were close advisers to President Calles, the Ministry of Foreign Relations, and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. Finally, in 1926 the Mexican government accepted Spain's invitation, and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, then headed by Luis N. Morones, was put in charge of all affairs related to Mexico's participation in the Seville exposition. Thus, at the beginning of 1926 the Mexican government made a call for design proposals for a Mexican pavilion in Seville. It was established that it had to be a provisional freestyle pavilion at a cost no greater than 90,000 pesos.^[27] In April the winners were announced: first place went to Ignacio Marquina and Agustín García's design; the second, to the designer of the Mexican pavilion for Rio de Janeiro's world's fair, Carlos Obregón Santacilia; and the third to Alberto Mendoza. The fifth prize was awarded to a design made by a young Mexican architect from Yucatán, Manuel Amabilis, who eventually became the architect of the Mexican pavilion in Seville.^[28] Marquina's design was for a pre-Hispanic style building that combined various parts of Uxmal's and Zayi's archaeological ruins.^[29]

The Calles government soon realized that more money would have to be spent, and it was originally reluctant to assign new resources to Mexico's performance at Seville. However, once an affirmative response was given to Spanish authorities, Mexico had little choice, for it would be awkward to withdraw from participation or not to follow what other countries were doing. In this connection, González Martínez confidentially informed the Mexican government of the expenditures other countries were undertaking for their pavilions at Seville. He claimed that Argentina had assigned a budget of one million Argentine pesos^[30] and that it was rather ridiculous for Mexico to spend only 90,000 pesos. Thus, by the end of 1926 the Ministry of Industry and Commerce had appointed three commissions in charge of Mexico's exhibit in Seville. The first commission was put in charge of the building and the exhibit itself; the second, of publicity and propaganda; and the third, of industrial promotion. In addition, a budget of 750,000 pesetas (U.S.$125,000) was approved,^[31] and a new call for proposals for a building design was made in the beginning of 1927. The new building ought to be, it was established, a permanent, freestyle construction costing not more than 300,000 pesos. Amabilis's design of a Toltec-Maya building won this contest. The jury and the Mexican government decided to favor a pre-Hispanic building instead of, for example, the original neocolonial building proposed by Obregón Santacilia.^[32] Hence, by the beginning of 1928 Amabilis was in Seville constructing his Maya-like building in El Parque María Luisa (see Fig. 40).^[33]

Before examining Amabilis's building, let us consider how the officials in

Image not available.

40.
The Mexican pavilion at the 1929 Seville exhibition. 
Source: SRE EMESP 523; reproduced courtesy of SRE.

charge of Mexico's display functioned. It is important to recall that, during the Porfirian period, world's fairs were considered important parts of industrial, commercial, and immigration promotion. By the 1920s, as we have seen, world's fairs had lost their nineteenth-century value as great showcases of the modern world. Therefore, a professional group of exhibition experts was not needed by the revolutionary governments. Nonetheless, in the early twentieth century, world's fairs were still an important way to promote a national image, something very much needed by the new revolutionary government to gain international acceptance. To produce this image at fairs for consumption abroad, the government did need in fact a small group of relatively professional bureaucrats, and the Callista governments sought to field such a team at Seville.

Originally the Mexican delegation was formed by Francisco A. Sáenz as president, Amabilis as chief architect (joined by the painter Victor Reyes and the sculptor Leopoldo Tomassi), and Rodolfo Ramírez, José M. Ramos, J. Montiel Olivera, and Luis R. Herrera as secretaries of the delegation.^[34] In addition, the Mexican minister in Spain, González Martínez, was a fundamental part of this team. He was a modernist poet recycled in the revolutionary government, a bureaucrat who upheld, as the hypercritical Vas-concelos of the 1930s described him, "the diplomatic legation with modesty and grace," before he became "a militant callista , a revolutionary, and even

a Bolshevik."^[35] In mid-1929 Sáenz was removed from his post as president, and Rodolfo Ramirez provisionally headed the delegation until October 1929, when Francisco Orozco Ramirez assumed the presidency. The causes of these changes are unclear, but it is very likely that they reflected the harsh electoral processes which Mexico underwent beginning in March 1929, when Pascual Ortiz Rubio was nominated as the PNR's candidate for the presidency.^[36]

