Orozco's American Epic: Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race 9781478003304

Citation preview

Orozco’s American Epic

mary k. coffey

Orozco’s American Epic Myth, History, and the Melancholy of Race

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2020

© 2020 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 00 Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Whitman and Knockout by Julie Allred, BW&A Books, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Coffey, Mary K., [date] author. Title: Orozco’s American epic : myth, history, and the melancholy of race / Mary K. Coffey. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019013467 (print) | lccn 2019980252 (ebook) isbn 9781478001782 (hardcover) isbn 9781478002987 (paperback) isbn 9781478003304 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Orozco, José Clemente, 1883–1949. | Orozco, José Clemente, 1883–1949—Criticism and interpretation. | Orozco, José Clemente, 1883–1949. Epic of American civilization | Mural painting and decoration, Mexican—New Hampshire—Hanover. Classification lcc nd259.07 c644 2019 (print) | lcc nd259.o7 (ebook) | ddc 759.972—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013467 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov​/2019980252 Cover art: José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: Modern Industrial Man (detail), 1932–1934, fresco.

duke university press gratefully acknowledges the orozco fund, an endowment established at the hood museum of art, dartmouth, by the manton foundation, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the wyeth foundation for american art publication fund of caa.

For all of my students, past, present, and future In gratitude to Mishuana, Lourdes, Reena, and Aimee for helping me to see the concerns of our oppressed pasts as my own

contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface xv Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1

6 9 14 21 28

Epic, National Narration, and Counternarrative Mexico, U.S. Antiempire, and the Borders of Identity Melancholy, Race, and Performance Idea, Intention, and the Melancholy Art Summary of Mural, Chapters, and Argument

chapter 1. Orozco’s Melancholy Dialectics 43

45

The Rivera–­Si­quei­ros Debate over the Mural Form Rivera’s Material Dialectics: History as Discourse Si­quei­ros’s Cinematographic Mural Art: The Visual Politics of Affect History as Ruin: Orozco’s Poetic Image



64



70 76

The Benjamin Interlude: Allegory, Melancholy, and the Dialectics of History Orozco as Critical Philosopher: Form and Politics The Epic as Dialectical Image

chapter 2. Colonial Melancholy and the Myth of Quetzalcoatl 79

80 Quetzalcoatl: The Myth, the Man, the Prophecy 85 The Postrevolutionary Quetzalcoatl: Messianic Politics and Indigenism Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl Rivera’s Quetzalcoatl



101 Reframing Quetzalcoatl: Allegory and the Irony of Empire 115 Time, History, and Prophecy: Quetzalcoatl and Weak Messianism

chapter 3. American Modernity and the Play of Mourning 123

124 Part I. Cortés and the Spanish Conquest Rivera’s Cortés Orozco’s Cortés



151 Part II. The Conquest, the Two Americas, and the Thanatopolitics of Race The Machine and the Two Americas: Orozco’s Version Rivera’s Vision of Industry and Pan-­American Cooperation Death, Sacrifice, and the Melancholy of the American Dream



184 Part III. Cortés, Christ, and Weak Messianism Rivera’s National Palace: Technology, Progress, and Messianic Redemption Orozco and the Phantasmagoria of Sovereignty

chapter 4. “Modern Industrial Man” and the Melancholy of Race

in America 207

208 215 222 229 242 251

The Supplement Neither Dartmouth Man nor Emiliano Zapata The Worker Who Reads Between Mestizaje and Minstrelsy Vestigial Blackface, Artistic Freedom, and the Poetics of Plasmatics Disidentification and the Melancholy of Race in America

Conclusion 261

262 “Greening the Epic”: The “Hovey Mural” 274 The “Evil Grandchildren of Orozco”: Orozco ­MEXotica

Notes 287 Bibliography 325 Index 341

illustrations

figure i.1. View of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization. 2 figure i.2. Overview of José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization, 1932–­34. 4 figure i.3. Dartmouth students reading statements by former faculty of color about their experiences at the college, May 27, 2016. 25 figure i.4. José Clemente Orozco, Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life, 1932. 29 figure i.5. View of the west wall of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Migration” (Panel 1), “Snakes and Spears” (Panel 2), and “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (Panel 3), 1932–­34. 32 figure i.6. View of the Ancient wing of the north wall of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Aztec Warriors” (Panel 4), “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 5), “The Pre-­Columbian Golden Age” (Panel 6), “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 7), “The Prophecy” (Panel 8), 1932–­34. 33 figure i.7. View of the Modern wing of the north wall of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Cortez and the Cross” (Panel 11), “The Machine” (Panel 12), “Anglo-­America” (Panel 13), “Hispano-­America” (Panel 14), “Gods of the Modern World” (Panel 15), 1932–­34. 33 figures i.8, i.9, and i.10. View of the east wall vestibule of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Symbols of Nationalism” (Panel 16), “Modern Human Sacrifice” (Panel 17), “Modern Migration of the Spirit” (Panel 18), “Chains of the Spirit” (Panel 19), 1932–­34. 34–35 figure i.11. View of the supplement on the south wall of the Orozco Room,

Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (Panel 20), 1932–­34. 36 figure i.12. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Totem Poles” (2 panels, Panel 9), 1932–­34. 37 figure i.13. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Machine Images” (2 panels, Panel 10), 1932–­34. 38 figure 1.1. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “The Ancient Indian World,” 1929, Fresco, north wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. 47 figure 1.2. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34. 48 figure 1.3. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” 1934. 49 figure 1.4. Diego Rivera, detail of central arch on west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. 51 figure 1.5. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the International Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, view of left, central, and right walls. 53 figure 1.6. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the International Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, detail of fascist parrot, left wall, 1939–­40. 54 figure 1.7. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the International Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, detail of infernal machine, central wall, 1939–­40. 55 figure 1.8. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the International Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, detail of proletarian worker, right wall, 1939–­40. 56 figure 1.9. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the International Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, detail of electrical towers, ceiling, 1939–­40. 58 figure 1.10. José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940. 62 figure 2.1. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 5), 1932–­34. 87 figure 2.2. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Pre-­ Columbian Golden Age” (Panel 6), 1932–­34. 88 figure 2.3. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 7), 1932–­34. 89 figure 2.4. Illustration of images from the Florentine Codex of Títlacáhuan (the necromancer), from John Hubert Cornyn, The Song of Quetzalcoatl, 1931. 92 figure 2.5. Illustration of Quetzalcoatl from Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Lives of Celebrated American Indians, 1843. 92 figure 2.6. William Blake, 1757–­1827, Job Rebuked by His Friends, recto, eighteenth century. 93

x  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

figure 2.7. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Aztec Warriors” (Panel 4), 1932–­34. 102 figure 2.8. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Prophecy” (Panel 8), 1932–­34. 103 figure 2.9. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Migration” (Panel 1), 1932–­34. 106 figure 2.10. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (Panel 3), 1932–­34. 107 figure 2.11. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Human Sacrifice” (Panel 17), 1932–­34. 108 figure 2.12. José Clemente Orozco, Echate La Otra (Dancing Indians), 1935. 112 figure 3.1. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Cortez and the Cross” (Panel 11), 1932–­34. 125 figure 3.2. Félix Parra, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 1875. 131 figure 3.3. Detail of Cortés’s landing. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34. 134 figure 3.4. Detail of Cortés, Malintzin (“La Malinche”), and Martín. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34. 134 figure 3.5. Scene from the “golden age” of the Spanish conquest. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34. 135 figure 3.6. Scene from the “Silver Age” of the Spanish conquest. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34. 136 figure 3.7. Detail of Pedro de Alvarado branding an indigenous slave. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34. 137 figure 3.8. José Clemente Orozco, Hernan Cortés and “La Malinche,” 1926. 142 figure 3.9. José Clemente Orozco, The Franciscan and the Indian, 1926. 142 figure 3.10. José Clemente Orozco, Portrait of Cortez, 1938–­39. 146 figure 3.11. José Clemente Orozco, The Franciscans, 1938–­39. 146 figure 3.12. José Clemente Orozco, The Mechanized Masses, 1938–­39. 148 figure 3.13. José Clemente Orozco, Las Masas (The Masses), 1935. 148 figure 3.14. José Clemente Orozco, Despotism, 1938–­39. 149 figure 3.15. José Clemente Orozco, The Dictators, 1938–­39. 149 figure 3.16. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Machine” (Panel 12), 1932–­34. 153 figure 3.17. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Anglo-­ America” (Panel 13), 1932–­34. 155 figure 3.18. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Hispano-­ America” (Panel 14), 1932–­34. 156 figure 3.19. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Gods of the Modern World” (Panel 15), 1932–­34. 165 figure 3.20. Diego Rivera, 1886–­1957, Allegory of California, 1930–­31. 167

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS  xi

figure 3.21. Diego Rivera, The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man (end wall), 1926–­27. 168 figure 3.22. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (east wall), 1932–­33. 170 figure 3.23. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (west wall), 1932–­33. 171 figure 3.24. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (south wall), 1932–­33. 172 figure 3.25. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (north wall), 1932–­33. 173 figure 3.26. Detail of Vaccination. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (north wall), 1932–­33. 174 figure 3.27. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Symbols of Nationalism” (Panel 16), 1932–­34. 181 figure 3.28. Detail of central arch depicting the dialectical transition from independence to revolution to postrevolutionary Mexico. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34. 191 figure 3.29. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Migration of the Spirit” (Panel 18), 1932–­34. 198 figure 3.30. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Chains of the Spirit” (Panel 19), 1932–­34. 200 figure 3.31. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: study of figure chopping the Cross for “Modern Migration of the Spirit” (Panel 18), 1932–­34. 202 figure 4.1. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34. 208 figures 4.2 and 4.3. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (left panel, 1 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34. 210 figure 4.4. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: study for “Modern Industrial Man” (left panel, 1 of 3, Panel 20) 1930–­34. 211 figures 4.5 and 4.6. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (right panel, 3 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34. 213 figure 4.7. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: figure study for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1930–­34. 217 figure 4.8. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: study of hand for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1930–­34. 217 figure 4.9. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: study for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34. 218 figure 4.10. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: study of hand for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34. 218 figure 4.11. José Clemente Orozco, Zapatistas (Generals; Leaders), 1935. 221 figure 4.12. Tina Modotti, Worker Reading “El Machete,” 1928. 225

xii  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

figure 4.13. José Clemente Orozco painting Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life, n.d. 228 figure 4.14. Frida Kahlo, My Nurse and I, 1937. 230 figure 4.15. José Clemente Orozco, Teatro de Variedades en Harlem (Vaudeville in Harlem), 1928. 235 figure 4.16. José Clemente Orozco, Negroes (Negros colgados, Hanged Black Men), from the portfolio The Contemporary Print Group: American Scene No. 1: A Comment upon American Life by America’s Leading Artists, 1933. 241 figure 4.17. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, Victim of Fascism, 1944–­45. 242 figure c.1. Dartmouth students and faculty dining in the Hovey Grill, ca. 1958. 264 figure c.2. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–1966, “Oh, Eleazar Wheelock Was a Very Pious Man . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 1), 1938. 266 figure c.3. Walter Beach Humphrey, “Five Hundred Gallons of New England Rum . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 2), 1938. 267 figure c.4. Walter Beach Humphrey, “The Big Chief That Met Him Was . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 3), 1938. 267 figure c.5. Walter Beach Humphrey, “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 4), 1938. 268 figure c.6. Walter Beach Humphrey, “Eleazar and the Big Chief Harangued . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 5), 1938. 268 figure c.7. Walter Beach Humphrey, “They Founded Dartmouth College . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 6), 1938. 269 figure c.8. Walter Beach Humphrey, “Fill the Bowl . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Title and Chorus, Panel 7), 1938. 271 figure c.9. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: study of Eleazar Wheelock with Indians, 1932–­34. 273 figure c.10. Detail of Occom Pond Singers in front of “Migration” panel, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002. 275 figure c.11. Detail of Michelle Ceballos in her guise as a Zapatista dominatrix in front of “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002. 277 figure c.12. Detail of Juan Ybarra in front of “The Machine” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002. 278

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS  xiii

figure c.13. Detail of Guillermo Gómez-­Peña engaging student/​­viewer/​ ­participant in a tableau vivant. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002. 279 figure c.14. Detail of Dartmouth student performing the stereotype of black “super-­predator/​­lynching victim” in front of the “Modern Migration of the Spirit” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002. 280 figure c.15. Detail of Dartmouth student performing the stereotype of a “Voodoo Princess” in front of “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco M ­ EXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002. 281 figure c.16. Detail of Dartmouth student performing the stereotype of a “Kabuki Club Girl.” Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002. 282

xiv  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

preface

In 2012 José Clemente Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization was designated a National Historical Landmark by the Landmarks Committee of the National Park System of the United States of America. It was the second mural and the first work of art executed by a Mexican artist to receive such a designation. This honor took place within the context of Barak Obama’s presidential administration and what appears to have been a concerted effort to add to the registry landmarks that testify to the nation’s “Hispanic”/​ ­Latin American heritage. Despite the political expediency of this gesture during the administration of a president who appropriated the Chicano civil rights’ mantra, “sí se puede” (“yes, we can”) and enacted important immigration reforms, but who also came to be called the “Deporter in Chief,” Orozco’s Epic was more than worthy of this honor. Long considered a local treasure, the mural is widely viewed by scholars as one of Orozco’s best. It represents a transition from his early frescos to the masterworks of his late career. And it is the most accomplished cycle he executed while working in the United States. As I argue in the pages that follow, the themes of this mural, while continuous with those of his broader oeuvre, also bear distinct traces of his experience on this side of the border. Of all of Orozco’s mural cycles, the Epic is the one that most reflects his experience as a Mexican in the United States and the many ways that change in location affected his understanding of history, identity, and sovereignty in the Americas. As such, it is as much a monument of U.S. cultural heritage as it is Mexican. In fact, this mural reveals how we have come to imagine this border and why this kind of bordering—​­national, cultural, racial—​­is not only historically inaccurate but also existentially and symbolically violent. Diego Rivera’s contemporaneous Detroit Industry Murals (1932) are perhaps more famous, but Orozco’s Epic is gaining in recognition and praise. This is due to the themes Orozco addresses and to his nondidactic approach to figuration, which is less rooted in what is now denigrated as the social realism of the interwar period and more open to interpretation. His mural

seems to gain relevance, standing up as a work of contemporary art rather than as a curious object frozen in amber. Moreover, as a mural that critiques the triumphalist thrust of national narration, its status as a landmark within the material cultural heritage upon which those narratives are often based and within a nation that assiduously seeks to eliminate any trace of its “Hispanic”/​­Latin American heritage is all the more surprising and welcome. This book is dedicated to all of the students, colleagues, and alumni whose interest, passion, and dedication to this mural have opened my eyes to its rich afterlife. Whenever possible, I have credited their insights. However, it is the nature of academic work that singular authors end up taking the credit for what is, in reality, a dialogical process. The nature of interpretation is mysterious, more rooted in contingent circumstance than we care to admit. As one colleague put it, my work on this mural has been a labor of love. And yet my romance with this object began as a consequence of the vagaries of the academic job market. With this book, I bring this dalliance to a provisional close, with the knowledge that the minds I encounter in future courses, tours, and endeavors will inevitably force me to rethink, revise, and renew my passion for Orozco’s Epic and the America it encourages us to imagine.

xvi  PREFACE

acknowledgments

This book has been a labor of love. Many who have contributed to my thinking about Orozco’s Epic are acknowledged within the text and notes. However, I would like to thank first my colleagues George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek, as well as the many members of the Humanities Institute they convened on “States of Exception,” for it was there that this project originated. I would also like to thank the members of the Art History Department and the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program at Dartmouth for their support and for their feedback as I presented work in progress. Similarly, the many opportunities provided by colleagues in other Dartmouth departments to present my work in their courses allowed me to try out ideas as they were evolving on the page. Additionally, the members of the Theory Reading Group, sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, provided an indispensable space on campus for the fostering of intellectual community. It was through this group and the conversations that came out of it that I encountered much of the theoretical literature that informs this book. Particular thanks go to Aimee Bahng, Alysia Garrison, Christian Haines, Tish Lopez, and Abby Neely. Doug Moody was incredibly generous with me in sharing his documentation and thoughts about the M ­ EXotica performance. Without him, I doubt I would have uncovered that connection. I would be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge the impact my many students have had on the evolution of my thinking with regard to Orozco’s Epic. Their work is cited throughout the text, and I have dedicated this book to them. Although there are so many more than I can cite or thank individually. CoFIRED, the student organization that formed to support daca and undocumented students, deserves special mention as their plight, strength, and spirit answers to the command in Orozco’s mural. Likewise, the incomparable staff at the Hood Museum of Art, the Baker-­Berry Library, and the Rauner Special Collections deserve special mention as their indefatigable labors to support faculty, and my work in particular, knows no bounds. In particular, I want to single out Katherine Hart, Juliette Bianco, Amelia Kahl,

Michael Taylor, John Stomberg, Jay Satterfield, Jill Baron, Meredith Steinfels, and Neely MacNulty for praise. Relatedly, the Manton Foundation has been a true gift to my scholarship. Their selfless support for Orozco’s Epic has virtually guaranteed that the scholarship and celebration of this great work of art will continue in perpetuity. This book has been funded in part by the Orozco Fund, an endowment established at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, by the Manton Foundation. The many postdoctoral fellows who have illuminated our community with their fresh ideas, progressive outlook, and cutting-­edge scholarship have also fed my thinking over the years. I want to give a special shout-­out to Michael Barany, Yesenia Barragan, Nathalie Batraville, Marcela Di Blasi, Laura ­McTighe, Tatiana Reinoza, Holly Shaffer, Yana Stainova, and Phoebe Wolfskill. I also want to acknowledge the support I have received from Dartmouth’s administration, in particular, Deans of the Faculty Mike Mastan­duno and Elizabeth Smith, Associate Deans of the Humanities Adrian Randolph and Barbara Will, Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Programs Dennis Washburn, and Dean of the College Rebecca Biron. My colleagues who work in the administration have always celebrated and promoted my work; they have rewarded my service with fellowships and supported its publication through subvention. Similarly, our department administrator, Samantha Potter, and our curator of visual resources, Janice Chapman Allen, do superlative work. They play an important role in everything I do. In addition to the many people at Dartmouth, I also want to thank some folks beyond the Green. At the top of any list are my Mexicanist compadres, especially Anna Indych-­López, Jennifer Jolly, James Oles, Roberto Tejada, and Adriana Zavala. They have been with me from the beginning. They are my best sounding boards and most critical interlocutors. Likewise, the consortium of Latin Americanists who come together annually as part of an ever-­expanding Encuentro have vetted this project at various stages. While our membership is always evolving, I am particularly indebted to Natalia Brizuela, George Flaherty, Claire Fox, Esther Gabera, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, China Medel, Sergio Delgado Moya, Adele Nelson, Fernando Rosenberg, and Camilo Trumper. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge a few other scholars whose work and support have aided me along the way, namely Luis Castañeda, Barry Carr, Terri Geis, Michele Greet, Robb Hernández, Jennifer Josten, Rebecca McGrew, and Kathryn O’Rourke. While I undertook this project, in part, because it allowed me to stay close to home while my children were small, my colleagues in Mexico continue to influence my thinking. As always, I must acknowledge the unparalleled work of Renato González-­Mello, whose scholarship on Orozco has been salutary

xviii  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

in every respect. Similarly, Karen Cordero Reiman, Dafne Cruz Porchini, Rita Eder, Olivier Debroise, Federico Navarrete, and Cuauhte­moc Medina have done as much as anyone to shape my thinking about Mexican art. A few other U.S.-­based scholars deserve special mention as well: Bill Boyer, who introduced me to Nick Sammonds’s work, and Kellen Hoxworth, who rounded out my bibliography on blackface minstrelsy in Mexico. Finally, it is to those individuals whose love and friendship has sustained me over these many years that I now turn, knowing there is really no way to adequately convey their significance in my life or to this project. Francine A’ness and Laura Edmondson are my rocks. I can’t imagine life without them. Katie Hornstein and Joy Kenseth keep me laughing in the hallway; their joie de vivre is contagious. Pam Voekel, Bethany Moreton, Pati Hernandez, and Annelise Orleck keep me energized for the good fight. Eng-­ Beng Lim’s fabulosity knows no limits. Bill Boyer’s camaraderie as a parent, and especially his ability to deconstruct animated features, buoyed my spirits more than once. My family, who get the brunt of my stress and exhaustion, deserve all my praise and more. I am often my worst self at home. And yet it is my home and the love of family that centers me and helps me to come back from the brink. My husband, Jon Zinman, is the most supportive spouse an academic could ask for. We are in the trenches together, in both work and life. My stepdaughter, Ella, has helped me to be more patient, forgiving, and flexible. Her humor and kindness are everything. Elias, my stepson, and I have had some hard years. But I trust that our best years are to come. And Rena, my daughter, my love, and my gift: you have redefined my life. I am my best self in your eyes. It is for you and your generation that I attempt, in my small way, to write the wrongs of our American epic. In addition to my students, this book is also dedicated to four fierce and brilliant women. Mishuana Goeman has done more than anyone to open my eyes to the centrality of settler colonialism and its violence toward indigenous peoples to any American epic. Lourdes Guttiérez Nájera’s tireless efforts on behalf of our Latinx students, and in particular, those who are undocumented, has pushed me to reshape my Mexicanism to accommodate transborder and Latinx points of view. Reena Goldthree’s insightful scholarship and activism in the wake of Ferguson helped me to see that the future of my work lies in helping to reclaim Afro-­Latino, African American, and Afro-­ Mexican histories within the American epic. And Aimee Bahng showed me the power of speculative fiction for helping to write the stories we need into the record. These women have all shaped my thinking, but their integrity, compassion, and ability to speak truth to power no matter what the personal

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  xix

cost is their real example. They have made me braver, led me onto new intellectual terrain, and helped me to clarify the intellectual and political stakes of my work. As I indicate in my dedication, they have helped me to see how the concerns of oppressed pasts are my own. I humbly submit this book in their honor and hope that it lives up to their examples. I conclude by acknowledging my debt to Gisela Fosado, my editor at Duke University Press. She has been a champion of this project since she heard one of my first presentations on Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl. In addition to her expert stewardship, I have also appreciated the help and guidance, particularly with my images, of Lydia Rose Rappoport-­Hankins and Jenny Tan. Additionally, I would like to thank Chad Royal and Christopher Robinson for their help with marketing materials; Susan Albury and David Heath for their copy editing; and Julie Allred for her expert guidance throughout the production process. And finally, I want to thank Mark Mastromarino for his work on the index. While nearly everything in this manuscript represents new work, a few things have appeared in other venues. Part of my argument about Orozco’s melancholy dialectics in chapter 1 has been published in “Putting Prometheus in Motion: Reframing Mural Art’s Meaning for Contemporary Art Practice,” in Prometheus 2017: Four Mexican Artists Revisit Orozco, edited by Rebecca McGrew and Terri Geis (Claremont, CA: Pomona Art Museum, 2017), 47–­89. My discussion of Walter Beach Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” in the conclusion first appeared in “The ‘Hovey Mural’ and the ‘Greening’ of Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization” in Walter Beach Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” at Dartmouth College: A Cultural History, edited by Brian P. Kennedy and Katherine Hart (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2011), 79–­106. Finally, a part of my discussion of Orozco’s figural dialectics from chapter 2 appears in “Myth, Melancholy, and History: Figural Dialectics in José Clemente Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization,” in What Was History Painting and What is it Now? edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear (Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 160–81.

xx  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

José Clemente Orozco painted his twenty-­four-­panel fresco cycle, The Epic of American Civilization, between 1932 and 1934 in the basement reserve reading room of Dartmouth College’s Baker-­Berry Library (now referred to as the Orozco Room). This mural wraps around the west, north, and east walls of the rectangular corridor, portraying a vision of American history that originates in pre-­Hispanic civilization and that seems to culminate in a scene of Christian Apocalypse (figure i.1). The Epic is divided into two wings situated on either side of a reserve desk, which opens up a chasm within the sequence that the viewer must navigate both physically and conceptually as she moves through the corridor (figure i.2). This breach marks a crisis wherein the Spanish conquest of the Americas cleaves the Epic in two. In a niche opposite to the reserve desk, on the south wall, Orozco painted a supplement to the cycle entitled “Modern Industrial Man,” where we see a racially ambiguous worker reading a book much as the Dartmouth student checking out reserve materials might (see figure i.11). The supplement is located within the scission between pre-­and postconquest America. As such, it situates the viewer in a charged but ambiguous relationship to the story/​ ­history articulated across the cycle. What, Orozco asks, is our relationship to the violence of the Spanish conquest? In 1933, near the conclusion of this commission, Orozco drafted a statement for Dartmouth’s Alumni Magazine in which he emphasizes two things. He writes: In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an idea, never a story. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.

figure i.1. View of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College.

2  INTRODUCTION

There are as many literary associations as spectators. One of them, when looking at a picture representing a scene of war, for example, may start thinking of murder, another of pacifism, another of anatomy, another of history, and so on. Consequently, to write a story and say that it is actually told by a painting is wrong and untrue. Now the organic idea of every painting, even the worst in the world, is extremely obvious to the average spectator with normal mind and normal sight. The artist cannot possibly hide it. It might be a poor, superfluous and ridiculous idea or a great and significant one. But the important point regarding the frescoes of Baker Library is not only the quality of the idea that initiates and organizes the whole structure, it is also the fact that it is an American idea developed into American forms, American feeling, and, as a consequence, into Ameri­ can style. It is unnecessary to speak about Tradition. Certainly we have to fall in line and learn our lesson from the Masters. If there is another way

it has not been discovered yet. It seems that the line of Culture is continuous, without shortcuts, unbroken from the unknown Beginning to the unknown End. But we are proud to say now: This is no imitation, this is our own effort, to the limit of our own strength and experience, in all sincerity and spontaneity.1 First, he asserts the primacy of idea over story in his mural. Second, he argues that the idea animating his Epic is American in “forms . . . feeling . . . and style.” The purpose of this book is to pursue the link between these two claims. The first entails questions of form and communication. Orozco declares his antipathy to narrative, raising questions about his invocation of the “epic” along with consideration of the organization of the cycle and its relationship to the architectural structure of the reserve corridor. In short, how are we to read his sequenced imagery as something other than a story or, using the Spanish cognate (historia), a “history”? The second statement raises questions about the relationship between form and style on the one hand, and content and meaning on the other. For Orozco characterizes not only the form and style of his mural but also its structure of feeling as American. Orozco’s America is continental. When proposing a topic to the college, he argued that in this mural he would interpret the “forces, constructive and destructive, which have created the patterns of human life in the Western Hemisphere.” 2 He selected the myth of Quetzalcoatl, a myth he described as both autochthonous and “living,” “pointing clearly by its prophetic nature to the responsibility shared equally by the two Americas of creating here an authentic New World civilization.” 3 The myth of Quetzalcoatl refers to a pre-­ Hispanic prophecy that has been used to justify the Spanish conquest since the late sixteenth century, although today its authenticity is highly debated.4 According to the myth, Quetzalcoatl, a god/​­enlightened leader, brought about a highly cultivated civilization among the Toltecs until he was tricked into wanton behavior and rejected by his people. Upon his departure he decreed that he would return to destroy the civilization that rejected him. The Aztecs traced their lineage to the Toltecs, and thereby Quetzalcoatl played a legitimating role in the rise of their imperial civilization. In the immediate postcolonial period, the surviving Aztec leadership and their Spanish interlocutors crafted the myth of prophecy as a prefiguration of the conquest, arguing that Cortés’s arrival in the year One Reed corresponded with Quetzalcoatl’s much-­anticipated return. In this way, a purportedly Toltecan myth appeared to foretell the conquest, suturing Mesoamerican notions of time and history into the linear, historicist, and eschatalogical time of Western Christian empire. From that point forward, the myth of Quetzalcoatl has serviced the construction of Mexican national identity. INTRODUCTION  3

4

5 5

6

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33 2 2

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1 Migration 2 Snake and Spears figure i.2. of 3Overview Ancient Human Sacrifice José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 4 1883–­1Aztec 949, The Warriors Epic of American Civilization, 5 Coming of Quetzalcoatl Fresco, 1932–­34, Hood Museum of 6 Art, Dartmouth The Pre-Columbian Golden Age College. Commissioned by 7 of Dartmouth Departure of Quetzalcoatl the Trustees College. 8 The Prophecy 9 Totem Poles 10 Machine Totems

11 Cortez and the Cross 12 1 Migration The Machine 2 Snake and Spears 13 3 Anglo-America Ancient Human Sacrifice 4 Aztec Warriors 14 Hispano-America 5 Coming of Quetzalcoatl 15 6 Gods of the Modern The Pre-Columbian GoldenWorld Age Departure of of Quetzalcoatl 16 7 Symbols Nationalism 8 The Prophecy 17 9 Modern Human Sacrifice Totem Poles Machine Totems 18 10 Modern Migration of the Spirit 19 Chains of the Spirit 20 Modern Industrial Man

11 11 11

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11 Cortez and the Cross 12 The Machine 13 Anglo-America 14 Hispano-America 15 Gods of the Modern World 16 Symbols of Nationalism 17 Modern Human Sacrifice 18 Modern Migration of the Spirit 19 Chains of the Spirit 20 Modern Industrial Man

19 19

Epic, National Narration, and Counternarrative

Despite his skepticism about “story,” Orozco conceived of his mural as an epic. Because epics pertain to origin stories, Susanne Wofford notes, they are often entailed in the secular narratives of national histories.5 Even though epics are understood to be “linear and teleological,” they are often ambivalent about both origins and endpoints.6 The linear stories epics relay, she argues, often “begin[ ] in medias res and end[ ] ex mediis rebus.” 7 In this respect, she distinguishes epic from the “origin tale.” The latter have clear origins that are marked by violence and a “catastrophic and irreversible metamorphosis that produces . . . the being in question.” 8 Thus both the origin tale and epic are concerned with origins. However, in origin tales violence is explicit; in epic, violence is mystified. For, Wofford argues, “those moments in the epic when origins are narrated can . . . sometimes be moments when a submerged counternarrative is allowed to surface.” 9 The myth of Quetzalcoatl is an origin tale that served to justify Aztec imperial power and to forestall any attempts at challenging the social order within that society, even after the conquest, as surviving Aztecs sought to shore up their power within the new colonial regime. However, once its etiology was folded into postcolonial narratives of national becoming, it became part of an eschatological epic that served to mystify the violent origins of the nation-­state in the Spanish conquest. In this sense, the myth of Quetzalcoatl demonstrates the very danger that Wofford identifies when the origin tale is incorporated into national epics. While it is meant to naturalize the violence of the conquest, the myth’s objectification within the colonial narratives of the national epic has made it available for ongoing demands for justice and the decolonization of the postcolonial nation-­state. Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization is one such counternarrative. In this sense, Orozco’s mural is decolonial, following the insights of Aní­ bal Quijano and Walter Mignolo in the broadest sense. In their writing, they argue that modernity is a colonial project rooted in epistemic violence that centers Europe, constitutes non-­European knowledge as irrational, naturalizes capitalism as the necessary and logical outcome of historical economic development, and constructs non-­Europeans as inferior and racialized others. They note that despite independence movements to decolonize settler states, we have not achieved the status of being postcolonial because we have not escaped the “colonial matrix of power” through which colonialism emerged. They call decolonial those analytic and political endeavors that seek to expose the coloniality of power by provincializing its universalism, attacking its hierarchies, and denaturalizing it logics.10

6  INTRODUCTION

To best grasp the critical and decolonial capacity of Orozco’s Epic, I compare it with Diego Rivera’s contemporaneous History of Mexico (1929–­35) cycle at the National Palace in Mexico City, among other important public murals from the 1930s (see figures 1.1–­1.4). This cycle, I will show, betrays Wofford’s claims about the epic’s ambivalence toward beginnings and endings insofar as it presents a linear and tautological narrative of national becoming that seeks to mystify the violence of origins by incorporating the Quetzalcoatl myth into a heroic and monumental story of national historical progress. While Rivera does represent violent episodes from Mexico’s colonial and postcolonial history, they are of the special kind that Benedict Anderson ascribes to national narration. “The nation’s biography,” he writes, “snatches . . . exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts.” 11 But, in order for these “violent deaths” to serve the purposes of national narration, they “must be remembered/​ ­forgotten as ‘our own.’” 12 In Rivera’s cycle, the death of the Aztec leader Cuauhtémoc is not remembered as a sovereign act of resistance to Spanish imperialism; the epistemological and sovereign difference between the Aztec empire and Spanish crown is “forgotten” and re-­membered as a fratri­cidal conflict that birthed a Mestizo nation. Cuauhtémoc’s death has become “ours,” not “theirs,” a proto-­national martyrdom that serves the official indigenismo of the postrevolutionary state and its intellectual left. Rivera’s mural, like the “homogeneous, empty time” of national narration, is historicist, even as the formal and conceptual complexity of its visual dialectics complicates its linear and tautological thrust.13 It begins in medias res with Quetzalcoatl’s pacific reign, and through a dialectical process that progresses from the conquest to the Mexican Revolution, it ends ex mediis rebus in Quetzalcoatl’s messianic return as Karl Marx. Mari Carmen Ramírez asserts that Rivera’s History of Mexico marks a “historicist” turn among Mexican muralists in the 1930s.14 During this period many artists intensified their exploration of the nation’s past to articulate a unique national identity—​ ­Mexicanidad—​­rooted in indigenous culture but reflecting an idealized conception of postconquest racial and cultural mixing, known as mestizaje, and culminating in an industrialized future. In this respect Rivera’s cycle is part of a tradition whereby history painting has been put in the service of the consolidation of political power and nation ­formation since the late colonial period. Rivera began the mural in 1929 during the Maximato, the period between 1928 and 1934 when Plutarco Elías Calles—​­the “Jefe Máximo”—​­ruled through three proxy presidents (Emilio Portes Gil, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, and Abelardo Rodríguez). During this period Calles consolidated political power in the state through the formation of an official ruling party and exploited

INTRODUCTION  7

populist rhetoric to convert the revolution from a chaotic civil war into an institutionalized myth that foreclosed further rebellion in the name of national unity. Rivera completed the mural in 1935 after Lázaro Cárdenas became president, declared his independence from the Maximato, and cultivated a messianic persona as a rural populist. Cárdenas brokered a rapprochement with the communist left and enacted socialist reforms that reoriented the ruling party from the liberal bourgeois policies of the Maximato toward more radical ends. Rivera’s mural reflects this shift in that it both extols the modernizing agenda of the Maximato while also condemning Calles after his fall from grace. Further, with the introduction of Marx into the mural’s program, he took advantage of Cárdenas’s political opening and exploited the messianic overtones of his socializing agenda. My reading of Rivera’s National Palace mural is aligned with that of Leonard Folgarait, who argues that it is a state ritual that endeavors to convert its viewers into law-­abiding citizens subject to the authority of the new ruling party.15 David Craven characterizes this mural as the epitome of ­Rivera’s epic modernism, a term derived from Meyer Schapiro but inflected by Bertolt Brecht’s characterization of “epic theater.” 16 Like Folgarait, Craven emphasizes Rivera’s canny integration of avant-­garde techniques with a dialectical conception of history. However, unlike Folgarait, who focuses on the tendency within Rivera’s mural to use these devices in the service of a fundamentally statist agenda, Craven insists that the mural is “open ended” in its narrative, that it is “uneven in its representation of history” as a consequence of his use of metalepsis (reference to one thing through the substitution of another remotely related to it) and montage, and that it is postcolonial because it decenters European culture in its hybrid aesthetics and conception of Mexico’s mestizo identity.17 He asserts that the question that animates the mural is “nothing less than the course of human history, with Mexico being the particular place where this development is concretely known.” 18 The National Palace mural, he concludes, “feature[s] a tragic past, an undecided present, and a hopeful vision, which, if realized in the ‘classless future,’ will redeem all the rest.” 19 Craven and I agree that Rivera’s mural proposes a prophetic reading of Mexican history in which its tragic past is redeemed by its proletarian future. However, we disagree about the decentering effects of Rivera’s “epic modernism.” Like Folgarait, I argue that the mural is less open-­ended than its overwhelming scale and copious detail suggest. Its logic is profoundly eschatological and more attuned to the liberal political theology of the state than to the more radical aims of Mexico’s working and popular classes. In the chapters that follow, I show that Rivera’s National Palace mural is a key

8  INTRODUCTION

intertext to any analysis of Orozco’s Epic. If Rivera’s allegory of national history is akin to epic theater, as Craven contends, then Orozco’s Epic is a Trauer­spiel, like the “mourning plays” that Walter Benjamin described in his study of Germany’s Baroque theater.20 Trauerspiel refers to a genre of German tragic theater that emerged in the eighteenth century. The protagonists were often bourgeois individuals, elevating their exploits to a status once reserved for aristocrats. My use of the term derives from Benjamin’s reading of the genre as an allegory for the art form’s fall from transcendence into historical time, which I discuss at greater length in chapter 1. For Benjamin the Trauerspiel does not so much celebrate the ascendance of the bourgeoisie but rather the decay of sovereignty in the face of history’s capacity for meaningless violence. As Trauerspiel, Orozco’s Epic is not a national allegory; rather, it languishes in allegoresis (the proliferation of metaphor in the absence of a transcendent truth to anchor meaning). He takes an anti-­historicist approach to history and painted dialectics. Through the constructivist principle of montage, he approaches the preconquest past melancholically, acknowledging the barbarism of civilization and the catastrophe of history conceived of as progress. In this sense, Orozco’s Epic contradicts the messianic politics of both the Mexican state and the communist left in the 1930s. If it is an epic, it is one that reveals, rather than obscures, the violence at the origin of the nation-­state, thereby “depriving the society of its founding authority.” 21 Mexico, U.S. Antiempire, and the Borders of Identity

It is probable that Orozco used the term epic to liken his mural form to poetic composition and to indicate that its subject matter entailed the travails and achievements recounted in epic poetry. In his mural it is the viewer who performs the epic; she, rather than a depicted protagonist, is the hero who undertakes a perilous journey and emerges from the experience transformed. Thus, Orozco’s Epic is concerned with more than Mexican national sovereignty and the cultural politics of the international left. Unlike Rivera’s National Palace cycle, which is sited in a colonial building built atop the Aztecs’ destroyed ritual precinct in Tenochtitlán and which has served, since the colonial period through the mid-­twentieth century, as the literal seat of federal power, Orozco’s Epic is located in one of the oldest and most hallowed educational institutions in the United States within the very region—​ ­New England—​­credited for its exceptional character and history. Dartmouth College was founded in 1769 by Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, a Congregationalist minister, for the “education and instruction of youth

INTRODUCTION  9

of the Indian tribes in this land.” 22 As a consequence, it has long been understood to be a college dedicated to the education of Native Americans. While Wheelock is credited with the institution’s founding, it was Samson Occom, a Mohegan man, Presbyterian minister, and one of Wheelock’s first students, whose tour through England and Scotland secured the funding for what was originally an Indian Charity School located in Connecticut.23 Once Occom returned, however, Wheelock all but abandoned his Indian school. He split his educational mission into a grammar school for the training of indigenous children (and some enslaved men and women) in handcrafts and domestic tasks and a college, now intended for Anglo-­American youth. He relocated the latter to the Hanover Plain on Abenaki lands along the Connecticut River, granted by Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire. It was through this feint that Wheelock’s charity school became Dartmouth College. Occom broke with Wheelock over this betrayal, and only about twenty Native American students graduated from Dartmouth between the year of its founding and 1972, when President John Kemeny reinvested in the college’s original charter and established one of the first Native American studies programs in the country. As with so many U.S. American institutions, Dartmouth and its majority-­white student body have long enjoyed the settler proclivity for “playing Indian” without acknowledging the usurpation of Abenaki lands or the reliance on enslaved labor that enabled its foundation within the colonial enterprise.24 Orozco pointed to this blind spot with regard to the colonial violence of the American epic in his autobiography, where he writes: “Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, is one of the oldest of educational institutions in the American Union. Several years before the War of Independence it was founded by a missionary who wished to educate the Indians of the neighborhood. Eleazar Wheelock came among them with a grammar, a Bible, a drum, and more than five thousand quarts of whiskey. To the sound of his drum, the Indians assembled, drank his whiskey, and learned the idiom of the New Testament. Today there are no more Indians left to be educated after this admirable plan.” 25 Orozco’s facts are wrong.26 Not only was Wheelock a teetotaler but also, despite the efforts of missionaries and the effects of colonization, there were (and are) indigenous peoples, tribes, and nations still living throughout the U.S., including New England. As will become clear in the conclusion, he was likely deriving most of his information from a popular drinking song penned by Dartmouth alumnus Richard Hovey. Nonetheless, he reveals the hypocrisy of the U.S. American veneration of the Indian in the face of the nation’s genocidal policies toward indigenous peoples. Despite indigenous survivance and the occasional enrollment

10  INTRODUCTION

of Native American students, when Orozco was at work at the college he would likely not have encountered any, save for white students donning “war paint” and dressing up as Chief Wa-­Hoo-­Wah to perform during halftime at football games, or carrying Indian-­head canes and breaking “peace pipes” as part of the college’s annual graduation ritual. The Epic is, therefore, explicitly addressed to a U.S. American viewer. As such, it is also pointed in its critique of U.S. American exceptionalism and its instantiation in narrative histories that excerpt the settlement of the territorial United States from the broader colonial histories of the continent, and in particular from the spiritual and military violence of the Spanish conquest. María DeGuzmán has dubbed this “fantasy of the United States as independent, isolated, as simply ‘America,’” the U.S. “antiempire.” 27 Relatedly, it is likely that Orozco was critically engaging popular histories wherein U.S.-­based historians, artists, and filmmakers were also claiming the epic. For example, Thomas Hart Benton painted a fourteen-­panel “mural” between 1920 and 1928 called American Historical Epic. It is unlikely Orozco ever saw Benton’s Epic, but he surely did know Benton’s more prominent public cycles, such as America Today, painted for the New School for Social Research in 1931 at the same time that Orozco was painting his New School mural cycle, or Benton’s Arts of Life in America series that debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1932. These two mural projects reflect Benton’s turn toward romantic, highly cinematic, and deliberately mythologizing renderings of the American epic after the failure of his earlier cycle.28 The most prominent and prolific U.S. American muralist, Benton persistently engaged with the discourses of Manifest Destiny, the “popular arts” and folk traditions of American leisure, and the style of Holly­wood filmmaking. He therefore provides a compelling parallel and foil to the seriousness of purpose and avant-­garde film aesthetics employed by the Mexican muralists. Benton’s contribution to what Austen Barron Bailly has called the “American epics” of the interwar period helps us to better understand the currency of the term among cultural workers in the 1930s as well as the narratives of U.S. American history and audience expectations into which Orozco was likely intervening with his Epic. Take, for example, James Truslow Adams’s 1931 narrative history of the United States entitled The American Epic. In this book, Adams coined the phrase the “American Dream,” arguing that despite its current economic and moral crisis, the United States was unique in both the Old and New Worlds for its promise of “opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” 29 Adams’s story recapitulates commonplace themes of American exceptionalism: that its settlers were motivated by “liberty” rather than

INTRODUCTION  11

territorial conquest; that its national story originates with the “men of destiny” who colonized the Northeast and moved, ax in hand, inexorably West; that its character was shaped by the hardships of the frontier; and that its unique work ethic and material success was fundamentally Anglo-­Saxon and Protestant despite the presence of other faiths and ethnicities. Adams likens the course of American Empire to “Old Man River” (the Mississippi), naturalizing its territorial designs and inevitable progress as a “continuous process” wherein “all that happens flows from what has been into what is to be.” 30 His narrative is, thus, explicitly historicist, smoothing over every barbarism—​­slavery, Indian removal, wars, corporate greed, and labor exploitation—​­with a professed faith in American destiny. While we cannot know if Orozco was familiar with Adams’s book, he certainly understood the broad strokes of U.S. American exceptionalism and its triumphalist narratives of national history as Manifest Destiny. As an artist living and working in the Northeast, he recognized the special place the New England colonies held in stories of national becoming. Moreover, as a Mexican, he was sensitized to the exclusionary racial terms of its white, Anglo-­Saxon, Protestant imaginary. Whereas Adams relegated Mexico’s contributions to the American epic to his prologue, Orozco painted his from a Mexican standpoint wherein what he viewed as an indigenous myth—​­the myth of Quetzalcoatl—​­animates the entire drama. In Orozco’s cycle it is Cortés’s conquest, not the landing at Plymouth Rock, that inaugurates modern history. A man of destiny to be sure, Cortés and his destructive power are not lionized like Adams’s woodsman and his ax. Rather, Orozco makes the violent and traumatic foundations of America’s settler states unavoidable for any viewer who performs his Epic. Like Orozco, Adams recalls the “legend” of Quetzalcoatl and writes of the pitiless fate of the “savages” at the hands of the Spanish.31 But he does not fold this Aztec origin tale into his epic; rather, it forms the foundation for a story that lies, literally, with/​­out the civilizational time of history, in the “time immemorial” of his prologue.32 It is not the Spanish conquest that brings this prologue to a close and inaugurates his American epic; it is the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. This event not only “sealed” the “fate of the unwitting North American savage,” he argues; it also eliminated the threat of Spanish dominion over territories that would become part of the continental United States and confined its cultural influence to an undemocratic, Catholic, and stagnant “Mexico.” 33 Adams thus anachronistically instantiates the nineteenth-­century political border between the U.S. and Mexican nation-­states in the imperial contest between sixteenth-­century Spain and England, minimizing the Spanish presence in the territorial United States

