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.