This delegation had a rather inefficient and unorganized structure and functioning. They did not have a clear plan of action—how could they?—and hence they worked on a daily basis constantly consulting with the Mexican minister in Spain and directly with the various Ministers of Industry and Commerce—first Luis N. Morones, then Ramón P. Neri, and later in 1930, Luis L. León. Political and economic uncertainty prevailed throughout 1929 and 1930. Improvisations, overlapping of functions and changes of mind were all too common. There were constant communications with Amabilis asking him to take great care of the budget. In turn, Amabilis seriously complained many times of the economic restrictions he was living under: "I earn less than the most unskilled laborer," he complained in July 1928.^[37]

In addition, serious internal problems made evident the existence of corruption and political frictions. This even caused some problems with Spain's legal authorities: at a country banquet organized by the Spanish contractor for the construction of the building (the Casso engineers) to celebrate the completion of the pavilion, Amabilis and Reyes resolved their disputes with alcohol and a brawl that concluded with the intervention of the police and the arrest of both.^[38] Furthermore, in July 1930 a Mexican employee of the Mexican pavilion denounced to the Mexican government various irregularities apparently committed by the president of the delegation. These included robbery, fraud, and the hiring of a lover as an employee in the Mexican pavilion.^[39] In effect, it seems that not only because of the officially indigenist pavilion but because of its administrative and political functioning, Mexico's presence in Seville was indeed a preview of the lasting postrevolutionary ideology and modus operandi.

The Mexican Pavilion

In 1929 Manuel Amabilis (born in 1883) was an obscure architect from Yucatán trained at L'École Speciale d'Architecture, in Paris.^[40] During the progressive administration of Salvador Alvarado in Yucatán, he was in charge of public works, and from this position he constructed the building La Casa del Pueblo in Mayan style. In addition, together with Colombian artist Ró-mulo Razo, he designed the Monumento a la Patria in Mérida. This was an indigenist monument that honored not only Mexican nationalism but especially Yucatecan nationalism. The monument summarized the entire his-

tory of Mexico, including pre-Hispanic times when, as Razo explained, "the land of the Mayans was a paradise."^[41] For the Seville fair, Amabilis made a conscious effort to synthesize pre-Hispanic styles with modern construction techniques and uses of space. He wrote an explanatory book that was not only an architectural description but also, in fact, a historical, sociological, and artistic interpretation of what Mexico was and how it ought to be.^[42] In it he aimed to explain, as he himself observed, why "Mexico presents itself to Europe through a shroud of ancient American tradition" and why this tradition "although scorned by the rich, bestowed worldwide recognition to the Mexican art scene. It is the Mexican Revolution that has had the honor of rescuing this tradition for the country."^[43]

According to Amabilis, the triumph of the revolution had brought "an unknown national blossom, full of joy and well-being." The new Mexico needed a real Mexican art that could encompass its unique spirit. Although he realized that the search for the Mexican spirit had not ended, he observed that "while our philosophers may someday unravel the mystery of the spiritual ideal. . . we as artists are dedicated today to recording all aspects of this ideal, which has been revealing itself to our conscious minds." Thus he believed that his only role for the moment was "to achieve and recognize this communion of a native race, the love of an autonomous country."^[44] Amabilis maintained that pre-Hispanic architecture could be adapted to modern standards of comfort and construction. Above all, to represent Mexico in pre-Hispanic native style, he asserted, was to express "in Mexican" feelings and thoughts that belonged to Western civilization: "This is our small contribution [óbolo ] as Mexicans to the gestation and growth of the universal art that already influences contemporary European culture."^[45]

The building was formed of two concentric squares. From each side of the smaller square a gallery was projected and crossed the sides of the larger square.^[46] The two-storied structure had eight exhibition halls. The entire facade, surrounding fences, and a fountain in the outside gardens, were replete with sculpture in the same Maya-Toltec style (see Fig. 41). These were the work of Tomassi, a young sculptor and urbanist also from Yucatán. Among the pieces were two copies of Toltec stelae, placed to symbolize work and spirituality.^[47] Both were conceived in materialistic terms: spirituality was understood not as ethereal but as the almost anatomical "synthesis of all positive functions of the human heart and mind." In addition, at the top of the building a sculpture of five figures expressed "the solidarity of all social classes for the progress of Mexico, which is one of the ideals of the Mexican Revolution."^[48] These figures were represented not in pre-Hispanic fashion but in contemporary style. Thus, Amabilis argued, "the group symbolizes today's Mexico: emerging from a remote past that encompasses it, Mexico, a nation of Western civilization, actually arises to meet the modern day as in the symbolic sculpture; that is, surrounded by Toltec rhythms."^[49] At the