12  INTRODUCTION

and asserting an absolute cultural distinction between Hispano-­and Anglo-­ America, to use the parlance of the day. Orozco, as we will see, calls attention to this bordering practice and its consequences for how America is imagined, as well as to its effects on racialized subjects both within and without the United States. Orozco does not naturalize his vision of the American epic using flowing metaphors that treat the past as prologue and the future as ordained. His approach is dialectical, wherein the now of the 1930s is constellated with the then of the Spanish conquest interrupting the flow of time and raising questions about the role of the conquest in Mexican national history and identity as well as the role of the Black Legend in U.S. American national formation. In this sense his mural is situated at a discursive, geographical, and symbolic border between Mexican national discourses about mestizo identity and U.S. American national discourses about Anglo-­American exceptionalism. It also critically engages the political axis between Marxist conceptions of historical redemption promoted by leftist intellectuals in Mexico and U.S. American celebrations and critiques of industrialization, viewed as the unique achievement of the Protestant ethos. This uneasy political axis was hailed and naturalized through the discourse of pan-­Americanism, a binational initiative to constitute Anglo-­and Hispano-­America as complementary cultures, with U.S.-­based commodity production equated with the spiritualized cultural legacies of Latin America’s racialized culture.34 As will become clear, Orozco reworks the contemporary claims of pan-­Americanists about the two Americas. Thus, we might see Orozco’s Epic as akin to Herbert Eugene Bolton’s call for a transnational American epic in his 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association entitled “The Epic of Greater America.” Like Adams, Bolton was indebted to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis.35 However, Bolton bent it to promote the study of what he dubbed the “Spanish borderlands.” He thus characterized the Americas as a “disputed hemisphere rather than a set of fixed national entities,” wherein the negotiation between European settlers and indigenous inhabitants within multiple borderlands—​­not simply on the Western frontier—​­held the key to national character formation across the Americas.36 From this vantage, he called out what he saw as the provincialism and chauvinism of U.S. American historians whose focus on the “‘Original Thirteen’ has been very misleading and even pernicious” in its tendency to excerpt the “American Union” from the larger hemisphere and thereby minimize inter-­American relations in the formation of American nation-­states over time.37 Orozco’s Epic engages these discursive borders and axes, taking on the eschatological claims of history in Mexico and revealing their role in struc-

INTRODUCTION  13

turing the U.S. American antiempire as well. Likewise, he eschews the fetish­ i­za­tion of U.S. America’s machine culture while activating the critical ironies of Mexico’s official indigenismo. But his mural does more than engage these national, political, and discursive borders. It also, and perhaps more significantly, speaks to the aporias, encryptions, and silences that structure and haunt them. In particular, his mural raises the specter of race and racialization in the Americas through its melancholic engagement with the borders of identity and with identity as a bordering practice that “displaces the location and polarity of the nation-­border . . . [onto] the body.” 38 This comes to the fore in his supplement, “Modern Industrial Man,” through the critical act he demands of his viewer as she stands within the space of crisis that has founded Anglo-­and Hispano-­American identity and contemplates her relationship to the ambiguously raced body of the worker who reads. As I argue in the conclusion, Orozco’s supplement reconstitutes the viewer as a border-­subject and the mural room as a deterritorialized borderscape. Melancholy, Race, and Performance

How does Orozco’s mural do this? To answer this question, I turn to the theoretical concept of melancholy—​­both as an affective relationship to history and as constitutive of identity formation, crossing Walter Benjamin’s “melancholy dialectics” with Sigmund Freud’s insights about mourning and melancholia.39 Orozco and Benjamin were contemporaries, although there is no evidence that either was aware of the other. Both adopted a critical stance toward historicism, and both stayed involved in leftist politics while expressing concerns about the development of Marxism as a political theory and philosophy of history. Likewise, both engaged messianic theology overtly, posing difficult questions about the possibilities for redemption within the political ethos of the modern nation-­state and a cultural legacy of barbarism. My uptake of Benjamin’s melancholy dialectics is enhanced and modified by critical race and postcolonial theorists who have reinvigorated Freud’s theorization of melancholy, showing how it can inform a critical understanding of identity and racial formation in the Americas as well as abet ongoing struggles to decolonize the postcolonial nation state. I combine insights from Benjamin’s On the Origins of German Tragic Drama about the socio­historical conditions of loss that turn tragedy into Trauerspiel (the mourning play) with his insights about the redemptive—​­“weak messianic”—​­power of the critical historian in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 40 Read as Trauerspiel, Orozco’s Epic speaks to the collapse of eschatological redemption and narratives of national progress that the

14  INTRODUCTION

conquest entails. As Judith Butler writes, within this context, “History . . . becomes a kind of catastrophe, a fall from which there is no redemption, the dissolution of sequential temporality itself.” 41 “As a result of this dissolution,” she concludes, “history becomes grasped as a spatial image.” 42 Following this insight, I characterize Orozco’s Epic is a spatial image rather than a historicist narrative. Constellated through what Benjamin calls “figural dialectics,” its sequencing does not correspond with the linear logics of historicist time and progress. Rather, it is a constructivist “image,” an irruptive “flash,” produced through the avant-­garde aesthetic of montage.43 Benjamin’s melancholic conception of history as loss is not cynical or paralyzing. Rather, he imputes to melancholy a critical agency that David Eng describes as “an open relationship to the past—​­bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present.” 44 Eng’s characterization of Benjamin’s project draws on Freud’s insights, insofar as melancholia signals for both a “persistent struggle with lost objects.” 45 In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud famously distinguished between these two modes of grieving the lost object of desire, which for Freud can be “a loved person” or “an abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal and so on.” 46 Mourning describes the healthy and productive way that the subject incrementally withdraws libidinal attachment from the lost object in deference to “reality,” which shows that “the loved object no longer exists.” 47 The melancholic, however, is a pathological figure who not only cannot let go of the lost object of desire but also may not “see clearly what has been lost.” 48 Thus the melancholic’s loss may be “unconscious,” whereas in mourning “there is nothing unconscious about the loss.” 49 Because the melancholic cannot abandon the lost object, she incorporates it into the ego. This, in turn, “establishes an identification of the ego with the abandoned object.” 50 As a consequence, the melancholic loses self-­esteem, “reproaches” and “vilifies” herself.51 “In grief,” writes Freud, “the world becomes poor and empty; in Melancholia it is the ego itself.” 52 In her book The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng points out that for Freud melancholia plays a constitutive role in the formation of the ego, for the “ego comes into being as a psychical object, as a perceptual object, only after the ‘shadow of the object’ has fallen upon it.” 53 In this sense, the subject and object become “intrinsically (con)fused.” 54 The consequences of this “psychical drama,” Cheng argues, is that the subject must deny loss as loss in order to retain the object, while at the same time not allowing the object to return. Thus, she surmises that “exclusion, rather than loss, is the real stake of melancholic retention.” 55

INTRODUCTION  15

Cheng extends this insight about subject/​­object confusion to a consideration of the ontological status of the object. Rather than focus exclusively on the melancholic subject (as Freud and many of his interlocutors do), she seeks to explore the effects of melancholy on the excluded but retained object as well. She thereby argues that the psychic condition of melancholia is a useful framework for theorizing race relations in the United States, where the “dominant, standard, white national ideal . . . is sustained by the exclusion-­yet-­retention of racialized others.” 56 In this sense, the dialectic of loss, retention, denial, and exclusion that melancholia entails describes not only how dominant white identity operates but also the ideological dilemma of racist institutions such as segregation and colonialism. These institutions, she writes, “are internally fraught institutions not because they have eliminated the other but because they need the very thing they hate or fear.” 57 Melancholia also describes the condition of racialized people, for as affect it names the psychic effect of the “haunting negativity that has not only been attached to but also has helped to constitute the very category of ‘the racialized.’” 58 This affect manifests itself in the intergenerational grief that structures racial consciousness in the United States as well as in the grievances—​­legal or otherwise—​­lodged in its name. Cheng’s discussion of the melancholy of race helps us to understand not only why racialized populations are so integral to the symbolic processes of nation-­formation within colonial and postcolonial contexts but also why making manifest the ghostly objects of melancholic ego-­formation is so important for decolonization. Ranjana Khanna concurs, arguing that “theorizing melancholia involves theorizing a relationship to the other, and the manner in which the other is manifested” within postcolonial national representation.59 In her book Dark Continents, Khanna situates the emergence of psychoanalysis within the context of European colonization, noting in particular the importance of colonial archaeology and anthropology for the metaphors Freud elaborates when theorizing the modern (European) subject. She points out that Freud reconceptualized the ego, from a “topographical model of archeological layers” to an “economic one concerning drives,” and links this theoretical shift to changes in his own relationship to the nation-­state as the result of anti-­Semitism, the rise of Nazism, and exile.60 It is this experience that formed the backdrop to his theorization of melancholy, and, in particular, the “destructive splitting” of the ego that it describes. His retheorization of the ego opened up the “psychoanalytic critique of the modern nation-­state” that Cheng articulates.61 It also laid the groundwork for the critical decolonial reinscriptions of psychoanalytic theory in Europe and its colonies after World War II. Khanna calls these

16  INTRODUCTION

decolonial rescriptings “colonial melancholy,” an affective relationship to the nation-­state form that results from the “inability to introject the lost ideal of nation-­statehood.” 62 In colonial melancholy, the postcolonial subject is unable to effectively mourn the lost ideal of the nation-­state. Instead, it becomes an unassimilable remainder that interrupts and critiques national postcolonial representation. Following Freud, Khanna reminds us that “what distinguishes melancholia [from mourning] is a state of dejection, and a form of critical agency that is directed toward the self.” 63 Conceived of as a form of critical agency, melancholia not only makes the encrypted figures within the ego-­ideal of the postcolonial nation-­state manifest; its critical agency also works to dismantle both the colonizing subject (the postcolonial national ego) and the colonized object (those retained-­yet-­excluded racialized groups) at the same time. “This critical identification with the lost object,” she asserts, “constitutes the burden of melancholia, and indeed the traumatic undoing of self and lost object as a result.” 64 In this book, Quetzalcoatl represents the critical identification of the postcolonial nation-­state with the lost object of ancient indigenous culture configured as the foundation for an independent and sovereign postcolonial nation-­state. Mesoamerican culture serves as both a narcissistic projection, or “ego-­ideal,” for the postcolonial nation-­state and as a specter of the colonialism that haunts and delegitimates it. Quetzalcoatl’s return was used to justify the conquest. However, the incorporation of his prophecy of return into the national epic opens national history to critical counternarratives. In this sense, Quetzalcoatl’s return also alerts us to the unanswered call for justice. As an unassimilable remainder that haunts the postcolonial independent nation-­state, it makes ethical demands on the future. For as Khanna reminds us, “In the context of new formerly colonized nation-­states, the critical response to nation-­statehood arises from the secret embedded in the nation-­state formation: that the concept of nation-­statehood was constituted through the colonial relation, and needs to be radically reshaped if it is to survive without colonies or without a concealed (colonial) other.” 65 This, I argue, is the “responsibility shared equally by the two Americas” that Orozco intimated when describing Quetzalcoatl’s “living” myth. As we will see, however, the responsibility that inheres within Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy not only alerts us to the colonial politics of Mexico’s official indigenismo. As a specter of colonialism and justice that haunts the post­ colonial nation-­state, the myth of return also inflects Orozco’s grappling with the racial politics of the American dream. As Cheng points out, despite its claim that “all men are created equal,” U.S. America has repeatedly betrayed

INTRODUCTION  17

this founding ideal through a series of legalized exclusions, from the colonization of indigenous inhabitants and the enslavement of Africans to the exclusion of the Chinese, the repatriation of Mexicans, or the internment of the Japanese, to name only a few.66 These racialized groups are the buried but formative ghosts in the Constitution, as a founding document, and in the constitution of American national history and identity. Citing scholars such as Michael Rogin and Eric Lott, Cheng asserts that “the dominant culture’s relation to the raced other displays an entangled network of repulsion and sympathy, fear and desire, repudiation and identification.” 67 The racialized worker in Orozco’s supplement is one such “serviceable ghost” of U.S. American national representation.68 He conjures a host of excluded but retained objects of melancholic ego formation within the white racial ideal of U.S. American nationalism. Given the importance of race to my analysis of Orozco’s Epic, it behooves us to consider the term not only in its U.S. framework, where a black/​­white dichotomy structures notions of racial categorization and where whiteness is the marker of belonging, but also within a Mexican context wherein mestizaje, or race-­mixing, is the dominant trope through which race relations are imagined and where the mestizo, not “whiteness” per se, is upheld as the national ideal. Race as a category of identification or categorization is an ideological construct that nonetheless has real effects insofar as it imputes social, cultural, and biological differences to groups based, typically, on visible traits, such as skin color. While the biological differences purported to race have been discredited, race continues to be a powerful social category invoked not only by racists who would seek to demean entire groups of people but also by the very people who have been racialized to advance the cause of group rights in the face of legal, civil, and symbolic disenfranchisement. Racialization thereby refers to “the signification of race through social practices . . . [those] processes by which real or imagined characteristics are used to identify a group as a ‘racial’ collectivity, and cultural, political, or ideological situations where race thinking is invoked.” 69 Race management was central to the Spanish colonial project due to the radical mixing that occurred between people of Spanish, indigenous, and African descent.70 The Catholic ethos of evangelization and colonial governance mitigated, but did not preclude, the enslavement of indigenous peoples. Moreover, New Spain was the recipient of the vast majority of slaves brought to the Americas up until the late seventeenth century. These populations comingled in social space, intermarried, and engaged in forms of sartorial and legal passing that resulted in a large and hybrid population of people of mixed or indeterminate social status and lineage. During the

18  INTRODUCTION

colonial period an elaborate system of erudite classification, called ­castas (castes), was developed to categorize and fix peoples of mixed lineage within a hierarchy that placed intermarriage with the Spanish at the top and intermarriage between indios and negros at the bottom.71 Like the colonial United States, Mexico was involved in the slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. However, unlike in the United States, slavery was abolished with independence in 1829, when not only people of African but also indigenous descent were granted formal equality with creoles (people of Spanish descent but born in the colonies).72 After independence this colonial system of classification was reduced to a three-­part system of creole, indigenous, and mestizo, while blackness dropped out al­together. By the twentieth century, with the publication of José Vasconcelos’s La Raza Cosmica in 1924, racial fusion was hailed not as a stigmatized artifact of colonization but rather as the means by which Latin America would surpass Anglo-­Saxon America. “We in America,” he wrote, “shall arrive, before any other part of the world, at the creation of a new race fashioned out of the treasures of all the previous ones: The final race, the cosmic race.” 73 Due to texts like Vasconcelos’s, the mestizo was asserted as a normative ideal of imagined community. However, despite his paean to “a new race,” mestizaje does not signify all racial mixes but rather a carefully calibrated combination of Spanish and indigenous. Thus, other racially mixed groups, such as Afro-­mestizos, or immigrant populations such as the Jewish or Lebanese who began migrating in the late nineteenth century, do not register at all within discourses about the Mexican people.74 In spite of these exclusions, the ideology of mestizaje has long been understood, within Mexico, as a form of anti-­racism leveraged against the United States. For, as Vasconcelos emphatically claimed, “they committed the sin of destroying those races [Indians and blacks], while we assimilated them.” 75 Thus, Mexicans are often blind to the ways that antiblack racism has structured their own national imaginary, viewing it as a pathology that originates within the United States.76 Orozco certainly held this view; as a middle-­class mestizo, he would have understood himself as a non-­racialized person. And thus it must have come as quite a shock to find that when on the other side of the border, his Mexicanness rendered him not only a foreigner but also a racialized subject. In this sense he would have found himself grappling with the same problems U.S.-­born Latino/​­as face when trying to plot themselves along the white/​ ­black color line (I will return to this in the conclusion when discussing Mexican artist Guillermo Gómez-­Peña’s migration experience).77 And while it is unlikely that Orozco would have identified with African Americans, or

INTRODUCTION  19

even as a person of color, the experience of being reclassified—​­of shifting from the privileged position of mestizo normativity to the humiliation of being treated as a racially subordinate non-­American—​­must have provoked a glimmering awareness of the psychic complexities of race as a lived category of difference within the U.S. national imaginary. One of the goals of this book, therefore, is to explore how the racialized figure of “Modern Industrial Man,” who lies with/​­out the history/​­story that Orozco’s Epic seems to reify, manifests a “presence” that is encrypted within that very history/​­story nonetheless.78 As a figure of repudiation (a racialized subject) and identification (a reader engaged in the very same act we, the viewers, are presumably in the reserve corridor to undertake), he makes manifest the psychic conflicts of race in the U.S. American national imaginary. The responsibility of the performative epic we undertake as viewers thereby lies not in an easy identification with the utopian ethos of Mexican mestizaje—​­an idealized formulation of racial and cultural mixing—​­or in the multicultural fantasy that we can see ourselves in the “other” that prevails in U.S. liberalism. The “psychical paradox” inherent in identification (the melancholic subject’s identification with the lost object, its self-­flagellation as a consequence, its desire to exclude coupled with the necessity of retention) makes happy formulations of multicultural identification problematic.79 To paraphrase Cheng’s argument about the performance art of Anna Deavere Smith as a point of identification for the viewer, Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” “destabilizes, rather than confirms, the critical or spectatorial we.” 80 Following Elin Diamond, she argues that this kind of identification “provokes rather than disguises the historical contradictions within a social status quo implied by a homogeneous notion of the audience-­as-­one.” 81 It is in this sense that I see the racialized worker in the supplement as a provocative point of identification for the Dartmouth viewer, and one that troubles, rather than confirms, the status quo of an audience imagined as homogenous. He offers the viewer not a point of easy identification but rather a challenge to undertake the melancholic task of disidentification. As José Muñoz conceived it, the disidentifying subject, like the melancholic, “works to hold on to th[e lost] object and invest it with new life.” 82 While his argument can apply to any colonial subject (and I will argue that the supplement offers the white subject an opportunity to disidentify with whiteness), for Muñoz, melancholia is not only the pathological retention-­yet-­exclusion of the lost object that characterizes the psychic conflicts of the white, heteronormative subject vis-­à-­vis racialized populations. More importantly, it is a “structure of feeling” that “individual subjects and different communities in crisis can use to map the ambivalences of identification and the conditions

20  INTRODUCTION

of (im)possibility that shape . . . minority identities.” 83 Like Cheng, Muñoz recognizes melancholia as an affective response to racial grief/​­grievance. And like her, he explores the dialectic of fantasy and identification that compels minoritized subjects to organize their sense of self through majoritarian representations that wound as much as they compel. This “identity affirming ‘melancholia’” helps to explain why students who self-­identify as minorities at Dartmouth often find Orozco’s Epic affirming, despite the colonial narratives it recycles, its near exclusion of women from its iconographic program, and its reticence on matters of sexuality.84 And it helps to distinguish the difference between student identification with Native Americans at Dartmouth, best exemplified by the “Hovey Mural” (1939), and the critical interrogation of racial identities that students working with Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and members of the Pocha Nostra collective produced in their collaborative performance, Orozco ­MEXotica, in 2002. I discuss both of these responses to Orozco’s Epic in the conclusion. Orozco’s Epic thus crosses the melancholy of race in the United States with the colonial melancholy of Mexican nationalism. It brings the post­ colonial critique pioneered by subaltern scholars to bear upon U.S. America’s antiempire. In turn, it situates the ethos of Mexico’s postrevolutionary mestizaje in relation to U.S.-­based discourses on race, racialization, and racism, opening the concerns of Mexican muralism to those of critical race theorists in the United States. The mural thereby asks its (presumed) U.S. American viewer to recognize the coloniality of power, while at the same time asking Mexicans to recognize the racism that structures their national imaginary as well. Idea, Intention, and the Melancholy Art

My methodological and theoretical engagement with melancholy concerns more than the racial politics of Orozco’s Epic. As intimated at the outset, it also concerns the mural’s formal properties—​­its montage aesthetic—​­as well as my conception of the critical possibilities that inhere in the mural as a work of political art. In her work on Benjamin’s relationship with Freud’s theory of melancholy, Ilit Ferber characterizes his understanding of the philosophical enterprise as a “struggle for the presentation of ideas.” 85 Like Cheng and Khanna, she argues that Benjamin shifts Freud’s emphasis from the subject to the object, characterizing the work of melancholy as the “sad work” of “rendering the object present, and not absent (as the mourner does).” 86 Whereas work for Freud “effaces all traces of loss,” Benjamin, Ferber notes, “emphasizes” the “traces of loss and destruction” through the metaphor of

INTRODUCTION  21

the “mosaic as an image of the philosophical idea.” 87 The mosaic—​­or what I call constellation throughout this text—​­is a fragmented, “ruin-­like” image composed as much of the pieces it montages as it is of the seams of adhesive that hold it together. The marks of the adhesive make present what was destroyed and lost. The manifestation of the idea, then, is “produced from a condition of loss,” and thus “will always bear its traces.” 88 It is in this sense that the spatial image of Benjaminian melancholy makes loss present not for the purpose of freeing the subject but rather to free the object, to bring it to rest by coming to terms with it. Orozco’s Epic is not decolonial because it abets the “normal” work of mourning and thereby frees the colonizing subject from her libidinal attachments to the abstracted objects of postcolonial national desire. It is decolonial because of the way that it makes present the lost objects of postcolonial national representation, the way it inhabits what Richard Iton calls the “problem space” of the “modern/​­colonial matrix.” 89 It does so through the constellation of the fragments of Mexican and U.S. American nationalisms into a mosaic that foregrounds loss rather than the phantasmagoria (Scheinwelt) of progress toward a redeemed national state. It makes loss present not only through the visual seams, physical rupture, and temporal discontinuities that signal the mural’s montage aesthetic but also by emphasizing, iconographically and spatially, the very wound that colonial narration seeks to suture and thereby mystify. In this way the mural-­as-­constellation manifests an idea, not a story, by making present the lost and buried objects encrypted within the hoary epics and smooth flow of historicist national narration in both Mexico and the United States. By asserting this, I am not attributing the manifestation of idea in Orozco’s Epic to his intentions. Following Benjamin (and, I believe, Orozco as well), I see idea as already extant within the material world—​­in this case the mural itself, as a material object—​­that the critical historian engages melancholically. My reading of the mural shifts ambivalently between Orozco’s context and concerns and those of my own, as a U.S. American citizen-­ subject writing from the location of the early twenty-­first century. Following Michael Ann Holly, I understand the work of art history to be a “melancholy art.” 90 For Holly, even though works of art persist in their “thingliness” through time, they index a lost time that the historian attempts to make present through the pretense of empiricism. But this is “not where the art of art history comes from.” 91 The art of art history, she asserts, is both “haunted and animated” by the irretrievable loss of distance and time. Our writing, she concludes, becomes a compensatory mechanism to make present what is absent, to revivify the object by generating new meaning, not restoring

22  INTRODUCTION

original meaning, even as we recognize that that meaning is arbitrary and contingent upon our own desires. The relationship to the past that we seek to enliven, then, is not empirical, but ethical. Quoting Benjamin, Holly writes, “Past objects are ‘dead’ only until they are enlivened by the present’s commitment to them.” 92 It is in this sense that the art historian’s art is melancholic. She recognizes both the impossibility of objectivity and the impossibility of not seeking objective truth in the fragmentary ruins the past has bequeathed to us. In the art historical subject’s “rendezvous” with the lost objects of her desire, she is “reminded of something never cognitively apprehended but existentially known.” 93 My argument in this book, therefore, represents as much my scholarly and political desires as an embodied subject as it does my adherence to the historical methodologies of my discipline. I have attempted to enliven the past—​­1930s Mexico and the United States—​­by bringing the concerns of the present to bear upon it. Those concerns are complex and surely not entirely transparent to me. And yet I will sketch some of them here to acknowledge my situatedness in time and space and to credit a few of the experiences that have contributed to my understanding of the mural. This project began when I arrived at Dartmouth in 2004 and was immediately folded into a community of staff, alumni, students, and scholars who are deeply attached to the mural and eager to promote its significance at Dartmouth and beyond. In the years that ensued, I have taught multiple courses on the Epic, conducted countless lectures and tours, written or recorded pedagogical materials, and made extensive study of its commission, production, and reception through access to preparatory works and archival documents at the Hood Museum of Art and the Rauner Special Collections Library. And while I arrived with a relatively developed understanding of the mural as a consequence of my training as a specialist on Mexican muralism, several key experiences at Dartmouth impacted the trajectory of my argument here. The first was my participation in a Humanities Institute at the Leslie Center for the Humanities on “States of Exception” in 2009, where I was introduced to Benjamin’s writing. Up until that point, my theoretical tool kit had largely consisted of poststructural theorists. And while I had read abridged versions of Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I had encountered little else within his oeuvre. In that seminar, I conducted a tour of the mural for the other research fellows, and it was at that point that I began to consider the relationship the mural stages between myth and history. I returned to Benjamin’s writings, finding in them a compelling and contemporaneous corollary to what one scholar calls Orozco’s “via negativa.” 94 In short, Benjamin’s theorization of INTRODUCTION  23

melancholy became a way for me to theorize Orozco’s dark vision of history. Moreover, as I reread Orozco’s sundry statements and published texts, it became clear that he shared a similar mistrust of historicism and a similar ambivalence about the truth in painting. Several years later I was invited to give the inaugural lecture in what is now an annual lecture endowed by the Manton Foundation. The origins of this manuscript lie in that early text. Dartmouth College was rocked by the culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s, and to this day it remains a tradition-­bound place always teetering on the precipice of another conservative backlash. Nonetheless, the campus has become more inclusive in the decade and a half that I have taught here. My students are now more likely to be Latinx or black-­identified than they were fifteen years ago. They have pushed me to shift my relationship to the mural, from a position of theoretical distance to one of subjective entanglement. Their investments in the mural have also encouraged me to read it not only through my training as a scholar of Mexican cultural politics but also through the lens of U.S. American cultural history and the contemporary politics of race. The mural has become a part of my identity as a scholar, as a member of the Dartmouth community, and as a white U.S. American woman grappling with the legacies of racial violence that have enabled my privilege. And in that time, the nation elected its first black president and witnessed the spectacularization of violence against people of color with the advent of cell phone videos, social media, and body cams, to name only a few of the technologies that have become ubiquitous; the emergence of ­#blacklivesmatter and new forms of campus activism around racial bias, gender violence, and social justice; and the traumatic resurfacing of white racial nationalism, military aggression, and homicidal xenophobia, exacerbated by the election of Donald J. Trump. This trajectory from hope to horror has been the political backdrop throughout the writing of this book, and it has had a profound impact on my desire to articulate the mural’s radical potential and to foreground the question of racial justice. Within this context, the mural’s engagement with the political crisis of the 1930s seems all the more timely as we face so many of the same threats. Relatedly, I have been inspired by our students, who routinely look to the mural as they devise creative and powerful actions to protest bias on campus and in the nation more broadly. One particularly moving tribute was the staging of a mock funeral for the many faculty of color who have either been denied tenure or who were not aggressively retained by Dartmouth’s administration (figure i.3). The students processed across the Green to a gravesite where they laid flowers and read aloud statements from these scholars, all of whom have gone on to have impressive academic careers elsewhere,

24  INTRODUCTION

figure i.3. Dartmouth students reading statements by former faculty of color about their experiences at the college, at a mock gravesite where they symbolically buried their books and articles as part of a protest over the college’s failure to retain and promote faculty of color, May 27, 2016. Photo by Mary K. Coffey.

about their experiences at the college. In this act they converted a mock graduation ceremony into a macabre funeral in ways that echoed Orozco’s “Gods of the Modern World” panel (see figure 3.19). This, along with groups like ­CoFIRED (Coalition for Immigration Reform, Equality, and DREAMers), Dartmouth’s #blacklivesmatter group, the Native Americans at Dartmouth, and the demands students put forth in the 2014 Freedom Budget have pushed me as a scholar to articulate the ways Orozco’s mural exists for us today and, in so doing, far exceeds the artist’s concerns. In the many tours I have conducted over the years, I have come to recognize the significance of a number of things about the mural that I often dismissed in my early writing and public presentations. Many of these observations, questions, or silences have come to structure the questions I address here. For example, I am often asked why the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl is “white.” Likewise, viewers routinely identify the “Modern Industrial Man” as “black” and focus on his white gloves, hoping I can tell them what they mean. The former question is easy to explain, as will become clear in chapter 2. The latter, however, opened up contemplation of the racial ambiguities of this final figure, a figure that is anomalous in Orozco’s oeuvre. Early on I identified the reading worker as mestizo, viewing his significance through the celebratory discourses of Mexican racial and cultural mestizaje. Over the years I have become reluctant to pin down his racial identity. As will become clear in chapter 4, I explore the significance of his self-­evident racialization without definitively determining his racial INTRODUCTION  25

identity, keeping open the possibility that he, in fact, can be read as black, among other options not signaled within the mural proper. His white gloves are central to my current thinking about what Lott has identified as a “racial structure of feeling” in America. This “American feeling,” to quote Orozco, manifests itself in what Lott calls the dialectic of “love and theft” that has constituted U.S. American popular culture since the nineteenth century. Lott is referring to white appropriations of black culture in the invention of blackface minstrelsy. Nicholas Sammond argues that in the 1930s, oversized white gloves, which are a ubiquitous feature of animated characters like Mickey Mouse, are markers of “vestigial blackface.” 95 I elaborate on his insight and link it to Orozco’s mural in chapter 4. In reading Orozco’s mural through this framework, I not only honor visitors’ insights that the figure’s racial identity is somehow linked to his white gloves but also suggest ways that scholars of Mexican mestizaje might reframe our analysis of period indigenismo as a racial structure of feeling similar to that which animated the invention of blackface minstrelsy. Relatedly, students nearly always describe the children and citizens gathered in the “Anglo-­America” panel as “zombies” (figure 3.17). I initially viewed this observation as anachronistic, more a reflection of the so-­called postmodern zombie of contemporary popular culture than an index of popular uptakes of this figure in the 1930s. As will become clear in chapters 3 and 4, I have come to see this reading as symptomatic of white America’s sublimated fear of racialized people.96 In Orozco’s “Anglo-America,” the zombies are white, not the enslaved Haitians whose rebellion initiated this cultural trope. However, Orozco’s iteration of the “white zombie” trope anticipates the current tendency in the formerly colonized world to reappropriate the zombie and “put it to work in opposition to the domination of First World economic models.” 97 Moreover, Orozco limns several other figures in the Modern half of the Epic who might also be perceived as the “walking dead.” In so doing, he shifts our tendency to conceive of humanity through the Western liberal subject called Man toward a consideration of “enfleshment” and suffering as constitutive of human community instead.98 Read this way, Orozco’s zombies speak to the suppressed history of racism and exploitation in the American epic, a history that Alexander Weheliye argues “determine[s] the hierarchical ordering of the Homo sapiens species into humans, not-­quite-­ humans, and nonhumans.” 99 As a figuration of racialized populations in the Americas—​­the not-­quite-­human, the nonhuman—​­the phantom zombies that populate Orozco’s Epic speak to both the vulnerability of racialized people to violence and to the ways that violence is justified through the

26  INTRODUCTION

racializing assemblages of the modern/​­colonial matrix through which American civilization was formed. While these questions/​­comments arise on nearly every visit to the cycle, other features of the mural remain unnoticed by visitors and scholars alike. For example, viewers rarely ponder the truly anomalous fact that Orozco has included a Last Judgment scene in his mural (see figure 3.29). This panel was cited as one of the mural’s most controversial in the outcry that erupted over the commission in the 1930s. At that time it was the perception that Orozco’s Catholic sensibilities were out of place in a Protestant institution. However, even then, no one seemed to notice how unorthodox, even heretical, this iteration of divine justice is. Since then, scholars routinely mention the scene, and some have even suggested that Orozco’s vengeful Christ represents a Marxist worker because of his upraised fist.100 But they do not linger on how the scene deviates from convention beyond noting that Christ chops down his cross. In chapter 3, I devote considerable space to the unprecedented nature of this image within the mural renaissance of the 1930s. I argue that Orozco’s engagement with eschatology cannot simply be chalked up to his Catholic heritage. Rather, as the penultimate scene in the Modern half of the mural, it represents one of the most cogent features of his critique of history and, thereby, sovereignty in the Americas. While audiences are eager for information about the Quetzalcoatl sequence, they rarely know anything about this mythologem. I too did not know much about what I erroneously assumed was a Mesoamerican myth, and I originally found Orozco’s rendering of the myth hard to unpack. Attempts to find answers in the existing scholarship only steeped me further in the “scholarly despair” that Gesa Mackenthun attributes to the woefully hetero­glossic nature of the Quetzalcoatl myth.101 I am convinced that Orozco’s esoteric handling of the myth was deliberate and that it contributes to our difficulty in interpreting it to this day. This difficulty is one of the key ways that he introduces colonial melancholy into the mural’s seemingly nationalist program. Contemporary scholars have definitively cast doubt upon the Quetzalcoatl story, demonstrating the extent to which it is the product of pre-­and postconquest mythmaking rather than being an authentic Mesoamerican story or a reliable explanation for Moctezuma’s capitulation to Cortés. Thus, in chapter 2, I refract Orozco’s visualization of the myth through this contemporary scholarship despite the fact that Orozco surely would not have understood this in the 1930s. In so doing, I emphasize the ironies of empire that inhere within the Quetzalcoatl mythologem regardless of the intentions of those groups or individuals that have manipulated its meaning to claim or contest power.

INTRODUCTION  27

The Quetzalcoatl legend was probably more familiar to U.S. American audiences in the 1930s than it is today, but even then it would have been understood as a Mexican story and thus as foreign to the historical concerns of most of Orozco’s U.S. audience. Given this, it is even more imperative that we meditate on why Orozco would anchor his entire program in a mythologem that was considered ex-­centric to the historical narratives of his presumed audience and one that was so implicated within the colonial nationalist project in postrevolutionary Mexico. Rather than taking these thematic choices for granted—​­as something we might expect a Mexican artist to do—​­I linger upon the way Orozco takes them up, showing that, far from tailoring his mural to the expectations of nationalists or reifying Mexico’s colonial historiography, his uptake of both the myth of Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy and the eschatological narrative of the Spanish conquest of the Americas intervened in the national narration of Americans in both Mexico and the United States. Summary of Mural, Chapters, and Argument

Before concluding with an overview of the argument, it is necessary to summarize some of the basic information regarding the mural, its commission, and the space in which it is located. Orozco painted The Epic of American Civilization in true fresco between June of 1932 and February of 1934, while employed as a visiting professor in the Art Department (a post anonymously subsidized by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller).102 The commission was brokered by two art professors, Artemas Packard and Jerry Lathrop, for the walls of the reserve reading room in Baker Library, a Georgian revival building that had been completed in 1929. President Ernest Hopkins, as Orozco’s patron, wrangled financing for the mural, but he exerted little oversight other than to approve its ostensible subject—​­the “American myth” of Quetzalcoatl. As part of their lobbying effort, the art professors invited Orozco as a guest lecturer, during which he demonstrated the technique of fresco, which was experiencing a period of revival due to the widely publicized Mexican mural renaissance and to growing interest within the United States in establishing a similar federally funded public art initiative. He thus painted a somewhat uninspired test panel titled Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life (1932) in the corridor that leads from the reserve reading room to Carpenter Hall, which housed the Art Department at that time (figure i.4). Today this “secret mural” is located in a passageway mostly frequented by employees of the library, as the corridor was walled off and modified through a sequence of additions in 1941, 1957–­58, and then again when

28  INTRODUCTION

figure i.4. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life, 1932, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.932.12.

the library underwent the Berry expansion in 1967. Even though it is separate from the cycle, this panel encapsulates one of its central themes, insofar as it represents a heroic male figure rising up from a pile of industrial machine parts, tools, and weapons. The figure stands in profile, facing what was once a row of windows (but is now a wall) with his hands raised in the same gesture as those of the Assyrian king and his attendants depicted on relief panels from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud (883–­59 bce), in Dartmouth’s possession since 1856. This detail reveals Orozco’s interest in situating his art within a broad “tradition.” The seeming “whiteness” of the figure reveals that at this point Orozco was beholden to the universalizing discourses of Man wherein the white male embodies the human subject. This contrasts markedly with the racialized worker the artist depicts across from the reserve desk, a transition in the artist’s racial politics that I discuss in great detail in chapter 4. While there are thematic overlaps between Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life and the Modern half of the Epic, the test panel’s

INTRODUCTION  29

static composition reveals the limits of dynamic symmetry, Jay Hambidge’s compositional system that Orozco was experimenting with in the early 1930s. Finally, the palette in the upper quadrants is inconsistent, and we see passages where the day work has been chipped out and repainted. These “mistakes” were likely the by-­products of the image’s function as a teaching tool. However, as I will argue in chapters 1 and 4, Orozco’s tendency to reveal rather than to conceal his labor was part of both his montage aesthetic and his modernist ethos. Once the commission was secured, Orozco began to work on the Epic. His original contract specified payment of $5,200; however, by the end of the project he had received $10,000. While this amount was modest by comparison with what Rivera was garnering from his corporate patrons, it was the most money Orozco had received for a mural to date, making his experience at Dartmouth one of his best. The mural was engulfed in local controversy before it was complete, however. President Hopkins defended it even as Rivera’s contemporary mural in the rca tower at Rockefeller Plaza was being chipped off the wall. In the conclusion, I chronicle the controversy that erupted at Dartmouth. Orozco began the mural in 1932 with the panel entitled “The Prophecy” (see figure 2.8). He then left for a three-­month trip to Europe, his first time off the American continent. While there, he traveled to London and Paris and then through southern Italy and Spain. He saw the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance as well as the powerful paintings of El Greco. Likewise, he saw an exhibition of Picasso’s work and was surely exposed to other artists at work in the European avant-­gardes.103 Orozco had been academically trained, and even prior to his trip to Europe he was well informed about both the masterworks of European art and the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes. However, his firsthand exposure to the monumental works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto seems to have liberated him from his brief adherence to Hambidge’s theories. After his return, his style opened up again. His brushwork became freer; his sense of scale expanded to really hold the wall. And his expressionist use of color, dramatic highlighting, and formal distortion came to the fore. The latter was exacerbated midway through his work on the Epic with the introduction of synthetic pigments, whereupon he began experimenting with a more acrid and unnaturalistic palette. Orozco worked with minimal assistance despite having the use of only his right hand. He made numerous sketches, color studies, and to-­scale compositions.104 He did not make extensive use of cartoons or the ancient technique of pouncing his designs into the wet plaster before beginning. Rather, he selected details from carefully worked compositional drawings,

30  INTRODUCTION

typically of feet, hands, and faces, and drew them to scale onto tracing paper. He would then place the paper on top of the wet plaster and use the end of a brush to incise the compositional lines into the wall. From these details he would fill in the rest of the image freehand and go from there. The resultant imagery has an improvisational feel despite the careful, and in some cases copious, preparatory works associated with each scene. Similarly, Orozco devised an unconventional use of the fresco medium. He mixed putty into his pigments, which gave them an opacity and plasticity that is atypical for the medium. This allowed Orozco to work from dark tones to light, rather than starting with fields of lighter color and then layering on the detail in darker tones. The benefits of his reverse technique are most apparent in the dramatic highlights that suggest rather than delineate anatomical forms, such as Quetzalcoatl’s pointing finger in the “Departure of Quetzalcoatl” scene, lending the mural an energy that is lacking in the more controlled work of Rivera (see figure 2.3).105 From its inception Orozco’s mural has been popular with students, alumni, and interested persons from the region and farther away. Artists like Jackson Pollock made special trips to view the mural when it was new. And to this day, artists, community groups, college classes, and school groups from the region visit the mural regularly.106 Alumni routinely schedule tours for their class reunions. And on any given day, one can find a surprisingly large number of visitors in the corridor looking on their own or following along to one of several recorded tours they can check out for free at the reserve desk. Additionally, there are online resources for the mural that make it available digitally to users far beyond Dartmouth.107 And finally, professors at the college routinely integrate the mural into their course curriculum.108 In this book, I emphasize the work I have done with my students on this mural, but many of the insights included herein derive from tours I have conducted with groups or individuals from outside the college, ranging from visiting ambassadors, curators, and scholars to students from Freedom University to social activists from Bikes Not Bombs to documentary filmmakers and reporters from local public radio stations. Then, as now, the mural enjoys a robust audience, drawing interest from a wide swath of the public with diverse levels of education, financial resources, and identity formations. The Epic of American Civilization presents a sequence of images that I describe here with minimal interpretation. While I identify each image with its conventional title, it is important to note that Orozco did not provide these titles. He authorized Artemas Packard to name each mural in a correspondence that took place between March and April of 1934.109 Therefore, while they are generally descriptive, they are not prescriptive, having been

INTRODUCTION  31

figure i.5. View of the west wall of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Migration” (Panel 1), “Snakes and Spears” (Panel 2), and “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (Panel 3), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.1, P.934.13.2, P.934.13.3.

32  INTRODUCTION

added retrospectively. Throughout, I use the title that registrars at the Hood Museum of Art request for publications, online resources, and publicity materials. Given that I am following what has become standard convention on campus, I have not changed the spelling of proper names like “Cortez” in the titles, even as I use the Spanish spelling “Cortés” in my text. Relatedly, I have opted to use quotation marks for the titles of individual panels, reserving italics for the title of the mural as a whole. I do this to remind the reader that these titles are conventional, not definitive. The west wall sequence includes “Migration,” where nude male bodies trudge grimly forward, directing the viewer toward the next scene, “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (figure i.5). Here Aztec priests restrain a masked sacrificial victim while cutting open his chest to pull out his beating heart. “Snakes and Spears,” a “decorative panel” executed in the bright palette associated with the scenes in the Modern wing, is located above the door that separates these two episodes. The cycle continues onto the north wall, a long, flat expanse that details the myth of Quetzalcoatl (figure i.6). A small panel over a doorway, “Aztec Warriors,” inaugurates the north wall sequence. These figures wear symbolic dress and face east, across the expanse of the wall. The following three scenes detail Quetzalcoatl’s Golden Age. In “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl,” the bearded white god rises up at the crossing of the pyramids of the sun and the moon at Teotihuacán. Behind

figure i.6. View of the Ancient Wing of the north wall of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Aztec Warriors” (Panel 4), “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 5), “The Pre-­ Columbian Golden Age” (Panel 6), “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 7), “The Prophecy” (Panel 8), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.4, P934.13.5, P.934.13.6, P.934.13.7, P.934.13.8.

figure i.7. View of the Modern wing of the north wall of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Cortez and the Cross” (Panel 11), “The Machine” (Panel 12), “Anglo-­America” (Panel 13), “Hispano-­America” (Panel 14), “Gods of the Modern World” (Panel 15), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.13, P.934.13.14, P.934.13.15, P.934.13.16, P.934.13.17.

him an array of pagan gods is displaced, while below him ancient Americans awake from slumber and begin peaceful communication. “The Pre-­ Columbian Golden Age” presents three indigenous figures harvesting corn, carving a stele, and striving toward the heavens. These scenes of peaceful civilization are followed by “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl,” where a mass of primitivized men violently gesture and pull away from a wild-­eyed and wizened Quetzalcoatl. He reaches out a long arm and points dramatically toward the final image along the north wall in the western half of the corridor. “The Prophecy” depicts conquistadors on horseback in reference to the reported belief among the Aztecs that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl returned. The mural breaks with “The Prophecy” and continues on the other side of the reserve desk with “Cortez and the Cross,” a second representation of the Spanish conquest (figure i.7). In this scene, Cortés stands impassively amid the destruction of Mesoamerican civilization and a heap of dead bodies. He is accompanied by a friar who stakes an enormous cross into the rubble, announcing the spiritual conquest of the Americas. The scenario then jumps in time to the twentieth century with “The Machine,” a highly compressed 34  INTRODUCTION

landscape of industrial machinery that feeds off of the destroyed bodies at Cortés’s feet. “Anglo-­America” and “Hispano-­America” follow. In “Anglo-America” a desultory schoolteacher looms possessively over a sea of zombie-­like children. To her right businessmen in gray flannel suits and frowning blond women gather before a red barn and white Protestant schoolhouse for a New England town hall meeting. In “Hispano-­America” a doomed guerrilla stands stoically amid the tumbling mass of Mexican, U.S., and French generals who vie with greedy businessmen to possess the golden coins of Mexico’s mineral wealth. In the final scene of this sequence, “Gods of the Modern World,” a group of skeletal academics preside over a macabre graduation as fetal skeletons donning mortarboards are delivered from a decayed maternal carcass. The final four images are in a vestibule marked off by support columns at the east end of the corridor (figures i.8–­i.10). Their location mimics that of the altar in liturgical architecture. It is thus fitting that it is here that Orozco invokes the Last Judgment, situating it within a suite of images that speak

figures i.8, i.9, and i.10 (opposite and above). View of the east wall vestibule of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Symbols of Nationalism” (Panel 16), “Modern Human Sacrifice” (Panel 17), “Modern Migration of the Spirit” (Panel 18), “Chains of the Spirit” (Panel 19), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.19, P.934.13.18; P.934.13.21, P.934.13.20.

