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]