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41.
Sculpture and fountain of the 1929 Mexican pavilion in Seville. 
Left to right: Victor Reyes, Leopoldo Tomassi, and Manuel Amabilis. 
Source: SRE EMESP 523; reproduced courtesy of SRE.

main entrance, two giant, plumed serpents served as columns. There Vasconcelos's dictum, "Por mi Raza Hablará el Espíritu " (For My Race the Spirit Shall Speak), was engraved in the frieze. Ironically, official indigenism was thus merged with Vasconcelos's Hispanism, and this in 1929, when the Mexican Ulysses was threatening the new revolutionary status quo with his presidential campaign.

In its interior, Amabilis's pavilion combined colorful decorative motifs, stained-glass windows, mural paintings, and bas-reliefs. The colorful decoration of murals and walls was part of the effort to make the pavilion look truly pre-Hispanic. The stained glass depicted Mexico's natural resources and tropical beauty with such titles as El Papagayo, El Plátano , and La Palmera . The bas-reliefs were four sets that the architect called jambas : allegorical representations of various historical topics. The most interesting of these jambas was that of the Guerreros , which portrayed both a Mexican and a Spaniard warrior because "our nationality is a product of their battles," and the Jamba de la Fusión de las Razas , which depicted Cortés, Malinche, and a child, "the first little mestizo."^[50] Other bas-reliefs represented agriculture, sciences, traditions, and customs.

The most important mural paintings inside the building—all by Reyes—

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42.
Victor Reyes and his mural in the 1929 Mexican pavilion in Seville. 
Source: SRE EMESP 523; reproduced courtesy of SRE.

were located in the stairwell of the building (see Fig. 42).^[51] There Reyes tried to do what Rivera was then doing in the National Palace. "Don Diego Maria Rivera," Amabilis explained, was the first to see "the profound sense of exile experienced by the Mexican people. Rivera awakens Mexico's joys and sorrows from this bitter indifference, in order to teach how to love this people so that through this love this nation can be directed toward an emancipation which is spiritual rather than material." By 1929 Rivera was becoming the prototype of the socially committed artist, the head of the Mexican revolutionary school, and although Amabilis shared Rivera's revolutionary populism, his argument was articulated in spiritual rather than in political and racial terms. Along these lines, Reyes painted a mural that covered the entire stairwell. The mural was in two parts. In one, out of the image of a Mexican woman, various motifs were depicted in a sequence of images, as Amabilis explained, like a film clip. In the other, the same effect was achieved with a male image. The female aspect of the Mexican race, one learns from Amabilis's description of the Reyes mural, represented opportunism; the masculine image stood above all for thinking and rationality: "from the representation of the masculinity of our race arise concepts and activities that attempt to implant ideals, create beauty, and perfect the human species. Conversely, from the female representation are derived practical, immediately obtainable concepts. . . [because] those ideals of immense scope but dif-

ficult to secure are reserved for men."^[52] In sum, the Mexican pavilion condensed a relatively complete image of a revolutionary, more or less populist, modern, and virile Mexico.

In general, the pavilions of the rest of the Latin American countries at the exposition also seemed to be engaged in a conscious search for a "national style," so neocolonial hybridism prevailed. Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States constructed neocolonial buildings with some type of local inspiration.^[53] In contrast, the Mexican pavilion was exotic and eccentric, and during the exposition was known as the organ because its friezes bore a striking resemblance to the tubes of an organ.^[54] Of course, the Catholic Spanish media criticized this Indian pagan building, as part of their campaign against the Mexican government for the expulsion of Spanish priests from Mexico during the Cristero rebellion.^[55] These Catholic complaints not only emboldened others to criticize the Mexican building but also provoked King Alfonso XIII to reproach González Martínez for the expulsion of priests during the monarch's visit to the Mexican Pavilion.^[56]