INTRODUCTION  35

figure i.11. View of the supplement on the south wall of the Orozco Room, Baker-­Berry Library, Dartmouth College. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (left, central, and right panel, 3 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.22, P.934.13.23, P.934.13.24.

36  INTRODUCTION

not to God’s glory but rather to the dissolution of redemptive certainty within the secular struggle for power that characterizes the rise of nationalism. “Symbols of Nationalism” is situated above the door on the north wall of the vestibule; it depicts a heap of brightly colored military regalia and eagles. “Modern Human Sacrifice,” and “Modern Migration of the Spirit” flank a doorway on the east end of the vestibule, directly across from their ancient counterparts at the west end of the corridor. In “Modern Human Sacrifice,” Orozco’s penchant for social satire reaches its peak, as he makes use of the calavera to satirize the official glorification of the deaths of “unknown soldiers.” In “Modern Migration of the Spirit,” a crucified Christ stands astride a fallen cross, with one arm raised in a fist and the other wielding an ax. And finally, a small panel entitled “Chains of the Spirit” is situated above a doorway on the south wall of the vestibule. Here we see vultures in clerical collars perched atop a pile of chains with paddle locks and revolvers. The southern expanse of the corridor consists largely of windows; however, at the midpoint there is a large niche across from the reserve desk where we find five images collectively entitled “Modern Industrial Man” (figure i.11). This sequence is centered around a long horizontal panel in which Orozco depicts a racialized worker reading a book in front of a building under construction. To his right a cluster of workers huddle with their backs to the viewer, and to his left a group of workers labor to construct a modern steel-­frame building. Additionally, there are four more “decorative panels” located on either side of the support walls at the center of the corridor. “Totem Poles” faces west toward the ancient half of the cycle and depict Native Northwest coast totem poles in homage to indigenous civilizations

within the territorial United States (figure i.12). “Machine Images” faces east toward the Modern half of the cycle and lampoons the modern idolatry of weapons and machinery (figure i.13). I have chosen to organize the chapters of this book in accordance with the main divisions of Orozco’s mural, with chapter 2 focused on the Ancient half, chapter 3 on the Modern half, and chapter 4 on the supplement. While this is a logical way to read the mural sequence, as I argue in chapter 1, the Epic is better apprehended not as a narrative that moves from the past to the future but rather as a constellation wherein a “then” and a “now” are montaged together. With this insight in mind, I argue that the place from which one might “begin” the Epic is not with what we suppose to be the first scene—​­“Migration”—​­but rather by standing within the space of crisis, where the “Modern Industrial Man” reclines with his book. In order to understand why this is so, chapter 1 is devoted to elucidating the politics of Orozco’s formal and conceptual approach to mural art, which I read through what Max Pensky calls Walter Benjamin’s melancholy

figure i.12. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Totem Poles” (2 panels, Panel 9), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.9, P.934.13.10.

INTRODUCTION  37

figure i.13. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Machine Images” (2 panels, Panel 10), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.11, P.934.13.12.

38  INTRODUCTION

dialectics. To do this, I situate Orozco’s Epic with respect to the period debates over the mural form. In particular, I relate the highly publicized polemic between Rivera and David Alfaro Si­quei­ros in order to explore the various modalities of visual dialectics in the 1930s and the political stakes of these aesthetic choices. Unlike Rivera, Orozco avoided publicity, and unlike Si­quei­ros, he declined to polemicize. We have, therefore, very few textual guides from which to deduce Orozco’s opinions on these matters. And what we do have is often written in a sardonic voice that requires careful exegesis. Nonetheless, I have found much to work with in four key texts: Orozco’s 1929 manifesto, “New Worlds, New Races, New Art;” his statement about the significance of his Dartmouth frescoes from 1933 (reproduced at the outset); his “explanation” written with regard to his portable fresco, Dive Bomber and Tank, from 1940; and his autobiography.110 The latter refers to a series of articles that Orozco dictated to his wife for serialized publication in the Mexico City periodical Excelsior between February 17 and April 8 of 1942. It was

subsequently compiled and published as an autobiography in 1945. Despite its title, it bears only a passing resemblance to this genre. Its tone is casual, its prose crisp, swift, and often caustic. As a retrospective look back, it reflects the deep skepticism Orozco felt toward all orthodoxies in his later life. Taken together, these documents suggest a consistent, if darkening, position on public art, politics, and form. Chapter 2 shifts from questions of form to those of history, myth, and messianic nationalism. Taking Orozco’s claim that the myth of Quetzalcoatl points “clearly by its prophetic nature to the responsibility shared equally by the two Americas of creating here an authentic New World civilization,” I ask, what does this quintessentially Mexican origin story have to offer its U.S. American audience? In order to unpack Orozco’s version of the myth, I survey the basic features—​­visual, mythical, and historiographic—​­of the myth as it has evolved over time. I explore both its dialogic formation within the context of the Spanish defeat of the Aztecs as well as its reinvigoration by intellectuals, politicians, and artists in postrevolutionary Mexico as part of the official indigenismo of mestizo statecraft. In particular, I compare Orozco’s iteration of the myth with Rivera’s messianic version on the north wall of his History of Mexico cycle at the National Palace. Through this comparison, key differences emerge that help us to appreciate how Orozco’s iteration of the myth not only allegorizes it within the context of colonial violence but also brings the irony of empire that inheres within the mythologem to the fore. Orozco’s handling of the Quetzalcoatl mythologem, therefore, introduces a critical colonial melancholy into the Epic that sets the stage for his radical revision of American modernity, sovereignty, and identity, which are the topics of chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 3, I shift to the Modern half of the mural, focusing on Orozco’s rendering of the Spanish conquest as its inaugural scene. Orozco’s montage aesthetic intensifies in the Modern half of the mural, marked, most obviously, by the radical leap in time from the scene of Cortés’s conquest to a sequence of images that speak directly to American life in the 1930s. Thus, in this chapter, I take up Orozco’s call for the viewer to become a radical monteur and break my analysis into three discreet but related sections in which I shuffle and rearrange the scenes to bring out “unexpected” possibilities.111 Each section circles back to the scene of the historical conquest and its meaning within both Mexican and U.S. American conceptions of history, progress, and sovereignty. In this way, the entire chapter explores the many facets of the modern/​­colonial matrix, a “problem space” in which various forms of relationality are denied—​­the relation between the Spanish conquest and the U.S. antiempire, the relation between the victims of conquest

INTRODUCTION  39

and the contemporary viewer, the relation between “Anglo” and “Hispano” America, and the relation between what Weheliye identifies as the “liberal humanist figure of Man” and those “subjects excluded from this domain.” 112 In part I of chapter 3, I situate the Spanish conquest within Mexican historiography in order to explicate the theological temporality of Western conceptions of history that subtend national narration. Again, through an instructive comparison with Rivera’s representation of the conquest in his National Palace mural, I draw a distinction between what Roberto Esposito calls “philosophy as history” and “history as philosophical event.” 113 In this sense, Rivera’s historicism subordinates historical events to a philosophy of history, whereas Orozco’s melancholy dialectics situate the conquest as an event within a philosophical contest of meaning in post­revolutionary Mexico. In part II, I turn from the Mexican context to the U.S. American one, by placing Orozco’s characterization of industry and the two Americas within period pan-­Americanism. Again, comparison with Rivera’s murals, in this case his U.S. commissions in San Francisco and Detroit, proves useful, as both artists engaged this theme through gendered metaphors that mark the biopolitical concerns of the period with what Esposito dubs the immunitary ethos of racialized communitas. Whereas Rivera’s murals offer ambivalent messages about hemispheric cooperation, particularly with respect to the technocratic management of life, Orozco’s mural is unambiguously critical of the discourses of pan-­American communion. He draws attention to the violent bordering that the U.S. antiempire enacts between so-­called Anglo-­and Hispano-­America, and thereby the thanatopolitics of white, Anglo-­ Saxon, Protestant nationalism. In this context, Orozco’s reference to the conquest recalls the Black Legend as a bordering device for establishing the United States as exceptional within the Americas, and in turn for constituting “Hispanic” Americans as outside of its political imaginary. Part III returns to the discussion of theology introduced in part I but shifts from a consideration of its role in the philosophy of history to a consideration of the Christian genealogy of modern political theory, or what Carl Schmitt calls the “political theology” of modern sovereignty.114 Here the melancholic allegoresis from chapter 1 returns, as I explore Orozco’s representation of Christ in the penultimate image of the Modern wing. While his decision to culminate the mural with an image of the Christian Messiah would seem to ratify the Christian eschatology of the Spanish conquest, I argue that Orozco’s Christ is not a redeemer. Rather, he is the critical material historian who destroys the phantasmagoria of modern sovereignty and

40  INTRODUCTION

calls on the viewer to enact her weak messianic power to respond to the claim the oppressed past makes upon us. In this sense, I read the Modern half of the Epic as a Trauerspiel, or mourning play, wherein “history—​­as a narrative of the human march towards redemption on the Day of Judgment—​ ­loses the eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomes secularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle over political power.” 115 Following James Martel, I characterize Orozco’s political theology as a “dissipated sovereignty” that counters the political idolatry of Rivera’s messianic Marxism, raising the question of what a non­idolatrous sovereignty in the Americas might look like. Chapter 4 focuses on the supplement, “Modern Industrial Man,” and shifts to the melancholy of race in the Americas. Arguing against an iconic interpretation of the worker who reads as either indigenous or mestizo, I engage in a series of readings that explore his non-­iconic qualities with respect to the most ubiquitous tropes of Mexican national identity. However, my reading does not stop at the level of signification; it also delves into the symptomatic and reads this figure as an encryption of all that lies with/​­out U.S. and Mexican national representation, Orozco’s mural included. In this vein, I push further into the speculative, taking seriously the U.S. American visitor’s tendency to interpret the figure as black and asking how this identification speaks not only to the figure of the slave encrypted within U.S. American discourses of freedom but, more significantly, how it speaks to the role that anti­blackness, a legacy Lorgia García-Peña situates as a “fear of Haiti” within the Americas, plays in the violent bordering of “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America” and their respective racial imaginaries.116 Concluding with a return to the performative demand the mural makes upon its viewer(s), I explore both the uncomfortable forms of problematized identification and the radical politics of disidentification and relationality that this figure commands as a specter of social justice that cannot remediate the violence of the past but that is nonetheless already here. In the conclusion, I explore two of the many uptakes of the mural that have transpired in the eighty-­plus years since Orozco painted it. The first, the “Hovey Mural,” began before Orozco had completed the Epic, and the second, Orozco ­MEXotica, was a two-­hour performance that took place over two nights in May of 2002. Through this comparison, I demonstrate that the call for justice encrypted within Orozco’s Epic has and has not been heeded. These two examples lend credence to Orozco’s claim in his “Statement” that the idea in a work of art is energy, creating matter, and that it is released by the critical labors of the viewer, with the painting acting as stimulus.

INTRODUCTION  41

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chapter 1 OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS

Ideas are to objects as

History breaks down into

constellations are to stars.

images not into stories.

—​­Walter Benjamin, The Origins of

—​­Walter Benjamin, “On the

German Tragic Drama, 34

Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” 466

To the first-­time viewer, The Epic of American Civilization appears disjointed. The palette is uneven, with colors intensifying as one moves from the Ancient into the Modern sequence. The pictorial space vacillates between scenes of extreme spatial compression and those that seem predicated on a one-­point perspectival system. There are stylistic shifts, most visibly between the loose bravura brushwork displayed in “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl” and the careful shading and timid, lamadito, marks that constitute “The Prophecy” (see figures 2.3 and 2.8).1 Transitions can appear clumsy. Consider, for example, the inconsistent use of depicted architecture to divide the flat expanse of the north wall (see figures i.6–­i.7). This technique is deployed effectively along the western half, but as we cross into the eastern half of the corridor, scenes are jarringly juxtaposed without any consistent visual hinge between them. Orozco makes no effort, for instance, to establish a logical transition between “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America.” The dramatically different compositions are simply juxtaposed as though an invisible border separated them and dictated their dissociation. Finally, Orozco has made little effort to mask the tonal shifts in color or the seams from one day’s work to another. In addition to these formal incongruities, Orozco develops asymmetrical analogies across space and time in which the relationship between episodes

can be difficult to decipher or reconcile. In what sense are we to understand the ancient migration of peoples (“Migration”) as analogous to a Christian apocalypse in which Christ seems to reject his role as redeemer (“Modern Migration of the Spirit”) (see figures 2.9 and 3.29)? Similarly, Orozco suggests multiple possibilities for comparison through the iconographic program that spans the western and eastern wings of the long north wall. For instance, “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” can be likened to “Cortez and the Cross”: both images depict the arrival of a “white god,” and both scenes inaugurate the episodes that unfold along their respective halves of the corridor (see figures 2.1 and 3.1). Yet “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” can also be understood as a parallel to “Gods of the Modern World” (see figure 3.19). In this sense, the two scenes might be viewed as visual “bookends” for the north wall sequence as a whole. Read this way, the pagan gods displaced during Quetzalcoatl’s enlightened reign are analogous to the robed academics presiding over a scene of stillborn knowledge. Despite these provocative parallels and analogies, these images do not assert similitude across time and space. Rather, the appearance or lure of repetition in the Epic foregrounds difference.2 Notwithstanding its ostensible beginning and end, or the directional logic of the corridor, the mural cycle belies a linear reading or route. The more one contemplates the sequencing of the images, the more the mural object appears to fragment into discreet scenes whose relation to one another is at once elusive and yet not arbitrary. The mural is better viewed as a constellation in which discreet scenes are connected via their proximate nature through an unexpressed and yet conceptually graspable idea. The idea brings the images into a relation with one another even as it is never synonymous with any particular scene. Might we attribute these formal incongruities, conceptual asymmetries, or repetitions with a difference, to Orozco’s slow maturation as a mural artist, and his struggles to develop a style and compositional approach commensurate with the demands of monumental wall painting? It is the case that some of the stylistic shifts in this mural can be attributed to the artist’s difficult transition from a private painting practice to a public one. Likewise, we can trace his growing confidence with the fresco medium. However, the conceptual complexity of the mural is deliberate and consistent with the structure of both his uneven earlier cycles, such as his murals at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City (1923–­26) and his late masterworks, in particular his monumental mural cycle on the Spanish conquest of Mexico at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico (1938–­39) and his portable fresco, Dive Bomber and Tank (1940), executed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City in conjunction with their Twenty 44  CHAPTER 1

Centuries of Mexican Art exhibition. In each of these works Orozco fragments his fresco into a series of images that retain a discreet identity even as they form a loose constellation. And yet despite Orozco’s fragmentation, the idea of his murals comes through. It is as if each part intimates the whole. Orozco’s fragmentary approach to content distinguishes him from his peers within the Mexican mural movement. And while he never articulated an explicit theory or political argument in support of his mural practice, we can better understand his formal choices and their implicit politics by situating him with respect to the debate over the mural form in the 1930s. This debate was dominated by the polemic that erupted between Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Si­quei­ros in 1934–­35 as a consequence of the latter’s attack on the former in the pages of the leftist journal, New Masses.3 Rivera and Si­quei­ros were the most vocal and publicity-­seeking of the artists associated with the mural movement in Mexico; however, their debate articulated a central, if often implicit, problem of muralism as a public art form: How does one organize images on the walls of large, often architecturally complex spaces in such a way that they not only communicate with a highly stratified public (in terms of race, class, education, and ideology) but also move that public toward political action? This question touched upon style, but it also entailed the artist’s relationship with his patron, his conception of the viewing public, and his orientation toward architecture. And while Orozco was always dubious about controlling the political effects of public art, he grappled with this question as well, albeit in paint rather than through the leftist periodicals of the day. The Rivera–­Si­quei­ros Debate over the Mural Form

In the May 1934 issue of New Masses, Si­quei­ros eviscerated Rivera, accusing the artist of being a “saboteur of collective work,” a “mental tourist,” an “agent of the government,” the “official painter of the new bourgeoisie,” and an “aesthete of Imperialism.” 4 Motivated by the bitter internecine struggles of the international communist left and Rivera’s allegiance to Leon Trotsky, Si­quei­ros’s attack nonetheless raised relevant questions about the stylistic, technical, and ideological ends of mural art. He took Rivera to task for using fresco, an antiquated medium that he felt was not adequate to the demands of propaganda because of its reliance on an immovable architectural support. He characterized Rivera’s subject matter as “chronological itinerar[ies]” calculated to appeal to the exotic stereotypes held by foreign tourists and his capitalist patrons, or the nationalist agenda of the Mexican state.5 He argued that Rivera’s mode of figuration, a “conglomeration of figures, banners, etc.,”

OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS  45

induced “the static contemplation of the parasite or of the elite” rather than the active participation of the “revolutionary . . . mass-­spectator.” 6 In short, he indicted what he called Rivera’s “demagoguery” for his execution of works with such convoluted programs and “meticulous detail” that only the most sophisticated viewer could “read” the mural, while less literate audiences would require some authority to interpret it for them.7 Si­quei­ros’s critique formed the basis for his own reaction to what he dubbed the “first phase of muralism.” 8 Over the course of the 1930s he developed what he referred to as a “cinematographic” mural art directly inspired by and in competition with the mass medium of film.9 He experimented with new techniques and industrial materials, such as spray-­guns, photo-­ projection, synthetic paints, and blowtorches, and cultivated an ideological commitment to collective production in emulation of both industrial practice and communist principles.10 Inspired by the film theories of Sergei Eisen­stein, Si­quei­ros sought to activate the wall by calibrating the visual experience of the mural to a moving spectator. He conceived of this as a dialectical process whereby a mural’s ideological message would be apprehended emotionally by a physically active viewer, thereby triggering in that viewer a sense of his or her own revolutionary agency. Through this affective approach to mural art he sought to move the viewer both physically and emotionally rather than to appeal to him or her intellectually. To illustrate the difference between Rivera’s and Si­quei­ros’s mural art during this period, we might briefly consider Rivera’s History of Mexico (1929–­34), executed in the National Palace, a Viceregal building in the heart of the historic center of Mexico City that had served as the seat of the federal government since the colonial period, with Si­quei­ros’s Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939), painted at the Electricians’ Syndicate headquarters in a working-­class neighborhood in Mexico City.

Rivera’s Material Dialectics: History as Discourse Rivera’s mural is divided into three scenes that correspond with the north, west, and south walls of a monumental stairwell near the central entrance to the National Palace. The north wall, entitled “The Ancient Indian World,” depicts the nation’s pre-­Cortesian past (figure 1.1). The western wall, “From the Conquest to 1930,” provides a spatially and chronologically complex panorama of Mexican history from the conquest to the revolution (figure 1.2). And the south wall is dedicated to a Marxist vision of “Mexico of Today and Tomorrow” (figure 1.3). Rivera situates Aztec civilization and its veneration of Quetzalcoatl as modern Mexico’s mythical prehistory on the north wall. However, as the viewer moves toward the large western wall depicting 46  CHAPTER 1

figure 1.1. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “The Ancient Indian World,” 1929, Fresco, north wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

Mexican history from the conquest to 1930, scenes of social unrest appear as an indigenous agitator attempts to organize tribute-­paying subjects against the abuses of the Aztec Empire. On the western wall the imagery is organized into three horizontal registers with scenes of Spanish conquest depicted along the bottom, episodes from the colonial period in the middle, and groupings of peasants and leaders associated with Mexico’s postindependence history aligned across the top. The imagery is likewise organized into five vertical bands framed by the arches of the architectural space. These bands house clusters of historical figures associated with key military struggles in the nation’s history. The French intervention and U.S. invasion are represented in the outer arches, with the revolutionary and reform wars framing a central arch dedicated to Mexican independence. Ida Rodríguez Prampolini argues that Rivera’s National Palace cycle is his most accomplished attempt to visualize Marx’s material dialectics of history. Not only does Rivera’s mural literalize—​­iconographically and through an inscription painted on the south wall—​­Marx’s dictum that “the entire history of human society to the present is the history of class struggle,” she asserts, OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS  47

figure 1.2. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34, Fresco, west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

48  CHAPTER 1

but it is also structured conceptually around sequences of theses, antitheses, and syntheses that illustrate the dialectical development of history through that struggle. For example, she points to the lower registers of the mural in which we see the thesis of Mesoamerican civilization coming into conflict with its antithesis in the Spanish conquest. The synthesis of these opposing forces is represented in the mestizo society forged through the rape of an indigenous woman by a conquistador. The colonial viceroyalty becomes, in turn, the thesis confronted by its antithesis in the republican model of government represented by the figures who led the struggle for independence. “The insurgent liberation movement,” she writes, “is contrasted with the survival of colonialism in the monarchy of Agustín de Iturbide, the concept of empire with that of the Mexican Republic, the first Mexican Republic with the Federal Republic.” 11 Prampolini notes that in order to represent contradiction, Rivera sacrificed “actual historical chronology” throughout the mural. Historical figures (cf. Porfirio Díaz, Emiliano Zapata) appear more than once, sometimes outside of their “actual time” in order to

present them as the antithesis for a subsequent episode.12 As a consequence of this “visual complexity,” she argues, Rivera’s mural is “nearly illegible.” 13 She attributes this to Rivera’s incomplete transition from the bourgeois individualism of his early career as an avant-­garde artist to his Marxist turn to realism in the 1930s. Leonard Folgarait, however, demonstrates that despite the mural’s semi­ otic complexity, there is a discernible logic to its structure as whole. He points out that there is a shift from illusionistic scenes of hand-­to-­hand combat along the lower register of the western wall to a more static and spatially compressed depiction of history as “discourse” toward the top.14 As the viewer moves up the stairs to arrive at a balcony situated at a remove from

figure 1.3. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” 1934, Fresco, south wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS  49

figure 1.4 (opposite). Diego Rivera, detail of central arch on west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

50  CHAPTER 1

the fresco, she is at first immersed in near life-­size battle scenes, but eventually steps back to enjoy a distanced view, her body now oriented toward the fresco in a manner similar to the many peasants depicted from behind in the act of witnessing or reading the numerous texts that accompany the figures in each arch. The historical and chronological complexity of the western wall is anchored by an Aztec sculpture of an eagle with a war banner in its beak located at the center of the wall (figure 1.4). This reference to an actual Aztec relief carving recalls the prophecy of an eagle with a serpent in its beak alighting upon a cactus that instructed the Mexica on where to found the imperial capital of Tenochtitlán. It also corresponds with the toponym on the modern Mexican flag, a motif that nineteenth-­century liberals appropriated from the Mexica to ground their new nation within indigenous antiquity. This symbol of empire and nation anchors the central vertical band connecting a scene of the Aztec warrior Cuauhtémoc’s heroic struggle against Cortés with the radical priest Miguel Hidalgo’s uprising during the independence struggle and Emiliano Zapata’s revolutionary faction agitating for land reform. Rivera thereby draws a straight line from the indigenous past to the modern state that asserts that Aztec resistance animates the nation’s long struggle for independence and social justice against a host of colonizing and exploitative forces. The southern wall completes the cycle with a scene depicting “Mexico Today and Tomorrow” (see figure 1.3). As with its mirror image across the stairs, we see scenes of industry and exploitation, with a communist agitator attempting to organize the working class. In the place of Quetzalcoatl, Rivera depicts Marx holding the Communist Manifesto and pointing dramatically toward the east, where a utopian industrial city rises as an emblem of a future freed from class antagonism through technological advance. We will return in the next chapter to Rivera’s Marxist interpretation of the Quetzalcoatl myth. For now I emphasize the visual structure of Rivera’s mural program in order to distinguish his narrative or “discursive” approach to Marx’s material dialectics from Si­quei­ros’s “dialectical-­subversive” approach to mural form and from what I will argue is Orozco’s construction of a “dialectical image” in his Dartmouth fresco. As Si­quei­ros noted, Rivera’s mural consists largely of historical portraits interspersed with banners and texts that trace a roughly chronological itinerary through Mexico’s violent past. Moreover, the mural’s location within the ultimate symbol of federal authority along with the fact that it was commissioned by the Mexican state during Plutarco Elías Calles’s endeavors to “institutionalize the Revolution” through the creation of an official ruling

party (1929) all lend credence to Si­quei­ros’s indictment of Rivera’s political opportunism and repudiation of both the revolutionary and proletarian causes. Folgarait concurs, noting that Rivera’s mural stages a struggle between two kinds of communication, through “images” on the one hand and “writing” on the other. The shift in a viewer’s experience from active immersion within historical action to the static contemplation of the past, he argues, is effected through the formal shift from the illusionism of scenes along the lower wall to the “relentless evenness of attention” and flatness of the overlapping figures along the upper register.15 This appeal to two different literacies “ultimately favors the discursive over the figurative.” 16 This is evident not only in the literal flattening out of history toward the top or the implied progress of moving upward from chaos into a more secure global perspective but also in the “pre-­narratised” quality of the mural’s historical panorama.17 We are able to read Rivera’s agglomeration of figures as a coherent linear history lesson because we already know the official story of national becoming that it presents. Folgarait points out that Mexico’s unruly past culminates in a juridically imposed order signified by the numerous legal decrees, constitutional articles, and pronouncements proffered by the historical leaders in the three central arches to the anonymous peasants who gather about to read them.18 He argues that Rivera’s formal reconciliation of the figurative and the discursive resonated with and served the Calles administration’s rhetorical reconciliation of revolutionary action with legalistic subjection to a nationalist state through the creation of the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, pnr), known today as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, pri). The creation of a ruling party was initiated by Calles to suppress the factionalized personalism of Mexican politics after the revolution in favor of an institution that would ensure the smooth succession of power. Likewise, he sought to combat the ongoing threat of class politics by subsuming working-­class organizations into its membership, thereby converting railway workers or teachers into an undifferentiated popular citizenry. Rivera gives visual sense to this new arrangement between an abstract institutionalism and an equally abstracted notion of the public in those passages of the mural where we see groups of faceless peasants observing the historical figures much the same way as we face the mural from the second-­story balcony. If they, in turn, are our proxies within the work, then their subjection to the law interpolates us, the viewers, into a similar relationship with the state. Folgarait concludes that the mural stages a ritual that endeavors to transform the participant/​ ­viewer into a citizen/​­observer as she moves from the first to the second floor.

52  CHAPTER 1

Si­quei­ros’s Cinematographic Mural Art: The Visual Politics of Affect In contrast to Rivera’s National Palace mural, Si­quei­ros’s Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, painted five years later, reflects his cinematographic paradigm with its implicit attack on discursive “demagoguery” and its formal embodiment, rather than pictorial illustration, of the material dialectics of history (figure 1.5). Working with a team of artists—​­Antonio Pujol, Luis Arenal, Josep Renau, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Miguel Prieto, Roberto Berdecio, and Fanny Rabel—​­Si­quei­ros covered the walls within a small stairwell at the headquarters of a labor union with imagery drawn from contemporary mass culture regarding the socialist struggle against both fascism and capitalism. Unlike Rivera’s national theme, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie is emphatically international in keeping with the views of the communist left. And

figure 1.5. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the Inter­ national Team of Plastic Artists (Antonio Pujol, Luis Arenal, Josep Renau, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Miguel Prieto, Roberto Berdecio, and Fanny Rabel), Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), view of left, central, and right walls, pyroxyline/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians Syndicate (1939–­40). Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS  53

figure 1.6. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the International Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail of fascist parrot, left wall, pyroxyline/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians Syndicate (1939–­40). Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

54  CHAPTER 1

rather than subsume the electrical workers into a generic popular citizenry through a “pre-­narratised” state ritual, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie attempts to activate the political will of a specific proletarian organization—​­the Electricians’ Syndicate—​­through an emotionally dynamic montage.19 The viewer first encounters imagery along the lower registers of the left wall. Here a parrot-­headed dictator mounted upon and controlled by a “strongbox (representing capitalist finance)” rallies the masses and suppresses the working classes (figure 1.6).20 As she turns the corner, a Greek temple erupts in flames, representing the destruction of republican virtues—​ ­“liberty, equality, and brotherhood”—​­by capitalism. On the long, vertical,

central wall, an “infernal machine” crowned by a militarized eagle consumes workers and produces wealth in the form of coins (figure 1.7).21 This machine is surrounded by figures representing both the Allied and Axis powers during World War II and includes references to racially motivated lynching in the United States. A monumental armed revolutionary worker lunges in from the right, confronting this scene of conflict, genocide, and class warfare and completing the cycle (figure 1.8). Unlike Rivera’s stairwell program, Si­quei­ros’s never resolves into a total or holistic view, nor does its figuration give way to a more discursive register. Rather, to see the mural at all, the viewer must climb the stairs (whereas

figure 1.7. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the Inter­ national Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail of infernal machine, central wall, pyroxyline/ cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians Syndicate (1939–­40). Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS  55

figure 1.8. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the Inter­ national Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail of proletarian worker, right wall, pyroxyline/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians Syndicate (1939–­40). Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

one can view Rivera’s mural either from below, looking up from the ground floor, or head-­on once one arrives at the second-­floor balcony). Yet when the viewer arrives at the second-­floor landing, large parts of the mural are either obscured by the architecture or so distorted that she can no longer clearly make them out. This is due partially to the cramped quarters of the stairwell. However, preliminary studies of the space by the mural team reveal that the program was calculated to reward six successive viewing positions rather than one or two preferred points of view.22 At moments in the journey anamorphic images appear and suddenly resolve, only to once again become distorted as the viewer continues her ascent.

56  CHAPTER 1

There are jumps in scale and juxtapositions of technique. Some passages are executed with stencils that have been spray-­painted (the swarming mass that coheres into high-­stepping fascist military forces), while others are hand-­painted and built up from the surface with successive layers of thick Duco© paints (the monumental armed worker). Some figures have been drawn from photographs circulating in international anti-­fascist journals and collaged onto the wall using a projector (the image of a lynched black man or the Jewish refugees to the left of the central militarized eagle). Other images are inspired by the avant-­garde montage aesthetic of the Berlin Dada­­ists (the “infernal machine” quotes John Heartfield’s famous poster of 1932, “Adolf, the Superman: Swallows gold and spouts rubbish”). Still other images, such as the electrical towers depicted on the ceiling, are executed in dramatic trompe l’oeil (figure 1.9). The entire mural partakes of montage, with radical juxtapositions that are meant to destabilize the viewer. Mari Carmen Ramírez argues that Portrait of the Bourgeoisie represents the culmination of Si­quei­ros’s efforts to create what he called “pictorial cinematographic art,” an attempt to unite monumental painting with cinematography, which he felt was “the most powerful means of disseminating Graphic Art to the masses.” 23 Si­quei­ros worked out these ideas in a series of lectures he presented in 1931–­32 after completing experimental murals in California and Argentina.24 This paradigm was informed by Sergei Eisen­­ stein’s theory of “emotional dynamization,” in which the dialectical film form was understood to activate the subject-­spectator psychologically.25 Si­ quei­ros translated these ideas into what he called a “dialectic-­subversive painting”; thus, his emphasis on physical movement and visual montage was undertaken to elicit an instantaneous and destabilizing emotional reaction from the viewer that would lead to subversive action.26 Both Si­quei­ros and Rivera were aware of Eisen­­stein’s early film theories. Rivera had spent several months with the Russian director as he prepared for filming ¡Que Viva México! Si­quei­ros and Eisen­­stein spent weeks together in dialogue while the former was under house arrest in Taxco. While Rivera’s murals at the Ministry of Public Education (1924–­28) influenced the imagery and conception of Eisen­­stein’s Mexican film, Rivera’s art betrays little engagement with the director’s formal techniques or theories about the viewing subject.27 Rather, Rivera shared Eisen­­stein’s general interest in “conflict” as a motivating feature of both history and dialectical art. Si­quei­ ros, however, integrated formal techniques from Eisen­­stein and also derived his conception of a cinematographic mural art from the director’s film theory. In particular, Si­quei­ros took on board Eisen­­stein’s belief that carefully orchestrated montage could have calculated effects on the viewing subject.

OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS  57

figure 1.9. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros and the Inter­ national Team of Plastic Artists, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail of electrical towers, ceiling, pyroxyline/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (1939–­40). Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

Si­quei­ros’s use of photomontage is a plastic analog to Eisen­­stein’s theories about the film image’s connection to actual or material reality. Just as the director manipulated this reality through filmic montage, Si­quei­ros’s team manipulated media images, creating a connection to actuality. Drawing from Marxist dialectics, Eisen­­stein understood history in materialist but Hegelian terms, as an objective reality that was not teleological but rather conflictive. History was conflict seeking transcendence from conflict. For Eisen­stein, the work of the director was part of the dialectic of history as, through the rhetorical work of film form, the director could bring this objective reality (the conflictive nature of history) into consciousness by affectively moving the spectator.28

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Eisen­stein believed that the cuts and rhythmic movement of the film image would grip the viewer emotionally, leading her toward action by bypassing conscious articulation. This distinction between intellection and affect bears upon Si­quei­ros’s critique of Rivera’s “demagoguery.” Si­quei­ros’s disdain for Rivera’s mural style rests on his claim that Rivera’s murals turn viewers into immobile readers—​­that he was, in effect, lecturing to them rather than mobilizing them emotionally. As Dana Polan points out, there is nothing about Eisen­stein’s affect theory that “in any way allowed [for] perceiver freedom.” 29 She writes: An utmost necessity in Eisen­stein’s theory was that of economy, the need to affect an audience by the quickest possible means. Emotional montage seemed to offer this, but with no possibilities for conceptualization, for articulated response: the only way to such a response seemed to be through chance, through a hope that audiences would conceptualize the film in the desired way. The viewer had to be brought into consonance with the historical meaning of the actuality/​­reality, and this could really be accomplished only if the viewer was given as little chance as possible to interpose his/​­her own creative unconscious, his/​­her own actuality, into the already correctly articulated dialectic of the film text.30 Following Eisen­stein, Si­quei­ros’s convictions about a dialectic-­subversive mural art were every bit as demagogic as he accused Rivera of being. Whereas Rivera’s demagoguery resided in telling his viewers what to think, Si­quei­ ros’s lay in an attempt to manipulate them emotionally, toward political ends of his choosing. Both artists believed that they were leading the masses toward a Marxist, and therefore an emancipatory, understanding of history. Both artists viewed history as an objective reality unfolding according to a dialectical logic that was rooted in class conflict but that was ultimately progressive. And while each believed that the artist could affect change in the viewer and thereby hasten the unfolding of history’s dialectic, neither had much confidence or even interest in the viewer’s own critical, creative, or conscious capacities. For Rivera, the viewing subject—whether bourgeois, peasant, or proletarian—​­was an individual who needed to be instructed about the true nature of history. As he famously proclaimed in his 1960 autobiography, his murals “reflected the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through my vision of the truth show the masses the outline of the future.” 31 His positivist elitism was rooted in a governmental attitude toward the public. Si­quei­ros, on the other hand, largely conceived of his audience as a proletariat in formation. For him, the job of mural art was to mobilize

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the public, to direct them toward action that could only be emancipatory because it would be guided by strict Marxist principles. Orozco understood the idiosyncrasies of reception and therefore expressed grave doubts about orchestrating the political effects of art. Likewise, as a critical but undoctrinaire artist, he was suspicious of the Marxist model of history as an objective and progressive dialectic espoused by his peers. His approach to history was anti-­historicist and anti­progressive and more akin to Walter Benjamin’s heterodox reformulation of Marxist dialectics.

History as Ruin: Orozco’s Poetic Image Commenting on the distinction that Orozco draws between “idea” and “story” in his Dartmouth statement, Renato González Mello points out that the Spanish word for “story”—​­historia—​­is also the word for “history.” 32 He implies thereby that Orozco’s professed antipathy toward narrative must also entail a critique of history. González Mello likens what he characterizes as Orozco’s asymmetrical handling of “form and narration . . . idea and historia” to the dialectical materialism of Eisen­stein’s montage theory.33 And while Eisen­steinian montage provides an instructive analog to Orozco’s fragmented approach to composition, we cannot assume that he shared any of the Soviet filmmaker’s assumptions about audience or the politics of form. Unlike his peers, Orozco never met Eisen­stein (although Eisen­stein knew and admired his work). We can speculate that he was vaguely familiar with his films and their radical form, but we should not imagine that Orozco was intentionally modeling his mural art after Eisen­stein’s theories or the mass medium of film. Nonetheless, in this brief observation, González Mello pinpoints something important about Orozco’s mural art. But in order to really grasp the formal and ideological implications of these asymmetries, we need to explore further Orozco’s claims about painting and the politics of the mural form. Ultimately, Orozco’s mural form is more akin to Baroque allegory inflected by an avant-­garde commitment to fragmentation than it is to avant-­garde film theory per se. In the Dartmouth statement, Orozco elaborated on his antipathy toward “story,” writing, “the stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus. There are as many literary associations as spectators. One of them, when looking at a picture representing a scene of war, for example, may start thinking of murder, another of pacifism, another of anatomy, another of history, and so on. Consequently, to write a story and say that it is actually told by a painting is wrong and untrue.” 34 In this passage, Orozco acknowledges that viewers make what 60  CHAPTER 1

they will of what they see. He links the “viewer’s share” with story, arguing that the work of art stimulates something in the mind of the viewer but that it is she who then weaves this into a narrative. Unlike Marcel Duchamp, who attributed the completion of the creative act to the viewer, Orozco does not embrace her “share.” Yet, in recognizing the creative capacities of the viewer, Orozco does allow for the inevitability that it is she who will determine the meaning of the work. Orozco’s observation is melancholic insofar as he acknowledges and laments the essential fluidity of signification and the inability of the artist to secure meaning through an appeal to a transcendent ideal. Unlike Rivera and Si­quei­ros, Orozco was resigned to the fact that artists could not keep viewers from creating stories of their own from the ideas in their work, and therefore he expressed skepticism about the ability of visual art to effect political change. Writing retrospectively in his autobiography about the Syndicate Manifesto and the heady early days of the mural movement, Orozco satirized the manifesto’s endorsement of what he called “combat painting,” or art designed to “incite the oppressed to a struggle for liberation.” 35 “When,” he asks rhetorically, “is a painting or a piece of sculpture really calculated to arouse mental processes that will turn into revolutionary action in the viewer?” 36 Answering his own question, he notes that Catholic art has certainly helped to “quicken faith and devotion” among believers.37 But he follows by observing that one sees equal devotion among the faithful in “Mosques” and “Protestant Churches.” 38 In other words, the emotional experience of “faith and devotion” does not depend upon figurative art. Orozco concludes that “instances of the arts exerting a decisive revolutionary influence upon the spectator must be conditioned by some factors as yet unknown and others of a purely fortuitous nature.” 39 He suggests that affective contexts, such as “standing in the plaza, while the flags are rippling in the sunshine and the bells are sounding and sirens are deafening us” makes hearing the national anthem more effective than listening to it “alone, at home, on the phonograph.” 40 For Orozco the affective power of any art form depends upon its context of reception, the public nature of the experience, and incidental and unpredictable factors (like a sunny day). For him, reception that moves the viewer is a whole-­body experience articulated to and through other affective phenomena, such as patriotism or religious faith. Orozco did not attempt to orchestrate sensory surrounds for his mural projects (as Si­quei­ros would in the 1960s), so his observation is a renunciation of affective political art of the kind that Marxists like Si­quei­ros were espousing in the 1930s. Moreover, panels like “Modern Human Sacrifice” in his Epic suggest that Orozco viewed this kind of OROZCO’S MELANCHOLY DIALECTICS  61

figure 1.10. José Clemente Orozco (1883–­1949), Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940, Fresco, six panels, each 9 ft. × 36 in. (275 × 91.4 cm), overall 9 ft. × 18 in. (275 × 550 cm). Commissioned through the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by scala/Art Resource, NY.

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political persuasion negatively. This raises the question, then, as to what mural art, as a public art, was for Orozco. He notoriously abjured explaining his art, and yet he endeavored again and again, in both paint and texts, to insist upon its anti­narrative qualities. It is this feature of the work that holds the key to Orozco’s convictions about a host of related issues—namely, form, history, and the work’s relationship to audience, architecture, and politics. In “Orozco ‘Explains,’” a short text Orozco drafted for MoMA upon the completion of Dive Bomber and Tank (1940; figure 1.10), he rephrased his Dartmouth statement, arguing that “a painting is a Poem and nothing else. A poem made of relationships between forms as other kinds of poems are made of relationships between words, sounds or ideas.” 41 He went on to characterize painting of this nature as a “machine-­motor” that “sets in motion our senses, first; our emotional capacity, second; and our intellect, last.” 42 Like Si­quei­ros, Orozco suggests that visual art is first and foremost an emotional experience. But unlike Si­quei­ros, Orozco does not insist that his art moves the viewer in particular or political ways. Nor does he believe that the sensory, emotional, or intellectual reaction of the viewer follows from a rigorously Marxist formal method. Rather, he places emphasis on the formal poetry of the work, insisting that each part of the “machine” can

“function independently of the whole.” 43 “The order of the inter-­relations between its parts may be altered,” he notes, “but those relationships may stay the same in any other order, and unexpected or expected possibilities may appear.” 44 Despite his emphasis on form as poetry, Orozco’s explanation was not a defense of formalism. His remarks pertained specifically to Dive Bomber and Tank, a portable mural that is made up of six freestanding panels that could be shuffled (the panels could even be inverted!) into a large number of configurations. In each instance, the idea of the work remains even as the order of its parts has been altered. As James Oles argues, the idea animating Dive Bomber and Tank was “the devastating capabilities of technology and modern warfare.” 45 The mural “works,” regardless of its physical iteration, he observes, because “there is a level of signification in the mural that is attached not to objects (the war machines [of the title]) but to fragments.” 46 Dive Bomber and Tank provides an instructive instance of how Orozco’s formal concerns translate into conceptual ones. Note that he uses the metaphor of a machine to describe the painting’s formal procedure, creating a mural that literally embodies fragmentation to address cultural and historical fragmentation. In this sense the work’s composition serves as an allegory for its larger idea. As stated at the outset, I argue that Orozco does this even when not explicitly tackling the question of modern warfare. Orozco’s mural oeuvre reveals a consistent fragmentary approach to composition as well as a consistent emphasis upon ruins and destruction within its iconographic programs. Rita Eder has noted the relationship between Orozco’s allegorical approach to mural art and his iconographic emphasis upon ruins. She explains this relationship through recourse to Benjamin’s writings on Baroque allegory in On the Origins of German Tragic Drama, arguing that in the 1930s Orozco abandoned the classicism of his academic training in favor of a style informed by the Baroque. This stylistic shift, she suggests, signaled the emergence of Orozco’s melancholic view of history as ruin. She writes: “If the ruin is, as Benjamin points out with regard to Baroque allegory, the form in which history enters the stage, it is a history that breaks with the idea of classical order as eternal life, and instead assumes its decay.” 47 This insight is salutary and bears greater elaboration. A substantial foray into Benjamin’s philosophy of history and its origins in his early writings on language and the “art form” will help us to better understand Orozco’s fragmentation of the mural form, his anti­narrative sensibilities, and his melancholic attitude toward history, Marxist politics, and the emancipatory capacities of art.