In addition, some art critics complained less about the indigenist style than about the general anachronism of the art of Mexico and other Latin American countries. Pedro de Repide, in La Libertad (Madrid), not only complained that the art of most Latin American countries did no more than copy French aesthetics of the 1900s but also claimed that the indigenist tendency simply did not "come together" in the new circumstances.^[57] On the other hand, pro-Hispanist Mexicans approved of the building, with some reservations. For instance, Rodolfo Reyes, the well-known son of Gen. Bernardo Reyes, who was then residing in Spain, stated that the Mexican pavilion was acceptable only as an evolution of the "matrix civilization" (that is, Spain). He claimed that "[in art] our people are imaginative apprentices with good intentions who rely on a few of our own indigenous traditions, such as the Maya and the Inca," and, he added, "the Asian exoticism [primorismo ] of our indigenous races could be an important element to develop. However, the naturalist and instinctive qualities that we Mexicans boldly proclaim in our carvings and paintings are outlines to consider, rather than definitive directions to follow."^[58]

The architecture of the Mexican pavilion was only part of the total image of Mexico at Seville. The building's amalgamation of pre-Hispanic architecture with all sorts of representational techniques contrasted with the strong pro-Hispanic rhetoric to be seen in its interior. For example, engraved on the interior walls of the building was the above-mentioned legend "Mother Spain: because you have illuminated American lands with the brilliance of your culture. . . Méjico." Along these lines, in a propaganda article that was published in various Mexican and Spanish periodicals, Francisco A. Sáenz, president of the Mexican delegation in Seville, claimed that the Latin American countries were in Seville because "one single call from Spain

to her daughters, now mature women, was sufficient" for them to come.^[59] The general tone of Mexico's exhibit was that of veneration for Spain, but in a supposedly "mature" relationship. "Spain, upon inviting and receiving us, demonstrates a generosity beyond rancor. In attending her noble exhibition, we affirm our Spanish ancestry and take pride in our spirit and blood line," González Martínez maintained.^[60]

In fact, Reyes had drafted more legends to accompany the various allegories throughout the interior of the building—allegories of the national culture, the male and female races of the nation, and the legislators' instruments (that is, the constitution, land reform, and labor laws). One of them read: "Three beacons illuminate the culture that Mexico imparts to her children—three foundations nourish it: European civilization, Christianity, and Mexican traditions." These legends were never actually used in the building, but they epitomized the ideological aspects that Mexico wished to emphasize. Reyes's inelegant prose was not considered appropriate, however, and the idea was dropped.^[61]

Nonetheless, the Spanish government was pleased with this Mexican Hispanism—so much so that the mayor of Seville wrote a letter of gratitude to the Mexican delegation that expressed not only Spain's gratitude but also Andalucía's pride, in an even more pompous rhetoric: "Certainly: Spain illuminated American lands with the brilliance of her culture. However, the creative vigor emerged from the fertile lands of Andalucía and from the no less fertile lands of Extremadura. . . . Indeed, Spain has also illuminated Mexico's soul with the lamp of her devotional spirit, but this lamp was nourished by Seville's holy oil."^[62] Oddly enough, as late as the 1992 Seville world's fair, the phrase was still recalled with great pride by a local historian of Seville.^[63]

Exhibiting Revolutionary Mexico

Framed in indigenist architecture, with an overlay of Hispanist rhetoric, Mexico displayed exactly the same agricultural products, pictures, books, and crafts that had graced the preceding fifty years of its presence at world's fairs—tropical fruits, coffee, cocoa, cactus, hats, and gaudy ornaments, together with the same seemingly eternal products of industry: beer (Cervecería Cuauhtémoc), cigarettes (El Buen Tono), and canned food (Clemente Jacques). All of these industries had been part of Mexico's displays since the 1880s. What was new about the industrial exhibit were the displays of petroleum companies (Huasteca Petroleum, El Águila, and so forth) and the bas-relief of Plutarco Elías Calles, made by Julio Sosa, which replaced the bust of Porfirio Diaz that was always displayed in nineteenth-century world's fairs.^[64]

However, as discussed above, the Mexican display in Seville appealed not only to the imperial Hispanism of the fair but also to the international fascination with the Mexican popular revolution. As such, it was extremely well

received by republican Spanish intellectuals. This reception—and Mexico's use of this favorable opinion—was especially visible during the week of the exposition that honored Mexico in June 1930. By then the Mexican exhibit was directed by Orozco Ramírez, who organized a set of events that featured Mexican and Spanish intellectuals and artists who were favorable to the Mexican Revolution.^[65] The Mexican musical folklorist Ignacio Fernandez and the poet Luis G. Urbina were the only official Mexican participants during this week (although it was also attended by the poet Jaime Torres Bodet). Thus a radio session of poetry reading (once again with verses by Nervo, Díaz Mirón, and Gonzalez Martínez) was combined with talks by the Spanish intellectuals and activists Luis Araquistán and Fernando de los Ríos. Araquistáin spoke about Mexico's social evolution and was extremely favorable to the social transformation produced by the Mexican Revolution. He characterized it as the first real Hispanic social revolution, and he added, "Politically, Spain has never been truly European, but Asian or African." Thus, in the Mexican Revolution "not only is the historical credibility of a nation pledged, but also the credibility of an entire race."^[66] For his part, de los Ríos delivered a paper titled "En Torno a la Tierra y el Alma Mejicana, Impresiones y Recuerdos." Both were socialists in the struggle against Primo de Rivera's regime, and both used the Mexican Revolution as a cosmopolitan symbol of modern social politics and development.^[67] Mexico promoted those ideas with its exhibition in Seville, without damaging its pro-Hispanic conservative tone. Thus began Mexico's official policy of making the revolution its passport to the modern cosmopolitan world.

As always, Mexico organized a good propaganda network that consisted of national and international journalists and writers paid by the Mexican government.^[68] What was new about this network was the massive use of cinema for propaganda purposes. The United States impressed the Spanish public with its film Hoover in Spanish America , among many others,^[69] but the Mexican exhibit showed at least ten movies with titles such as El Museo Nacional, Yucatán: La tierra del afamado henequén, Industria de la plata, La industria del petróleo en México, San Juan Teotihuacán , and Ruinas de Yucatán .^[70] A specially produced movie about the economic and industrial development of Mexico was also shown,^[71] and numerous photographs that portrayed Mexico's beauty and progress as well as its exoticism were exhibited. Old and new masters of those images were present: Hugo Brehme, Guillermo Kahlo, Tina Modotti, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Some people opposed the exhibition of the same exoticism that had been featured in the past. For instance, the Mexican consul in Berlin, F. R. Serrano, wrote in 1925 to Aarón Sáenz, then minister of foreign affairs, that Mexico ought not to send "pranks," by which he meant huaraches, tequila, pulque, and Indian textiles: "I find it contradictory that on the one hand we try to expunge the white cotton trousers and leather sandals [guaraches ] of

the Indians from our nation, while on the other hand we make an effort to exhibit these articles in foreign countries."^[72] Nonetheless, the pictures and figures of tipos populares , Indian cloth, huaraches, furniture in Aztec and Maya styles, and traditions were displayed just as they had been in the nineteenth century.^[73]

Despite this opposition, Mexico's efforts were rewarded. The nation won a total of 137 grand prizes, 23 honor diplomas, 368 gold medals, 462 silver medals, and 286 bronze medals.^[74] In general, the winners were those items that reflected Spanish expectations of Mexico. Mexican authors such as Vas-concelos, Federico Gamboa, Urbina, José Juan Tablada, González Martínez, Jesús Galindo y Villa, and Antonio Caso were granted grand prizes and honor diplomas for their books. A collection of tipos populates made in wax by Juan Lechuga was also awarded a grand prize, as were the architect, the painter, and the sculptor of the Mexican pavilion. But books dealing with colonial Mexican art were especially welcomed: Dr. Atl's book on Mexican churches, Manuel Toussaint's on the Mexican cathedral, and Manuel Gómez Morin's España Fiel . The new Mexican literature earned some acknowledgments but no grand prizes. José Gorostiza won a silver medal with his Canciones para cantar en los barcos , Ortiz de Montellano won gold with El trompo de siete colores , and gold was also given to Julio Jiménez Rueda, Salvador Novo, and Xavier Villaurrutia. But best received was the romantic popular music of Mexico, which was already acquiring a nostalgic nature: Alfonso Esparza Otero, María Greaver, and Manuel M. Ponce were awarded grand prizes and honor diplomas. They represented Porfirian high culture transformed into a popular romantic sensibility.