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The Benjamin Interlude: Allegory, Melancholy, and the Dialectics of History

Benjamin conceived of Baroque allegory in opposition to classicism. His understanding of allegory is rooted in his early philosophical exploration of language and “art form.” Jan Mieszkowski argues that for Benjamin, “form is both the act whereby the work of art affirms its own autonomy, its independence from any external standard or rule that would govern it, and the act whereby it acknowledges the inevitable fact that any given form is contingent.” 48 The contingency of form is what opens the work to the possibility of becoming something else. This possibility, in turn, represents both the radical possibilities of the artwork and its death as a work of art. This quality of form informs Benjamin’s interest in allegory, or “speaking otherwise than one seems to speak.” 49 As Mieszkowski explains, “by nature, allegories are reflexive, that is, they call attention to the ways in which their meanings are produced as much as to what those meanings may be.” 50 For Benjamin, allegory is not a code to be deciphered definitively, nor does its polysemy confirm that language is inherently nonsensical. Rather, allegory reveals “a disjunction . . . between the mode and meaning of an expression.” 51 In this sense, it, “calls attention . . . to the strange co-­presence of distinct semantic levels of a text, levels whose relationship to one another is not easily clarified with an aesthetic or semiotic model.” 52 Benjamin approaches Baroque allegory through an analysis of the Trauerspiel or the German “mourning play,” a literary genre that he characterizes as a secularized Christian drama. Unlike classical tragedy, which is rooted in myth, the Trauerspiel reflects our fall into profane history. Likewise, the Trauerspiel is also distinguished from the sacred plays and Christian chronicles of the Medieval period in that the Christianity invoked in the former is no longer oriented by a faith in redemption. He writes, “whereas the Middle Ages present the futility of world events and the transience of the creature as stations on the road to salvation, the German Trauerspiel is taken up with the hopelessness of the earthly condition.” 53 Benjamin situates the theological incongruity of the Trauerspiel within the secularizing effects of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century political and legal philosophy alongside the Lutheran “renunciation” of Calvinism’s emphasis upon good works. This political and theological framework marks the antinomial form of the “mourning play,” in which “history—​­as a narrative of the human march towards redemption on the Day of Judgment—​­loses the eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomes secularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle over political power.” 54

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Here Benjamin’s conception of language and Baroque allegory meet up with his emerging philosophy of history. For his discussion of the form and content of Trauerspiel as produced by and re-­presenting the ontological melancholy of human history encapsulates the theological anti­humanism he elaborated in conversation with and against humanist art history, and subsequently historical materialism. Benjamin’s writings on allegory were conceived in reaction to the writings of Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl on the psycho­social function of allegorical art through their humanist readings of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of 1541, Melancholy I.55 In their argument, the artist is configured as the agent of human liberation from the threat of saturnine depression. They viewed the allegorical character of Dürer’s engraving—​­the disparate array of medical and astrological symbols in the work—​­as a sublimation of the “magical and mythical” into the “spiritual and intellectual”; thus, for them, allegory represents the reconciliation of opposing forces: pagan/​­Christian, magic/​­intellect, depression/​ ­joy, myth/​­history, and so on.56 By way of contrast, Howard Caygill argues that for Benjamin, allegory represents the irreconcilability of opposing forces. If Warburg emphasizes the talismanic “magic Jovial square” in the upper left quadrant of the image to promote human transcendence over natural forces, Benjamin “focuses on the dog and the stone—​­precisely the non-­human emblems of natural and creaturely melancholy.” 57 For Benjamin, the melancholic attitude of the allegorical figure toward the natural and creaturely things around him places the human amid the spectacle of ruin. He cautions us, however, from understanding Benjamin’s notion of melancholy as a psychological state, arguing that it is rather an “ontological property of things.” 58 “For Benjamin,” he writes, “it is not humans that are melancholy before physical and creaturely nature, but nature that is melancholy under the gaze of the human.” 59 Baroque allegory thereby emblematizes the plunging of the world into “creaturely things,” or what he called “natural history,” as opposed to viewing the world as evidence of an ideal transcendental order. With allegory, the world becomes sign, meaning becomes conventional rather than something secured by a transcendental truth, and thus fluid, ever open to mutation. This unmooring of the world from transcendental systems that would guarantee its meaning is profoundly melancholic, for the world becomes transitory, no longer secured by an eternal order but rather fleeting and mortal. The world appears fragmentary and enigmatic, a system of arbitrary signs, and deriving meaning from this world becomes an esoteric exercise. Benjamin’s critique of the Warburg school’s humanism found its analog in his critique of capitalist modernity and the historicist investment in progress.

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As Benjamin famously claimed, “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” 60 Writing against what he characterized as the historicist’s “empathy for the victors” 61 of history, Benjamin characterized the prevailing humanist conception of culture as fetishistic and argued that its fetishistic nature was intimately connected to a concept of time as “empty and homogeneous.” 62 Time, in this sense, is understood as an empty vessel in which the historicist plots events according to a logic of continuous development. The past foretells the present, which is conceived of as a period of transition toward a more fully achieved future that will fulfill the promise of that glorious past. “Whoever has emerged victorious,” he writes, “participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate . . . the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures.” 63 Benjamin contrasts the humanist’s historicism with his conception of historical materialism, which was based not on the doctrine of progress but rather on the “theological concept of incompleteness.” 64 He writes, “Historicism presents the eternal image of the past whereas historical materialism presents a given experience with the past—​­an experience that is unique. The replacement of the epic element by the constructive element proves to be the condition for this experience. The immense forces bound up in historicism’s ‘once upon a time’ are liberated in this experience. To put to work an experience with history—​­a history that is original for every present—​­is the task of historical materialism. The latter is directed toward a consciousness of the present which explodes the continuum of history.” 65 Caygill observes that Benjamin’s prepositional distinction between “of” and “with” signals a “temporal and modal” distinction between how the historicist and the historical materialist experience the past.66 The historicist’s experience of the past is likened to the hoary rhetoric of children’s stories that begin “Once upon a time,” whereas the historical materialist’s engagement with the past is constructive, a term Benjamin derived from surrealist montage and constructivist filmmaking. Benjamin transposed the avant-­garde practice of montage—​­the technique of ripping things from their original context and recombining these fragments into a new, seemingly arbitrary composition—​­from art to historiography. Montage was his method for enacting what he called “critical philosophy.” The critical philosopher both destroys the mythic vision of the past, by exploding its seeming continuity into fragments, and then constructs, out of its debased fragments, an image of the past that stops the flow of time as it coalesces, instantaneously, into a dialectical image capable of providing fleeting insight into the true condition of the present.

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Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image follows from his meditations on the nineteenth-­century poet Charles Baudelaire. As with his work on the Trauerspiel, Benjamin’s appreciation of Baudelaire is a consequence of his interest in allegory as both a reflexive form and a symptom of sociopolitical decline. If Trauerspiel’s melancholic allegoresis provided a key for apprehending the crisis of meaning (language) that followed from secularization, Baudelaire’s splenetic poetry provides insight into the crisis of experience (historical subjectivity) occasioned by capitalist modernity. If the fallen world of things is melancholic under the gaze of the human, the detritus of capital becomes the occasion for spleen. “Spleen,” Max Pensky elaborates, “refers specifically to the mode of melancholia in which the subject can no longer mournfully ‘observe’ the permanent catastrophe of natural history, but rather, in a quite literal sense, is this catastrophe.” 67 Benjamin characterizes Baudelaire as a splenetic allegorist who reads modern Paris against the phantasmagoria of capitalist progress as a spectacle of death (ruins), debased fragments (discarded commodities, rags), and alienation (the anonymity of the metropolitan masses). Baudelaire’s poetic method, “the wrenching of things from their familiar contexts,” he asserts, embodies and reveals “the normal state for goods on display,” which in turn “is linked to the destruction of organic contexts in allegorical intention.” 68 In this sense, Baudelaire’s practice of allegory provides insight into the catastrophe of history, but it also gives rise to the possibility of the revolutionary power of language. In Benjamin’s appreciation of Baudelaire as allegorist we see how Benjamin’s recognition of art’s contingency can be the occasion for its transformation into a mechanism of redemption. Benjamin argues that Baudelaire’s spleen is the very ground for his evocation of an “idéal.” Like the redemption that is condemned to fail in the Trauerspiel, the “flight toward the ideal” is, in Baudelaire, “fatally foundering” and “doomed.” 69 And yet, in both cases, this melancholic condition generates more insistently a desire for redemption. The redemptive power generated by the dialectics of spleen and the ideal recalls our earlier discussion of the tension between the autonomy and contingency of art that leads to its dissolution as art. In Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire, his poetry ceases to be valued for its modernist aesthetic withdrawal into the realm of art for art’s sake—​­its purported autonomy—​­and is instead converted into something else: an occasion for material history. Benjamin acts as the critical philosopher and blasts Baudelaire out of the formalist history of poetry, making his work a vehicle for “interrupting the course of the world” rather than one that confirms the progress of art toward an autonomous ideal.

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Benjamin’s dissolution of Baudelaire’s poetry’s status as formalist art object represents his dialectical conception of the object as incomplete. For him, the work of art has no fixed identity; it is never fully present. Rather, its meaning is determined by the interpretations that follow, what Benjamin called its “after-­history,” which in turn inflects and determines any understanding of its “fore-­history.” 70 The present is never able to fully possess the past through its objects. Rather, as Caygill argues, the objects of the past “retain a reserve, whether unacknowledged labor or of a potential that is yet to be realized.” 71 A dialectical history is one that acknowledges the reserve of the past as potentially disruptive of the present. With regard to Baudelaire, Benjamin writes, “the dialectical image is an image that flashes up. The image of what has been—​­in this case, the image of Baudelaire—​­must be caught in this way, flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The redemption enacted in this way, and solely in this way, is won only against the perception of what is being irredeemably lost.” 72 If, in the 1930s, Baudelaire was cast as a luminous example of an advanced bourgeois civilization, Benjamin recasts his poetry as an artifact of the social and economic barbarism of “The Paris of the Second Empire.” 73 This returns us to the distinction that Benjamin draws between civilization and barbarism, between historicism and material history, between the progress of history and the “incompleteness” of the past, between the empathetic reconstruction of the past and the construction of images through a dialectical engagement with the past. Benjamin’s dialectics of history refuses the temporal naturalism of progress and resists narrating a causal relationship between the past and the present in favor of the figural procedure of montage, the juxtaposition of the “now” with a “then” in a “dialectical image,” not a story that begins “once upon a time.” He writes: “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation . . . for while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of the what-­has-­been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural.” 74 It is the critical philosopher who destroys the phantasmagoria of civilization in order to construct a dialectical image that illuminates the crisis of the “now time.” As Pensky notes, for Benjamin, the critical philosopher “operate[s] at the dialectical crossroads between the mythic and the messianic.” 75 “The critic,” he explains, is the conduit through which moments of messianic truth are able, however fragilely, to burst through the temporal continuum. Thus

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the active, essential contribution of critical intelligence involves not only the construction of the mosaic-­constellation, that is, the process of juxtaposing and rearranging discrete elements so that they merge suddenly into a momentary representational image of their messianic idea, but also . . . the prior, destructive moment in which critical intelligence is capable of producing the very fragments from which the constellation is constructed, by destroying the false image of beautiful unity, harmony, and totality of the mythic Scheinwelt [world of illusion or phatasmagoria], that is, by reducing this image to rubble. 76 Benjamin characterizes the “now time” of the dialectical image as a “messianic cessation of happening” insofar as it carries within it the possibility of bringing the historicist flow of time to a standstill.77 The critic destroys the mythical image of progress by revealing history to be a “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” 78 In so doing, he brings about “a revolutionary chance in the fight for an oppressed past,” the acts of exploitation and violence obscured by the triumphalism of culture.79 “Redemption,” states Benjamin, “depends upon the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe.” 80 Theological redemption does not signal a destruction of allegory and the completion of history, however. Rather, as Uwe Steiner insists, it evokes “the need to grasp history the way it would have to be imagined at any of its moments in accordance with the idea of redemption.” 81 Benjamin’s conception of time is differential. He insists that there is an ontological distinction between the temporalities of past, present, and future, and that our grasp of historical—​­human—​­time proceeds existentially through differential modes of “memory, expectation, and action.” 82 Thus his conception of a material dialectics of history transposes the existential experience of time onto the practice of history but reverses its directionality. Rather than recollecting the past in order to anticipate the future, in the static temporality of the dialectical image “the linearity of mythic time is doubled back upon itself.” 83 The critical philosopher foregrounds the present’s experience of the past, producing the historical intelligibility necessary for revolutionary action. The constellation he forges between the past, present, and future is an image, writes Pensky, “in which the category of anticipatory hope is cast upon the past . . . [and] the category of recollection is imposed upon the future.” 84 This non-­naturalistic conception of time and the politics of memory rubs against the political conformism of the status quo. Rather than situating the present on a continuum of progress, it characterizes the present as a crisis that commands us to see the concerns of an oppressed past as our own.

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Orozco as Critical Philosopher: Form and Politics

With Benjamin’s arguments about language and history in mind, we return to Orozco’s Dartmouth statement and to the contrast he draws between “idea” and “story.” Recall that Orozco, somewhat melancholically, acknowledges narrative as the viewer’s share.85 He invokes an unexpressed absolute—​­the “idea”—​­while nonetheless conceding the historical contingency of the work of art, reflected in the many stories different spectators will attribute to it. For Orozco, the work of art is indeed polysemic, its meaning esoteric, an index of the art form’s fall from transcendent ideal into allegoresis. The “idea,” if it registers at all, emerges as a consequence of the formal poetry of the work, with fragmentation and recombination as its procedure. The self-­reflexivity of his form is allegorical insofar as it calls as much attention to the way the mural’s meaning is produced as it does to what that meaning might be. If we return to Dive Bomber and Tank, we see how Orozco’s deployment of the fragment is both a formal procedure and a symptom of the modernity that the mural decries. The mural’s status as a system of fragments and relations without an ideal arrangement makes the splenetic allegoresis of modern visual art palpable. And yet its critical potential persists. Orozco addresses this confounding nexus of form, contingent meaning, and political redemption in his MoMA statement, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” which is itself a melancholic allegory of the very problem of meaning his mural diagnoses and makes recognizable. A note at the start of the text, added by the museum, proclaims: “This ‘explanation’ was written by Mr. Orozco. The quotation marks in his title indicate his feeling that explanations are unnecessary.” 86 Here the scare quotes around “Explains” indicate the conventional nature of language; his “explanation” is not what it seems to be—​­a clarification of his intentions or the mural’s symbolism—​­but rather a melancholic lament about the public’s demand for a “story.” “The public wants explanations about a painting,” he writes at the start of his text. “What the artist had in mind when he did it. What he was thinking of. What is the exact name of the picture, and what the artist means by that.” 87 Orozco does not, however, capitulate to these demands. Instead he satirizes the call for explanation, complaining that “the public refuses to see painting. They want to hear painting. They don’t care for the show itself, they prefer to listen to the barker outside. Free lectures every hour for the blind, around the Museum.” 88 We might understand Orozco’s frustration with the passivity of the public as not only a function of the polysemy of art but also the position taken up by artists like Rivera, whose mural form solicits and rewards this kind

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of passivity. If so, then what kind of ideal public or viewer does Orozco imagine? He does not say exactly, but one can discern a position from what Orozco says about painting as a “machine-­motor” with “inter-­relations between its parts.” In the final section of his MoMA text, Orozco addresses the question of form most explicitly. The subtitle for this section is “‘The Dive Bomber,’ or Six Interchangeable Panels,” as if to insist that the mural’s identity is as much a function of its symbolism (the dive bomber) as its form (six interchangeable panels). And yet he does not discuss its symbolism at all. Rather, he concludes his statement with an elaboration on his conception of form and its political effects. Orozco insists that his mural is a “machine” and that not only can each panel be conceived of as an independently functioning machine but also the “order of the inter-­relations between its parts may be altered.” 89 Nonetheless, the relationship between its parts “may stay the same in any other order and unexpected or expected possibilities may appear.” 90 This seemingly contradictory “explanation” of his mural form at once insists upon the fragmented nature of the whole while also asserting that that fragmentation intimates a relationship (an “idea”?) that stays the same no matter what the arrangement of its parts. Further, it is the relationship between the interchangeable parts that generates “unexpected or expected possibilities” even as the relationship between them (the mediating concept?) stays the same. Orozco follows with a suggestive thought experiment: “suppose we change the actual order of the plastic elements of the vaults in the Sixtine [sic] Chapel,” at which point he trails off with ellipses.91 Here he engages the reader in an act of imagination—​­the speculative “suppose we”—​­rather than making polemical assertions. He does not complete the thought, however. He does not tell us what might follow from such an exercise. He leaves this for us to ponder. It is through this imagined act of montage that Orozco illustrates how “possibilities” can inhere in visual poetry and the constructive principle of form even when visual language is unmoored from any absolute meaning or truth correspondence, and even if the work of art is destroyed as such. Orozco concludes his “explanation” with what seems to be a non sequitur about linotypes (a commercial typesetting machine) in which he locates politics in the linotype’s “motion,” that is, its typesetting action.92 He writes, “A linotype is a work of art, but a linotype in motion is an extraordinary adventure affecting the lives of many human beings or the course of history. A few lines from a linotype in action may start a World War or may mean the birth of a new era.” 93 Here Orozco connects political effects with the dissolution of the machine as “a work of art” and focuses on what it does when it

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is put in “motion.” Like Si­quei­ros, he analogizes mural painting with mass media. The typesetting machine, like film, is a reproducing and reproducible medium, a non-­auratic art form with the capacity to reach thousands of viewers because of its decontextualizing mobility. Like film, it is an art-­ in-­motion. When stripped of its status as an artistic object to be admired as such, the linotype in motion shifts the viewing experience from one of ritual (an experience with a unique object) to one that is functional and explicitly political. If we are hearing echoes of Benjamin’s famous argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” it is a deliberate correspondence.94 By invoking reproducibility, Orozco engages the utopian aspirations of his peers and their claims about the mass politics of muralism as a public art. Recall that Si­quei­ros, in particular, sought to make mural art “cinematographic” by mobilizing the viewer and thereby the imagery. Rivera, too, equated mural art with mass media—​­such as film newsreels, radio broadcasts, and the nascent technology of television—​­in his published statements about his work as well as through his iconographic programs.95 However, unlike Si­quei­ros and Rivera, Orozco believed that the political effects of his art were not guaranteed. A mobilized work of art can “start a World War” or give “birth to a new era.” Likewise, he does not argue that the political direction the work takes is determined by its adherence to an external truth, as Si­quei­ros did, or to a subjective one, as Rivera claimed. If a work in motion can either start a war or bring about a new order, what determines its political effects in either direction? Orozco is extremely coy on this point. Throughout the text he seems to eschew any notion of agency. He refuses to make “I” statements. He never says what it is he intended but rather speaks of what the public expects or of what painting is or can be: “parts can be ordered”; “unexpected . . . possibilities may appear.” Read from the standpoint of the subject, there is a slippage between the artist and the viewer in Orozco’s text. We can see this most clearly in his supposition that “we” rearrange the plastic elements of the Sistine ceiling. Here he invites us to become monteurs, destroying Michelangelo’s masterpiece, cutting it up into parts and rearranging them into new constructions/​­constellations that at once maintain some essential relationship while simultaneously producing unexpected possibilities. His “explanation,” in the end, is a call to just such a viewer, one who sees rather than wants to listen, one who is active rather than passive, one who can access the idea that springs forth from the image in fragments rather than one who crafts a triumphal story out of said fragments by lining them up into a linear tale. This viewer finds possibilities in the work through accessing some kind of redemptive truth that lies beyond his or her contingent perspective.

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If this is so, then who is the subject of the redemptive possibility (the idea) that inheres in a work of art? Is it the artist or the viewer who performs the critical work of montage? The slippage in Orozco’s text, the absence of an “I” who speaks or writes or paints, raises the question anew as to the relationship between an absolute and the contingency of the art form or, in this case, the truth in painting and the perceiving subject. Pensky notes a similar paradox in Benjamin’s philosophy of language and his famous claim that “ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.” 96 Pensky points out that the relationship between objects and ideas entails the same tension between the abstract and the contingent that Mieszkowski explored in Benjamin’s concept of “art form.” In fact, this tension structures and stymies Benjamin’s philosophy of history as well, as we are left to wonder if the dialectical image is an objective truth or merely the subjective interpretation of the critical philosopher. That is, is the material historian’s montage messianic—​­a redemptive truth that brings historical time to a standstill—​­or merely allegorical? Pensky’s discussion of the constellation metaphor in Benjamin’s philosophy of language can illuminate our understanding of the politics of form in Orozco’s mural art. He writes: The subject perceives individual objects—​­as we take in the vast canopy of individual stars. The imposition of concepts upon these disparate elements could have, as in the systematic ambition, the effect of dissolving the individuality of the discrete phenomena into the abstractness of a new conceptual structure; that is, one way to employ concepts is to subsume particulars under them. Benjamin’s alternative is the moment in which the application of a concept effects a mediation in the relationship between the particular objects themselves and the higher unity that is implicit within them but cannot be “grasped” or possessed as an object itself. The constellation emerges—​­discloses itself—​­only insofar as the concept divests the particulars of their status as merely particular, refers them to their hidden arrangement, but also preserves their material existence. At that point, a meaningful image jumps forward from the previously disparate elements, which from that point onward can never be seen as merely disparate again. In this way the phenomena are rescued from their status as phenomenal or fragmentary, without simultaneously sacrificing the phenomena in the name of an abstract concept.97 Pensky argues that it is through the notion of the “concept” that Benjamin introduces any semblance of the subject into his account of how ideas

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are disclosed in and through montage. Without the concept, understood as mediation, the idea would be objective truth rather than a critical construction and would thereby lack the trace of history or any messianic potential for change. “Truth,” Benjamin insists, “is the death of intention.” 98 Nonetheless, the idea that is represented through the critical construction of the critic is not his “willful creation” but rather a “discovery or a recognition.” 99 Pensky notes that Benjamin’s choice of metaphor—​­the constellation—​ ­entails vestiges of the mythic, for the creation of constellations out of stars has been attributed to ancient humans’ fear of and need to control nature. The constellation, therefore, represents the human’s lack of agency before nature, her attribution of power to mythic gods and their whims via astrology, and thus an archaic conception of nature. And yet it also speaks to the human’s desire to master nature, insofar as constellations render the sky knowable and controllable, as tools of navigation, mapping, and rational scientific study. Thus, the deciphering of constellations both retains and negates myth. Extending Benjamin’s metaphor to the technique of montage, Pensky argues that the idea constructed through the destructive and creative act of montage lies “at the dialectical crossroads between the mythic and the Messianic.” 100 Pensky refers to this antinomial character of the dialectical image—​­its quality of being at once a constructive act and a “discovery or recognition” of something seemingly “true”—​­as “imminent transcendendentalism” or, understood in the terms of leftist politics, a form of “messianic Marxism.” 101 We can apprehend Orozco’s oblique arguments about the “unexpected possibilities” of painting as a poetic “machine” in a similar way. His language suggests that these possibilities are both made (through the act of interchanging fragments) and found (“possibilities occur”). Similarly, he insists upon a mediating concept that functions to interrelate the parts no matter their configuration and thereby appeals to some kind of human connection to a mythic truth or holism beyond the appearance of fragmentation. At the same time, he implies that redemption (the “birth of a new era”) arises from the act of putting the work of art in “motion” toward political (messianic) rather than mythical (absolute) ends. As Pensky points out, this conception of the critic (whether understood as the artist or the viewer of a mural) raises an unanswerable question as to how one determines whether the idea that discloses itself through montage is dialectical rather than allegorical. That is, how can we determine if the redemptive image that springs forth is something more than our own, or the artist’s, subjective interpretation of historical phenomenon? Orozco’s inability to answer this question accounts for his melancholic attitude toward both the public and history/​­story.

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“In the end,” Pensky argues, “the question of the ‘objectivity’ or nonarbitrariness of the dialectical image must transpose itself from discussions of Benjamin’s own understanding of it to our own. . . . From this point of view, the question appears in a different light. What are the grounds on which we might be persuaded to attribute to the dialectical image the objectivity that Benjamin claimed for it?” 102 Orozco’s Epic presents us with a relevant truth that draws a historical correspondence between our time and his own. As critical viewers we may seize upon the unexpected possibilities that inhere within the image. But if we do so, it is because Orozco has crafted a constellation from the fragments of a thoroughly fallen world. It is this melancholic, allegorical deployment of the fragment that distinguishes Orozco’s visual dialectics from those of his contemporaries on the left. Neither Si­ quei­ros nor Rivera emphasizes the fragmentary nature of their iconography as expressly as does Orozco. Despite the formal complexity of his murals, Rivera creates an illusory visual fluidity to his iconography and its integration with its architectural support. He devises visual segues between the imagery and architecture by illusionistically assimilating physical obstructions into the mis-­en-­scène, and more importantly by structuring a basic narrative coherence for the physical experience of the cycle for the viewer. His National Palace mural epitomizes the historicism that Benjamin opposes and the reliance on “pre-­ narratised” story that Orozco so disdained. On the other hand, Si­quei­ros’s engagement with montage would seem to be akin to the Benjaminian fragment, insofar as he mobilizes iconography from contemporary sources and quite literally rips them from their original context, creating a dizzying array of decontextualized details. His murals are often at odds with their architectural support, but his deployment of the fragment is not melancholy or allegorical, in Benjamin’s sense. Rather, he embraces technology and the commodity form as allies in his own conception of political progress, which, as argued above, does not allow for a critical engagement with the image but rather presumes a physiological one that bypasses critical thought. Benjamin emphasizes the instantaneity of insight in the dialectical image, but it is brought about by the constructive labor of the critic through his or her deep engagement with the melancholic state of fragmentation and through a radical telescoping of the past through the present. Si­quei­ros’s Electricians’ Syndicate mural is emphatically present-­and implicitly future-­oriented. He does not forge a relationship between the now and a then; rather, in his Electricians’ Syndicate mural, the crisis of the now is but a transition toward a more achieved future that is not depicted but that is assured by the sheer monumentality of the Soviet worker who swoops in to save the day.

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Orozco’s Epic shows us that a critical politics in the present must, on the one hand, engage the past while also refusing the humanist and vulgar Marxist desire to subordinate it to a unifying vision of progress. A critical or dialectical image must maintain the fragmentary nature of the fallen world of emblems and/​­or commodities if it has any hope of triggering an instantaneous awareness of the relationship our present has forged with the past. Or, conversely, if it has any hope of suggesting what a redemptive future might entail. In a Benjaminian sense, Si­quei­ros’s approach to montage remythologizes the fragments it juxtaposes via a theory of progress. Si­quei­ ros’s montage does not assert itself as imminently transcendental but rather as explicitly propagandistic. Si­quei­ros embraces fragmentation in montage without a concomitant concern for the ways it registers loss. For him, truth is dogma. For Orozco, truth is a facet of the things in the world; it is to be discovered in the world as it flashes up or is released. It does not precede engagement with the “creaturely”; rather, it is an ideal that can only be conjured through immersion within the splenetic modern world. Orozco argues that the idea is in the painting and that it is released by the critical labors of the viewer. He avers his own subjectivity in favor of a redemptive truth that inheres in the constellation of the work. Orozco is often characterized as having a prophet complex, as crafting himself, through his murals, as a self-­sacrificing figure of human redemption: a “Mexican Prometheus” to quote Eisen­stein.103 But this is not quite right. There is a real humility in his struggle with the mural form. His inability or unwillingness to explain his murals, especially along orthodox Marxist lines, even as he clearly clung to the revolutionary possibilities of public art; his tendency to attribute political agency to the work and its afterlife rather than to himself suggests that he was very wary of the self-­serving and aggrandizing postures of his peers. Orozco endows the viewer with what Benjamin calls a “weak messianic power,” despite our desire to “hear” rather than to “see.” We must become critical philosophers if his art is to have any redemptive power. The Epic as Dialectical Image

Dive Bomber and Tank is instructive for better understanding Orozco’s allegorical approach to form as well as the relationship between form, idea, and politics in his mural art. Dive Bomber and Tank is allegorical in both form and content, but it is not dialectical in the Benjaminian sense. The idea that mediates the fragments in Dive Bomber is the lack of meaning in the world, the abyss of a fallen world without redemption. There is no transcendental

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meaning or symbolic significance to the war machines depicted or the manner in which they have been depicted. They simply testify to the melancholic awareness of death as the condition of the modern world. The Epic, on the other hand, is a dialectical image for it presents the allegorical precisely as a problem of modernity’s relationship to the pre-­Cortesian past that follows from the traumatic conquest of the Americas. Orozco’s juxtaposition of the now of 1930s economic and political collapse with the Spanish conquest contravenes and critiques the relationship to that past that dominated nationalist and Marxist discourses of the period in Mexico. The fact that he staged this critique in the United States, rather than in Mexico, is significant because he brings the Mexican muralists’ indigenismo to bear upon the white, Anglo-­Saxon, Protestant conception of America. This is an America that “Anglo” America finds hard to recognize or claim as its own, and yet, Orozco insists, it must if there is to be redemption for our collective future. The key to his constellation is the prophetic figure of Quetzalcoatl as the mythical prefiguration of postconquest America. The entire cycle is structured around his prophecy, with the Ancient western half dedicated to his enlightened reign and the Modern eastern half dedicated to the melancholic condition of the Americas after Cortés’s military and spiritual conquest (see figures i.6–­i.7). Orozco uses the physical structure of the library to simultaneously anchor the symbolic code of the mural and to critique it. For the break enacted by the reserve desk does not suture the mythical time of Quetzalcoatl into the historical time of the Christian conquest; rather, it calls attention to the disjunction between these two temporal modalities (see figure i.2). His critical approach to the architectural space stages repetition as a differential phenomenon. Those “repetitions with a difference” that are described at the outset of this chapter are not meant to convince us that there is an essential sameness between Quetzalcoatl and Christ or between “Ancient Human Sacrifice” and “Modern Human Sacrifice.” Rather, they are meant to signal the heterogeneity—​­the radical difference—​­of the past and to resituate that past in the present in order to disrupt, rather than confirm, the progressive claims of history. Ultimately, Orozco’s formal strategy partakes of allegory, but the Epic is not an allegorical image. It is a dialectical one in the Benjaminian sense. In constructing an epic of American civilization on the walls of a New England college library in the 1930s, Orozco played the part of critical philosopher, a heterodox material historian who both destroys myth and montages the fragments of his fallen world into an image that blasts the now-­time out of its temporal continuum. By telescoping the pre-­Cortesian past through the mechanized present, Orozco juxtaposes American modernity with

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American antiquity, radically undermining the progressive claims of popular nationalism as well as those of the utopian future proclaimed by the Marxist left. His Epic thereby figures an incendiary vision of American civilization as a catastrophe rather than a gleaming achievement, its culture a ruinous monument to barbarism rather than progressive enlightenment. Orozco’s Epic is not structured as a seamless movement through homogeneous time in which Quetzalcoatl’s sacrifice prefigures Cortés’s conquest and ultimately America’s redemption through Christ’s messianic return. Rather, he deploys the architectural structure of the reserve room to give form to the differential time of history, insisting upon an asymmetry between the past, present, and future that questions rather than confirms not only America’s claim to the indigenous myth but also the very grounds of sovereignty for the modern nation-­state. The intimations of a more equitable future tentatively suggested in the supplement do not endorse the Marxist promise of class liberation (see figure i.11). Rather, if there is redemption for the Americas, it resides in a critical reckoning with European conquest and settlement and its role in the melancholy politics of racialization in both “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­” American nation-­states. In the chapters that follow, I pursue the implications of Orozco’s formal procedure and the meanings it produces and encrypts. The chapters reconstitute America’s past, present, and future as a spatial image. Instead of a progressive story of national redemption, it eschews nostalgic indigenismo, heroic technological modernity, and a vulgar Marxist faith in liberation. Orozco’s Epic partakes of the fragile utopianism of a “messianic Marxism” in which the “category of anticipatory hope is cast upon [an oppressed] past . . . and the category of recollection is imposed upon the future.” It will be the task of the reader to determine for herself if my Benjaminian reading of Orozco’s Epic partakes of myth or redemption.

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chapter 2 COLONIAL MELANCHOLY AND THE MYTH OF QUETZALCOATL

The American continental races are now

The story of Quetzalcoatl’s return operates,

becoming aware of their own personality,

during the critical events of 1519, as an

as it emerges from two cultural currents—​

ironic critique of the official and normative

­the indigenous and the European. The

perception of order and destiny of the Aztec

great American myth of Quetzalcoatl is a

capital. . . . The Aztecs, striving to align

living one embracing both elements and

themselves with the tradition of legitimate

pointing clearly, by its prophetic nature,

power in Mexico symbolized by the Toltecs

to the responsibility shared equally by the

and to capture its precious influence, are

two Americas of creating here an authentic

themselves captured by forces within the

New World civilization.

tradition that subverted their claim to

—​­José Clemente Orozco, Prospectus for Dartmouth

authority.

Mural

—​­Davíd Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony

of Empire, 151

The great enthusiasm Orozco expressed in 1932 regarding the living myth of Quetzalcoatl was typical of Mexican artists, intellectuals, and politicians in the heady years of cultural renewal following the Mexican Revolution. While what Davíd Carrasco refers to as the mythologem of Quetzalcoatl was commonplace in the cultural discourses about Mexico’s history and its mestizo modernity, it was less familiar to U.S. audiences. Orozco’s mural, therefore, represents an introduction to the figure and the story for most viewers. And while his rendering of Quetzalcoatl partakes of many of the key features of the mythologem, it also deviates in important ways from convention.

In order to appreciate Orozco’s version of the Quetzalcoatl myth, I situate it within the historical and contemporary discourse on Quetzalcoatl in Mexico. Following Carrasco, I argue that in Orozco’s Epic the “buried irony” of the Quetzalcoatl mythologem resurfaces to trouble the claims to American antiquity of the postrevolutionary nation-­state. While Orozco’s more critical engagement with the Quetzalcoatl myth was informed by the cultural politics of postrevolutionary Mexico, as his statement in his Dartmouth prospectus indicates, his deployment of the myth was aimed at the “two Americas.” How or in what sense does Orozco’s approach to the Quetzalcoatl mythologem and its imminent critique offer insights for contemporary viewers about the “responsibility” “we” in U.S. America share with Mexicans for creating an “authentic New World civilization”? Orozco puts pressure on the “prophetic” nature of this myth. Rather than empathize with or reconstruct the legendary power of the Toltecs in order to legitimate the claims of the modern nation-­state, Orozco establishes a dialectical relationship with that past that ironizes its imperial phantasmagoria. He suggests that our access to the mythical past has been irrevocably sundered. The myth of Quetzalcoatl’s return, therefore, cannot bridge the historical temporalities of pre-­and postconquest America. Instead, he holds them apart and thereby asks the viewer to consider the relationship our present has forged with the Mesoamerican past. In so doing he establishes the conditions for his melancholic critique of the postcolonial nation-­state revealing the extent to which it is constituted through the colonial relation and making demands upon the viewer to grasp the past “the way it would have to be imagined at any of its moments in accordance with the idea of redemption.” 1 Quetzalcoatl: The Myth, the Man, the Prophecy

The myth of Quetzalcoatl has a long and much-­debated life in Mexican cultural history. References to Quetzalcoatl appear across Mesoamerican culture groups from as early as the second century ad up to and beyond the Spanish conquest of central Mexico in 1519. In Mesoamerican visual culture, Quetzalcoatl can be found on pyramids, in sculptures, in frescoes, and in a few of the surviving preconquest codices. But most accounts of Quetzalcoatl derive from postconquest sources, such as Cortés’s letters to Charles V and Spanish chronicles of the conquest, or the proto-­ethnographic encyclopedias undertaken by the Franciscans, such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (ca. 1519–­40).2 While there are references to Quetzalcoatl in Mayan sources (where he appears with a variety of Quiché names), I will

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focus on his presence in central Mexican, largely Aztec or Mixtec-­informed sources, for it was the Aztec appropriation of the Toltecan dynasty—​­within which Quetzalcoatl figures significantly—​­that most profoundly impacted the postconquest constructions of the myth that Orozco knew.3 In visual and literary documents that derive from central Mexican sources, Quetzalcoatl appears variously as a creator god, a priest, and an enlightened ruler (both mythical and historic). As a creator god he is associated with the wind god (Éhecatl), the plumed serpent, and Venus, the cosmic figure associated with both the morning and evening star. In creator cosmogonies, he is often associated with the Divine Twins or paired in complementary roles with either Tezcatlipoca (jaguar or god of magic) or Huitzilopochtli (god of war). Susan Gillespie notes that Quetzalcoatl is, therefore, a “boundary marker” within Mesoamerican cosmogony and notions of divine rule.4 She reminds us that as a “plumed serpent,” Quetzalcoatl represented the unification of two generally differentiated states—​­the air/​­wind/​­bird with the chthonic/​­earthly/​­serpent. Therefore, feathered serpents often appear as boundary markers on pyramids.5 In broader terms, this opposition represents the mediation between the threatening regions of the netherworld with those of the cosmos, or the realm of the human and the realm of the gods. Regarding his identity as a mediating, boundary figure, Gillespie recalls: “he was a twin, a creator deity opposed/​­united with Tezcatlipoca, a mediator who separated the cosmos into earth and sky. He thus appeared in the liminal time between the original creation and the peopling of the earth. As Venus, morning and evening star, he appeared at the junction between night and day. And in the histories he was first and last king of the Toltecs, appearing in the era that existed between the cosmogony and the age of the Aztecs.” 6 This last attribute refers us to Quetzalcoatl’s appearance as the semidivine ruler of the fabled city of Tollan, the original earthly city and center of the Toltec civilization that, according to Aztec lore, existed between the creation of the universe and the creation of the fifth sun of their historical empire. The Aztecs adhered to a cyclical conception of time that originated in four cycles of creation, or “suns,” that rose and then collapsed before the creation of their contemporary world in the “fifth,” or “movement,” “sun.” 7 Human time was likewise conceived of as occurring in cycles of regeneration and destruction according to a fifty-­two year “century.” 8 Because of this cyclical conception of time, certain years within the cycle were associated with particular events. For example, the year One Rabbit (ce tochtli) was considered a famine year, or, for our purposes, the year One Reed (ce acatl) was associated with “the east, with dawn, with fertility, and with feathered serpents.” 9

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Dynastic time was also understood according to these cycles. The Aztecs associated their political authority with the Toltec dynasties; therefore, depending on the years of their rule, Aztec kings would align themselves with the historical cycles of the rulers of Tollan. “Since the Toltecs were believed to have formed the first civilization,” Gillespie explains, “the Mexica Aztecs, like other Mesoamerican peoples, linked their own culture and right to rule to a Toltec origin in order to be endowed with a legitimating antiquity and ultimate truth.” 10 The Toltecs were credited with the invention of agriculture and the cultivation of maize, the advancement of the arts, in particular stone carving and metalworking, and the development of higher mathematics, science, and astronomy. For this reason, in Nahuatl, the term toltec refers to a skilled craftsman. Tollan—​­meaning “great city”—​ ­consequently became the model for the ideal organization of urban space and sacred power throughout central Mexico. Davíd Carrasco argues that subsequent cities, most notably the Aztec’s imperial capital of Tenochtitlán, were modeled after this fabled place in an attempt to harness the sacred authority of the Toltecs and Tollan.11 The Toltec’s achievements were attributed to the enlightened rule of the priest-­king Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl (ce acatl = One Reed, a day name; Topiltzin = “Our Prince,” a title; Quetzalcoatl = quetzal feather + serpent, or “Feathered Serpent”), who appears as both the first and last king of the Toltec dynasty.12 There are many versions of the Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl legend, but generally he is characterized as an austere and benevolent ruler who banned the practice of human sacrifice. Various legends recount his having been tricked by rival gods (often Tezcatlipoca) into debauchery and sexual wantonness, resulting in his disgraced banishment. He is said to have departed, in some accounts on a raft of serpents, to the east, whereupon he prophesied his return, in the year One Reed, to reclaim his rule and to destroy the civilization that rejected him. Given Mesoamerican conceptions of cyclical time and dynastic rule, the last Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s reign was necessarily associated with the destruction of his city and his death or exile. The Aztec kings construed themselves as successors to the Toltec kingship; therefore, over time, Moctezuma I and II were aligned symbolically with Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl as figures who marked the end of cycles—​­the Aztec and Toltec ages, respectively. However, as many scholars argue, there is little evidence that the prophecy of Quetzalcoatl’s return predates the conquest. In fact, the first reference to this prophecy seems to be in Cortés’s second letter to Charles V (1520), in which he claims to reproduce Moctezuma’s abdication speech, in which the defeated king identifies Cortés with the return of an ancestral ruler from the east.

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While Cortés does not name this ruler, his account formed the foundation for the subsequent claim that the Aztecs mistook Cortés for the prophesied return of Quetzalcoatl. Therefore, the conventional association between Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl’s prophetic return and Cortés’s conquest did not cohere until the sixteenth century, when surviving Aztecs and Spaniards alike integrated the various preconquest legends associated with Quetzalcoatl into an eschatological story line in order to explain and justify the destruction and trauma of conquest.13 Davíd Carrasco agrees with these scholars that most aspects of the Quetzalcoatl legend were elaborated after the conquest by indigenous and Spanish stakeholders alike. However, he insists that there is “ample proof that the belief in a returning king antedated the appearance of Europeans.” 14 Consequently, he suggests that Cortés’s arrival and the sacking of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, revived rather than spurred the invention of the “mythologem . . . of Quetzalcoatl’s flight from Tollan and return to Tenochtitlan.” 15 For Carrasco, the Aztec appropriation of Toltec creativity and political authority, both of which had “Quetzalcoatl at its core,” had a “double edged influence.” 16 It served to guide and stabilize the Aztec city and to legitimate the Aztecs’ self-­proclaimed destiny as an imperial power. But it also expressed “anxiety that their authority was illegitimate and that their city would be subject to a lethal blow from the gods.” 17 This “buried irony” surfaced with a “vengeance,” he argues, when Quetzalcoatl’s return was applied to the conquest.18 It is in this sense that he characterizes the story of Quetzalcoatl’s return as an “ironic critique” of empire. “The Aztecs,” he argues, “striving to align themselves with the tradition of legitimate power in Mexico symbolized by the Toltecs and to capture its precious influence, are themselves captured by forces within the tradition that subverted their claim to authority.” 19 While those sources dating to the immediate postconquest period and informed by participants—​­both European and indigenous—​­purport to provide us with information about the preconquest, indigenous understanding of Quetzalcoatl, later sources elaborated upon this information, confabulating new features of the story that served the interests of the colonial regime and the postcolonial nation-­state. The creole construction of an Occidentalized Quetzalcoatl reflects similar anxieties about authority and legitimacy on the part of the conquering Spanish, whose millenarian zeal and Christian faith required the reworking of indigenous history and myth to bring it in line with Europe’s precontact conceptions of human history and religious dogma. In this sense, Gesa Mackenthun insists that the myth of Quetzalcoatl “owes its existence to a strange similarity between two ‘nomadic’ societies and respective cultural narratives for legitimating imperialist action.” 20

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Both the imperial Aztecs and imperial Spain understood that political domination was secured by generating “‘knowledge’ of subject people’s culture and the infiltration of their religious beliefs,” both secured their national lineage and identity through a “series of strategic repressions of political guilt,” and both consolidated their power through “the tactical adaptation of underground myths,” like that of Quetzalcoatl’s return.21 It was the identification of Quetzalcoatl as a New World prophet that informed the nineteenth-­century liberal discourse about Quetzalcoatl as an exemplary and nonindigenous Indian. The colonial and subsequent liberal construction of Quetzalcoatl as a proto-­Christian saint had a profound impact on the postrevolutionary construction of Quetzalcoatl, a construction that Orozco both embraced and critiqued in his Epic. The most significant confabulation for our purpose is the conflation of Quetzalcoatl with St. Thomas the Apostle. From the moment of contact, many Spaniards noted images of the cross in Mesoamerican visual art as well as similarities between Christian and native religious practice. These observations, along with the Christian belief that Jesus’s Apostles had spread the gospel to all nations, prompted clergy and Spanish apologists to speculate that one of the Apostles had preceded the conquest and proselytized to the Indians. St. Thomas emerged as the most likely candidate because apocryphal texts claimed he had evangelized the Indies.22 The idea that an Apostle had arrived, encouraged an ideal civilization, and left fit nicely with indigenous stories of Quetzalcoatl’s enlightened reign as well as those that chronicled his rejection and departure. Moreover, St. Thomas and Quetzalcoatl shared certain attributes—​­both were understood as “twins” to deities and both were said to be sculptors.23 Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the association between Quetzalcoatl and St. Thomas became official. And with this official embrace, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was transformed from a pagan man-­god, at times associated with bloodthirsty deeds, into the chaste, monotheistic, peace-­ loving, Occidentalized prophet, St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl. In his guise as an Old World saint, Quetzalcoatl was increasingly characterized as foreign (i.e., not indigenous) and as an apotheosized white, bearded leader who banished human sacrifice and taught the peoples of the New World how to live like Christians. However, as the story goes, these people rejected his enlightened path, and the Aztecs’ failed evangelization—​­particularly evident in the practice of human sacrifice—​­was conjured as cause for the punishment of conquest. Cortés’s arrival in 1519, which coincided with the symbolically loaded year of One Reed in the cyclical Aztec calendar, became construed as Quetzalcoatl’s prophetic return. Cortés, the prototypical

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foreigner with light skin, beard, and unfamiliar vestments, arrived on American shores over water from the east, thereby conforming to certain key features of the year One Reed associated with the attributes of Quetzalcoatl. “The prophecy of return,” writes Gillespie “was not a pre-­Hispanic belief but became most important after the conquest,” when both the colonial Spanish and the colonized Aztecs were invested in the salvation represented by a post-­Aztec Quetzalcoatl.24 For the Spanish, Cortés was the New World messiah. But for many colonial Aztecs, the prophecy held out the promise of a future messiah. For them, Quetzalcoatl’s promised return helped to foster revitalization movements in the face of unfathomable and prolonged genocide.25 This doubled appeal accounts for the strength of the Quetzalcoatl mythologem across the centuries and helps to clarify why both twentieth-­ century political elites and Marxist indigenists, like Diego Rivera, would continue to promote the Christianized Occidental vision of Quetzalcoatl when promoting a messianic vision of the future. The Postrevolutionary Quetzalcoatl: Messianic Politics and Indigenism

When Orozco painted his Epic at Dartmouth College, the Quetzalcoatl myth was enjoying yet another renaissance, spurred by the publication of Manuel Gamio’s excavations at Teotihuacán in 1921 and the subsequent promotion of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl as an enlightened teacher and prophet by the postrevolutionary political elite.26 Like the Aztecs and Spanish before them, the nascent postrevolutionary regime rooted their political authority in autochthonous antiquity, appropriating Aztec constructions of Toltec achievements to legitimate their political agenda. As Itzel Rodríguez Mortellaro points out, Gamio’s identification of Teotihuacán as the location of the fabled Tollan and his focus on Quetzalcoatl helped legitimate the modern state’s centralization of political power in the Federal District while also providing a model for the outward emanation of civilization from a sacred center.27 Following Gamio’s lead, Minister of Public Education José Vasconcelos characterized Quetzalcoatl as a messianic leader, emphasizing his role as a teacher and prophet along with his achievements in the arts and industry. Vasconcelos grafted the figure of St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl onto his own ministry, equating his initiatives in public education with the spiritual leadership and civilizing capacity of the man-­god in the ancient world. Vasconcelos went so far as to offer the supposed rejection of Quetzalcoatl’s ban on human sacrifice by the Aztecs under the barbaric influence of Huitzilopochtli as a

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warning to his cadres of rural teachers, calling upon them to take up Quetzalcoatl’s civilizing mandate in order to ensure that Huitzilopochtli would not triumph again.28 Rodríguez Mortellaro recalls that the postrevolutionary renaissance of Quetzalcoatl “took place in a political climate governed by the omnipresence of liberal thought,” with its traditional emphasis on “education, social progress, and economic development.” 29 As part of this liberal agenda, postrevolutionary political elites promoted racial and cultural integration as a necessary step toward the modernization of a predominantly rural and heterogeneous population. Indigenous antiquity was valuable for its ability to provide an autochthonous origin from which a shared culture could be built, but its stigmatic associations with human sacrifice and the impoverished and degraded state of contemporary indigenous populations would have to be remediated for any cultural integration to proceed. Thus, we find multiple calls for the “Mexicanization of the Indian” as an answer to the nation’s much-­lamented “Indian problem.” 30 The Occidentalized St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl thus proved to be expedient. As both an exemplary, and therefore nonindigenous, Indian and the progenitor of a pre-­Hispanic Golden Age, he provided an ideal emblem for the postrevolutionary liberal cause.

Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl Orozco’s representation of the Quetzalcoatl myth spans the west wing of the north wall. It consists of three large panels—​­“The Coming of Quetzalcoatl,” “The Pre-­Columbian Golden Age,” and “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl.” This sequence is framed by two smaller panels—​­“Aztec Warriors” and “The Prophecy”—​­located over two doorways at either end of the wall (see figure i.6). And it follows the three panels along the west wall: “Migration,” “Snake and Spears,” and “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (see figure i.5). In keeping with the mythologem of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, Orozco depicts Quetzalcoatl as both a historical leader and a deified prophet. In “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” panel, he appears in his guise as the semidivine ruler of the Toltecs emerging at the crossing of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon in the ancient city of Teotihuacán (figure 2.1). Recalling the Occidentalization of Quetzalcoatl, he appears as a blond, white, bearded man with powerful hands and all-­seeing blue eyes. As a boundary marker, he mediates between the cosmos and the human realm. Orozco bisects the composition horizontally to demarcate the two. Along the top, pagan gods line up behind Quetzalcoatl. Their distorted, unnaturally hued bodies and grotesque expressions contrast with Quetzalcoatl’s idealized “white” visage. While Orozco’s rendering of the pagan pantheon is 86  CHAPTER 2

unconventional, he endows each figure with an attribute that has helped to secure their identification. Nonetheless, it bears noting that even a viewer familiar with the gods of Mesoamerica would have trouble identifying Orozco’s figures. Some of the iconography derives from literal descriptions or illustrations from the codices. But unlike Rivera, Orozco does not adhere to pre-­Hispanic visual codes. Instead, he combines motifs from the myths with an esoteric color symbolism, likely drawn from Masonism and Western symbolic systems. Scanning left to right, we see Xipe Totec, the god of greed, a dull pink figure draped in the skins of his victims; Tezcatlipoca, the god of magic, is gray with a black and gold mask and feet of smoking mirrors; Tlaloc, the god of rain and storm, appears a sickly green. He has coiled serpents where his face should be and he roils the sky with lightning. Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death, is a smoky black and wears the grimace of an eviscerated skull; Huitzilopochtli, god of war, is a bright cobalt blue and also wears a striped mask. He displays feet of feathers in keeping with stories of his immaculate birth. And finally, Huehueteotl, the god of fire, emanates a rosy glow and emerges from the Pico de Orizaba. The pagan gods are arrayed in a flattened space demarcating it from the recessional space depicted below.

figure 2.1. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 5), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.5.

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figure 2.2. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Pre-­ Columbian Golden Age” (Panel 6), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.6.

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Quetzalcoatl, with his heavily modeled arms and face, projects into the viewer’s space. He draws our eye up from the human scene in the lower register toward the celestial drama above. Orozco establishes a logical pictorial space in the lower half of the composition, where a low brick wall serves as an orthogonal that guides our vision from the left-­hand corner of the composition toward the crossing of the pyramids. He locates Quetzalcoatl there, at the vanishing point of his perspectival system. Following these sight lines, the movement of our gaze reinforces the concept of Quetzalcoatl’s ascent, as it is first drawn toward the man-­god by the low wall and then directed upward by the jutting lines and expanding form of Quetzalcoatl’s white gown. It is as if Quetzalcoatl literally expands outward as he shoots up. Despite the juxtaposition of two incompatible perspectival systems, the entire scene is balanced and anchored by Quetzalcoatl’s looming form. As an image of nascent enlightenment, “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” exploits the visual pleasure associated with rational space in Western visual culture to suggest the emergence of an ideal civilization. Orozco reinforces the connection between the earthly and cosmic realms iconographically as well. Quetzalcoatl, with his raised hands, appears to command a slumbering man lying across the middle ground to awaken. Behind this sleeping figure, two

others toil with their eyes closed, perhaps indicating a potential yet to be released. The composition is framed on the right by a low building that shelters a group of Toltecans engaged in conversation. The following scene, “The Pre-­Columbian Golden Age,” speaks to Quetzalcoatl’s associations with the cultivation of maize, Toltecan achievements in the arts, and advances in astronomy (figure 2.2). Three dark-­skinned men stage a progression from settlement, the practice of agriculture and manual labor, to the development of elite forms of artistic labor, and finally to more abstract forms of cognitive labor.31 The first figure bends forward to till the land; the next kneels upright while carving a stele; and the third reaches toward the heavens, his eyes closed as though responding to an inner vision. Despite their generalization and Orozco’s expressive handling of form, these figures reveal the artist’s academic training. He models their bodies, recalling the heroic musculature favored by nineteenth-­century academicians. Moreover, their indigenous features, in particular the profiles of the second and third figures, have been aestheticized, allowing for a powerful but orderly and pacific depiction of ancient Americans.32 In “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl,” the man-­god’s beard has grown wild and he bears the aspect of a wizened prophet (figure 2.3). He stares toward

figure 2.3. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 7), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.7.

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the heavens, his face twisted in agony at the humiliation of his betrayal and exile. This final panel contravenes the balanced visual quality of the preceding scenes as Orozco cleaves the composition vertically. A cluster of grimacing and masked humans huddle and gesture violently to the viewer’s left. Their leaning pyramidal form echoes the raking lines of the sacrificial altar behind them. Unlike those in “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” scene, this pyramid, with its squared-­off top, has likely been drawn from depictions of human sacrifice in the Florentine Codex.33 Thereby, Orozco alludes to Quetzalcoatl’s ban of human sacrifice, linking his downfall with the return of this barbaric practice. To the right of the image, Quetzalcoatl’s angular body moves amid a sea of writhing serpents as he points dramatically east, toward the arrival of armored conquistadors. Orozco’s expressive tendencies are most evident in this final scene. The steady cadence of figures that established a progressive movement forward in the prior episodes is here violently disrupted. In the “Departure” panel, the compositional lines pull the eye in opposite directions, like a rubber band that has snapped. While the castigating mob inclines, atavistically, toward the barbaric past, Quetzalcoatl’s long, thrusting arm sends our gaze careening toward the Spanish onslaught, in accordance with the claim that the Spanish conquest was punishment for the Aztecs’ rejection of Quetzalcoatl’s Golden Age. The sequence of panels dedicated to Quetzalcoatl dramatizes the ruler’s transformation from semidivine king to prophet while intimating his return as the white, bearded god, Cortés. In the shift from the arrival of the man-­god to his departure as prophet, Orozco employs the metaphor of daylight and nightfall: Quetzalcoatl, emanating an aureole of light, rises like the sun, illuminating Toltecan civilization and then departs with the fall of night, thereby recalling his association with Venus, the morning and evening star, and his role as mediator between day and night. The metaphorics of light also characterize his disgraced departure as the end of an enlightened epoch and the prefiguration of a dark age for American civilization. And as I argue in chapter 4, the metaphorics of light return in the supplement, whose greenish hue signals a twilight state after the purgatorial setting of the Modern sequence. As a Mexican citizen and postrevolutionary artist and intellectual, Orozco would have been familiar with postconquest accounts of the Quetzalcoatl myth. Moreover, he would have had any number of popular representations of the man-­god to draw from given the ubiquitous presence of Quetzalcoatl imagery in state propaganda, commercial advertisements, and political car-

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toons during the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, his rival and peer, Rivera, had completed the “The Ancient Indian World” portion of his National Palace mural in 1929, where Quetzalcoatl figures frequently (see figure 1.1). It is perhaps for this reason that Orozco emphasized the “original” nature of his rendering of the myth while at work on the cycle. In his notes from a conversation with the artist from May of 1932, Dartmouth art professor Artemas Packard recounts in an aside that “it is to be understood that there is no literary or other record of the exact implications of this ancient myth of Quetzacoatl [sic] and that this interpretation grows out of the inspired ideal­ ism and creative imagination of Orozco. There is no paralele [sic] to it in existence. It is in every sense an original work not a work derived or imitated from any other man.” 34 While Orozco’s visualization of the Quetzalcoatl myth is unique to his artistic and political sensibilities, his iconography can be traced to a number of sources, some specific to Mexico and others from the broader Western artistic tradition. Orozco’s characterization of Quetzalcoatl as a white, bearded god conforms to conventional descriptions of St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl as well as to the popular representations of Quetzalcoatl circulating in political and commercial print culture in Mexico. However, the particular appearance of Orozco’s Occidentalized Quetzalcoatl suggests the influence of several sources to which he would have had access in Baker Library’s extensive collection. For example, Gamio’s three-­volume publication on his excavations of Teotihuacán, La Población del Valle de Teotihuacán (1922), entered the collection in 1930.35 There he would have encountered not only images of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon as well as the Temple of Quetzalcoatl but also Gamio’s diffusionist theory of culture and his argument that this ancient city was the historical site of Tollan. Orozco’s depiction of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon in “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” panel was no doubt informed by Gamio’s illustrations. Nahuatl fragments relating to Quetzalcoatl, from Sahagún’s influential Florentine Codex, had been recently transcribed into lyric poems by John Hubert Cornyn in his The Song of Quetzalcoatl (1931). This publication, also in Dartmouth’s collection, included line etchings of the pyramids at Teotihuacán, including the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, details of the “wind god” in his guise as a plumed serpent, along with excerpts from the illustrations in the Florentine Codex depicting Quetzalcoatl, Aztec eagle and “tiger” warriors, and gods of necromancy.36 Orozco’s imagery, especially the eagle and jaguar (“tiger”) warriors and the stone effigy of the plumed serpent in the “Aztec Warriors” panel, bear a strong resemblance to the illustrations in this

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figure 2.4. Illustration of images from the Florentine Codex of Títlacáhuan (the necro­mancer), from John Hubert Cornyn, The Song of Quetzalcoatl (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1931), 105. figure 2.5. Illustration of Quetzalcoatl from Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Lives of Celebrated American Indians (Boston: George C. Rand, 1843), 86.

book. Likewise, Orozco seems to have taken inspiration from an image of Títlacáhuan, the necromancer, when painting Tetcatzlipoca and Tlaloc in “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” (figure 2.4). Their striped faces, viewed in profile, while heavily stylized, are reminiscent of this illustration. Samuel Goodrich’s Lives of the Celebrated American Indians from 1849, in which Quetzalcoatl’s reign is described as a “Golden Age” and his achievements in the arts, religion, science, and politics are enumerated, may also have played a role.37 The frontispiece to the Quetzalcoatl entry presents the divine king in the guise of Moses, complete with a staff, long white hair and beard, and flowing robes (figure 2.5). While the figure is situated within a volcanic landscape to indicate his American location, his Caucasian features belie Quetzalcoatl’s indigenous status. These features are all the more conspicuous in that an Indian couple with dark skin, feathered headdresses,

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figure 2.6. William Blake, 1757–­1827, Job Rebuked by His Friends, recto, eighteenth century. The Morgan Library & Museum. 2001.72. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan (1837–­ 1913) in 1909.

and loosely draped cloaks accompanies him. Their placement among the flora contrasts with Quetzalcoatl’s more commanding full-­length pose. This clear visual hierarchy reinforces the trope of Quetzalcoatl as a foreigner who brought civilization to a savage people and land. Goodrich’s characterization of Quetzalcoatl as a New World Moses is significant, for not only did it draw upon the Occidentalized vision of St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl, but it also resonated with Orozco’s interest in esoteric visual languages derived from Masonic, theosophic, and Rosicrucian sources. In an unpublished manuscript, Patricia Martínez Gutiérrez argues that the placement of the pagan gods next to “scenes of labor, order, and edification” suggests theosophical principles of spiritual evolution.38 González Mello elaborates by noting that the iconography and color symbolism of the gods depicted in “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” can be interpreted according to Masonic principles based in alchemy: lead = death; white = purification; red = sulfur; and so on. In his reading, “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” encodes a hermetic message for initiates in which Quetzalcoatl’s reign models the triumph of the spirit.39 Likewise, González Mello argues that Orozco was influenced by William Blake’s illustrations for his Book of Job (ca. 1827) (figure 2.6). He enumerates COLONIAL MELANCHOLY AND THE MYTH OF QUETZALCOATL  93

several formal borrowings from Blake’s illustrations, most notably the physical similarity between Blake’s Job and Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl. Orozco’s understanding of Blake’s work was, in turn, informed by Emily Hamblen, whose Interpretation of William Blake’s Job (1930) characterized the figure of Job as a decadent priest who undergoes a transformation to become the prophetic leader of a nation.40 Thus, he argues, from the point of view of esoteric philosophy, Quetzalcoatl represents the unification of duality. “The rational and intuitive qualities,” he concludes, “are brought together at the end of history in the figure of the illuminated prophet.” 41 Orozco found inspiration in Hamblen’s occult reading of Job because of his desire to emphasize the prophetic nature of the Quetzalcoatl myth for the foundation of a “New World civilization” in the Americas. Recall that in the prospectus he furnished the college (prior to beginning the Epic) he argued that the “great American myth of Quetzalcoatl, by its prophetic nature,” points to the “responsibility of the two Americas of creating here an authentic New World civilization.” 42 Thus, the “duality” that Quetzalcoatl unifies might be interpreted as the boundary between the Old (“rational”) and New (“intuitive”) Worlds, between European and indigenous culture. The myth of Quetzalcoatl, and especially his confabulated status as a New World prophet who foretells the arrival of Cortés, serves, therefore, as the ultimate vehicle for visualizing an “authentic New World civilization,” one that is both indigenous and European without strictly being either. Orozco’s characterization of Quetzalcoatl in the prospectus was largely a rearticulation of the argument he made in his 1929 manifesto, “New World, New Races, and New Art,” wherein he began by calling for an “art of the New World” that was rooted neither in “the traditions of the Old World nor in the aboriginal traditions represented by the remains of our ancient indian [sic] peoples.” 43 As the title suggests, Orozco’s conception of New World art was predicated on the racial trope of the mestizo (the so-­called New Races). However, by rejecting the “servil[e] copy[ing]” of indigenous “ruins or its present folklore” Orozco’s conception of mestizaje aligns with the essentially assimilationist formulation of racial and cultural hybridity that Vasconcelos articulated in his 1924 treatise, The Cosmic Race.44 Like Vasconcelos, Orozco’s conception of mestizo culture, while ostensibly praising racial hybridity, rejects indigenism as an atavistic impulse. However, whereas Vasconcelos advocated for a neoclassical art that integrated decorative motifs from ancient and popular indigenous culture, Orozco insists that neither the “indigenous remains” of the past nor “its present folklore” should be “loot[ed]” by artists of the present.45 Rather, he promotes the “architecture of Manhattan”

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as the avatar of a New World art and civilization.46 Calling it a “new value,” he writes that it has “nothing to do with Egyptian pyramids, with the Paris Opera, with the Giralda of Seville, or with Saint Sofia any more than it has to do with the maya [sic] palaces of Chichen-­Itza or with the ‘pueblos’ of Arizona.” 47 Modern architecture is an important trope throughout the Epic. However, for now I focus on the extent to which Orozco’s esoteric depiction of the Quetzalcoatl myth does or does not partake of the messianism of postrevolutionary indigenism. Orozco’s blending of ethnographic imagery derived from sources engaged with Mesoamerican culture, and esoteric symbolism derived from hermetic Western visual culture reflects what González Mello has argued was the “private language” of public art in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s.48 Mello reveals that political and cultural power in Mexico during and after the revolution was concentrated among members of secret societies, and that Mexican murals are filled with Masonic and Rosicrucian symbols. The majority of murals from the 1920s up to the early 1930s had two messages. “One,” he claims, “was didactic, open, understandable: exoteric.” 49 “The other,” he continues, “secret, understandable only to those who were in on the secret: esoteric.” 50 Both messages were sincere; one did not negate the other. Rather, the esoteric message merely spoke in code to a restricted public of political and intellectual leaders, enhancing the didactic exoteric one available to the public at large. For González Mello the reliance on what to us appears as an irrational and anachronistic occult symbolism was part of an ethical project to address the challenging questions facing the new cultural and political administrators of the postrevolutionary state. The turn toward a private language was part of a broader desire to forge a radical visual language that encoded within it signs—​­both private and public—​­of its subversion of the prerevolutionary status quo, whether conceived of as political or cultural. Many scholars have noted that the national themes treated by muralists largely continued rather than broke with the concerns of artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to the extent that muralism was successful in its subversion of Mexican culture, it succeeded because it was political. Muralism, he writes, “did not seek to establish a purely moral (or racial) position” on the margins of official culture and power “but rather to build a hegemony.” 51 To understand what González Mello means, we return to Rivera’s National Palace mural and to his depiction of Quetzalcoatl in the scenes dedicated to “The Ancient Indian World” on the north wall.

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Rivera’s Quetzalcoatl Rivera’s rendering of the Quetzalcoatl myth is far more ethnographic than Orozco’s. His imagery reveals his intensive study of central Mexican culture, available at the time largely through postconquest codices as excavations of ancient sites and federal and private collecting of objects from these sites was still under way. Rivera’s interest in central Mexican art and culture corresponds with a long-­standing official desire to locate postindependence political power in Mexico City. Liberal regimes from the nineteenth century onward located the seat of the federal government in the historic center of Mexico City, where they could draw symbolic power from the preceding imperial Aztec capital Tenochtitlan as well as the colonial administration of New Spain. This fascination with the cultural authority of the Toltecs and Aztecs resulted in the relative neglect and subordination of southern and coastal Mexican sites by the federal government. Important Mayan and Olmec sites were largely excavated by foreign scholars or entities working in conjunction with municipal or state authorities, such as the Carnegie Institute’s reconstruction of Chichén Itzá at the behest of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the radical governor of Yucatán (1922–­24).52 Thus, the privileging of central Mexican sources in Rivera’s work reflects his complicity with the hegemonic designs of his patron, the postrevolutionary political regime. In “The Ancient Indian World” (see figure 1.1) Rivera depicts Quetzalcoatl three times within a single space. At the top left of the arch we see Quetzalcoatl emerge from a volcano in his guise as a feathered serpent with bifurcated tongue. This image, while stylized, borrows from images of feathered serpents found in the codices, such as the Codex Telleriano-­Remensis (ca. mid-­ sixteenth century). In the center of the image, Rivera depicts Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl as a white, bearded man-­god in his sacred aspect as a spiritual leader administering to acolytes. His clothing, staff, and conch-­shell breastplate all derive from depictions of Quetzalcoatl in the Florentine Codex. However, his Orientalized features and cross-­legged pose are more characteristic of images of the seated Buddha. At the top right of the arch, Quetzalcoatl rides to the east on a serpent raft. Rivera again quotes the Florentine Codex in his characterization of Quetzalcoatl’s clothing, headdress, and staff. His serpent raft, while difficult to source, is likely derived from images of leaders on litters in the central Mexican codices.53 These three explicit references to the Quetzalcoatl myth recall his cosmogonic status as a creator deity, his identity as a semidivine priest-­king and ruler of Tollan, and his prophetic departure to the east. Like Orozco, whose Quetzalcoatl sequence incorporates these multiple associations into a linear movement from ascent to exile, Rivera presents different features 96  CHAPTER 2

of the myth as moving from left to right, implying his transformation from creator to earthly ruler to departing prophet. He, too, orients the events of the Quetzalcoatl story toward the east corresponding with the direction of the man-­god’s mythical departure. However, Rivera’s figures face away from the trajectory of the mural’s action, suggesting a lack of continuity between the mythical story of Quetzalcoatl and the historical narrative that unwinds on the west wall. The various representations of Quetzalcoatl also exist in the same space, differing from the linear movement of Orozco’s sequence in favor of simultaneity. Rivera was emulating the representational practices of some Mesoamerican pictorial genres, where spatial orientation within the image is privileged over indications of time.54 Thematically, the Buddha-­like Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl anchors the scene, as all of the earthly action radiates from his still form. To his left, indigenous peoples cultivate maize and convert it into tortillas. Musicians play drums and blow conch shells while an array of artisans paint, carve, weave, and sew. The peaceful order and creativity of these vignettes slowly comes undone as one scans the image from right to left. Thus the trajectory of history moves in the direction opposite the trajectory of myth. As Quetzalcoatl departs, Mesoamerican society moves toward decline and conquest. Exploitation takes the place of cooperation as warriors replace artists and engage in violent combat. The bounty of the land becomes accumulated into stockpiles rather than dispersed as food. Bundled into large baskets, it is lugged by enslaved peoples and offered as tribute to armed warriors atop a sacrificial pyramid. As one approaches the large west wall, images of exploitation in the ancient world set the stage for the arrival of the Spanish, who capitalize on tensions between the Aztecs and their subject populations to enable their conquest of central Mexico. Situated at the crossroads between scenes of peace and creativity and those dedicated to war and subordination, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl functions as a visual, conceptual, and mytho-­historical hinge between the enlightened, mythical Toltec civilization and the exploitative historic Aztec Empire that appropriated it. The mural thereby suggests that all was ideal in the ancient Indian world until members of the Aztec ruling elite began to exploit subject populations. Rivera’s depiction of the abuses of the Aztec Empire is tepid, however, when compared with those enacted by the Spanish on the west wall. Rivera’s Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, like Orozco’s, is a white, bearded man-­god: an Occidentalized Indian. Depicting an official image of indigenous Mexico, he thereby sidesteps the “Indian problem,” providing an idealized autochthonous origin upon which the postrevolutionary state could base both its claim to autonomy and its liberal agenda for modernization.

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Thus, through Quetzalcoatl’s Toltec leadership, Rivera’s mural enabled the postrevolutionary political regime to articulate itself to the powerful central authority of the Aztecs while distancing itself from its barbarity. Rivera’s depiction of Quetzalcoatl at the National Palace was informed by the esoteric sentiments of political and intellectual elites like Gamio and Vasconcelos. At the time, Rivera was a member of a local chapter of the Rosicrucian brotherhood called the Quetzalcoatl Logia.55 This secret society included intellectuals like Rivera and Gamio as well as political leaders like Plutarco Elías Calles, the Jefe Máximo of Mexican politics and the patron of Rivera’s mural. The members of such secret societies viewed themselves as the exalted spiritual leaders of a new cycle in Mexican history. And in this sense, they identified themselves with the visionary and civilizing attributes associated with St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl in his postrevolutionary guise as one of Vasconcelos’s exalted teacher-­prophets. This accounts for the Buddha-­like rendering of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl at the National Palace. For the Buddha, along with Quetzalcoatl, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, and Plato, was one of the “universal spiritual leaders” that Vasconcelos had carved onto relief panels in the four corners of the first patio at the new headquarters of his Ministry of Public Education.56 While Quetzalcoatl was the only pre-­Hispanic figure that Vasconcelos permitted into his “universal” pantheon of wise men, he was admitted as St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl, the “first educator in this zone of the world,” not as a pagan man-­god.57 Rivera’s rendering of the Quetzalcoatl myth at the National Palace had both a public and a private message. As an Occidentalized Indian, he represented a heroic vision of the nation’s indigenous past that served the mestizo nation-­building process. Likewise, he modeled the kind of Mexican that liberal politicians hoped to create through the civilizing agenda of social integration. And for a powerful minority he served as an avatar of the kind of visionary leadership they offered. For them, Rivera’s Quetzalcoatl was a “spiritual guide . . . [the] founder of a cycle of messianic leadership that gave to the national epic a spiritual transcendence and a sentiment of predestination.” 58 Rivera, like Vasconcelos, imagined his own role in the postrevolutionary state to be like that of Quetzalcoatl, an enlightened prophet leading the people toward his “vision of the truth.” 59 When Rivera completed his National Palace cycle in 1935, Calles was no longer controlling the presidency. The more leftist Lázaro Cárdenas had wrestled political power from Calles and his proxies, and Rivera was endeavoring to distance himself from his prior involvement with esoteric organizations in order to gain the approval of members of the Communist Party

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(Rivera had been expelled in 1929). Thus, the south wall, depicting “Mexico Today and Tomorrow” (see figure 1.3), is more explicitly Marxist than the imagery along the north and west walls. It is on the south wall that Rivera painted a portrait of Karl Marx holding up a passage of the Communist Manifesto declaring that “the entire history of human society to the present is the history of class struggle.” Moreover, in this panel he takes aim at Calles, depicting him colluding with the corrupt leaders of the military and the Church to exploit Mexican workers for the benefit of foreign capital. Along the left-­hand side of the wall, workers in blue overalls lug bricks on their backs. They are the modern-­day counterparts to the Aztecs’ enslaved subjects imaged on the opposite wall. The overtly propagandistic nature of the south wall inflects the entire cycle, recasting images of intercultural and interethnic conflict as class conflict. As a consequence, recalling Ida Rodríguez Prampolini’s reading of the mural, the viewer is encouraged to read the entire cycle as a Marxist treatise on class conflict and the dialectic of history. However, I would argue that Rivera’s Marxism represents a shift in emphasis from his original conception of the cycle. He painted the south wall of the cycle under different conditions of patronage and during his struggle for acceptance by the international communist left. The rest of the mural bears no signs of Marxist dogma. Instead of workers, we see peasants, and in the place of Marxist sloganeering, we find references to popular political movements such as the Zapatista slogan, “Tierra y Libertad.” Over the 1920s, Rivera was working out an argument whereby Zapatismo could be understood as a proto-­proletarian movement; however, he maintained that the popular revolution in Mexico precedes the world historical proletarian one.60 Nonetheless, he endeavored in all of his murals to cast Marxism in a populist indigenous guise in order to Mexicanize this foreign ideology. The National Palace mural is no exception, as Rivera uses both Mesoamerican pictorial logics and the symbolic attributes of Quetzalcoatl to cast Marx as his messianic return. At the top of the north wall arch we see an image of the sun, depicted upside down, or “falling” in reference to Tzontémoc, or “he who lowers his head,” an Aztec god associated with the underworld, death, and the setting sun. This detail suggests that the “Ancient Indian World” depicted below is setting. At the top of the south wall, Rivera again portrays the sun, only here we see a blazing, naturalistic sunrise situated on the horizon behind Marx. These two references to the setting and rising sun refer us to Quetzalcoatl’s associations with Venus and the evening and morning star. By depicting the sun falling on the north wall and

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rising on the south, Rivera insinuates that Marx, not Cortés, is the prophesied return of a post-­Aztec Quetzalcoatl. However, Rivera’s evocation of the cycles of the sun also insinuates Mesoamerican conceptions of cyclical time into his history of Mexico. At one level we are encouraged to read the cycle, in particular the north and south walls, as an enormous codex, wherein the destruction of the indigenous world is construed as part of a larger cosmic cycle that is renewed by the arrival of a sixth sun in the figure of Marx. This cyclical reading of the cycle is belied, however, by the “pre-­narratised” or “discursive” quality of postconquest history relayed along the western wall (see figure 1.2). Likewise, the displacement of Mesoamerican cosmogony with the secularized eschatology of Marxism recapitulates the violence of the Spanish conquest, which, as Enrique Florescano points out, “expelled the indigenous people as a protagonist of history and established a new historical discourse in almost all aspects.” 61 Like the Spanish, Rivera weaves Mesoamerican conceptions of history and cyclical time into the linear logic of Judeo-­Christian notions of messianic and apocalyptic time. Rivera’s treatment of the prophecy of return thereby corresponds with what Giorgio Agamben calls the oxymoronic structure of messianism in which an idealized past is married with a utopian vision of the future. The two incommensurable temporalities are joined in the figure of the messiah whose coming promises to take us “back to the future.” 62 Orozco’s Epic, and in particular its Ancient half, was likely conceived in dialogue with Rivera’s History of Mexico at the National Palace. And while Orozco completed his cycle before Rivera had executed the south wall of his, Orozco would have known of Rivera’s plans to complete the Quetzalcoatl prophecy with a nod toward industrialization. Preparatory sketches of the entire mural were circulating as early as 1929. In these early phases of the mural, Rivera, in keeping with his desire to promote the Calles regime’s vision of modernization, planned to dedicate the south wall to utopian scenes of industrialization, both urban and rural.63 At the apex of the mural, a proletarian worker and an agrarian peasant clasp hands before a rising sun. To their right Rivera depicts a volcano encircled by a plumed serpent, echoing the Quetzalcoatl imagery on the north wall. In this early version, however, we do not see Marx depicted as his messianic return but rather an airplane soaring skyward representing an industrial apotheosis of sorts. The first iteration of the mural made no reference to class conflict in “Mexico Today and Tomorrow.” Rather, it outlined a utopian vision of class harmony, the very integrated society that postrevolutionary elites envisioned. Rivera’s endorsement of industry followed from his vulgar Marxism, in

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which technological advance would hasten the destruction of capitalism. However, in 1929, working at this venue, Rivera avoided any critique of his patrons or references to future proletarian revolt. In his mural, the modernization promoted by Calles and his proxies would bring Mexico “back to the future” of Quetzalcoatl’s Golden Age. His utopian vision of an industrialized Mexico presents the viewer with a modern Tollan in which the industry, egalitarianism, and creativity of the Toltecs is reborn as a socialized technocracy. In this respect Rivera’s mural is historicist; he asserts continuity between the Mesoamerican past and a Marxist future. The flow of time moves in one direction, and it is progressive despite the havoc wreaked along the way. His empathetic reconstruction of Mesoamerica serves the triumphalism of postrevolutionary cultural nationalism, not a call for justice for the indigenous peoples oppressed by so many subsequent colonial projects. Reframing Quetzalcoatl: Allegory and the Irony of Empire

Rivera’s National Palace mural is both exceptional (in terms of its historical sweep, scale, and central location) and emblematic of mural art’s historicist tendencies. For our purposes, its notable features are its adherence to Marx’s philosophy of history as a material dialectic akin to Hegel’s model; its use of the Quetzalcoatl myth of departure and return to naturalize a triumphant and progressive vision of Mexican history; and its Marxist messianism, whereby the communist theorist becomes a deus ex machina of history, taking Mexico “back to the future” and authorizing, in secular form, the eschatological claims of the conquest via the Quetzalcoatl mythologem. Orozco’s conception of the Quetzalcoatl myth has much in common with Rivera’s if we confine ourselves solely to the three panels dedicated to the myth proper. Both artists depict his reign as a time of peace, industry, and creativity. Both artists represent Quetzalcoatl in his Occidentalized guise. And both artists implicate his prophetic return in postconquest history. However, if we reflect upon how Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl panels are situated within the entire Ancient sequence, salient differences present themselves, particularly with regard to indigenism and its relationship to postrevolutionary messianism. Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl sequence is framed along the north wall by two images of warriors, Aztecs to the viewer’s left and conquistadors to her right. The figures in these two panels—​­“Aztec Warriors” and “The Prophecy”—​ ­face off across space and time, intimating their historic confrontation in the year One Reed (see figure i.6). These panels thereby situate the reign of the Toltecs as a mythical parenthesis between competing Imperialisms, suggesting that it was not only the Spanish who laid claim to Quetzalcoatl’s legacy

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figure 2.7. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Aztec Warriors” (Panel 4), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.4.

with the arrival of Cortés but also the Aztecs who called upon the mythologem in their domination of central Mexico. “Aztec Warriors” depicts four figures dressed in the vestments of ritualized warfare (figure 2.7). Three figures don the guise of eagles, the fourth that of a jaguar; both animals are associated with the origin tale of Quetzalcoatl’s struggle against Tezcatlipoca. The warriors carry feathered banners and macua­huitl, wooden clubs embedded with blades that were used by the Aztecs. Compressed within a tight architectural space, these four warriors bear grim expressions and, tellingly, have closed their eyes. In contrast with the wide-­eyed visage of Quetzalcoatl or the inner vision of the “Golden Age” astronomer, their pinched expressions and blindness suggests a grim will to power unchecked by enlightened vision or moral insight. The warriors overlap in a quasi-­cubist pictorial space, which also contrasts with the more rational spatial system Orozco employs in subsequent scenes of social harmony.

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figure 2.8. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Prophecy” (Panel 8), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.8.

Finally, they are situated behind a stone effigy of Quetzalcoatl likely derived from those that protrude from the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihua­ cán. Orozco’s image thereby associates Aztec warfare with their veneration of the Toltecs, and particularly with their appropriation of the ancient site of Teotihuacán as the birthplace of their gods. Orozco’s depiction of this stone effigy was likely informed by images in Gamio’s publications as well as Cornyn’s line engravings of the same sites. However, he modifies the image, emphasizing the serpent’s barred fangs, suggesting that under Aztec influence the boundary figure of the plumed serpent took on a more ferocious and aggressive aspect. “Aztec Warriors” is echoed positionally and iconographically by “The Prophecy,” located at the far end of the wall (figure 2.8). Here we see armor-­ clad conquistadors, horses, and a weaponized cross. They, too, are situated within a compressed architectural space. Their faces are obscured by armor,

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suggesting that they are guided by a bleak and conquering will as well. Orozco displaces human affect onto the animals, for it is only in the rearing form and wild eye of the horse that we sense trepidation over what is to come. Whereas the myth of Quetzalcoatl authorizes the military power of the Aztec warriors, in this panel Christian faith guides these soldiers of fortune. In the place of the stone effigy we find Western architectural icons: stone columns with Doric and Corinthian capitals. Orozco thereby equates the Spanish conquest with the imposition of a new faith and a new cultural order. A glinting knifepoint opposes and matches Quetzalcoatl’s barred fangs. “The Prophecy” refers to the postcolonial myth of Quetzalcoatl’s return as Cortés. It follows the dramatic scene of Quetzalcoatl’s departure countering the directional force of the man-­god’s gesture by marching inevitably westward, backward in time, and toward the Aztec warriors who stand at the ready along the far end of the wall. Orozco’s reference to Quetzalcoatl in the “Aztec Warriors” panel reminds us, however, that the Spanish were not the only ones to appropriate this powerful myth for the purpose of legitimating their military conquest. The Aztecs, too, appropriated Toltecan traditions and influence to authorize their political control of central Mexico. And as Carrasco argues, their emulation of the Toltecs encompassed an ironic critique of their own imperial will. This irony was imminent to their veneration of Quetzalcoatl and the mythologem’s portent of destruction. The myth of Quetzalcoatl is posited as a shared resource between the Aztec Empire and its Spanish conquerors. Their face-­off across the north wall conveys a sense of inevitability, with the myth of Quetzalcoatl wedged between them serving as the mediation of not only two distinct cultures and eschatological worldviews but also between two historical temporalities. As Mackenthun suggests, the Quetzalcoatl myth may owe its “longevity to precisely this power to bridge such a cultural hiatus, to activate elements of structural similarity from a mass of cultural differences.” 64 However, rather than bringing these distinct cultures, worldviews, and temporalities together, Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl sequence holds them apart, literally and figuratively. He maintains their distinction and suggests that while both imperial cultures drew upon the myth of Quetzalcoatl, the myth cannot reconcile or integrate them. The myth of Quetzalcoatl does not serve, therefore, as an image of an idealized indigenous past upon which the modern state may draw to authorize its own claims to legitimate rule. Rather, in Orozco’s mural, the myth of Quetzalcoatl has been allegorized as a sacred, oral tradition from which we are irrevocably cut off as a consequence of both the Aztec domination of

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central Mexico and the Spanish chroniclers who recorded fragments of this oral tradition within colonial texts that actively suppressed their polyvocal, heterogeneous, and heteroglossic nature. As Mackenthun points out, “crucial aspects” of Mesoamerican belief and reality “lie beyond our intellectual reach” precisely because “all of the signifiers (texts) that we have are already influenced by the effects of the conquista.” 65 We have the signifiers, but the “signifieds are no longer available to us in any easy way.” 66 Even the Crónicas by Spanish friars that purport to transmit Mesoamerican accounts of Quetzalcoatl to us “contradict each other to the point of despair,” revealing less any cultural agreement and instead “their status as ideological and political sites of conflict.” 67 Thus, in Orozco’s handling, the myth of Quetzalcoatl discloses itself to us as a fragmentary and enigmatic set of cultural signs rather than a transcendental system to which we might return in order to bring about liberation, redemption, or truth. Far from auguring the rise of a new, post-­Aztec messiah, Orozco’s Quetzalcoatl involves us in a Trauerspiel or “mourning play.” Orozco’s presentation of the Quetzalcoatl myth as a cultural resource deployed in the rise of two aggressive imperial powers reminds the viewer that indeed, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” 68 For barbarism, as Benjamin insists, is not only a feature of the “cultural treasures” that any civilization amasses as heritage, such as the stone effigy appropriated by the Aztecs. It also taints “the manner in which [that heritage is] transmitted from one owner to another.” 69 By calling our attention to the distinct semantic levels of the Quetzalcoatl myth and its role as bedrock for the heritage of two imperial civilizations, Orozco allegorizes it. That is, Orozco’s treatment of the myth calls attention as much to the ways its meaning has been produced—​­through a dialogic process between surviving Aztecs and their colonial interlocutors—​­as it does to what that meaning may be. To better appreciate the ways that Orozco’s presentation of the Quetzalcoatl myth foregrounds the dialectic between civilization and barbarism, we attend to the panels on the west wall that further situate the myth within the rise of Mexica civilization. “Migration” and “Ancient Human Sacrifice” reveal that Orozco’s view of Aztec culture is largely negative (figures 2.9–­ 2.10). Not only does he depict the Aztecs’ foundation myth of migration into central Mexico as a grim and physically unforgiving journey; he also refers explicitly to the practice of human sacrifice. These two scenes precede those devoted to the Quetzalcoatl sequence. Thus, we are not to read them as prehistory, for, technically, the Aztecs postdated the Toltecs. Rather, the west

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figure 2.9. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Migration” (Panel 1), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.1.

wall panels elaborate the theme of barbarism that frames the parenthesis of Quetzalcoatl’s mythical rule by indicting the Mesoamerican practice of human sacrifice, and the Aztecs in particular. “Ancient Human Sacrifice” is a scene of Aztec sacrifice because the monolith that presides over the grisly scene can be identified as Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and the chief deity in Aztec cosmogony. Orozco arranges the scene in a tightly compressed space with five figures restraining a sacrificial victim while one cuts open his chest to pull out his beating heart. While Orozco does not literalize the gruesome act, as was often the case in the postcontact codices, where we see figures brandishing bleeding hearts atop bloodstained pyramids, he indicates its cruelty in the strained musculature of the victim. He is displayed upside down. Two figures secure his head

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figure 2.10. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (Panel 3), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.3.

with a strap they hold taut in their fists. His sinewy body suggests that he has been subdued by force. The tipped-­up perspective of the sacrificial platform pulls the viewer’s eye up toward the looming monolith. This effigy bears attributes associated with both Huitzilopochtli and Coatlicue, reflecting Orozco’s tendency to stray from the ethnographic record in favor of his own visual repertoire. The masked figure is blocky and awkwardly rendered. It bears a shield, spears, and red ropes, all attributes associated with Huitzilopochtli. It also has what appears to be a necklace of heart glyphs that resembles the Coatlicue monolith’s necklace of hands and hearts. While not a literal transcription of the famous Aztec monolith, it is likely that Orozco had the Coatlicue monument in mind. It was, and remains, the most recognizable Mesoamerican

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figure 2.11. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Human Sacrifice” (Panel 17), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.18.

sculpture, and in his day it was already renowned as an emblem of the terrifying cultural and religious alterity of preconquest civilization. Orozco presents human sacrifice as a barbaric atrocity against an unwitting victim, yet he also intimates that it played a meaningful, albeit violent, socio­religious role in Mesoamerican societies. To understand this last point, it is helpful to compare “Ancient Human Sacrifice” with its “Modern” counterpart across the corridor (figure 2.11). There an unknown soldier lies buried under piles of wreaths with an eternal flame burning between his skeletal legs. Like the ancient victim of sacrifice, the modern victim is anonymous. Whereas the ancient victim’s body is held down by other figures, his modern counterpart lies alone, isolated and physically disconnected from the pompous politician who lauds his sacrifice. Through a circle of human contact, Orozco concedes that while barbaric, Aztec sacrifice was integrated into a socio­religious worldview that gave the victim’s death meaning and that connected his fate to the survival and even success of the society at large.70 In the modern world, conversely,

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the anonymous victims of war die in vain; they are honored with memorials and brass bands, but their sacrifice is merely political, without social or cosmological value. “Ancient” and “Modern Human Sacrifice” disclose that while Orozco shared the period contempt for the practice of human sacrifice, he was not subscribing to a civilizational logic whereby the ancient world is more barbaric than the modern. The temporality of his mural is more complex. The atavistic turning backward of the figures in the “Departure” scene foretells the fall that Orozco describes in the Modern wing. As they incline toward the banned practice of human sacrifice, they augur a modern world that partakes not of Quetzalcoatl’s enlightened reign but rather continues in the barbaric trajectory of the Aztecs while further secularizing, and thereby profaning, its violent rituals. Orozco crafts a clear distinction between the peaceful civilization attributed to the Toltecs and the violent aggression of the Aztecs by referring explicitly to the practice of human sacrifice, a stigmatized feature of Mesoamerican civilization that Rivera, for the most part, downplayed in his murals. In his National Palace mural, Rivera refers to the extraction of tribute and the subordination of central Mexican cultures by the Aztecs. He even depicts a prisoner of war wearing a mantle covered in bones, identifying him as a sacrificial victim. However, he does not show human sacrifice itself (see figure 1.1). Rivera’s reticence raises the question more fully as to why, if Orozco wanted to capitalize on the “prophetic vision” of the Quetzalcoatl myth, he devoted so much space to the stigmatic practice of human sacrifice in his Epic. This decision was, in part, a vestige of his original plans for the mural. In keeping with the hopeful statement he drafted in his prospectus, Orozco initially planned to emphasize the “constructive, affirmative, positive, aspects of the myth” of Quetzalcoatl along the west and east wings of the long north wall and the “barbaric aspects of human nature” on the east and west walls.71 According to notes that Artemas Packard took during discussions with Orozco in May of 1932 (before the artist began to paint), the Ancient half of the north wall would depict “the Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl) representing Heaven & Earth” in scenes detailing his arrival among the Toltecs and a “long period of Prosperity, Peace, Fraternity and great accomplishments: Architecture, creation of American agriculture—​­maize, squash, fruits etc.—​­various handicrafts.” 72 The Modern wing would have depicted “the Dream of an Ideal Culture of the Future” in scenes dedicated to “the New Culture of the American continent according to the prophecy of Q.: New Culture/​­New Religion/​­New Art/​­New Architecture (Spanish-­ Ren.-­N.Y.)/​­The Machine as a factor [sic] human happiness.” 73 The two panels