Welcome to Twentieth-Century Mexico

Mexico's presence at the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition in Seville was a debut for the postrevolutionary official notions of the Mexican modern nation. Although the Mexican display was not essentially different from those Mexican exhibits at nineteenth-century world's fairs, it highlighted some aspects and included some new elements of the nation's image. There was neither the liberal-positivist consensus nor the loyalty to the supreme caudillo that had given coherence and order to Porfirian displays. Neither was there the prevalence of a single point of view shaped by the virtu of a personality that intrudes into history, as was the case with Mexico's attendance at the Rio de Janeiro world's fair. Undoubtedly the idea of Mexico depicted in 1929 was intellectually contradictory and ambivalent about its own identity, as well as unclear in political and administrative terms. Notwithstanding, culturally one could see it—of course from the historian's advantageous point of view—as displaying the basic milieu in which notions such as nation, progress, and modernization would be discussed throughout the twentieth century. This

is a realm constituted by a set of old and new ingredients, combined with old and new tactics.

In brief, I would argue that Mexico's presence at Seville can be seen from two perspectives: from the continuity of intellectual and cultural tendencies that, though long-established, had acquired special cohesion during the Porfirian peace; and from the view of the emergence of new languages, strategies, and elements that both reinforced and changed the traditional continuities. After all, I am dealing with snapshots of modern Mexico, and hence whatever fluctuation I notice may be irrelevant before the full sweep of Mexico's history. Yet in these flashing instants (that is, world's fairs) change—when present—is nicely perceivable.

The continuities were noticeable in the focus on the nation's natural wealth and beauty, as well as in the glorification of the Indian past of Mexico. They were also in the artifices used to achieve both the impression of natural wealth and the historical glorifications; that is, in the use of artistic, scientific, and rhetorical devices that were as cosmopolitan and modern as possible. Thus Mexico's tropical fertility and beauty were represented in stained-glass windows, in statistics, in samples of exotic fruits, or in photographs and murals. The overall aim was to highlight the possibilities for commerce and investment and to appeal to the twentieth century's new industry: tourism. In contrast, Mexican industrial exhibits changed scarcely at all in composition from those of the 1890s.^[75] All in all, Mexico's presence at Seville did not put particular accent on this issue. In this regard, and from what it is possible to perceive, Mexico's exhibit in Seville was carried on as a rather old-fashioned policy of commercial and industrial development.

Continuities were especially evident in the cultural aspects Mexico highlighted in an exposition that dealt above all with ideology and culture. In addressing issues such as race, national spirit, and modernization, Mexico's presence at Seville made use of a warehouse of the nation's basics, and it included scientific, symbolic, artistic, and intellectual utilería (assorted stage material). As I have maintained throughout this study, when considering nations, nationalism, and modernism, what is essential are forms, styles, and experiments; in these regards, history is our main instructor.

To illustrate these continuities, Amabilis's pavilion was a curious amalgamation of Indian styles with modern construction techniques and requirements. On the one hand, it was inspired by the expanding anthropological and archaeological studies that were heavily promoted during the administrations of Obregón and Calles. Miguel Othón de Mendizábal, Moisés Sáenz, and even Manuel Gamio—though he had a profound disagreement with Calles—were fundamental in this advancement of anthropology and archaeology, which eventually fed the artistic and populist official indigenism. Most of these archaeologists and anthropologists believed in the need to incorporate Indians into modern national development. Their works

and research were a continuation of the aim to reach an autoethnology acceptable and useful both for the nationalistic needs of the Mexican elites and for the demands of the modern scientific perspective of the Western world. This aim had a long history in Mexico, but it was especially developed within a modern scientific framework during the Porfirian peace.^[76] In Seville, for Mexican officials there was no other language in which to talk about such topics as race, acceptable evolutionary paths that proved Mexico's adequate racial shape, and potential for the future of a hybrid race, than that furnished by the long-established processes of trial and error and discussion of the last part of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the very fact that the Mexican pavilion was above all about race underlines the deep-rooted continuities.

These tendencies were expressed in Amabilis's pavilion. But in so doing he was only, as he argued, trying to propose a tentative combination of styles that could eventually form the national style.^[77] Just as the Mexican colonial building in Rio de Janeiro favored one of the various profound cultural and intellectual historical tendencies, Amabilis's building favored another kind of deep-rooted national trend. For its tentative character, for its indigenism, as well as for the official decision to introduce it as a symbolic summary of the nation, the Mexico display at Seville was a continuation of how modernity and nationalism had been culturally constructed in Mexico since the 1880s. Features of this continuity were, first, constant and conscious internal negotiations and disputes regarding symbols and epic; second, constant reading and rereading of prototypical recent Western conceptions of modernity and nationalism (from Europe or from the United States), searching both for arms to fight the national discussion and for an edge as to where to insert the national debate into the course of modern cosmopolitanism; and finally, by means of all the above, an endless trial-and-error process led by elites, who adjusted and maneuvered the image of the nation according to new domestic and international circumstances in favor of their oxen interests.

What best illustrates this continuity are the other pre-Hispanic building planned for Mexico's presence in the 1889 Paris fair—the Aztec Palace, another attempt, another set of goals, another world, but essentially the same recipe and identical ingredients, so to speak—and the building constructed by Lázaro Cárdenas's government for the 1937 Paris international exhibition. If in 1889 the Porfirian government opted for Peñafiel's building, it was because of the coherence with which it epitomized the official historiography. But in the very feat of erecting an Aztec Palace at the 1889 Paris world's fair, the Porfirian elite showed its decision to favor pro-indigenist national tendencies in view of the European cosmopolitan demands for the exotic. They thought such a building would give them the best opportunity, to acquire presence and visibility at Paris, "capital of the nineteenth century."

It was a trial they rejected afterward. In the same way, Calles's decision to construct Amabilis's building favored the indigenist national tendencies, but it was based also on the perception of the potential effect it would have on both European exoticism (important for tourism) and on the international artistic and political rediscovery of Mexico after the revolution.^[78] Furthermore, it was combined with a pro-Hispanic rhetoric that made the exotic building both attractive and acceptable.

In sharp contrast, for the 1937 Paris international exhibition of "arts and techniques of modern life," Mexico constructed a Functionalist-style pavilion. That fair would be remembered for its avant-garde architecture and massive, fascist, and socialist arts, as well as for the display of Picasso's Guernica . Among Mexican officials and intellectuals, a long debate took place regarding whether to join the 1937 fair, and how. Finally, Lázaro Cárdenas's government decided to attend. Of course, a regime with a socialist rhetoric, with indigenist and nationalist policies, and, more importantly, with severe economic difficulties did not aim to present a Porfirian-like display in Paris. However, money was expended in constructing a pavilion, and despite the fact that the exhibit emphasized arts, the Mexican government sent the repeatedly exhibited official propaganda of statistics, maps, exotic products, and proofs of Mexico's beauty. In 1937, once again, Mexican officials and intellectuals debated about whether to build an indigenist structure (as in Paris 1889 or in Seville 1929) or a colonial structure (as in Buffalo 1901 or in Rio de Janeiro 1922). Manuel Chacón, engineer in charge of the construction, argued that archaeology should not be confused with architecture. Although it seemed natural for Cárdenas's government to favor an indigenist style, Chacón explained that a pre-Hispanic national architectural style was impossible because it was hopeless to try to reconstruct the old structures and their utility, which were understood only by their original creators. For him, a colonial style was also an "archaeological style."^[79] Nonetheless, as in 1889, in 1900, or in 1929, the Cardenista government used the old rules of trial and error and showed that it had learned its lesson. That is, in 1937, using the tired and long-in-the-making artistic infrastructure, Mexico constructed a building in the most avant-garde cosmopolitan style in order to publicize new and old pragmatic goals (tourism and foreign investment) (see Fig. 43). In addition, Mexican officials clothed in an international fashion what they had made into Mexico's most cosmopolitan product: the Mexican Revolution and its social and cultural surroundings. Therefore, they constructed a cosmopolitan, if small, Functionalist-style building at the Trocadero, with a giant sculpture of a campesino with a sickle and a worker with a hammer. Conceptually and architecturally, the building was far from the Aztec Palace of 1889, from the neoclassical building of 1900, or from the Maya pavilion of 1929, but it was close, physically and conceptually, to the giant

Image not available.

43.
The Mexican pavilion at the 1937 Paris world's fair.
 Source: AGN, Centro de Información Gráfica, colección presidentes,
 Cárdenas; reproduced courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación, 
Mexico City. (Photograph by the Archivo General de la Nacién)

Nazi building of Germany and the no less enormous and modernist building of the Soviet Union. It also appealed to international concerns with the Mexican Revolution.