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along the west wall were dedicated to the “destruction of the Toltec Empire & Coming of the Aztecs” with scenes of the discovery of alcohol to represent “the destructive vices and superstitions” and the “resumption of human sacrifices.” 74 The east wall panels were reserved for the “destruction of the Indian civilizations (from Alaska to Patagonia) by the White Man,” which included scenes of Cortés’s conquest and the “introduction of modern weapons.” 75 In a letter dated May 22, Alma Reed also described Orozco’s preliminary plans for the mural, indicating that the Ancient half of the north wall had been narrowed and focused with three proposed scenes—​­Quetzalcoatl appearing among the Toltecs, a “golden age,” and “the Prophecy”—​­that roughly correspond to the sequence he ultimately did paint.76 At that point he envisioned that the panels over the doorways would be dedicated to “The Migrations from the North” and the “European Invasion.” 77 He still imagined that the eastern wing or Modern half of the north wall would be dedicated to positive scenes showing “The Return of Quetzalcoatl,” “The Future Golden Age,” and “Our Time,” with the panels over the doors depicting “Agriculture” and “Science and Industry.” 78 At this point the west and east walls were still dedicated to “barbaric” episodes from the ancient and modern period with panels describing “The Aztec Invasions” and “Huitzilopichtli [sic], God of War” at the west end of the corridor and “Spaniards—​­Cortez, and War between the Europeans and Indians” to the east. At this stage he also imagined several possibilities for the “Decorative Panels” (“Natural Products of Continent. Figures”) as well as the south wall, opposite the reserve desk (“The Mayflower, The Norseman/​­Immigrants, to America”).79 As these early, third-­party descriptions reveal, Orozco’s original conception of the mural was far more akin to Rivera’s original plans for the National Palace. Both murals would have presented the myth of Quetzalcoatl as a prophetic origin for a technologically advanced, utopian future. Both artists presented Toltec civilization as an ideal and model for the future they were imaging. And both artists conceived of some kind of messianic return of a post-­Aztec Quetzalcoatl, although Reed’s letter does not indicate who that redeemer might have been in Orozco’s original conception. As these descriptions indicate, Orozco planned from the start to structure his mural through a series of mirroring contrasts, with episodes detailing the positive aspects of the Quetzalcoatl myth along the north wall and episodes of barbarism confined to the west and east walls. However, as he developed his idea he diverged sharply from this original outline. For in its final state, the Modern half of the mural no longer depicts anything positive about “Our Time” or the future. He did retain several of the key scenes in the final sequence

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but moved them into different positions, giving them different inflections that profoundly impact our interpretation of his message. These changes were most significant in the Modern half of the mural, as Orozco shifted the scenes of Cortés’s conquest from the “barbaric” axis to the formerly positive north wall (see figure i.7). He characterized “Machines” and “Science and Industry” as the dehumanizing legacy of the conquest rather than as a “factor of human happiness.” He integrated “Agriculture” into the zombified milieu of “Anglo-­America.” And while we see images of “New Architecture” and certainly are witness to the “New Culture” of the postconquest Americas, it hardly seems to conform to the lofty vision he voiced in his manifesto, “New World, New Races, and New Art.” His treatment of the Ancient half of the mural is more consistent with the vision he described to Packard and Reed (see figures i.5–­i.6). He not only retained the basic structure of a positive north wall contrasted with a “barbaric” west wall but also painted scenes that correspond with his outline for the most part. However, in the final mural, he conflated the theme of “Migration” with “The Aztec Invasion” while adding human sacrifice to his depiction of Huitzilopochtli. Replacing the relatively neutral “Migrations from the North” with the more pointed “Aztec Warriors,” he implicated his critique of the Aztecs in his representation of the Quetzalcoatl myth. This casts the myth of Quetzalcoatl sequence as an enlightened parenthesis in an otherwise “barbaric” set of scenes dedicated to Aztec and Spanish aggression alike. As a consequence, the connotations of Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy have shifted from affirmative themes of civilization, reconciliation, and redemption to more melancholic ones of loss, mourning, and trauma. These changes suggest that Orozco’s vision darkened as he worked from his proposal to the wall. We might argue that the intentions he outlined in private correspondence with his patrons were designed to secure the commission and therefore were more upbeat than his actual plans. However, even Orozco’s original outline included a very straightforward critique of European conquest and violence against indigenous peoples. Had he executed the mural he described to Packard and Reed, it would have stood out as an unusually frank condemnation of conquest and the Indian wars for the period. Orozco’s attitude toward postrevolutionary indigenism darkened over the course of his career. His prints from the 1930s are almost exclusively concerned with the fetishization of indigenous culture, the hypocrisy of politicians, and the misery of working-­class and peasant life. In works such as Rocks (1935), Echate La Otra (Dancing Indians, 1935), or Dumping Ground (1935), Orozco characterizes indigenous people as intractable features of the landscape, as participants in corrupt spectacles of culture, and as subject

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figure 2.12. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, Echate La Otra (Dancing Indians), 1935, Lithograph on wove paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Museum Purchase; PR.966.10.

to degrading poverty (figure 2.12). Gone is the sympathetic tone of works from the 1920s, such as Mexican Peasants Working (1929). Instead, Orozco produces images that reflect not the hoary rhetoric of postrevolutionary indigenismo but rather the perverse reality of Mexico’s vast underclass. Whereas Orozco expressed skepticism about the value of indigenous and folk culture as an aesthetic resource for new art in his “New World, New Races, and New Art” manifesto, by 1942, when he began serializing his autobiography, he derided its role in the construction of the postrevolutionary state apparatus and its handmaiden, cultural nationalism. In a seething indictment of the “racial point of view” then dominating constructions of Mexican history, Orozco condemns the “indigenists,” arguing that they exacerbate “racial antagonism” by demonizing the Spanish inheritance and idealizing the Indian one.80 “According to them,” he writes, the Conquest ought not to have taken place as it did. Instead of sending cruel and ambitious captains to the New World, Spain should have sent a great delegation of ethnologists, anthropologists, archeologists, civil engineers, dentists, veterinarians, physicians, country school-­teachers, agronomists, Red Cross nurses, philosophers, philologists, biologists, art critics, mural painters, and learned historians. . . . Human sacrifice

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might have been encouraged further, and a great packing house built for human flesh, with a department to handle canning and refrigeration. . . . In this way the three abhorrent centuries of the Colonial Period could have been side-­stepped, and Great Teocalli would still be standing, though thoroughly disinfected to keep the blood of sacrifices from going bad, and to enable us to turn it into blood pudding.81 Orozco’s satire of the indigenist point of view targets the federal management of indigenous life for the purposes of modern nation-­building. He characterizes the modern governmental approach to population management—​­the subjection of indigenous peoples to the pastoral power of “archeologists,” “anthropologists,” or “physicians,” the ministering to the peasantry by Vasconcelos’s cadres of “country school-­teachers,” the representational politics of “mural painters” and “historians”—​­as hypocritical and no kinder than the “cruel” tactics of the “captains” of the “New World.” In an earlier passage he savages the Department of Indian Affairs, arguing that it should be called “a Department of Poor Devils, a Department of Unfortunate Minors, incapable of doing for themselves and standing in need of another race to think for them and graciously provide them with their wants, in token return for three centuries of colonial exploitation.” 82 Here he calls out the various attempts to “Mexicanize” the Indian as both patronizing and exploitative. And yet, as his angry words reveal, he did not believe that preconquest Mexico should be the model for the modern state. The vision of history offered by “indigenists,” he argues, turns a blind eye to the unsavory facets of ancient indigenous civilization. They not only sanitize the barbarism of human sacrifice but also convert it into a modernized—​­“disinfected,” “refrigerated”—​­form of national production. Orozco links the production of “blood pudding” to the Marxist fantasy of a socialist state rooted in autochthonous culture, thereby lampooning Rivera’s vision in his National Palace mural and his collusion with a paternal state and ruling party. If “they . . . [had] respected the indigenous religion and left Huitzilopochtli standing,” he continues dryly, “there should have been a free distribution of grain, cattle, and agricultural machinery. Free housing could have been provided for the country folk, and common landholdings and cooperatives established. Roads and bridges might have been built.” 83 The savage wit Orozco employs here in his satire of the “back to the future” fantasies of Rivera’s messianic Marxism is an expression of his disgust for “official Indigenismo” and his cynicism about the modernity it authorized. Rivera’s mural is not his only target, but it represents the most explicit iteration of the kind of modernizing indigenism Orozco came to revile.

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With these remarks in mind, it becomes clearer that Orozco’s mural cannot be read as an idealized packaging of preconquest civilization for the purposes of modern nation-­building, or even the construction of a New World civilization. His prominent and powerful depiction of human sacrifice ensures that the “barbarism” of preconquest Mexico will not be “disinfected” and converted into a national commodity—​­a nutritious “blood pudding.” The admiration that his mural expresses with respect to Quetzalcoatl’s “Golden Age” must serve another purpose (see figure 2.2). It is clear that Orozco did not intend to cast indigeneity as “barbaric” tout court. However, his critique of the Aztecs and his emphasis on the Spanish conquest suggest that his relationship to the messianism implicit within the Quetzalcoatl myth was vexed. In Orozco’s mural, the “buried irony” of the mythologem that Carrasco identifies reemerges again, only this time it undermines the authority of the very New World civilization he had hoped initially to celebrate. Orozco invokes the messianic trope of the Quetzalcoatl mythologem only to call the politics of messianism into question. If Rivera appeals to Marx as the return of a postconquest Quetzalcoatl, Orozco resists identifying any such return. And yet his mural is suffused with references to messianism, not only in the invocation of the Quetzalcoatl myth itself but also in the representation of a vengeful Christ in the mural’s final scene (see figure 3.29). I will return to Orozco’s representation of Christian eschatology in chapter 3. At this point I want to indicate that Orozco’s mural resonates with the unorthodox variant of messianic Marxism espoused by Benjamin. This approach is best understood through Benjamin’s conception of the “weak messianism” of the critical historian. The constellation Orozco constructs between the Quetzalcoatl myth, the historical Spanish conquest, and Christian eschatology destroys rather than reifies the “false image” of the preconquest past peddled by indigenists and the “beautiful unity” of pre-­and postcolonial culture that the Quetzalcoatl myth traditionally has served to secure. In so doing, Orozco’s Epic commands us to see the concerns of an oppressed past as our own. This is particularly cogent given the location of Orozco’s mural versus that of Rivera’s. Whereas Rivera was painting in Mexico City, the center of political and cultural power and for a federal patron, Orozco was painting his Epic at a small college in New England. Rivera’s message was crafted to fortify the pretentions of the ruling elite. His national epic sought to lend authority and validity to the modernizing designs of the postrevolutionary nation-­state. Orozco, on the other hand, was painting for a U.S. audience. His reference to a shared America was unconventional and illegible to many

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who viewed the settler mode of colonization as an exception to the Black Legend of the Spanish conquest. Moreover, his emphasis on the deployment of indigenous culture as a legacy of empire was anathema to the self-­ perception of U.S. Americans who viewed the origins of their nation-­state as a fight for democracy against the inauthentic power of an overseas monarchy. Finally, the “racial point of view” of indigenismo had less purchase in the United States during a period when the U.S. government was in the process of reassessing the effects of the Dawes Act (1887) and its attendant allotment and assimilationist policies. While “playing Indian” has a long history within the United States and at Dartmouth, the radical identification with indigeneity espoused by Mexican artists was foreign to the sensibilities of a predominantly white, Anglo-­Saxon, Protestant student body who largely viewed Native peoples as a fantasy projection of their highly ritualized sport and leisure culture.84 Thus, Orozco’s command that the viewer see the concerns of an oppressed past as her own rubbed against the grain of U.S. American conceptions of historical progress, regional exceptionalism, and racial privilege. I will return to this point in chapters 3 and 4. Here I explore further the differential temporalities of historiography that Orozco’s framing of the Quetzalcoatl myth allegorizes and thereby the melancholic politics of memory that his Epic mobilizes for the modern viewer. Time, History, and Prophecy: Quetzalcoatl and Weak Messianism

In his salutary study of the significance of Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy for postconquest Mexican culture and politics, Jacques Lafaye pinpoints its utility, writing: “Quetzalcoatl alone could span the historical and cultural chasm separating the New World from the Old. Thanks to Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy, Indians and Spaniards found that they shared the same history.” 85 And indeed, Rivera’s National Palace mural testifies to the ongoing capacity of Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy to bridge the “historical and cultural chasm” separating ancient Mesoamerica from the modernizing postrevolutionary state. Orozco’s Epic, on the other hand, resists this temptation. In his handling of the prophecy he suggests that Indians and Spaniards did not share the same history, or for that matter the same conception of historical time. Orozco’s treatment of Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy emphasizes rather than seamlessly bridges the “chasm” between the cyclical time and prophetic history of the Aztecs and the linear time and eschatological history of the Spanish. Gillespie elaborates on the relationship between conceptions of time and history among the Aztecs. She notes that while the Aztecs did have a con-

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ception of linear time, the cyclical prevailed. “Cyclical time,” she explains, “is measured in infinitely repeatable cycles so that it continually returns to its ‘zero’ point, and a single event therefore recurs every time the cycle repeats.” 86 Because cyclical time asserts continuity between the past, present, and future, the past is not understood to be fixed but rather to be mutable so that it can conform to and explain events happening in the present. She refers to this as “prophetic history” because its role was to explain not only what had happened but also what would be.87 “Prophetic history” is divinatory rather than a mechanism for keeping time. The Spanish adhered to a conception of time that was linear and eschatological. As Florescano argues, the Christian conception of the past is narrative, “with sharp and positive beginnings . . . a story of unfolding events, revealing the purpose of God and man leading up to the dramatic climax of Christ’s life and death; after this the pilgrimage of mankind to its final Doom, which would also come at a precise moment in time.” 88 The Judeo-­Christian philosophy of history has a distinct beginning and a definitive end point, when God’s kingdom will be restored through the coming of a messiah. Time does not repeat in an eternal return. Rather, it runs in one direction and is endowed with “apostolic, messianic and providential resonance.” 89 For surviving Aztecs, revising their past to emphasize Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy of return was in keeping with the prophetic function of history. As Gillespie notes, the Aztecs “considered their loss to be the defeat of their gods by the gods of the Spaniards.” 90 By assimilating the god of the Spanish into their pantheon they “signaled their submission to him.” 91 This was but another instance of the very strategies they had employed to assert their dominance in central Mexico to begin with, the “historical manipulation and ideological appropriation” of non-­endogenous myths.92 If the appropriation of Toltecan mythology was an effective strategy for legitimizing their claim to dynastic power, the postconquest appropriation of the myth of return was a strategy for coping with the trauma of military and spiritual defeat. For the Spanish who sought to situate the Aztec past within an eschatological and linear narrative of history, the prophecy of return was understood as the arrival of a providential man who would bring about vengeance against nonbelievers and eternal glory for God’s chosen ones. The Spanish were the agents of providence leading humanity toward apocalypse and theological redemption. Rivera took this mystical understanding of prophecy and secularized it, situating Marx, rather than Christ, as the redeemer of a postcolonial Mexico. Like the Spanish, he over­coded the prophetic history of the Aztecs with the theological logic of Christian messianism, converting Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy into a harbinger of proletarian providence. As

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Folgarait argues, in his mural Mexican history is presented discursively, its jumble of figures, texts, and symbols conjuring a “pre-­narratised” past with a beginning, middle, and end plotted along its three walls. The enormous chasm that separates “The Ancient Indian World” from “Mexico of Today and Tomorrow” is bridged by Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy. The prophecy is not only an “instrument of legitimation” for Rivera’s modernizing Marxism; it also fixes indigenous civilization in a mythicized past. Rivera’s ethnographic approach to that past partakes of what Benjamin called empathetic reconstruction. His mural presents an “eternal image” of the Mesoamerican past as a point of origin for the progressive unfolding of history toward its redemptive end. The “reserve” retained in this past—​­the practice of human sacrifice, the irony of empire—​­is not allowed to disrupt the triumphalism of the present. Thereby, the critical irony of the Quetzalcoatl mythologem does not trouble Rivera’s neocolonial attempts to legitimate his Marxist vision of the future via recourse to the same mythicized historiography that the Aztecs and the Spanish used to authorize their political authority. Instead, Rivera’s “once upon a time” crafts Mesoamerica as a “cultural treasure” to be claimed by either the modernizing state or its Marxist component. But, as Susanne Wofford reminds us, when origin tales like the myth of Quetzalcoatl become objectified within national historical epics, they open themselves up to the creation of counternarratives.93 Orozco’s Epic is one such counternarrative. It seizes upon the origins in the Mexican national epic and rearticulates them from a mechanism of legitimation to one of decolonial critique. Orozco marks the traumatic shift from Mesoamerican to Christian conceptions of time by representing Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy twice, once as a prophecy (see figure 2.8) and then again as the inaugural act of the historical conquest (“Cortez and the Cross”) (see figure 3.1). These two scenes are adjacent to one another but separated by the reserve desk, which functions, physically, as a chasm between Ancient and Modern America. “The Prophecy” is the last panel along the eastern wing of the north wall. It follows the Quetzalcoatl sequence. Its figures face away from the reserve desk and look toward the “Aztec Warriors” depicted in the first panel of the north wall. Their visual relation to one another suggests the action of a circle, drawing the eye back and forth across the wall but containing its movement within a self-­referential system in which the Aztec appropriation of Quetzalcoatl foretells the return of a conquering god and the arrival of the conquistadors seems to confirm the divinatory nature of the past (see figure i.6). This cyclical movement serves as imminent critique of the Aztec deployment of the Quetzalcoatl mythologem, as its portent of destruction augurs the irony of

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empire. The “mythic force” of Quetzalcoatl’s return, Carrasco writes, “came upon the Aztecs from a primordial tradition which they thought could be utilized to support and legitimate their throne. But the contours of that tradition had their own shape and meaning and could not be reduced to Aztec inventions and applications.” 94 The Ancient half of Orozco’s Epic brings these ironies to the fore. For as the viewer moves across the chasm of time and history, the conquistadors arrive again. And this repetition makes all the difference. If the conquistadors are an anonymous, “mythic force” in “The Prophecy,” they are all too identifiable in “Cortez and the Cross.” The tall, ironclad figure of Cortés stands astride a pile of dead bodies. A solemn friar accompanies him and plants a gangrenous cross into the rubble of Mesoamerican civilization. The eschatological nature of this conquest is clear: Cortés is the providential man who punishes nonbelievers and sets the Americas on a path toward God’s glory. On this side of the reserve desk there is no corresponding image at the far end of the north wall that would send the viewer back to its prophetic origins. Cortés’s conquest inaugurates a linear unfolding of events. It is the propulsive point of origin for the narrative of doom that unfolds across the western half of the mural (see figure i.7). Indigenous peoples exit the scene as the new protagonist of history—​­the settler—​­takes their place. From here on out, the “mythic force” of Quetzalcoatl’s return will take on new “shape and meaning.” Orozco allegorizes the myth of Quetzalcoatl within the context of colonial violence, drawing a visual and epistemic distinction between the prophetic history of the Aztecs and the Judeo-­Christian conception of history as linear and eschatological. The contrast he draws between myth and history, however, does not reify this distinction in favor of the veracity of history and the progress of historical time or, conversely, in favor of a prelapsarian mythical time conceived of as a repository that assuages the discontents of capitalist modernity. Both options are refused by the iconographic and formal program of the mural. Instead, Orozco’s Epic forces the viewer to apprehend the distinction between myth and history and, in turn, to understand it as a categorical one that has been produced by and within the intellectual practices of modernity rather than an empirical and evaluative difference that precedes or exists outside of these practices. It is the historical conquest that constitutes the prophetic history of the Aztecs as mere myth, as something that lies outside the time of history. But as cultural critic Roger Bartra points out, “Western time is mythical time, too. . . . And one of its central myths is precisely the devising of another mythical time linked to the primitive paradise, rather than to modern notions of historical fact.” 95

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In Orozco’s Epic, Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy does not assert that the Indians and the Spaniards shared a history. Rather, through repetition, his mural literally marks the historiographic differentiation between two temporal and historical modalities. The returned god of Toltec/​­Aztec prophecy is not Cortés; Cortés’s arrival signals an abrupt shift from prophetic history to Christian eschatology. Orozco makes clear that this shift was achieved through the genocidal violence of Spanish conquest. He reveals that our relationship with the preconquest past is irrevocably mediated by that violence, a violence that was material, spiritual, and symbolic. Our access to the myth of Quetzalcoatl is always already mediated, whether we understand that mediation to be Spanish colonial appropriation or the Aztecs’ precolonial state-­building and post­traumatic reconstitution of their past. Orozco’s insight into the present’s mediated relationship with the Mesoamerican past is less a function of a conscious postcolonial politics and more a reflection of his melancholic grappling with the art form and the problem of allegory. In attempting to piece the Quetzalcoatl story together from various sources, Orozco confronted its polyvocal and heteroglossic nature. His reliance upon disarticulated signifiers forced him to craft an image in the absence of a secure signified. Some of the perennial problems that scholars and viewers have when trying to interpret the western wing reveal just how unmoored Mesoamerican legend is from any fixed or transcendent meaning. The form and content in Orozco’s idiosyncratic and non-­ethnographic treatment of the Quetzalcoatl myth don’t quite match up. Orozco’s allegorical treatment of the myth of return signals the irreconcilability of opposing forces rather than their spiritual transcendence. And it establishes a melancholy relationship with history. Like Baudelaire’s splenetic poetry, Orozco’s Epic presents us with the epistemological and ontological crisis of the modern world. Read against the grain of Rivera and the postrevolutionary political regime’s faith in progress, Orozco’s mural characterizes the modern world as a spectacle of death, debased fragments, and alienation. Unlike Rivera, who approaches the past empathically, attempting to convert the catastrophe of history into a story of triumph, Orozco draws our attention to the relationship the present has forged with the past. His procedure is figural rather than temporal. He explodes the mythical phantasmagoria of the postcolonial construction of the ancient world and recombines its shattered fragments into a dialectical image. His juxtaposition of the prophetic history and cyclical time of the Aztecs with the linear eschatological time of the Spanish illuminates the crisis of the “now time.” This is why the mural shifts so dramatically from “Cortez and the Cross” to “The Machine” and a sequence of panels that speak directly to the political crisis of

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the 1930s (see figures 3.1 and 3­ .16). It is also, I will argue in chapter 4, why the supplement has been placed within the space of crisis opened up by the Spanish conquest of the Americas. By arguing for a figural, as opposed to a temporal reading of the way Orozco negotiates the “chasm” between Mesoamerican civilization and the modern Americas, I suggest we read Orozco’s mural as a “messianic cessation of happening,” an attempt to bring the historicist flow of time to a standstill. Orozco here acts as Benjamin’s critical material historian, pointing to a redemption that depends not on the destruction of allegory and the completion of history but rather on the “tiny fissures in the continuous catastrophe” of history. If there is redemption in Orozco’s mural, it will come as a consequence of grasping history “the way it would have to be imagined at any of its moments in accordance with the idea of redemption.” 96 Orozco’s complex and confounding handling of the Quetzalcoatl myth of return produces the historical intelligibility necessary for any redemptive justice. His references to barbarism and genocide acknowledge that the reserve of the past disrupts rather than reifies the present. In his mural, the “linearity of mythical time doubles back upon itself,” casting the “category of anticipatory hope upon the past” and imposing the “category of recollection on the future.” 97 I return to Ranjana Khanna’s concept of colonial melancholy and her rephrasing of Benjamin’s notion of “weak messianism” as a “taking account of the haunting that overshadows any hope of future redemption.” 98 In this sense, Orozco’s melancholic grappling with the allegoresis of cultural indigenism is a symptom of the encryption of colonial violence at the heart of the formation of the modern postcolonial nation-­state. The postrevolutionary recourse of politicians, intellectuals, and artists to the Quetzalcoatl myth, their attempts to repeat the appropriative gestures of the imperial Aztecs and the colonial Spanish, involves them in an ironic critique of their own hegemonic authority. However, this repetition also reveals the impossibility of ever completely assimilating the lost object of desire. For Freud, this wholesale incorporation of the lost object results in a pathological form of self-­reproach whereby the subject criticizes him-­or herself for attributes one would more readily associate with the lost object.99 Bartra characterizes the laments of Mexican intellectuals—​­like Orozco—​ ­as melancholic for this reason. Quetzalcoatl’s “Golden Age” is one of the “invented mythical paradise[s]” he describes as “indispensable not only in order to fuel the sentiments of guilt occasioned by its destruction, but also in order to trace the outline of cohesive nationality.” 100 The myth of “paradise subverted,” he writes, is necessary to impose order “in a society convulsed

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by the abrupt arrival of the modern age and rocked by the contradictions of the new industrial lifestyle.” 101 Thus, the routine assessments by Mexican intellectuals of Mexico’s failed modernity and pathological national character—​­what Octavio Paz famously dubbed its “labyrinth of solitude”—​­can be understood as a form of self-­reproach whereby the national subject criticizes Mexican character for attributes it readily associates with the “lost object” of Paradise.102 Bartra identifies a host of national stereotypes that take the contemporary form of that lost object: the peasant, the Indian, the stooping pelado. These figures of “primordial man” fortify national culture while also providing a “contrast in order to stimulate modernity and progress in the nation.”  Bartra lampoons the melancholic intellectual as a “hero” or “genius” who has to “bear melancholy’s heavy load in exchange for the lucidity with which he can observe the world and create things.” 103 And yet Freud suggests an alternative agency for the melancholic’s critical identification with the lost object. Freud insists that a “creative agency” inheres in melancholy, one that Khanna argues results in the traumatic undoing of the self and the lost object.104 Orozco’s colonial melancholy is a form of critical agency that undoes the national self and the ego-­ideal of Quetzalcoatl as a narcissistic projection of the modern mestizo nation-­state. In his mural the invocation of a “paradise subverted” does not fortify national discourse, nor does it ratify the projects of industrializing modernity under way in the 1930s. Rather, it gives voice to the violence that is encrypted within the discourses of national progress and troubles the eschatological claims of history as a narrative of redemption. Despite this critical agency, the subaltern—​­or in this case, the return of a postconquest Quetzalcoatl—​­persists as an unassimilable remainder within the national myth, making demands for justice upon the future. Orozco’s mural does not present the viewer with a subaltern messiah—​­like Rivera’s Marx—​­who will enact the justice that the prophecy of Quetzalcoatl’s return promises. Rather, he vests that responsibility in the viewer. The viewer must comprehend the past, the colonial foundation of the postcolonial American nation-­states, in accordance with the idea of redemption. For U.S. American viewers, this means understanding the myth of Quetzalcoatl as a colonial encryption that is not simply the concern of Mexican nationals but also as a concern of their own. What the myth of Quetzalcoatl has to offer is not a prologue to the American epic but an ironic critique of the American antiempire. But before we can apprehend the claim the reserve of the past makes upon us—​­what Benjamin referred to as our “weak messianic power”—​­we need to fully grasp the Trauerspiel that is American modernity.

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chapter 3 AMERICAN MODERNITY AND THE PLAY OF MOURNING

In The Epic of American Civilization José Clemente Orozco refers to the Spanish conquest of the Americas twice, once as mythical pre-­Hispanic prophecy and again as historical fact. The difference produced by this repetition marks the violent transition from one temporal modality to another, from a cyclical conception of prophetic time to a linear one, and from an understanding of the past as divinatory, and therefore mutable, to an eschatalogical conception of the past as fixed and prologue to a providential redemption to be enacted in the future. In this chapter I focus on Orozco’s engagement with eschatological history, which his depiction of Cortés’s conquest introduces into the mural’s dialectics. In particular, I focus on the politics of messianism at play in the Modern, historical half of the mural, where, I argue, Orozco characterizes modern America as a Trauerspiel, or “mourning play.” As Trauerspiel, Orozco’s Epic situates modernity as a traumatic inheritance rather than an enlightened project. He calls into question technological and political progress, rubbing against the grain of historicism and the period claims of the secular nation-­state. Moreover, the Trauer (mourning, sorrow, misery) of modernity raises questions about the kind of political action one might take in response to the paralysis that melancholy induces. It foregrounds the allegorical nature of the art form, questioning its efficacy as a mechanism for revealing truths. Yet, as argued in chapter 1, it also grounds a different historical materialism as well as an alternative formulation of messianic politics. The questions that the Trauer of the modern half of Orozco’s Epic opens up pertain not only to the role and nature of violence in the history of the postconquest Americas but also the role of divine violence as a means for its messianic redemption.

Conspicuously, Orozco’s fresco culminates with a highly unorthodox scene of Christian Apocalypse (see figure 3.29). While this conforms to the spirit of the messianism foretold in Christian eschatology, it is highly unusual in public art in the 1930s on either side of the U.S.–Mexico border. We do see secularized imagery derived from the Passion, such as the crucified peasants in Rivera’s Ministry of Public Education mural (1923–­28) or Orozco’s Maternity (1924) at the National Preparatory School. Likewise, we see references to popular religious cults, such as Fermín Revueltas’s mural Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe (1922–­23) or Fernando Leal’s Feast of the Lord of Chalma (1922–­23), also at the Prepa. An image of Christ appears in David Alfaro Si­quei­ros’s unfinished murals at the Colegio Chico (1922), where he represents the degeneracy of Occidental culture. However, only Orozco turned consistently to the themes of judgment, punishment, and redemption associated with the Eastertide. And only Orozco painted images of Christ in his murals from his early frescoes at the Prepa through his late commissions in Guadalajara. Therefore, rather than view Orozco’s decision to end his Epic with an image of a Christian messiah as logical, I emphasize its strangeness and ask how theology figures within putatively secular conceptions of time, history, and political sovereignty.

PART I.

Cortés and the Spanish Conquest

In “Cortez and the Cross,” the conquistador stands impassively amid a scene of destruction (figure 3.1). Large gray boulders mount to the sky in a pile of rubble, compressing the pictorial space and pushing Cortés close to the picture plane, where he looms over the viewer. To his right a friar plants an ominous dark green cross into the newly claimed land. To his left a heap of naked corpses accumulate beneath Cortés’s commanding gesture. In contrast to his exposed victims, Cortés is clad in armor and wields a sharp sword. His elongated body and pale, pointed visage are clearly indebted to El Greco’s Mannerist figuration. However, where El Greco’s images of earthly events are often accompanied by but demarcated from a celestial scene, in Orozco’s panel there is no heavenly ordination in sight, save for that implied by the friar’s action. Rather, the brutal scene of conquest takes place against a flaming backdrop of burning ships, in reference to historical accounts that Cortés scuttled his fleet to ensure his troop’s dedication to the cause of New World dominion.1 “Cortez and the Cross” draws its iconography from the chroniclers of the conquest, such as Hernán Cortés in the Cartas de relación (Letters from 124  CHAPTER 3

Mexico, 1568) or Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Verdadera historia de la conquista de México (True History of the Conquest of Mexico, ca. 1520s).2 Enrique Flores­cano notes that unlike the “providential-­imperialist interpretations” written by chroniclers of the Crown or the “mystical apocalyptic” ones offered in Christian histories written by members of the mendicant orders, the accounts of firsthand participants represent a “realist, profoundly earthly historical literature.” 3 And indeed, Orozco lingers on brutal acts of physical destruction rather than recalling the more noble images of diplomacy or religious ordination found in colonial paintings of Cortés’s arrival. To wit, metallic grays overwhelm the scene. They seem to extend the steely pallor of Cortés’s protective armor to the devastation around him, giving it a preternatural industrial feel that effectively foreshadows the portentous machines in the adjacent panel. The friar, too, has been drained of color and life. Bent in an ambiguous embrace of the cross, his body echoes the curve of the heaping mound of rubble behind him, as though he were yet another stone in the landscape of ruin. Orozco’s decision to emphasize the material rather than the spiritual na-

figure 3.1. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Cortez and the Cross” (Panel 11), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.13.

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ture of the conquest situates this event as a fall from the cosmic register indicated by “The Prophecy,” the scene that culminates the Ancient half of the mural (see figure 2.8). This fall likewise marks a shift from the realm of myth to that of history. Recalling the mutually reinforcing processes of the military and spiritual conquests, the cross and Cortés are given equal weight in Orozco’s image, with the former situated at the center of the composition and the latter just ahead but to its side. However, while the cross competes with Cortés for the viewer’s attention, it has a blunt, instrumental quality that stresses its physicality and weight. It is a tool of conquest, a dead thing that draws our eye down toward the field of mute stones. Cortés, by comparison, inspires a terrible awe, pulling our gaze upward and beyond the frame. He stares past the viewer, as though pursuing his destiny unconcerned with the suffering his actions wreak or the moral judgment they might elicit in the viewer. As the inaugural scene of the Modern half of the American epic, Orozco’s reference to the Black Legend strikes the contemporary U.S. American viewer as a bleak and foreign point of origin. Cortés’s technology-­aided destruction sets in motion the dark vision that unfolds in the scenes that follow. It seems to instantiate Enrique Florescano’s claim that with the conquest the conqueror became the “agent of history” as the colonized land and people were rendered “the passive recipient[s] of his action.” 4 Indeed, from this point on, there are no more references to indigenous life or cosmology. The stage has been brutally cleared to make way for a new play and protagonist, the Christian tyrant of political history as opposed to the tragic hero of ancient Tollan. Cortés’s lack of concern and sense of destiny resonates with the historical record insofar as the conquistadors viewed their adventure in the New World as a civilizing action against barbarians and, more significantly, as a crusading action to propagate the faith. Their accounts thereby relay a disregard for the slaughter of indigenous peoples that is shocking to modern sensibilities.5 Orozco’s characterization of the conquest stresses the extent to which the Christian mission enabled the brutality on view. However, his reference to the spiritual conquest raises questions about the relationship between history and theology, New World sovereignty and Old World divinity. As Florescano notes, the “historiography of the discovery and conquest of American lands” consistently confuses “the transcendent mission of the church (the propagation of the faith) . . . with the political goals of the Spanish state, which assumes in the Indies the character of a church-­state.” 6 With the image of the friar and the cross, Orozco evokes the intermingling of providence with the church-­state. However, he does this not to affirm the claims of conquistadors

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and/​­or New World mendicants but rather to make manifest the theological temporality of Western conceptions of history and sovereignty. The Spanish conception of New World providence drew from medieval Judeo-­Christian notions of history as a revelation of God’s plans as well as the ideas perpetuated by ascetic monks and dissidents, preeminent among them Joachim of Fiore. Judeo-­Christian notions of history are teleological and linear, positing a process that moves from Creation to Salvation. The course toward eternal redemption is messianic and eschatalogical insofar as final salvation requires both the arrival of a providential man and the catastrophic destruction of the world. To the messianic and eschatological orientation of medieval Christianity, Joachim of Fiore, a twelfth-­century Calabrian abbot, added a particular prophetic claim. He used the Trinity as a key to interpret the meaning of history, positing that the process of history moved according to three ascending phases that would culminate with a spiritual age lasting for a thousand years. The idea of a millenary kingdom was in turn perpetuated by the rigorist branch of the Franciscan order and given new life by the millennial alignment of the conquest with the turn of the century along with the discovery of unknown lands and pagan peoples. When the twelve Franciscans arrived at Veracruz, they viewed their mission as being like that of the twelve Apostles, to proselytize the faith and bring about the age of the Spirit. Viewed as both divine reward and providential sign, the New World and its inhabitants authorized the apostolic, messianic, and prophetic claims of Spanish imperialism and evangelical missionaries alike.7 Secular Spaniards and their regular clergy were, however, often in conflict with the mendicant orders seeking to reinstitute the primitive church in the Americas. While the mendicant orders included Dominicans, Augustinians, and ­eventually Jesuits, not to mention their associated female communities, it was the Franciscans, with their radical vow of poverty and adherence to Fiore’s mystical prophecies, who had the largest impact on the apocalyptic, messianic, and prophetic conception of the conquest.8 The mendicant’s subversive defense of the Indians against Spanish greed, as we will see, had a profound impact on our subsequent understanding of the early colonial period. The mendicants’ apostolic role in the New World likewise impacted their perspective on indigenous peoples. They tended to view Amerindians as Adam-­or Christ-­like in their humility and subservience. In millennial terms, indigenous peoples were also construed as one of the lost tribes of Israel, and thus their evangelization was linked to the end of time and to the restoration of the Holy Land.9 The mendicants therefore viewed indigenous peoples as slaves to a pagan faith but argued that they were capable of conversion, and

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thus they imputed to them both a humanity and a subjectivity rarely found in the views of secular Spaniards. Because conversion was their primary goal, the mendicants often sought to protect Indian communities from the abuses of the colonial state and offered bitter condemnations of the exploitative behavior of viceregal functionaries and Spanish colonists toward the land and its newly Christianized inhabitants. The different orders generated different arguments for the justification of Spanish sovereignty, the exploitation of native labor, and the respective status of Spain and native “nations” in the missionary project to instantiate a “universal church.” 10 They differed, in particular, in their assessment of Cortés and the use of force, with Dominicans like Bartolomé de las Casas repudiating both. Franciscans, as frontline missionaries, were the most consumed with a messianic and apocalyptic understanding of history, and their arguments regarding the conquest and New World dominion followed a mystical logic. Among the Franciscans, John Leddy Phelan argues that Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–­1604) was “responsible for formulating what must be considered the mystical interpretation of the conquest.” 11 His Historia eclesiástica indiana (written between 1571 and 1596) applied Fiore’s prophetic conception of theological time to New Spanish history.12 Mendieta characterized Cortés as a new Moses, divinely ordained to conquer the Aztecs and lead them out of captivity toward the faith. For him, Cortés was the apocalyptic messiah described by Fiore. His acts in the New World announced the arrival of the end times and cleared a path for the Franciscans’ apostolic work among the naturales (naturals). And while Mendieta believed that the use of force was initially necessary to convert the Aztecs, he became one of the most vocal and outraged critics of ongoing abuse during the reign of Philip II (1556–­98). Mendieta divided New World history into four stages that roughly align with Fiore’s Trinitarian prophetic history. The first stage was the pre-­Hispanic period, a time of captivity and idolatry that came to an end with Cortés’s arrival in 1519. The second, a Golden Age, was inaugurated in 1524 with the arrival of the twelve Franciscans and culminated with the death of the second viceroy, Luís de Velasco, in 1564. It was during this early phase of the colonial project that the mendicants endeavored to institute an Indian church to protect their charges from the materialism of Spanish colonials. Under the tutelage of the friars, Indians were viewed as childlike students and maintained in communities conceived of as pastoral classrooms devoted to the glorification of God. Some secular clergy attempted to instantiate aspects of this missionary ideal. The most significant projects of this nature were the pueblos-­hospitales (hospital-­towns) created by “Tata” Vasco de Quiroga, the 128  CHAPTER 3

first bishop of Michoacán. Unlike Mendieta, who was anticipating a proximate Apocalypse, Quiroga was inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia. Nevertheless, he too has become venerated along with select mendicant friars as an early protector of the Indians.13 This subversive attitude ran counter to the increasingly mercantilist orientation of the Crown toward its colonies, bringing the mendicants and some regular clergy into conflict with viceregal functionaries and resulting over time in the suppression of their endeavors on behalf of Indian communities. Mendieta’s third stage ran from 1564 to 1596 and corresponds with the period during which he was writing his Historia. He characterizes this period as the Age of Mammon, when the avarice of the Spanish brought about epidemics that decimated the indigenous population and the consolidation of royal control through corporatist rule, the favoring of the secular church, new systems of tribute, and the accelerated extraction of natural resources through forced labor as a consequence of the discovery of silver mines in the north. Despondent over the fate of the Indian church and the deferment of a terrestrial paradise, Mendieta ends the Historia with “a prayer that God would send the Messiah who would kill the beast of avarice” and thereby bring about the last age, Fiore’s Age of the Spirit.14 Mendieta’s Historia, while written during his lifetime, was not published until 1870. As the Crown centralized and consolidated its control over the colonies, it worked to suppress the subversive literary and historical traditions that had emerged during the early colonial period. The Crown instituted an official chronicler of the Indies and a series of restrictions on what kind of information could be published about the history, geography, economy, and politics of New Spain. Official chroniclers proliferated within the corporatist apparatus of the colony, with each viceroyalty, religious order, and capital appointing one to serve its particular political agenda within the limits imposed by the Crown. In addition to controlling the historical record, the Crown also suppressed the historical and ethnographic work of the Franciscans. Beginning in 1570, it outlawed any investigation into the indigenous past and blocked the publication of important works, such as the massive research conducted by Bernardino de Sahagún, The General History of the Things of New Spain (1499–­1590). Key sixteenth-­century texts regarding the conquest, the establishment of the colonies, and the history of indigenous peoples were not published until the mid-­nineteenth century, when Mexico’s independence from Spain prompted a nationalist interest in indigenous antiquity and a creole desire to distinguish Mexico’s Spanish heritage from the inauthentic claims of the gachupíns (Spaniards living, but not born, in the colonies and thereby enjoying AMERICAN MODERNITY AND THE PLAY OF MOURNING  129

a higher status than colony-­born creoles). It was at this time that the histories penned by missionaries, such as the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas and the Franciscans Motolinía (Toribio de Benavente), Sahagún, and Mendieta, were published, exerting an enormous influence on the postindependence, liberal, republican construction of Mexico’s pre-­Hispanic and colonial past. Even though Mendieta’s Historia was censored in the sixteenth century, much of his argument was cribbed by his friend Juan de Torquemada and published in his influential history of the Franciscan enterprise in Mexico, Monarquía Indiana (Indian Monarchy, 1604). Torquemada omitted those passages most offensive to the Crown, Spanish laymen, and regular clergy; he moderated Mendieta’s extreme mysticism and reconciled the various threads of sixteenth-­century ecclesiastical historiography with the more apologetic positions of nonmendicants toward the actions of the conquistadors against the Aztecs. “Torquemada connected the secular and religious history of the exotic New World to the main currents of medieval Christian civilization,” writes Phelan.15 He also integrated Aztec history into the “secular and profane history of the Greco-­Roman world and the sacred tradition of the Old Testament,” paving the way for eighteenth-­century creole historians who, out of a burgeoning nationalist pride, began revaluing Aztec civilization and calling for emancipation from Spain.16 “The axiom of the sixteenth-­century mendicant chroniclers that the New Indian Church was a return to the Primitive Apostolic Church,” observes Phelan, “is the origin of the Creole claim that Aztec civilization was the classical antiquity of the New World.” 17 Through Torquemada, Mendieta’s idealization of the Indian fed into eighteenth-­century proto-­nationalism, which in turn informed the Romantic conception of the noble savage that undergirded nineteenth-­century indigenismo. “His millennialism,” concludes Phelan, “received many secularized expressions in the eighteenth century and afterward: since America lacked the dead weight of tradition of Europe, the New World could be the geographical theater where the institutions and the theories of the Old World could be perfected by being applied.” 18 While both Mendieta and Torquemada viewed Cortés as a new Moses, nineteenth-­century historians split along ideological lines with regard to the “legacy of Cortés.” 19 Conservative imperialists, like Lucas Alamán, characterized him as a hero. “The Conquest was the means through which the civilization and religion of this country were established,” he wrote in his Disertaciones (Dissertations, 1844), “and Hernán Cortés was the extraordinary man sent by Providence to achieve this purpose.” 20 Liberal republicans, like José María Luis Mora or later Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, on the other

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figure 3.2. Félix Parra, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 1875, oil on canvas, 11 ft. 8 1⁄8 in. × 8 ft. 7 ½ in. (365.5 × 263 cm). Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City. De Agostini Picture Library/G. Daglie Orti/Bridgeman Images.

hand, nurtured the Black Legend characterizing Cortés as a scoundrel and the conquest as a terrible violation. Unlike during the colonial period, images of Cortés are rare in nineteenth-­century art. With the triumph of the liberals after the reform, artists periodically executed works that reflect the liberal condemnation of the conquest, such as Félix Parra’s Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1875) and The Massacre of Cholula (1877) (figure 3.2). And by the end of the century, images of Cortés began to appear in works that venerated the Aztec rebel Cuauhtémoc, like the relief panels adorning Francisco M. Jiménez and Miguel Noreña’s Monument to Cuauhtémoc installed on the Paseo de la Reforma in 1887 or Leandro Izaguirre’s The Torture of Cuauhtémoc, executed in 1892 and exhibited in the Mexican Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.21 In these works of art, conquistadors are the villains, Indians are victims, and the Catholic faith, represented by the missionary friars, is the agent of redemption and reconciliation between pre-­Hispanic and postconquest Mexico. By the beginning of the twentieth century, partisanship waned under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–­1910). As Enrique Krauze notes, the

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centenary celebrations mounted in 1910 to celebrate Mexico’s independence included a historical pantomime of the historic encounter between Moctezuma and Cortés in which the two figures were represented as equals, fated to bring about the convergence of two cultures.22 This emphasis on cultural convergence was echoed in the romantic alliance between Cortés and his consort, Malintzin or Doña Marina, a Tabascan woman who served as his translator, diplomat, and mistress. Both she and their son Martín were included in Cortés’s entourage in the centenary celebrations. Born of dual ethnic and religious heritage within the colonies, Martín is deemed the first mestizo and Mexican. While Malintzin would come to be known as “La Malinche,” a derogatory epithet used to denigrate Mexicans for treachery toward the nation, she embodies the biological foundation of the idealized process of acculturation known as mestizaje. “We Mexicans,” wrote Justo Sierra in his The Political Evolution of the Mexican People (1948), “are the sons of two countries and two races. We were born of the Conquest; our roots are in the land where the aborigines lived and in the soil of Spain. This fact rules our whole history; to it we owe our soul.” 23 Díaz was profoundly interested in the Mexican past, and he did more to cement the identification between the modern state and the Aztec Empire than any other leader. However, he was also a modernizing Catholic who waged campaigns to destroy surviving Indian communities and quell ongoing rebellion. He both funded the study and restoration of indigenous ruins and brokered a rapprochement with the Church after the Jacobinism of the reform years. It was during his presidency that the Virgin of Guadalupe was designated the “queen of Mexico” and the Order of the Sisters of Guadalupe created. Likewise, we see a resurgence of images dedicated to the official elevation of her popular cult to sainthood in 1895, the year of the coronation of her miraculous image.24 These included a cycle of large-­scale paintings commissioned for the sanctuary of the basilica, among them a work by Parra depicting the Jura de Patronato (the “vow of patronage”) commemorating the collaboration of civil and religious authorities to elevate the Guadalupan cult after her miraculous intervention during the plague of 1737. Díaz’s desire to reconcile the liberal and conservative political factions mirrored his interest in reconciling Mexico’s indigenous and Spanish cultures. And as an exemplary mestizo himself, he embodied the forces of convergence and civilization that his regime perpetuated in the name of building a new, patriotic religion to unify the country. Díaz’s identification with indigenous antiquity coupled with his contempt for contemporary indigenous communities is characteristic of nineteenth-­ century creole­indigenismo, which is distinguished from postrevolutionary

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indigenismo.25 Postrevolutionary intellectuals, politicians, and artists continued the nineteenth-­century creole interest in Aztec antiquity, but they also turned their attention to the pastoral administration of contemporary indigenous populations. This is nowhere more evident than in Vasconcelos’s creation of rural educational missions, which he famously compared with the compassionate works of Spanish missionaries like de las Casas.26 It was initiatives like this that Orozco savaged in his autobiography as a “Department of Poor Devils.” 27 The postrevolutionary state focused intently on “Mexicanizing the Indian,” which amounted to both an aesthetic revaluation and a governmental reorganization of indigenous political and folk life according to modern, secular, and, at times, quasi-­socialist principles. And, as discussed in chapter 2, this nation-­building project, while secular, was articulated through appeals to messianism, with both a pagan and a Christian inflection. If we return to Diego Rivera’s National Palace cycle, we can see how his mural cleaves not only to the liberal view of the “legacy of Cortés” but also to an implicitly theological conception of New World history that, while secularized, bears traces of Mendieta’s mystical-­apocalyptic characterization of the colonial period. Rivera’s Cortés

The central register along the large west wall of Rivera’s National Palace mural depicts the colonial epoch of Mexican history (see figure 1.2). It begins at the far right with conquistadors firing a cannon as indigenous men tear down an Aztec building. The scene culminates at the far left, with the enslavement of Indians, who now labor to construct a colonial edifice. The imagery thus moves from right to left and is organized around the large central pyramid and Mexica toponym. The iconography and composition on either side of this motif establish an axial symmetry wherein an image to the right is echoed by a similar one to the left. For example, the conquistador’s cannon blast aligns with the first arch of the wall and is placed just below a portrait of Cortés (figure 3.3). This is mirrored on the other side by the burning of indigenous codices. Here the conflagration is aligned with the final arch and positioned just below a second portrait of Cortés, now accompanied by Malintzin and Martín (figure 3.4). These two references to Cortés figure the conquest and mestizaje, respectively. They also preside over two phases of the colonial project; the first corresponds with Mendieta’s “Golden Age” when the mendicant missionaries were empowered to evangelize, while the second depicts some of the horrors he ascribed to the “Babylonian captivity” of the third phase.