To return to 1929, Mexico's presence at Seville can also be seen as depicting the transformation experienced by Mexico and the world in the 1910s and 1920s. In brief, by 1929 the revolutionary governments of Mexico had not yet radically transformed the social and economic shape of the country. What the popular movements of the Mexican Revolution had done to the image of the nation was, on one hand, to radically change the balance of political and economic power and thus of the nation's symbols and metaphors. On the other hand, these movements had fostered the emergence of a new language to describe new situations but also to rephrase old circumstances.

In terms of cultural and intellectual creation, the decade of the 1920s represented a creative looseness of authority: fertile creative ground to take advantages of disorder, to abuse alliances, and to merge ideas.^[80] In Mexico's presence at Seville, therefore, former leading intellectuals of the last part of the Porfirian modernist movement—such as González Martínez and Urbina —were working together with technocrats trained in the best fashion of the

Porfirian era—that is, Amabilis—with new iconoclast artists—Reyes and Tomassi—and with the revolutionary bureaucracy, particularly sensitive to the political movements in Mexico—that is, Francisco A. Sáenz and Orozco Muñoz. From the beginning, the entire exhibit was organized by the more radical faction of Obreristas through the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Work—that is, first Morones and later Neri. This combination—in the last analysis inevitable for any revolutionary government wishing to establish a stable regime facilitated the amalgamation of various tactics and views of the image of the nation.

It was possible, thus, to portray the country as experimentally indigenist, with great concern for the solidarity of all classes in the national reconstruction but also universally Hispanic. This Mexico was above all inclusionist: it merged Porfirian symbols of order and progress and Porfirian indigenism with Vasconcelos's focus on race and spirit and with Gamio's type of indigenism, all combined with a more or less radical populist rhetoric.

The new language forged for the revolution was a synthesis of the many revolutionary demands by the various groups during the violent struggle. It was also made of the striking experience of the urban intellectuals and political elites: the city taken by Indians and mestizos, all poor, threatening the Mexican belle epoque. Now it was possible to refer to the history of the nation as preparing the real great event: the revolution. Everything else became antecedent. Now it was possible to name them with pride: our Indians, our popular classes. It was also possible to talk about class struggle, but not without mentioning the existence of solidarity of classes in the common will of national reconstruction. And all that acquired an acceptable aesthetic representation in the 1920s and 1930s. This was Amabilis's building.

In 1929 it was impossible to control all of the various aspects involved in this new language and to see where it might go. Thus some sort of socialist radicalism, Catholic philanthropism, social realism, and romantic idealism had to flow freely in what seemed to have an unclear structure. In Seville, Mexico's symbolism acted like a shotgun: it was a rain of bullets aiming to hit all perspectives in order to miss no opportunity. Yet it already included what eventually became a centralized, officially imposed image of Mexico: a selective anthropological, archaeological, and political indigenism, a rewriting of the national history to change the moment of emergence of the country's golden age, a strong tendency toward both homogenizing and mythologizing revolutionary symbols, and reconstructing the understanding of the nation by decree. Mexico was tropical, fertile, beautiful, fundamentally virile, statist, and populist. This was not so much a new image of Mexico as a redefined one, fabricated with long-established ingredients and tactics.

This redefinition would not have been possible without yet another revolution: the crisis of Western politics and thought during the 1910s and 1920s. A new aesthetic and political language was created with the avant-garde move-

ments in Paris, with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and with World War I. In fact, the Spanish fair sought to be for Europe the proof that there was a not fully European option to revitalize Europe: Spain. The Russian Revolution and the international socialist movement, as well as workers' general discontent, had made socialism appear to be the twentieth century's greatest hope—and Mexico's redefinition of its image appealed to these transformations. Of course, Mexico's presence at Seville's exposition did not display its avant-garde facade, not because there were no Mexican innovative intellectuals who could have helped to modernize the image of the nation in this direction but because Seville's fair was already anachronistic. Eventually, world's fairs would be held in which Mexico would be able to camouflage the same nationalism in avant-garde art and architecture (for instance, Paris 1937). But Mexico did display its new social concerns at Seville, which was, after all, a rather imperialist and conservative exposition. It seems to be that for the image of the nation, Mexico's social revolution had to be exploited as Mexico's best chance to be accepted in twentieth-century modern terms. In effect, the Mexican Revolution was being transformed not only into a national unifying myth but also into a patrimony of the truly modern world. In the last analysis, during the 1920s and 1930s very few minds foresaw the powerful ideology that was in the making. But how can anyone ever interpret the hints of history when the past is present?