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figure 3.3. Detail of Cortés’s landing. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34, Fresco, far right arch, west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. figure 3.4. Detail of Cortés, Malintzin (“La Malinche”), and Martín. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34, Fresco, far left arch, west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

Throughout, Rivera depicts a sea of historical figures engaged in the physical exploitation and spiritual conversion of indigenous Americans. The figures on the right are mostly friars renowned for their defense of the Indians. Thus, in opposition to Cortés and the greedy conquistadors who accompany him, Rivera shows de las Casas, characterizing him in much the same way as Félix Parra had in the aforementioned history painting (figure 3.5). De las Casas stands upright and brandishes a crucifix. An Indian family clings to his robes, seeking protection from the inhumane actions of the soldiers around them. As the viewer scans to the left, monks and a nun appear receiving tribute, conducting Mass, and baptizing indigenous subjects. And near the center of the wall, Rivera portrays Quiroga, Pedro de Gante, and Sahagún, religious men known for their protection, education, and chronicling of Indians. While these figures are set against a backdrop of physical labor, the right half of the central register along the west wall represents the

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figure 3.5. Scene from the “golden age” of the Spanish conquest, with detail showing Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, the evangelization of the Indians, and Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Vasco “Tata Vasco” de Quiroga, and Fray Pedro de Gante. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: From the Conquest to 1930, 1929–­34, Fresco, second arch from right, west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

humanitarian face of the conquest, emblematized to the far right through the good works of the missionary friars and at the center by the more juridical clergy who worked within the colonial administration to service and enhance the lives of new Christians. The corresponding imagery along the left half of the west wall tells a different story. There Rivera depicts the horrors of the Inquisition, the destruction of indigenous knowledge, the rape and enslavement of indigenous women and men (figure 3.6). In addition to Cortés, Malintzin, and Martín, Rivera depicts Pedro Moya de Contreras, first inquisitor general, third archbishop, and sixth viceroy of New Spain; Don Juan de Mendoza, tenth viceroy, archbishop, and inquisitor general of the colonies shown overseeing an auto da fé (the burning of a heretic); and Pedro de Alvarado, conquistador and governor of Guatemala, renowned for the slaughter of Aztecs during the Spanish occupation of Tenochtitlán, searing a brand into the flesh of a bound and kneeling

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figure 3.6. Scene from the “Silver Age” of the Spanish conquest with detail show­ ing the Inquisition with Inquisators Pedro Moya de Contreras and Don Juan de Mendoza. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34, Fresco, second arch from left, west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

indigenous man (figure 3.7). These religious and civil authorities, infamous for their cruelty, represent the intermingling of the regular clergy within the exploitative colonial administration. They counter the more benign evangelical and juridical figures on the right, in essence creating a dialectical but narrative movement from the Golden Age of the Indian church to the “Babylonian captivity” that Mendieta lamented at the end of his Historia. In this half, references to the Inquisition reflect and counter the juridical labors of Quiroga, de Gante, and Sahagún. Likewise, the image of Sepúlveda at the far left, mirrors and refutes the attempts of de las Casas to combat the abuses of Cortés’s conquest at the far right.

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figure 3.7. Detail of Pedro de Alvarado branding an indigenous slave. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34, Fresco, second arch from left, west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

While Cortés appears twice in this part of the mural, he is not endowed with superhuman or, conversely, satanic features. He is presented as a historical man. His role in the conquest and colonization of Mexico is emphasized but placed among a frieze of other historical actors and agents. In this respect, Rivera’s characterization of the colonial epoch corresponds with the late nineteenth-­century liberal point of view, according to which Cortés is accorded a foundational role but neither heroized nor condemned. The Spanish conquest is depicted as a brutal victimization of heroic but suffering indigenous people. However, the humanitarian compassion of the missionary friars seems to redeem this brutality, setting in motion a historical

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dialectic that will bring about the insurgent priests who led the independence movement and paved the way, ideologically, for the institution of a republican state depicted in the lunettes along the top of the west wall. In fact, if we understand the axial symmetry of the west wall as organized around the Mexica toponym at its center, then those episodes furthest from the center present the pro and con case for the conquest: missionary evangelization versus the rape, murder, and bondage enacted by the conquistadors (see figure 1.2). Those closer to the center demonstrate the institutionalization of these origins in the jurist defense of the Indians on the right and the Inquisition with its autos da fé on the left. This movement from outward in leads the eye, finally, to the Mexica toponym, that liberal appropriation of the Aztecs’ foundation myth and the preeminent symbol of the Mexican nation-­state (see figure 1.4). And as the eye moves upward into the central lunette that crowns this axis, the eagle aligns perfectly with Padre Hidalgo, the radical priest and “father” of Mexico’s independence. Above Hidalgo, Rivera places Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the agrarian faction of the Mexican Revolution. Hidalgo is framed on the right and the left by figures who represent the good and bad sides of the independence struggle. On his left we see Padre Morelos and the other leaders of the independence movement. And on his right we find Agustín de Iturbide, the first—and last—emperor of Mexico surrounded by figures who agitated against the progressive measures instituted by Morelos’s cohort. Above Iturbide, Rivera places Álvaro Obregón and Calles, while above Morelos he locates Zapata and other agrarian leaders. A blue denim–­clad worker stands next to Zapata and points to the viewer’s left, toward the future depicted along the south wall. This anonymous representation of the proletariat is paired with Zapata as an indication of the melding of popular and proletarian revolution that Rivera promoted as part of his dialectical understanding of Mexico’s place within the world-­ historical transformation from capitalism toward socialism.28 This brief sketch of Rivera’s complex narrative strategy and visual dialectics provides some sense of how his mural explains the historical movement from the colonial to the modern period and the legacy of the split he depicts between the good and bad aspects of the conquest. There can be no doubt that the imagery along the west wall is exceedingly violent. Nonetheless, it is logically ordered vertically, horizontally, axially, and from right to left. While the dialectical logic is complex, the historical resonances, visual mirroring, and play of ideologies are often delightful, inducing a visual and conceptual pleasure that is at odds with the horrors on view. The patient and erudite viewer will be rewarded for her labor as image after image, figure after

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figure, and episode after episode line up into one of these dialectical pairings. These relationships and symmetries seem to proliferate, perhaps thwarting attempts to foreclose further readings. However, one has the sense, despite information overload, that there is order here, not chaos. The viewer can stand at a historical distance and feel morally superior with regard to the barbarism of civilization without feeling personally implicated. When Rivera originally executed the mural, the more religious or politically conservative members of the viewing public would have felt attacked by it. But his ideal audience, the liberal secularists engaged in building a new national state, would have endorsed his dialectical vision of Mexican history. And even though his federal patrons were located on the bad side of the equation, their central position, along with the larger ideological thrust of the mural, would have been construed as laudatory rather than critical. This was the case for Si­quei­ros, who, in his attack on Rivera’s “demagoguery” in his New Masses essay, cites Rivera’s depiction of Calles in this mural as but one instance of the artist’s complicity with the forces of the counterrevolution.29 Rivera’s mural does not endorse the providential claims of the Spanish church-­state, but it does partake of the theological temporality of Mendieta’s New World history. Viewed through its colonial historical strata, Rivera’s mural is divided into four stages: the pre-­Hispanic, a colonial Golden Age, a colonial Babylon, and a messianic period of redemption. Instead of characterizing the pre-­Hispanic past as an age of idolatry, however, Rivera depicts it as a primitive theological state. And instead of viewing Cortés as a New World messiah, Rivera extends the horizon of Mendieta’s theological time from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. He posits Marx as the Mosaic redeemer, and in the place of a millennial kingdom of Christ, he locates a secular socialist utopia on the event horizon of the mural’s eschatological time (see figure 1.3). Whereas Mendieta proclaimed that the “Indian commonwealth” would become a “terrestrial paradise” after the age of apocalypse, in Rivera’s mural it becomes a great industrial city just beyond Marx’s outstretched hand. I will return to the changes Rivera made to the iconographic program on the west and south walls in what follows. For now, it should be recalled that in chapter 2 I characterize the messianic relationship between Quetzalcoatl, depicted on the north wall, and Marx, his mirror image on the south wall, as an instance of the “back to the future” logic of Rivera’s messianic indigenismo. Here I underscore the extent to which his appreciation of Amer­indian culture is rooted in the apostolic tradition of the mendicants. Not only did Rivera draw heavily from Sahagún’s research when visualizing the “Ancient Indian World” (see figure 1.1); the messianic structure of New

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World history that he vivifies draws upon Christian notions of eschatological time and their providential claims regarding the New World and New Spain/​­Mexico’s place within it. While Rivera secularizes Mendieta’s Christian prophecy, his millennialism represents a mystical version of Marxism. As Phelan observes, Mendieta’s millennialism “received many secularized expressions in the eighteenth century and afterward.” 30 Taking liberties with Phelan’s observation, we might argue that, as with the mendicants and the creole indigenists who drew from their legacy, for Rivera, “[Mexico] could be the geographical theater where the institutions and the theories of [Marxism] could be perfected by being applied.” 31 Orozco’s Cortés

Orozco’s approach to New World history is no less theological. However, unlike Rivera, who exploits the mysticism of eschatological history to support a putative secularism, Orozco directs our attention to the theological nature of time and sovereignty to call the secular messianism of Rivera into question. To appreciate how Orozco’s Epic engages these themes differently, we need to situate his treatment of Cortés and the spiritual conquest at Dartmouth within earlier and later iterations of this theme in his work. Orozco tackled these themes throughout his career, not only in his murals but also in paintings, drawings, and prints. His perspective on Cortés and the conquest shifts with the context and concerns of each project. We might see these shifts as an evolution, wherein Orozco’s attitude toward this history becomes more melancholic over time. However, a more productive way of assessing shifts like this in Orozco’s work (for they appear with respect to other figures and phenomena, most significantly with respect to Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution) is to recall the figural nature of Orozco’s dialectics. If Rivera subordinates the conquest to a philosophy of history wherein it is but one episode in a progressive dialectic unfolding over time and moving toward a utopian future culmination, Orozco treats it as what Roberto Esposito calls an “event.” For Rivera, following Esposito’s argument, history is the object of philosophy; for Orozco, philosophy is the subject or content of history.32 Regarding this difference—​­between philosophy as history and history as philosophy—​­Esposito argues that according to the first model “phenomena are located along a single trajectory. History and philosophy are therefore categorically distinct fields, and only philosophy is assigned the task of granting total meaning to a series of otherwise senseless facts.” 33 In Rivera’s case, Marx’s material dialectics provide the totalizing scheme that

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gives the facts of Mexico’s postconquest history their meaning. The second model, he continues, “reconfigures the relationship between philosophy and history; it no longer aims to subordinate historical dynamics to the logic of a given philosophy but aims instead to grasp an element or a characteristic that is itself philosophical within certain historical events.” 34 “In this case,” he concludes, “meaning is no longer impressed upon historical events from the outside”; rather, it is “something that originates from and is made up of the facts themselves.” 35 Our task is to confront the meaning of events themselves while recognizing that history has no single meaning or effect. History’s “decisive events,” he insists, “are philosophical powers that struggle to take over the world and dominate our interpretation of it.” 36 Thus, the “metaphysical stakes of the conflict” lie precisely in the “definition and meaning of contemporary history.” 37 Understood in this way, Orozco’s engagement with the conquest is part of a contemporary conflict over the meaning of Mexico’s colonial history and the philosophical powers inherent within contemporary events struggling for domination. Thus, we might approach the vagaries of Orozco’s treatment of Cortés and the conquest by asking: What does he illuminate about the now during which he was painting? I proceed by analyzing four panels from two mural cycles that elucidate Orozco’s treatment of this theme in the Epic. The first two, Hernán Cortés and “La Malinche” and The Franciscan and the Indian, appear in Orozco’s National Preparatory School murals, executed in 1926. The last two, Portrait of Cortez and The Franciscans, appear in Orozco’s Hospicio Cabañas mural in Guadalajara, painted between 1938 and 1939. In Hernán Cortés and “La Malinche,” Orozco recalls Parra’s Fray Bartolomé de las Casas by pairing a prominent, white, Spanish man with a dependent, brown, indigenous woman (figure 3.8). In Parra’s painting an indigenous woman clings to de las Casas while her male counterpart lies dead at his feet (see figure 3.2). Thus, the painting suggests a chaste pairing between the Church and its indigenous subjects, which, as Stacie Widdifield has argued, retools the pairing of Spanish men and Indian women in colonial caste paintings in order to represent mestizaje as a symbolic rather than a biological process.38 Orozco rebiologizes Parra’s imagery, using the sexual relationship between Cortés and La Malinche to allegorize the violent convergence of two cultures as a foundational romance for the modern nation-­state.39 However, the violence of conquest is barely intimated by Cortés’s gesture, which is at once possessive and protective. Orozco’s image gives voice to an “ambivalent mestizaje.” 40 Our contact with La Malinche, as a figuration of Mexico’s indigenous culture and people, is barred not only by Cortés but also by her inscrutability. Her closed eyes, passive pose, and ambiguous

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figure 3.8. José Clemente Orozco, Hernan Cortés and “La Malinche,” 1926, Mural, National Preparatory School, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. figure 3.9. José Clemente Orozco, The Franciscan and the Indian, 1926, Mural, National Preparatory School, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

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relationship with Cortés suggest anxiety about the postrevolutionary artist’s access to indigeneity in much the same way as Orozco’s complex framing of the Quetzalcoatl myth does in the Ancient half of his Epic (see figure i.6). The Franciscan and the Indian, one of three images dedicated to Franciscan charity that face another set dedicated to Warring Ancient Races and The Conqueror-­Builder, is no less anxious (figure 3.9). Here a friar bends over to embrace the emaciated figure of a nude indigenous person. While his pose and humble features would seem to confirm the humanitarian view of the mendicants’ protective stance toward Native peoples, his towering presence and near stranglehold on his subject suggest the opposite. As with Cortés and La Malinche, the Franciscan is an allegorical figure who stands in for the evangelical project of the spiritual conquest. Like Rivera, Orozco represents the conquest, mestizaje, and the evangelization of the New World through images of Cortés, Malintzin, and mendicants administering to Indians. However, unlike Rivera, Orozco does not integrate these figures into a historico-­dialectical panorama; he does not subordinate these historical facts to a philosophy of history. In his Preparatory murals, they are icons disarticulated from their colonial mis-­en-­scène. Without the teleological framework of eschatological time, it is difficult to

definitively discern Orozco’s argument about the aforementioned historical processes. In fact, one wonders if Rivera had Orozco’s Preparatory murals in mind when he began work on his National Palace mural. Whereas Orozco reworked Parra’s painting of de las Casas into an ambivalent message about the foundational coupling of Cortés and La Malinche, Rivera separates the two themes into the less ambivalent moral coding of his rendering of the colonial period. His de las Casas does what Parra’s does but without the symbolic invocation of kinship. He leaves mestizaje to his representation of Cortés, ­Malintzín, and Martín. Yet, in that reference, we do not detect the ambivalence about mestizaje or the politics of indigenismo that troubles Orozco’s mural. Rivera does acknowledge the violence that underpins mestizaje through the proximate scene of rape (see figure 3.4). However, it is presented as a fact, and it is given redemptive meaning through the totalizing scheme of Rivera’s Marxist dialectic. Orozco’s equivocation can be partially attributed to the context of this project. The Preparatory School was the first collective commission meted out to artists by Vasconcelos, after an early experiment with Roberto Montenegro in the former convent of San Pedro y Pablo. Several artists worked on the project amid growing criticism of Vasconcelos and the artists in his employ. None of the artists had much experience with public art at this point. And yet they were charged with limning edifying images that might aid the reconstruction of Mexican society after its devastating civil war. Following Vasconcelos’s particular understanding of racio­cultural synthesis, each artist attempted to contribute to the postrevolutionary project of mestizaje, conceived of as both a hybrid aesthetic and a governmental project for social synthesis. Orozco opted to work in the Grand Patio and along the ceiling arches and landings of the main stairwell leading to the second and third floors. And while he began work in 1923 with a series of allegorical murals along the ground floor, he would shift gears in 1924 as a consequence of the attempted coup by Adolfo de la Huerta and the formation of the Syndicate of Revolutionary Painters and Sculptors. In subsequent images we see the biting tone of his satirical illustrations return in frescoes that caricature the law, the bourgeoisie, and the church. Moreover, he repainted his earlier allegorical murals with a series of works that address the ideological infighting and treachery of the postrevolutionary social and political order. And while images of hammers and sickles appear over doorframes and in marginalia that speak to Orozco’s brief alignment with socialism, he treats iconic socialist themes like workers and strikes with a critical distance that suggests he was a skeptical fellow traveler.41

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Orozco was summarily dismissed from this project in 1924 after the resignation of Vasconcelos and the election of Calles. His murals had been at the center of a series of controversies and protests lodged by nearly every faction of the gente-­decente (decent people), from the Catholic Woman’s League to students at the Prepa to critics and authors, like Salvador Novo and D. H. Lawrence. Even his fellow muralists were lackluster in their endorsement of his work between 1923 and 1924. He was allowed to return to complete his mural cycle in 1926. By this time he had executed two other murals and achieved some vindication. Upon his return he painted Hernan Cortés and “La Malinche” on the large vaulted ceiling over the stairwell as well as the murals dedicated to the Franciscans along the left-­hand landing and those concerned with Warring Ancient Races and The Conqueror-­Builder to the right. He would go on to paint the third-­floor sequence depicting episodes from the revolution in somber blues that differ in both tone and intent from the more acidic caricatures on the first and second floors. The experimental nature of this project, its erratic progress due to the whims of unsteady government patronage, and its relationship to a fragile and ever-­changing political context resulted in a somewhat disarticulated mural cycle wherein the connection between one suite of images and another can be hard to piece together. While Orozco touched upon themes that persist across his mural career, he was more reluctant at this early stage to make his politics explicit. His stylistic expressiveness and recourse to caricature made those murals from 1923 to 1924 highly controversial. Thus, in 1926 we see him softening both his stridency and his satire, perhaps to safeguard the project from further mutilation or worse, destruction. While in retrospect we can appreciate Orozco’s sympathetic portrayal of the revolutionary rank and file, it is difficult to ascertain whether he viewed the spiritual conquest as impetus for or amelioration of the violence and corruption detailed in the earlier frescoes along the first and second floors. What is evident is that in order to address the meaning and effects of the revolution, as a historical event, Orozco decided to address the conquest and evangelization. In this mural he brings together the then of the conquest with the now of the postrevolutionary project of mestizaje in order to explore the sexual violence that constitutes postrevolutionary Mexico’s racialized national community. By 1937, when Orozco began work at the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, his treatment of the conquest is both more damning and more melancholic. Painting at the height of his career and in his home state, Orozco made the conquest the overt theme of the entire cycle. The Spanish Conquest of Mexico covers every inch of wall and ceiling space in the chapel of a deconsecrated church designed by sculptor-­architect Manuel Tolsá. Founded

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in 1791 by the bishop of Guadalajara, Juan Ruiz de Cabañas, the Hospicio functioned as a workhouse, hospital, orphanage, and almshouse until the twentieth century.42 However, by the 1930s, when Orozco embarked upon his commission, the chapel had fallen into disuse.43 Unlike his Dartmouth cycle, The Spanish Conquest of Mexico does not assert a pre-­Hispanic Golden Age. Rather, it situates the brutality of the Spanish conquest along a continuum of Aztec barbarism, again signified by the practice of human sacrifice and the veneration of Huitzilopochtli, with no Toltecan interlude offered as an alternative heritage for the modern world. Quetzalcoatl makes a brief appearance, but as one grotesque head among others including Christ, Zeus, and a pagan idol, depicting the general theme of religion in one of the vaults. The chapel has a centralized plan with a short north/​­south arm and an elongated west/​­east one with six bays. The central bay is crowned with a cupola. The frescoes in the vaults, pendentives, and lunettes focus on the military and spiritual conquest, while those painted on the arched lower walls in each bay are dedicated, for the most part, to images of mechanized warfare, mass political movements, and fascist demagoguery. Orozco’s targets are generalized, but his message is clear: the modern threat of totalitarianism has its roots in the sacrificial violence of the Aztecs and the terror of Spanish colonialism. In this case, Orozco juxtaposes the now of totalitarianism—​­in his case both fascism and Stalinist communism—​­with the then of the conquest in order to explore the constitutive violence of the modern nation-­ state and to implicate industrial modernity in this critique of violence. Conquistadors and friars proliferate in the ceiling imagery, but I focus on two frescoes that parallel one another in the vaults on the east and west side of the cupola. Portrait of Cortez presents the conquistador as a mechanized robot with bolts for joints and a long, angular physique made up of steel beams (figure 3.10). He stands astride the nude bodies of brown-­skinned men who appear mutilated because of extreme foreshortening. Their positions are similar to the prostrate male figure in Cortés and “La Malinche.” Likewise, they recall the pile of corpses at Cortés’s feet in the Epic. In each instance, the bodies of Cortés’s victims are rendered more as mere flesh than as human forms. Likewise, in both, Cortés suspends his palm over his victims, as though their fate were entirely at his command. However, in “Cortez and the Cross” the skin tone of the victims is light, perhaps signaling their postmortem state. In Portrait of Cortez they are extremely dark, making their racialized status as indios self-­evident. At the Hospicio Cabañas, Cortés is accompanied by neither his consort, Malintzin, nor a mendicant friar. Instead, he is guided by a dark angel whose

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figure 3.10. José Clemente Orozco, Portrait of Cortez, 1938–­39, Fresco, western vault, Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk. figure 3.11. José Clemente Orozco, The Franciscans, 1938–­39, Fresco, eastern vault, Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

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presence recalls the providential claims of imperial chroniclers and mendicants like Mendieta. She, too, appears as a cyborg with bolts for breasts and spiky, metallic appendages. Cortés is compared with a friar, but the latter occupies his own space in the eastern vault, facing the conquistador (figure 3.11). Orozco depicts the friar clothed in a gray-­brown robe with narrow, closed eyes as opposed to the wide-­eyed stare of Cortés. He grasps a weaponized cross, which is angled toward the nude Indian man kneeling before him. Behind the friar another demonic machine-­angel unfurls a cloth emblazoned with the Latin letters, “a, b, c, d” in reference to the mendicant’s open-­air classrooms dedicated to the education of their New World subjects. Orozco includes slashing strokes of red on this teaching aid, implicating it in the violence of conversion.

If Orozco’s treatment of the Franciscans was ambivalent at the Prepa, over a decade later their mission is depicted as no less militaristic than that of Cortés. In fact, save for portraits of Cervantes and El Greco, Orozco characterizes sixteenth-­century Spain as a mechanized Babylon throughout the Hospicio cycle. Tellingly, he depicts King Philip II embracing a cross in a related vault, suggesting that it is his Silver Age on view. Orozco’s frescoes resonate with Mendieta’s Historia not only in their focus on the abuses of Philip II’s administration of the colonies but also in the theological characterization of the conquest. In this cycle the mendicants are not counterpoised against the conquistadors and viceregal functionaries as representatives of two stages/​­factions in New Spanish history as we see in Rivera’s National Palace mural. The two conquests are mutually implicated. And if, in his Prepa murals, the Franciscans’ pastoral compassion for indigenous peoples was suggested, here it is revealed to be a weapon of empire. For the institution of a great monastic classroom that Mendieta envisioned for the Indian church is shown to be part of the dramaturgy of eschatology, a means toward an apocalyptic end with deadly consequences not only for New World inhabitants but also for the modern world. Orozco was painting at the Hospicio Cabañas during the eruption of World War II. His interest in the conquest as an agent of global dominion was driven by concerns about contemporary mass politics. In three of the six bays he painted images that thematize the contemporary crisis along these lines. The Mechanized Masses shows robotic cadres of protestors moving in lockstep with their banners forming an ominous vertical block that recalls both the sails of a ship and a load of I-­beams (figure 3.12). This conflation of imagery transposes the materials of modern industry onto memories of Spanish galleons while also conjuring the lockstep formations of fascist troops in newsreels. Here Orozco draws upon imagery he had worked up in his lithographs from 1935, such as Las Masas (The Masses), where he lampoons public protest as mindless gibberish (figure 3.13). In The Mechanized Masses he goes further, equating the technology of conquest, modern industry, and the perils of mass political movements. In Despotism a colossus invades the scene from the right (figure 3.14). His head is not visible, but he carries a whip and wears the red boots, loose shirt, and voluminous pants of a Cossack. While the Cossacks were anti-­ Bolshevists during the Russian Revolution, by the time Orozco was painting, they were associated with the Red Army and therefore with the Soviet Union. As Orozco was completing his cycle in 1939, Stalin signed the Molotov–­ Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression agreement with Hitler, and through the Third International he commanded that communists cease their attacks

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figure 3.12. José Clemente Orozco, The Mechanized Masses, 1938–­39, Fresco, bay, Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico. Photo by Mary K. Coffey

figure 3.13. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, Las Masas (The Masses), 1935, Lithograph on wove paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Gift of the Schmeckebier Family; PR.985.40.1.

against fascism. It was at this point that the team working with Si­quei­ros at the Electricians’ Syndicate edited the mural to exclude overt references to Hitler and fascism, and focused instead on capitalism in deference to the directive.44 In addition to betraying the anti-­fascist stance of the Popular Front, the pact enabled Germany’s European campaigns. Thus, the reference here to the Cossack is likely an attack on Stalin and communism more generally as a form of totalitarianism, but it may also implicate his peers, like Si­quei­ros, who were falling in line with the terms dictated by the Soviet Comintern. Finally, in The Dictators, Orozco once again depicts a steel-­gray phalanx in the lower register of the image with a cohort of tribal chiefs gathered toward the top (figure 3.15). Here he primitivizes the figures to link modern dictators like Hitler, Stalin, or even members of the newly formed pri with the barbaric Aztec priests shown pulling out the hearts of sacrificial victims in the lunettes that crown the bays. In the Epic Orozco drew comparisons across time and space between Aztec sacrifice and the blood sacrifice of modern, nationalist warfare. Here, rather than split the two into

figure 3.14. José Clemente Orozco, Despotism, 1938–­39, Fresco, bay, Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico. Photo by Mary K. Coffey. figure 3.15. José Clemente Orozco, The Dictators, 1938–­39, Fresco, bay, Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

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separate scenes, they are brought together so that the negative connotations of tribalism constructed through the discourse on the “primitive” inflects the viewer’s perceptions of modern politics and statecraft. That these three images are linked is clear in both the themes they treat and the repetition of iconography and forms. Together they call attention to the warfare that plagued the 1930s, from the encroaching world war to the international confrontation between fascists and communists to the internecine struggles on the left. There is no way to read Orozco’s mural at the Hospicio Cabañas narratively or to view the images as linked in any causal way. Its discreet images form a true constellation. One can enter the chapel from either the north or the south portals of the short arm. Once inside, one stands under the central cupola with the imagery radiating east and west along the long arm of the chapel. But there is no indication as to which direction to go first, and no matter how the viewer moves, she is required to double back to the center before proceeding in the other direction. The imagery can be read across the vaults from east to west or west to east. It can also be read up, across, and down the walls and ceiling of each bay. Finally, one can relate any scene within the whole to another, regardless of its physical position within the chapel. Thus, the Hospicio cycle embodies Benjamin’s concept of history as a “constellation which [our] own era has formed with a definite earlier one.” 45 Orozco forges a constellation between the present political crisis and the Spanish conquest. But he resists the historicist temptation to tell “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” and instead employs the materialist’s practice of collage and radical juxtaposition.46 With its disarticulation of component parts, the Hospicio cycle is more like Dive Bomber and Tank (see figure 1.10) than the Epic. One cannot ascribe a temporality to the sequencing of images in the Hospicio Cabañas cycle, even as its iconography is saturated with the eschatological themes of Mendieta’s prophetic New World history. If the mural culminates, it is in the central cupola with the powerful image of the Man of Fire. And while this figure can be read as an apocalyptic one, it does not correspond with the messianic figures we have encountered thus far, whether pagan, Christian, or secular. Formally and conceptually this cycle embodies Benjamin’s concept of the Jetztzeit (or “now time”), a “conception of the present,” he writes, that is “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” 47 Like Dive Bomber and Tank, Orozco’s Hospicio Cabañas mural seems to allegorize the contemporary crisis through fragmentation, but in this case it is the crisis of philosophy as history. The mural places the viewer in the role of the historical materialist or radical monteur, requiring her to “change 150  CHAPTER 3

the actual order of the plastic elements in the vaults.” 48 It is precisely the machine-­poem that Orozco tried to “explain” in his MoMA statement a year after he completed this cycle: “The order of the inter-­relation between its parts may be altered, but those relationships may stay the same in any other order, and unexpected or expected possibilities may appear.” 49 Given the fact that the Hospicio Cabañas murals were painted in a chapel, his reference in the MoMA statement to Michelangelo’s “Sixtine [sic] Chapel” may very well have been an oblique nod to this cycle.50 In Orozco’s Hospicio Cabañas mural, philosophy is the subject of history forging a constellation between imperial colonialism and totalitarianism in a way that anticipates subsequent critiques of the thanatopolitics of the modern state. However, it is in the Epic that Orozco’s concerns about the bio­political (political strategies that concern themselves with the management of life at the macro [​­population demographics] ​­and micro [​­biological organism] ​­scales of existence) state, evident in his meditation on mestizaje at the Prepa, merge with his growing concerns about the thanatopolitics (the use of death to motivate political life) of totalitarianism, pictured in the Hospicio Cabañas. Moreover, it was at Dartmouth that he implicated the historicism of Rivera’s vulgar Marxism and fetishization of technological progress in his critique of modern sovereignty and the postcolonial nation-­state. It is in the Epic that what Richard Iton calls the “problem space that is the modern/​­colonial matrix” comes to the fore in a way that helps us to see how racialization in the Americas is rooted in colonial violence.51 In this sense, Orozco’s Epic argues that “race must be placed front and center in considerations of political violence,” to quote Alexander Weheliye, “albeit not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierachization, which are projected onto the putatively biological human body.” 52

The Conquest, the Two Americas, and the Thanatopolitics of Race

PART II.

In chapter 1, I note that Orozco’s Epic makes an abrupt leap in time from “Cortez and the Cross” to the subsequent image, “The Machine.” I argue that this shift marked the crisis of the now motivating Orozco’s turn to the conquest, a specific then, in order to command viewers to see the concerns of an oppressed past as their own. Recalling that Orozco’s mural is painted in the United States, not Mexico, and that it explicitly addresses a presumably U.S. American audience, I rephrase the question: In what sense is the Spanish

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conquest a concern of ours? Or, put another way, why ask U.S. Americans to contemplate the Spanish conquest, given the power of the Black Legend here, and elsewhere, to distantiate the settler-­state from both European imperialism and the pathologies of the postcolonial nation-­states in Latin America? To paraphrase Esposito, how might we find, in the present-­ness of this history, different possibilities for the postcolonial Americas, possibilities that might entail Anglo-­as well as Hispano-­America?53 This question is foregrounded in the two panels that follow “The Machine.” In this section, I consider how Orozco’s rendering of the two Americas engages with period discourses about hemispheric cooperation, discourses that were imperative for Rivera’s U.S. murals but that have never been considered in conjunction with Orozco’s Epic. Thus, via a comparison between Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural (1932–­33) and Orozco’s Epic, we can better apprehend the “unexpected possibilities” that arise from Orozco’s constellation of colonial violence with industrial production, biologized nationalism, reproduction, and sacrifice in The Epic of American Civilization. The Machine and the Two Americas: Orozco’s Version

“The Machine” is one of the few images in Orozco’s cycle that does not include humans (figure 3.16). Instead, we see a quasi-­cubist landscape of industrial implements, combine blades, bolted I-­beams, silos, smokestacks, and splintered metallic shards that bear a closer resemblance to knifepoints than to any functional object. A menacing black tower, made up of pipes, stands at the center like a funerary monument marking the graveyard of industrial modernity. The horizon line just barely appears at the top of the composition, compressing the pictorial space in an uncomfortably claustrophobic industrial landscape. Landscape is an ironic designation, as the metallic machine parts obscure any sign of the natural world. This is a technologized nightmare; the machine has consumed the garden. And what of the machines? To what use can these fractured and partial things be put? While one can make out recognizable parts, no object coalesces into a clearly identifiable machine or tool. These machines are useless, and in this respect they differ from the scenes of modern industry that we find in the work of artists like Charles Sheeler or Rivera. Even Louis Lozowick’s more ambivalent smoke-­spewing factories are recognizable as such. Only Orozco twists the machine aesthetic toward such nihilistic ends. The palette and iconography of “The Machine” pick up thematic elements in “Cortez and the Cross.” Echoing the conquistador’s steely armor and sharp sword, the machines seem to take up where the conquest left off,

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figure 3.16. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “The Machine” (Panel 12), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.14

feeding off of the bodies of the corpses piled at Cortés’s feet. The arm of one victim even seems to twist as though it were caught in the whirring action of an industrial thresher, traversing the panel at a diagonal from lower left to middle right. If we follow this oblique orthogonal across the panel, it seems to churn out the gray “organization men” arrayed in a neat semicircle in the subsequent image, “Anglo-­America.” 54 Orozco asserts here that the sacrifice of Amerindians fueled the rise of Anglo-­America’s orderly community. This is an unorthodox argument about the origins of the settler-­state that belies U.S. American exceptionalism, and with it the very ideological purpose of the Black Legend on these shores. María DeGuzmán argues that the Black Legend functioned, within turn-­ of-­the-­century U.S. America, to constitute Anglo-­American empire as an “antiempire, innocent of the barbarities of the Spanish Empire.” 55 Part and parcel with this distantiation between Anglo-­American and Spanish empires was the ideological construction of the term Hispanic to systematically exclude nonwhite, non-­Anglo-­Saxons from the category American.56 For ­DeGuzmán, the alignment of “Hispanic” with “un-­Americanness” shores up a “vengeful fantasy of the United States as independent, isolated, as simply

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‘America.’” 57 In this sense, she concludes, the category “Hispanic” both erases Anglo-­America’s cultural dependence upon Spain and the Spanish Empire for the “reproduction of its antiempire” while also obfuscating “current awareness of the presence of Spanish empire in what is now the United States.” 58 This double process, she notes, has enabled the constitution of “Hispanic” (read: Latin American) immigration as a “dangerous intrusion of anti-­entrepreneurial, antimodernizing, and essentially backward Ibero-­ Catholic values that threaten to undermine what is constructed as the ‘coherence’ of Anglo-­Protestant ‘American’ culture.” 59 Formally and iconographically, Orozco’s characterization of “Anglo-­ America” renders U.S. America as a white, Anglo-­Saxon, Protestant (wasp) nation (figure 3.17). Its proximity to “Hispano-­America” offers a study in contrasts that brings to the fore the former’s “coherence” and the latter’s danger. Like that of “The Machine,” the composition of “Anglo-­America” is cubistic. However, rather than deploying cubist fragmentation and spatial compression, Orozco relies on its implicit grid. He cleverly echoes the rectilinear geometry of the air vent along the top of the wall, as if to equate Anglo-­America’s homogenized citizenry with the efficiency of its industrial design. Organized into a series of horizontal registers that recede logically from a fore to middle to back ground, the panel presents a scene of children issuing from a white schoolhouse/​­Protestant church to gather around a stern schoolmistress. To their right men and women gather for a town hall meeting.60 The townsfolk are dressed in similar attire and painted in a limited gray-­and-­white palette. Their pallor and bland vestments seem drained of life; they are a collection of atomized persons who stare, dourly but without purpose, toward an absence at the heart of their communal gathering. These “walking dead” are often characterized by students as “zombies” because their affectless gathering suggests “subjugated agency,” a key feature of the zombie trope.61 The Protestant church/​­schoolhouse, red barn, and an unnaturally squared patch of wheat suggest an iconic rural America rather than any particular region of the country. It is as if Orozco were parodying the regionalist painting of the day, drawing together John Steuart Curry’s pious baptismal scene (Baptism in Kansas, 1928) with Paul Sample’s alienating Beaver Meadow (1939) and Grant Wood’s severe American Gothic (1930). Whereas the Regionalists were erroneously understood then, and even now, to be celebrating U.S. America’s parochial rural cultures, Orozco’s “Anglo-­America” has always been viewed as a savage attack on his host nation.62 “Anglo-­America’s” grid-­like order gives way to the spiraling chaos of “Hispano-­America” (figure 3.18). In this panel, architecture collapses as

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figure 3.17. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Anglo-­America” (Panel 13), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.15

businessmen, politicians, and generals vie for the gold coins that spill forth from a large sack. Here, Orozco refers both to the long history of foreign ownership of Mexico’s subsoil resources and, more specifically, to the recent history of U.S.-­owned mining interests operating along Mexico’s northern border, the region associated with Pancho Villa’s Northern Division. Orozco’s critique of foreign exploitation via resource extraction differs from Rivera’s more ambivalent but accommodating representation of hemispheric interdependence in his Detroit Industry murals. As if to make the connection between exploitation and revolutionary action clear, Orozco pictures

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figure 3.18. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Hispano-­ America” (Panel 14), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.16

an armed peasant standing dead center, posed against his rifle, readied for purposeful action. However, his imminent death at the hands of a U.S. American general reveals that he, too, is a walking dead man. With the first four panels of the Modern sequence, Orozco demonstrates that violence is what constitutes community. Esposito, citing the story of Romulus and Remus, reminds us that the very “foundation of community seems to be tied to the blood of a cadaver that lies, abandoned, on the ground.” 63 As the prior discussion of Parra and Orozco’s images of the conquest reveals, this is the case for most liberal history paintings that image the establishment of mestizo community in Mexico (see figures 3.2 and 3.8). In the classical examples of origin stories that Esposito surveys, he notes that the mythical violence of these stories is fraternal in nature, demonstrating that it is not difference but rather “indifference that brings human beings together.” 64 History painting in the Americas would suggest that it is difference that matters,

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for these images consistently stage a scene in which it is a stranger (and not a member of the “family”) who kills. Moreover, it is through this killing that strangers become family, “joined by the womb of the same mother” (in this case, Malintzin), rather than starting out as brothers only to have kinship sundered by fratricide.65 History paintings within the postcolonial Americas acknowledge what European scholars of bio­politics, like Esposito, routinely elide. As Weheliye convincingly shows, these discourses “largely occlude[ ] race as a critical category of analysis.” 66 In so doing, they ignore race and racialization as a “conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-­quite-­humans, and nonhumans.” 67 The “techniques of domination, dispossession, expropriation, exploitation, and violence” that are associated with the colonial/​­modern matrix, he argues, “are predicated upon the hierarchical ordering of racial, gender, sexual, economic, religious, and national differences.” 68 Because Esposito ignores the colonial theater, he argues that the radical equality of origins—​­a variant on Agamben’s concept of “bare life”—​ ­constitutes not only what he calls “bare community,” to indicate the original indifference that constitutes our relation in common, but also the “reciprocal violence” that threatens communal life once differences have been asserted through violent action.69 There may be an asymmetry of power, but at the level of life, “violence is what human beings share with one another.” 70 It is the very sameness, the “indifference,” of community that propels the construction of boundaries in an attempt to stabilize an inside and an outside of community. Boundaries seek to establish an “us” and a “them” that can both confer an identity upon the community but also keep the community from falling back into the undifferentiated mass and violent chaos of an originary communitas. Only the “division of what is common,” Esposito continues, “is able to give security to modern men and women.” 71 The security that boundaries between an “us” and a “them” safeguard often comes at a high price: the subordination of life to the law of the sovereign and/​­or state. “Sovereign power makes death the horizon against which life can be identified, and then only negatively.” 72 This negative identification is what Esposito calls the “immunitary” response of the modern state. Immunitas, he argues, sets up protective borders against what is outside as well as the threats that inhere within community. Weheliye counters that “there exists no such thing as an absolute biopolitical substance” because the “racializing assemblages” of coloniality have so dehumanized the colonized that they lie beyond the very category of the human and therefore are differentiated from human communitas at the outset.73 This helps us to appreciate why Orozco has lumped the victims of

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Cortés’s conquest into a pile of mere flesh at the outset of the Modern half of the mural. For it is the political violence of the colonial/​­modern matrix that differentiates and hierarchizes humanity, assigning the status of Man to the white Western subject and relegating subjugated peoples, such as Amerindians and enslaved Africans, to the category of mere flesh. Esposito’s philosophical meditation on communitas and immunitas derives from his reading of political theorists from Hobbes and Locke through Benjamin and Foucault. He traces a critical genealogy about violence and community within modern political theory in order to mark the shift in the function of immunity that occurs with the advent of what Foucault calls biopolitics at the end of the eighteenth century, or the period in which bio­ logical life becomes the object of politics through such power-­knowledge discourses as population demography, urban planning, and hygiene.74 At this point, the protection of life entails the preemptive destruction or containment of any contaminant that puts the social body at risk. “Once the immunitary paradigm is combined with the dispositifs [mechanisms through which power is exercised] of nationalism and then racism,” he writes, “the paradigm becomes what determines and orders the destruction of life.” 75 It is with this antinomial turn that biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics, with Nazism representing the most compelling example in the West. Recalling Hitler’s suicide orders at the end of the war, Esposito argues that thanatopolitics converts the immunitary response to community into an autoimmune response that threatens the very life it has been erected to protect. While Esposito’s emphasis on Nazism represents an overprivileged example of the modern biopolitical state, his insights regarding the dialectic between community and immunity that structure modern sovereignty apply to all modern states, liberal and totalitarian alike. His insights about community and immunity are compelling with regard to Orozco’s characterization of the two Americas in his Epic. Not only does Orozco foreground the violent foundation of the law through the Spanish conquest of the Americas; his “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America” seem to emblematize the ordered immunitary state, on the one hand, and the chaotic threat of bare community, on the other. By situating the emergence of the modern biopolitical state with respect to the conquest of the Americas, Orozco acknowledges what Esposito and others ignore—​­that the thanatopolitical violence of the modern state has its origins not in the eighteenth century but rather in colonial violence and its racializing assemblages. “Anglo-­America,” with its rigid geometry and relentless whiteness, presents a vision of the racialized nation-­state wherein all externalized differences have been expelled in order to secure wasp boundaries. The apparent 158  CHAPTER 3

absence of violence in this scene would seem to confer a kind of exceptionalism on the United States, distinguishing it from the violence of the Spanish conquest and the chaos of postrevolutionary Mexico. And yet Orozco argues that “Anglo-­America” derives its identity negatively—​­recall the absence at the center of the composition. It is neither Spanish in origin nor like “Hispano-­America” now. It has erected boundaries, established difference, via the Black Legend and a wasp social imaginary that brooks no brown or Catholic contaminants. Similarly, its order has been achieved at the expense of freedom, for no one in this gloomy scene seems to express the autonomy and individuality that modern sovereignty is supposed to confer upon the members of its community. Orozco therefore refuses the exceptionalism of the settler state by rearticulating Anglo-­America’s community to the violence of Spanish Empire (a historical violence that is both internal and external to the United States) and to the violence of the political border that insists upon a difference between Anglo-­and Hispano-­America. From this differentiation of the American communitas into two Americas racism and exploitation follow. Orozco’s “Anglo-­America” also seems to partake of the “white zombie” fetish in 1930s U.S. America when, after the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Haiti in 1914, the figure morphed into a loaded signifier in the service of “various Caucasian fears and racisms.” 76 Ann Kordas tracks the zombie through American popular culture in this period, arguing that it figures white fears of blacks, miscegenation, immigrants, and the New Woman. In period films like White Zombie (1932), white women were possessed by racially ambiguous zombie masters and converted into affectless “white slaves” who spoke simultaneously to the anxieties of white audiences over the sexual transgressions of the New Woman and of her opposite, the desexualized Victorian woman.77 Orozco’s configuration of “Anglo-­America” through the desexed figure of the stern schoolmarm captures both of these fears. Likewise, his characterization of the schoolchildren, businessmen, and rural citizens as dead-­eyed drones speaks to the “zombie as capital trope” that we find in contemporary Third World discourses that put it “to work in opposition to the domination of First World economic models.” 78 And what of “Hispano-­America”? What are we to make of Orozco’s image of its chaotic violence? Is this merely a parodic rendering of U.S. American discourses about postrevolutionary Mexico? Is it, conversely, a self-­ lacerating image that expresses Orozco’s disappointment in his home nation for its failure to enact real change? Or is there something more radical about his emphasis on violence within this scene? It is clear that Orozco depicts Mexico as a victim of internal and external corruption. However, his focus

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on the revolutionary peasant is significant. The guerrilla, as the emblem of popular struggle—​­an eruption of violence without a master ideology—​ ­represents the refusal of the law of the sovereign originating in the Spanish conquest and continuing through Mexico’s postindependence history of liberal governance (referred to here in the toppled beaux arts building and the sabotaged modern skyscraper that frame the scene along its upper limit). Without the safeguards of the state’s monopoly on violence, society falls back into the chaos of an originary, or bare, community. Moreover, the radical possibilities of postrevolutionary attempts to reengineer the social imaginary in ways that would eradicate the racial hierarchy in place since the colonial period (indigenismo and mestizaje) represent an attempt to return communitas to a condition of radical equality. Even though this never actually took place, as the critiques of official indigenismo and compulsory mestizaje suggest, we should not forget how radical the racial politics of this period in Mexico were when compared with the deracinated social imaginary in the United States. Orozco’s guerrilla is a racialized man—​­an indio or mestizo—​­whose very identity as such is rooted in the racial assemblages that emerged through the Spanish administration of its New World colonies.79 As the only dark-­skinned protagonist in the Modern half of the mural, he figures the threat of racial violence that fostered Anglo-­American fears about the Mexican Revolution, and what Lorgia García-Peña has identified as a “‘fear of Haiti’—​­the overwhelming concern that overtook slave economies like the United States and Spain following the slave revolt that began in 1791 and led to Haitian independence in 1804.” 80 This fear persisted well into the twentieth century and was reactivated in the popular imaginary after the U.S. occupation of Haiti enabled William Seabrook to travel there and undertake what he passed off as an ethnography of Vodun rituals. It was Seabrook, in The Magic Island (1929), who converted the Haitian zombi, a figure associated with both powerful spirits of African origin and the leader of a slave revolt, into the zombie, a reanimated corpse.81 Thus, Orozco’s guerrilla, while overtly and unambiguously a Mexican revolutionary, can also be read as the revenant zombie of U.S. America’s “fear of Haiti” and the revolution and revolt it threatened. Both Mexico and Haiti were associated with revolutions undertaken by racialized and colonized subjects. And both posed a threat to U.S. capital and suppositions of racial order. This reading is suggested, moreover, by the fact that the guerrilla is about to be assassinated by a U.S. general. He is, therefore, figuratively an animate corpse. Following Weheliye, Steven Pokornowski argues that the zombie “as a figure already caught up in theorizations of bare life, enmeshed in existential and political zones of indistinction—​­between

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life and death, human and monster, the camp and the colony, etc.—​­and entangled with a profound history of racism and exploitation, offers a unique window to see how life is made vulnerable and violence justified.” 82 In his formulation, the zombie as a signifier of “vulnerable life” helps us to see how “power is consolidated, sovereignty is validated, and vulnerability is disavowed, through the othering and making vulnerable of groups marked by race.” 83 In this sense, Orozco’s racialized guerrilla, who serves as a figure for “Hispano-­America” within the sequencing of the Epic, reveals that racialization is how the immunitary state of “Anglo-­America” not only seeks to secure itself against the threats of those it has colonized and/​­or racialized but also the way that the very vulnerability of those groups with respect to Anglo-­American history and policy comes to justify the violence enacted by the U.S. American state against them. The imminent death of the revolutionary at the hands of the U.S. general speaks to the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America as well as to the violence enacted against poor Mexicans through the exploitation of migrant workers and the demonization and deportation of “illegal aliens” from the U.S. body politic. However, rather than depicting him as the weak, docile, or pitiful figure of black servitude like the many filmic zombies of the period, Orozco recalls the power and rebellion associated with the Haitian zombi. Thus, just as in “Anglo-­America,” where he plays with and reverses the “white zombie” trope, his revolutionary guerrilla inverts significations of the Haitian zombie as a docile laborer and returns to him the threat that this figure was meant to assuage. The Mexican Revolution represented precisely the threat of chaos that sovereign law and the immunitary state seek to keep at bay. Thus, the “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America” panels represent not so much mirror images of one another—​­with Anglo-­America’s homogenized order the obverse to Hispano-­ America’s chaotic instability—​­as an acknowledgment of the antinomial split within the modern conception of community: immunitas and communitas. These panels show that this split is enacted through a racial assemblage that differentiates forms of life. Further, they make explicit the charge implicit in Orozco’s invocation of American civilization in the title of his mural. Orozco’s America does not distinguish between the two Americas. His invocation of a singular American civilization was a deliberate challenge to Anglo-­America and its immunitary attempts to differentiate itself from Hispano-­America, and in the process to claim American civilization for itself. Orozco’s Epic engages with the contemporary popular discourse about the two Americas, one of various period iterations of pan-­Americanism. His rendering of both “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America” has much in common

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with Waldo Frank’s contemporaneous arguments about the “two American half-­worlds” in his 1931 book America Hispana: A Portrait and a Prospect.84 Frank was a well-­known figure among Mexican intellectuals; he had presented his ideas in 1929 on a well-­received lecture tour organized by the University of Mexico.85 In America Hispana he characterizes “Anglo-­Saxon” America as materialistic and technologically developed, with an atomized conception of the person that has lost its organic connection with the land and the creative spirit. He writes, “The bases of life as it has been built in the United States are inadequate for the creating of whole human beings. These bases, we have seen, are the false concept of the person, the attempt to totalize life from partial impulses of personal and herd desire, and the perfecting of a social web that bars the individual from the sources of his health—​­his soul and his soil. Such bases can beget only chaos. And the outward show of order will merely hide confusion.” 86 Frank’s argument mirrors Orozco’s image with its emphasis on “herd desire” and a “social web” that alienates individuals from the land and community. Moreover, his characterization of the “false concept of the person” also echoes Esposito’s arguments about the immunitary response to the “boundlessness of community” insofar as he views U.S.-­American “individualism” as a form of separation that, paraphrasing Esposito, divides community into autonomous subjects and converts the natural world into property.87 Orozco’s homogenized gathering of men in gray flannel suits and women with severely upswept hair suggest precisely the kind of immunized body politic that Frank attributes to the “self-­assertion” and “other-­annihilation” that subtends U.S. America’s Protestant ethos.88 Moreover, the patch of wheat unnaturalistically confined to the composition’s grid logic gives voice to Frank’s concerns about how Protestantism has rationalized the capitalist exploitation of man and nature in the United States. As an emblem of nature subjected to capitalist America’s “machine culture,” this signifier of bounty reveals the extent to which the machine can “dig,” “weigh,” “leap,” and “level” the soil but never “know it.” 89 Orozco’s emphasis upon order, structure, and regimentation confirms Frank’s assertion that Anglo-­America’s apparent order merely hides its “confusion.” “America Hispana,” on the other hand, argues Frank, is spiritually strong but lacks “leadership and morale.” 90 “Whatever his condition,” Frank asserts, “the Hispano-­American has direct contact with his soul and his soil.” 91 He elaborates: “if he has remained the simple Indian or Negro, the contact [with soul and soil] is intense, and can become almost maniacal with oppression. . . . The Indian’s [experience] may be his archaic self-­awareness as an integer of the clan whose body is the communal acre. However elementary

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and arrested, it is a seed of creation against the coming of some spiritual Spring which shall warm it and make it grow.” 92 I will return to the easy conflation that Frank makes here between the “Indian” and the “Negro” in the final chapter. What I want to highlight in this passage is how “America Hispana” represents the Janus face of Anglo-­ America for Frank. If U.S. Americans are individualistic and dissociated from “soul and soil,” their “Hispanic” counterparts—​­due to the vestiges of primitivized figures of archaic lifeways (the “Indian” and “Negro”)—​­is connected to the “communal acre.” Here again Orozco’s image of “Hispano-­ America” ratifies Frank’s vision of this “American half-­world” insofar as he emphasizes indigenized popular revolt through the figure of the peasant warrior. His warrior’s resemblance to Zapata articulates popular struggle to the agrarian platform of Zapatismo. Zapata’s call for “land and liberty” was not the capitalist’s desire for autonomous personhood and private property but rather the socializing call for a return to the communal landholding system of the ejido. Orozco’s “Hispano-­America” is, likewise, an “arrested” world, as the forces of corruption have thwarted its development—​­witness the destroyed modern architecture and the imminent death of the guerrilla. And yet the “seed” of the “Indian” and “Negro’s” contact with “soul and soil” persists in the revolutionary spirit that rises up nonetheless. Characterizing the “two American half-­worlds” as body and spirit, respectively, Frank asserts that “in one place there is order that lacks life, in the other there is life that lacks order.” 93 For Frank, the solution to the “problem” of the “American half-­worlds” is an epiphanic union, wherein the “seed” of America Hispana’s spiritual “wholeness” “lodges” itself within the “sterile” but “solid body” of the United States, “tak[ing] unto itself the energy of the body” and “burst[ing] it in transfiguration.” 94 Describing this union in revelatory terms, Frank insists that it will enact a “change of attitude [in U.S. America] so deep and intense as to approximate in modern terms what the Saints called a conversion.” 95 At another moment, he characterizes this transfiguration as a “breaking” of the armored body of the United States, “probably with the aid of violent revolution.” 96 Frank’s discourse is both prophetic and sexualized, wherein the violence of revolution is achieved metaphorically through the insemination of the North by the South, or through an ecstatic sexual union between Anglo-­ and Hispano-­America. Through this spiritual congress the machine body of the regimented United States will be impregnated with the soul of America Hispana producing from these two half-­worlds a whole. But this is where Orozco deviates from Frank’s vision of the two Americas. For Orozco’s imagery militates against the possibility of a reproductive romance. In fact, he

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rescripts the racialized coupling of Cortés and Malintzin from his Preparatory School murals here. Rather than endorsing an ambivalent mestizaje, “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America” refuse it, tapping into period fears over miscegenation and anxieties about female sexuality within the United States that motivated the “white zombie” film trope and its anxious exploration of the New Woman/​­Victorian woman dyad. The stern schoolmistress in “Anglo-­America” has been desexed to the point of androgyny. Her hard, erect form recalls Frank’s concerns about U.S. American womanhood expressed in an earlier text, The Rediscovery of America. There he argues that women in the United States accommodated themselves to a world “created by men,” and in so doing began doing “violence to their nature” by “imitating men.” 97 When “our women” entered the workforce, he exclaims, “the centre of education shifted from the hearth, which is its normal focus, to the school, where it does not belong.” 98 While Orozco’s decision to emblematize “Anglo-­America” through the schoolteacher, and his characterization of her reflects Frank’s assertion that America’s women have gone too far in their emulation of men, he does not share Frank’s prophetic faith that women will soon revert to an essential “femaleness.” 99 As with his conception of the Hispano-­American, Frank argues that Anglo womanhood, too, possesses the “seed of the folk.” 100 Thus, like her Hispanic counterpart, she too will play a role in the “creation of a Whole from our American chaos.” 101 In her capacity as a “new Eve who has not been formed by [man’s] rib,” she is ready for union.102 Orozco’s vision of U.S. American womanhood does not intimate such a union. She turns her back to the male warrior in “Hispano-­America.” And her masculinized figure suggests that his “seed” would not find hospitable conditions in her womb. In fact, the guerrilla’s imminent death precludes any future union. Rather than figuring the ecstatic sexual congress necessary for a transfiguration of America, Orozco’s gendered geopolitical proxies intimate the end of the reproductive line. The immunitary impulse that has created two Americas from one communitas leads not to procreative union but rather to a thanatopolitical fate. This fate is underscored by the panels “Gods of the Modern World” (figure 3.19) and “Modern Human Sacrifice” (see figure 2.11), where skeletal figures give birth to stillborn fetuses or are buried beneath the pomp of nationalist commemoration. In both of these scenes Orozco utilizes the calavera or skeleton from Mexico’s satirical print tradition. And while these skeletons certainly satirize the modern world, they betray none of the humor or whimsy of Orozco’s nineteenth-­century predecessors, such as Manuel Manilla or José Guadalupe Posada. Instead, they are morbidly real, less proxies for human foibles and

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more references to the biopolitical concerns of the modern state. To better appreciate Orozco’s critical engagement with pan-­Americanist discourses as well as the bio-­and thanatopolitics of reproduction in the 1930s, we need to attend to Rivera’s U.S. murals, for the critical politics of Orozco’s references to the two Americas in the Epic become more palpable when considered alongside Rivera’s parallel path. Rivera’s Vision of Industry and Pan-­American Cooperation

figure 3.19. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Gods of the Modern World” (Panel 15), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.17.

Frank’s many books on Anglo-­and Hispano-­America can be situated within a broader cultural and policy discourse on pan-­Americanism that flourished in the United States between 1890 and 1940. This discourse was instantiated in the Pan American Union (pau), an international organization located in Washington, DC, dedicated to strengthening commercial relationships AMERICAN MODERNITY AND THE PLAY OF MOURNING  165

between the American states through economic, social, and cultural exchanges. Developing out of a series of pan-­American conferences convened in the United States after the Spanish-­American war of 1898, the pau was consolidated in the early twentieth century and enjoyed one of its most active periods in the 1920s and ’30s as Mexican artists were enjoying a brief vogue north of the border.103 As Claire Fox, among others, has shown, the pan-­Americanism of these years represented a strategic co-­optation of Latinamericanismo (Latin Americanism), a fin de siècle literary discourse produced by Latin American intellectuals and disseminated in a series of widely read and translated texts such as Uruguyan Enrique Rodó’s Ariel or Cuban José Martí’s “Nuestra America” (Our America).104 In these texts, Latin America is associated with “aesthetic,” “human,” and “spiritual” values and contrasted with the capitalist and technological modernity of the North. Fox, quoting Julio Ramos, argues that this “we/​­they forms the matrix of an emerging nationalistic subject . . . constitut[ing] an antithetical configuration that introduces the opposition between Anglo-­Saxon and the Latin race.” 105 In the 1920s and ’30s, U.S. pan-­Americanists adopted this antithetical configuration (despite the fact that Latinamericanismo was explicitly codified in opposition to hemispheric cooperation), conceding aesthetic and spiritual superiority to Latin America while simultaneously revaluing the United States’ technological advances as a “reciprocal culture” that could rationalize U.S. development and modernization policies in the region with the cooperation of Latin American intellectuals in the name of cultural exchange.106 Like his Latin Americanist colleagues, Frank concedes a spiritual superiority to America Hispana but condemns the machine culture of Protestant America. And, like U.S. pan-­Americanists, he imagines a reproductive union that can inseminate the “solid body” of the United States with the spirit of America Hispana. In this respect, his texts offered a vision very similar to the exoteric message of Rivera in his U.S. murals. Working stateside, Rivera exploited the Mexican nationalist discourse of mestizaje to picture the “reciprocal cultures” of the United States and Latin America along these lines; however, he was more ambivalent about the procreative possibilities of pan-­American union than authors like Frank or his pan-­Americanist policy peers. While working in San Francisco in 1931, Diego Rivera drafted a mock address to the American public for the fictional “Pan-­American Continental Radio” in which he dramatically proclaimed, “Americans, listen! I mean by America, the territory included between the two ice barriers of the two poles. A fig for your barriers of wire and your frontier guards.” 107 Proclaiming

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figure 3.20. Diego Rivera, 1886–­1957, Allegory of California, 1930–­31, Fresco, stairwell, The City Club, Stock Exchange Tower, San Francisco, California. USA/ Bridgeman Images.

a vision of hemispheric communitas, Rivera, like Orozco, sought to combat the parochialism of U.S. America and its claim to embody “America” at the expense of the other American states. Pan-­American unity is the explicit theme of his last U.S. mural, but references to cooperation between the two Americas are inserted into all of his U.S. commissions. Starting with Allegory of California (1930–­31) (figure 3.20), wherein he retooled the iconographic program of his fresco The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man (1926–­27) (figure 3.21), executed in the deconsecrated chapel at the National Agricultural School at Chapingo, the exoteric messages of Rivera’s U.S. murals would extol the virtues of industry via a gendered union between a masculinized (often white, or at the very least white-­ethnic) labor and a feminized and indigenized land.

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figure 3.21. Diego Rivera, The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man (end wall), 1926–­27, Fresco, 22 ft. 8 ½ in. × 19 ft. 7 ½ in. (792 × 598 cm), Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo (former Escuela Nacional de Agricultura), state of Mexico. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

At Chapingo, Rivera deployed the pregnant figure of his mestiza wife, Lupe Marín, as an allegory of the Mexican nation. Her body conforms to the contours of the country’s geographical boundaries, with her navel situated where Mexico City would be, associating the seat of federal power with the procreative promise of her womb. A Promethean New Man stands with his back turned to the viewer at the base of the image, harnessing her natural forces to nascent industrialization. Unlike the other allegorical nudes discussed in what follows, Marín-­as-­Mexico is shapely, hyperfeminine, and fertile. As a normative emblem of the land and an allegory of state-­promoted mestizaje within a cycle dedicated to socialist-­oriented industrialization, she confirms the conventional role of the painted nude to solicit the (presumed male) viewer’s desire. In San Francisco, working for capitalist patrons in the stairwell at the Lunch Club in the Pacific Stock Exchange, Rivera substituted the athletic

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tennis star Helen Wills Moody for Marín and presented a compendium of working-­class and professional laborers mining her interior, studying her plants, and pumping her oil. In deference to critics who balked at blurring the line between portrait and allegory in a public commission, Rivera modified Wills Moody’s appearance, darkening her hair and skin, which, along with her quasi-­indigenous necklace, crafted her as a generic signifier of the natal land.108 Here California’s abundant natural resources are in evidence, but instead of a robust New Man at the heart of the image, we find a young boy (a portrait of patron Timothy Pfleuger’s son) playing with a toy airplane. A less suitable companion, he seems indifferent to Wills Moody’s charms, too absorbed in his childish fixation with technology. If this mural is meant to envision a union between man and woman, nature and industry, an indigenized America and her Anglo-­Saxon suitor, this pairing suggests that the mating is premature. As Anthony Lee has argued, the mural may have been a paean to Cali­ fornia’s natural fecundity, but several details point to a more critical assessment of its fate at the hands of industrialists. Unlike the comely body of Marín-­as-­Mexico, Wills Moody’s body refuses to cohere. Her assets have been fragmented, deforested, mined, and exploited. No longer an “Edenic, unspoiled paradise,” Lee argues, California is revealed to have “already been subjected to the machinery of capital.” 109 Thus, in this, his first U.S. mural, Rivera was already straddling the line between pleasing his capitalist patrons with seemingly positive images of American industry and articulating his vulgar Marxist concerns about nature and industry subordinated to capitalist interests. What is more, we see his tendency to use gender to articulate relationships—​­between industry and nature, North and South America—​ ­put toward ambivalent ends. In his subsequent commission, to paint a mural cycle in Detroit’s new Institute of the Arts, he would return to these themes on a larger scale. Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural (1932–­33) focuses on Detroit’s automobile industry, limning a multi­surround scene of the Fordist assembly line. While technology and the U.S. American working class are his ostensible subjects, here, too, he used this commission to meditate upon the pan-­American union between northern industry and Latin America’s natural resources. And here, too, he articulates this relationship through a gendered schema whereby feminized reproduction fuels masculine production, just as the resources of Latin America fuel U.S. automobile manufacturing. This is most conspicuous on the east and west walls, which explicitly mirror feminized reproduction and masculinized industrial production. On the east wall we see images of the native crops of Michigan and Latin America

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figure 3.22. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (east wall), 1932–­33, Fresco, Detroit Institute of the Arts. USAGift of Edsel B. Ford/Bridgeman Images.

paired with plump allegorical females, one fair-­skinned and blonde, the other darker and brunette (figure 3.22). Between these scenes Rivera paid homage to his wife, Frida Kahlo’s, recent miscarriage by depicting her lost baby as a “germ seed” within the vaginal folds of soil strata. With its focus on female fecundity and agriculture, this wall establishes the land and its resources as the foundation of industrial development. Across the atrium on the west wall he addresses the theme of technology, using the moralized composition of Last Judgment scenes to divide the good (salvation) from the bad (damnation) (figure 3.23).110 And whereas the panels dedicated to nature’s procreative abundance emphasize female figures and feminine attributes, those dedicated to technology are exclusively associated with men and masculine vocations. On the west wall Rivera places scenes of aviation along the top and large panels depicting steam and electrical plants along the bottom. Rivera presents Ford’s newest transport plane, the Tri-­Motor, on the good side of the wall and a bomber on the side of damnation. To reinforce these moral assignments, he depicts the dove of peace below the Tri-­Motor and an aggressive hawk under the warplane. Likewise, steam power is associated with the mechanic/​­worker standing in his overalls before the enormous reheat unit, feeder pipes, and water pump and looking conspicuously like Rivera himself. Electrical power, by contrast, is fronted 170  CHAPTER 3

figure 3.23. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (west wall), 1932–­33, Fresco, Detroit Institute of the Arts. USAGift of Edsel B. Ford/Bridgeman Images.

by a manager/​­engineer, rendered to resemble a composite of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Located on the bad side of the wall, he represents the power of management and capitalist patrons over the working class/​­artist. Between the scenes of aviation and steam and electrical power, Rivera paints a horizontal panel in trompe l’oeil to mimic the carved reliefs in the Renaissance-­style courtyard. Titled the “Interdependence of North and South,” this panel recalls one of Ford’s greatest innovations in corporate management: the vertical integration of his supply chain. To the right we see a scene of Fordlandia, the catastrophic rubber-­tree plantation Ford carved out of the Brazilian jungle to supply the natural resources required for making tires.111 To the left we see freighters carrying these raw materials into the boat slip at Ford’s River Rouge factory. Overall, the scene suggests the smooth integration of Brazil’s resources into Ford’s factory, but an enigmatic detail introduces an element of doubt. At the center of the wall, situated just below a compass rose, Rivera depicts a face split by a star, reminiscent of a Preclassic mask from Tlatilco that represents the duality of life and death through the combination of a skull on the left and a human face on the right.112 Poorly understood to this day, these masks were likely viewed by Rivera as emblems of pre-­Columbian cosmology and its emphasis on cycles of life, death, and rebirth. Thus, the reference here could indicate that Ford’s factory AMERICAN MODERNITY AND THE PLAY OF MOURNING  171

figure 3.24. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (south wall), 1932–­33, Fresco, Detroit Institute of the Arts. USAGift of Edsel B. Ford/Bridgeman Images.

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is part of a cosmic or natural cycle whereby South American resources are sacrificed for the technological birth of the North’s machines. This interpretation would seem to be borne out by the fact that Rivera reverses the symbolic features of the mask, placing the human face on the Detroit side of the image and the skull on the Brazilian side, thereby associating death with resource extraction. However, his reference to pre-­Columbian culture here is but one of several throughout the mural that speak not only to cosmic cycles but also to a recognition of death and sacrifice as necessary parts of life and creation. That death and sacrifice are coded through references to Mesoamerican objects in this mural might cue the viewer to Rivera’s esoteric meaning, which, following his California murals, casts doubt upon the technocratic management of life his U.S. murals were meant to celebrate. While the east and west walls establish the themes of nature’s bounty and its industrial exploitation, the north and south walls make this relationship more specific by focusing on the Fordist assembly line (figures 3.24–­3.25). Working with the preexisting architecture and its numerous moldings and sculpted reliefs, Rivera divided each wall into a series of eight scenes. Along the top, he depicts monumental nude allegories of the raw materials that

go into car manufacturing. Underneath these a narrower horizontal register depicts these raw materials as they slide into the blast furnaces depicted below. In the largest panel on each wall he limned enormous scenes of the assembly line where a multiethnic workforce bends and sways in the choreographed construction of the Ford v­8. To the left and right of the allegorical nudes, Rivera depicts scenes of modern science in panels modified by smaller horizontal ones just below. In these, he refers to Detroit’s chemical and pharmaceutical industries, as per his patron’s request. Like his references to aviation on the west wall, these scenes of gasworks, poisonous gases, vaccination, embryos, and surgery represent both the good and bad application of modern science. At the base of each wall Rivera paints trompe l’oeil predella panels in grisaille that represent various aspects of Ford’s infamous labor management policies, from citizenship and hygiene classes to the long lines of workers queuing up to clock in or gather their paychecks. While several controversies ensued during and after the mural’s execution, the most notorious image in this cycle was Rivera’s “Vaccination” panel, which generated outrage over his conflation of a scene of modern

figure 3.25. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (north wall), 1932–­33, Fresco, Detroit Institute of the Arts. USAGift of Edsel B. Ford/Bridgeman Images.

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figure 3.26. Detail of Vaccination. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (north wall), 1932–­33, Fresco, Detroit Institute of the Arts. USAGift of Edsel B. Ford/Bridgeman Images.

immunization with the nativity (figure 3.26). Here lab animals double as the lowly beasts of the manger, portraits of scientists Louis Pasteur, Elie Metchnikoff, and Robert Koch stand in for the wise men bearing the gifts of modern immunology to a latter-­day Christ child, modeled after Charles Lindbergh Jr., the son of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow.113 The “Lindbergh baby,” as he came to be known, was brutally murdered in one of the most high-­profile kidnappings in American history just before Rivera began his mural.114 Like Kahlo’s miscarried fetus, we see here another attempt to convert trauma and loss into a productive image of health and, in this case, effective social hygiene. However, we should keep in mind that modern science could not save Kahlo’s pregnancy nor ensure her reproductive health, casting her as an unreproductive non­mother and thus an abject subject within the highly pro-­natalist national discourse of the postrevolutionary Mexican state. Likewise, all of the tools of modern forensic science could not save the Lindbergh baby from his grisly fate. Thus, each dead child represents, at one level, the failures of the biopolitical state, something Rivera

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might have been attuned to given Kahlo’s health struggles and her vivid portrayals of the physical and psychic pain she experienced as a consequence of her miscarriage. In this sense, following Esposito, the immunitary logic of the biopolitical nation-­state winds up negating rather than securing life.115 Scholars have debated Rivera’s characterization of industry, capitalism, and working-­class solidarity. Is the mural a celebration of labor that deemphasizes the commodity fetish in favor of the heroic spectacle of industrial workers?116 Or does it present a panoptic image of the factory floor that replicates the technocratic corporate image of mechanized labor favored by capitalists and their managers?117 Are the workers he depicts engaged in communal labor akin to the scenes of cultural production he painted at the Ministry of Public Education (see, for example, “The Sugar Mill”)? Or are they mindless industrial zombies caught up in the machinery of U.S. American capitalism? While these questions are important, my interest here is in how Rivera uses gender to naturalize and trouble the exploitation of natural resources for the purposes of industrial production. This is most conspicuous in his recourse to allegorical nudes to represent the raw materials—​ ­coal, iron ore, sand, and lime—​­necessary for making steel. These nudes, referred to as “goddesses,” also take the form of racial types, representing the so-­called black, red, yellow, and white races. They hold these raw materials in their hands, forging a visual and symbolic connection between skin tone, the reproductive body, and nature’s bounty without any references to slavery or inequality. Lee has argued that through these allegorized goddesses, Rivera smooths over the racial tensions and racism within Detroit’s working class and on Ford’s segregated assembly line. Detroit had been wracked with protest on the eve of Rivera’s arrival. And Rivera himself had participated in the repatriation of Mexican workers from Detroit after the Depression resulted in massive layoffs and the scapegoating of migrant laborers.118 As a result of these tensions, he struggled with where to locate himself within the mural’s fictive factory scene, ultimately opting for the eerie space of the gasworks, an area where black and Mexican workers were most likely to find themselves. Given the blatant racism Rivera confronted in Detroit, his infatuation with technology, and his desire to please his capitalist patrons, Lee argues that he displaced the question of race from the tensions on the floor or the street to the realm of myth, thereby rendering it a symbolic rather than an “actual instrument of change.” 119 Instead of depicting the segregated line or, more dangerous to his employers, the cross-­racial social bonds forged between workers on the floor, Rivera displaces the charge of racial hybridity—​­mestizaje—​­onto the quasi-­sexual

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union between ancient culture and modern machines in a manner that is reminiscent of Frank’s ecstatic union between the “machine body” and archaic spirit of Anglo-­and Hispano-­America. This is nowhere more apparent than in his amalgamation of the monumental stamping press with the Coatlicue monolith on the south wall (see figure 3.24). It is here, in this hybrid figure of goddess/​­machine, that, Lee argues, Rivera locates the “ghostly presence” of working-­class cross-­racial bonds. This figure reappears in his last U.S. mural, in which he explicitly argues for pan-­American unity. In Detroit, Lee insists that its role is to technologize human relations and to give them a mythic cast by blending ancient and modern, the Aztec goddess with the machine. In this sense, Latin America’s presence within the mechanized North can only be registered through the cultural artifacts of pre-­Columbian Mexico, a reiteration of the pan-­American argument about the “reciprocal cultures” of North and South that granted a superior spirituality to the South, legible in its visual and material culture, and a technological superiority to the United States, visible in its industrial products and consumer goods. If this hybrid figure casts Latin American culture as atavistic, it also genders it female. As Lee notes, the Coatlicue-­as-­stamping-press is a procreative machine that “literally pumps life into the south wall assembly line.” 120 The press operators, he concludes, “catch punched steel sheets as they emerge from its bottom, like infants from a gigantic mechanical mother.” 121 Is this, then, the “machine body” of Anglo-­America impregnated with the spirit of Hispano-­America’s primitivized cultures? Lee reads the Coatlicue-­ as-­stamping-press as a figure of procreativity via the goddess’s relationship to female reproduction and Hispano-­America’s connection to “soul and soil.” However, the Coatlicue is not only a figure of female fertility; she is also a ferocious representation of destruction intimately linked to the Aztecs’ foundation myth and the practice of human sacrifice. Coatlicue was the mother of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war. She embodies the duality of pre-­Columbian cosmology as both a procreative and mortal force. She wears a necklace with the hearts and skulls of her victims; her skirt writhes with twisting snakes. A phallic serpent emerges from between her legs, representing menses, while two curling serpents emerge from her neck as symbols of the blood that flowed after her daughter Coyolxauhqui decapitated her in a fit of jealousy over the impending birth of Huitzilopochtli. As the slain mother of Huitzilopochtli, she also represents the self-­justifying origins of the Aztecs’ militant and patriarchal empire. For upon her decapitation, Huitzilopochtli, god of war, emerged from her bleeding neck and avenged her death by throwing his sister from the temple and chopping

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her body to pieces (an event that was reenacted through ritual sacrifices in the temple precinct of Tenochtitlán). Anathema to the dualistic structure of Judeo-­Christian doctrine, her all-­encompassing status as life giving and taking, creative and destructive, generative and vengeful complicates any reading of the mural that attributes to her figure only procreative attributes. The admiration and horror that this monolith has generated among Western viewers is akin to that of Mesoamerican culture more broadly. For the story that animates her form recalls the centrality of sacrifice to Mesoamerican civilization, one of the most stigmatized features of its legacy for the modern Americas. If we consider the Coatlicue’s associations with both life (bios) and death (thanatos), how might we read her integration into the gendered allegory of hemispheric cooperation, or, to recall Rivera’s panel on the west wall, “The Interdependence of North and South”? As with the modified Tlatilco mask in that panel, perhaps Rivera is suggesting that the sacrifice of Hispano-­ America’s resources (in this case, cultural/​­spiritual) fuels the birth of industry in the North? To fully consider this question we need to return again to the strange racialized goddesses along the upper registers of the north and south walls, for they too betray ambiguity, in this case gender ambiguity, as they do not conform to period ideals of female beauty. While they all bear the secondary sex traits associated with women, they are oddly masculine in appearance, more angular than curvy, with stern visages and strange proportions that challenge the nude’s conventional role in eliciting desire. Kathryn O’Rourke has demonstrated that Rivera’s Detroit mural was influenced by his earlier cycle at the Health Ministry building in Mexico City (1929), where he had also depicted desexualized nudes along with images of disembodied hands, reproduction, natural resources, and modern technocratic science. Whereas in the Health Ministry murals Rivera’s distorted nudes speak to his concerns about the scientific management of reproduction, especially through social hygiene initiatives to use birth control to “improve the race,” in Detroit, O’Rourke argues, his asexual nudes voice his growing skepticism about “capitalism, maternity, and efforts to regulate individual and collective bodies,” in short, the biopolitical project of the modern nation-­state, especially as it became instantiated in Ford’s worker management policies and the early application of Taylorist motion studies to the assembly line.122 This insight becomes more compelling when we consider not only Rivera’s references to two dead children (Kahlo’s miscarried fetus, the Lindberghs’ murdered son) and the sacrificial connotations of the Coatlicue monolith. Moreover, given the explicit racialization of the goddesses and the

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Coatlicue-­as-­stamping-press’s identity as a hybrid figure, we might view Rivera’s skepticism as entailing more than capitalism’s body management (cf. in Taylorist efficiency studies) to include as well the biopolitical agenda of cultural mestizaje underpinning the exoteric messages of his U.S.-­based murals. In short, while the mural would seem to embrace the metaphor of cultural mestizaje to smooth his vision of pan-­American cooperation, the many references to death and sacrifice throughout suggest that Rivera, like Orozco, harbored concerns about pan-­Americanism, particularly when considered within the racist immunitary social environment of the United States. In this analysis, the gender politics of Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural trouble rather than promote the pan-­American ideology of hemispheric cooperation, whether it be Frank’s metaphor of ecstatic copulation between a feminized Anglo-­and a masculinized Hispano-­America or his own attempts to craft reciprocal cultures out of Latin America’s fecund natural resources and U.S. America’s virile industrial products. With this more esoteric reading in mind, we can now see that Orozco’s sequence in the Modern wing of his Epic (see figure i.7) has much in common with the themes of Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals. As in the case of his Allegory of California, Rivera managed to please his patrons (with some minor controversy) while subtly intimating his skepticism about pan-­American cooperation, given the immunitary thanatopolitics of racism subtending not only the division between the two Americas but also divisions within U.S. American society that Rivera was perhaps even more attuned to than Orozco because of his efforts in repatriation and the protests that rocked Detroit just before his arrival. That this racial divide is articulated to industry in both murals is no co­ incidence insofar as U.S. American technological advance was hailed as not only its signal achievement by pan-­Americanists but also the mechanism of its neocolonial relationship with Latin America via both resource extraction and technocratic modernization schemes. Whereas Rivera intimates this via the cosmic duality of the Coatlicue-­as-­ stamping-press—​­its status as a technologized mother and emblem of life-­ destroying automation—​­Orozco suggests it through the cenotaph-­like black tower that presides over the industrial landscape in “The Machine” (see figure 3.16). This is the only panel that is not anchored by a human figure. Instead we see an industrial monolith akin to the machine images that Orozco painted on the slim walls that flank either side of the space opened up by the reserve desk (see figure i.13). These “totems” mirror the stylized Native Northwest coast totem poles that Orozco painted on the other side of the desk (see figure i.12). And while it is clear that he had no understanding of the cultural significance of totem poles, his intention was to compare the

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modern fetishization of technology with what he viewed as ancient “fetishes,” much as he does when mirroring “Modern” and “Ancient Human Sacrifice.” Both murals are thereby situated critically toward the euphoric rhetoric of pan-­Americanism. Their critical stances derive from an implicit recognition of the immunitary politics of racial division within U.S. America’s Anglo imaginary. To propose an answer to the question posed at the outset of this section, Orozco’s demand that his U.S. American viewers see the conquest as a concern of their own seems to have something to do with the unanswered call for justice that animates colonial melancholy. The U.S. American viewer must see herself as a postcolonial subject, entangled in the “melancholy of race,” rather than as the exceptional subject of the U.S. antiempire.123 To persist in this exceptionalist state, Orozco’s mural suggests, is to participate in a thanatopolitical project that undermines the very security that Anglo-­America’s immunitary state seeks. A productive pan-­Americanism thus would not be the ecstatic union of two racially and culturally distinct entities but rather their melancholic entanglement, an embrace of the chaotic and radical indifference of communitas. I will return to the question of race and colonial melancholy in the final chapter. Death, Sacrifice, and The Melancholy of the American Dream

While scholars have explored the relationship in Rivera’s mural between industry, procreation, and race, very little attention has been paid to the way these themes are articulated in Orozco’s Epic. And yet, when one considers the two in concert, it is clear that Orozco, if not directly commenting on Rivera’s cycle, was weighing similar concerns. Moreover, when compared, it is evident that Orozco’s iteration of these themes is far more critical than Rivera’s. Consider, for instance, the way each artist troubles reproduction in his mural. In Rivera’s, the nude is desexualized; references to birth and creativity are counterbalanced with references to death and sacrifice. In Orozco’s mural, “Gods of the Modern World” converts the metaphor of childbirth into a macabre scene of stillborn knowledge (figure 3.19). Here there is no way for the viewer to read this image as procreative. The skeletal and fragmented body of the mother, the fetal skeletons encased in bullet-­shaped glass bell jars, and the fiery backdrop return us to the scene of Cortés amid his flaming ships and a mass of dead bodies. Rather than the gray rubble of destroyed Mesoamerican cities, we see ashen tomes forming what might be a funeral pyre, raising the specter of book burning, an activity undertaken by conquistadors and fascists alike.

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If, in Rivera’s mural, robust male workers serve as midwives to the steel sheets that issue from the Cotalicue s­ tamping press, in Orozco’s, desiccated skeletal professors preside over the birth of students who are dead on arrival. One professor bends over, like the hunched friar in the inaugural scene, holding a small skeletal cadaver in his hands, while the rest align along the background, forming an array of figures that recalls the displaced pagan gods in “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” (see figure 2.1). Their identities are all but impossible to make out, save for their elaborate academic robes and ceremonial garb, signs of institutional, rather than individual, identity. As a satirical scene of graduation, “Gods of the Modern World” picks up the theme of homogenizing education from the “Anglo-­America” panel and carries it to its logical extreme. Rather than zombie-­like children who turn into gray-­suited businessmen, we have students who are born into the world dead, the thanatopolitical outcome of the immunitary ethos of the Anglo nation state. That this scene was linked, in Orozco’s schema, to the problem of the modern nation-­state is suggested not only by the fact that it follows the panels dedicated to “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America” but also that it precedes panels dedicated to “Symbols of Nationalism” and “Modern Human Sacrifice” (see figures i.9–­i.10), where the blood ritual of nationalist war are likewise subjected to Orozco’s dark satire of human folly. “Symbols of Nationalism” equates emblems of modern states with those of historical empires, such as the Hapsburg, Mexican, and American: eagles, swords, epaulets, Napoleonic hats, and so on (figure 3.27). This jumble of symbols is echoed in the subsequent panel by a multicolored flag with gilded tassels that literally obliterates the skeletal cadaver commemorated by an eternal flame flickering between his legs (see figure 2.11). While traveling through Paris in 1932 at the start of his Dartmouth commission, Orozco surely saw the eternal flame installed in the Tomb of the Unknown Solider beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The Arc was initially erected in emulation of the Roman Arch of Titus in the nineteenth century to commemorate the Napoleonic Wars; however, in 1920 the tomb was added to honor the anonymous soldiers who died in World War I. While Orozco was working in the United States, the unfinished Porfirian Palace of Legislative Power was being transformed into the Monument to the Revolution, a massive triumphal arch that exceeded in scale its Parisian precedent. This project was spun by the postrevolutionary government as a monument to the people. However, scholars have demonstrated its role in converting the bloody civil war into the ideologically useful La Revolución, a discourse that helped to foreclose the radical demands of popular revolutionaries like Zapata in favor of a deradicalized nationalism.124

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figure 3.27. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Symbols of Nationalism” (Panel 16), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.19.

During his European sojourn, Orozco noted with horror the devastation of the recent war. Writing retrospectively in his autobiography, he singled out the “shameful politicians and the dealers in cannon fodder” for war profiteering and prolonging the conflict.125 He described photographs in sidewalk exhibitions showing “soldiers who lived on with their faces partly or completely shot away” or “others [who] had lost not only their faces but arms and legs, and miraculously went on living.” 126 His disgust at the way politicians and “philanthropists” were able to propel their reputations through public gestures toward the war’s brutalized rank and file clearly rankled. The bitterness of his recollections suggests that these scenes triggered memories of his own experiences chronicling the Mexican Revolution. They also speak to his deep skepticism about the postrevolutionary state and the construction of La Revolución through its public projects toward the end of his life. Orozco’s experiences in Mexico and Europe resulted in the particularly bitter scenes dedicated to national commemoration in the Epic.

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And while these panels speak broadly to the phenomenon of modern nation-­states, their constellation with scenes of the Spanish conquest, industry, and the racializing discourses of pan-­Americanism imbricate the general question of the thanatopolitics of racist nationalism into Orozco’s more specific critique of history, progress, and justice within the Americas. These penultimate scenes concur with Esposito’s observation that once the “immunitary turn in biopolitics intersects with the trajectory of nationalism and then racism,” a “fatal leap occurs” whereby “the population, which is seen as an ethnically defined body” is placed “in opposition to other states and other populations.” 127 “Biós,” he concludes, “is thus artificially cut by a series of thresholds in zones of varying value that subordinate part of it to the violent and destructive domination of the other.” 128 And while Esposito has in mind the genocidal policies of the Nazis or the virulent anti-­ immigration policies enacted after the terrorist attacks on 9/​­11, Orozco’s coupling of the disparate historical events of the conquest and interwar pan-­ Americanism demonstrates, as does Weheliye, that the thanatopolitics of the modern nation-­state can be traced back to the colonial/​­modern matrix and its racializing assemblages. That Orozco ties the crises of the 1930s to the violence of the Spanish conquest is not an attempt to scapegoat the Spanish for all the ills of the modern world but rather to raise questions about the thanatopolitical drift of the modern Americas and how that might be understood as a consequence of the violence of sovereign power and the law instantiated through the colonial project. Following Benjamin, Esposito argues that violence is the “hidden, repressed ground of every sovereign power.” 129 The law, he insists, should not be “understood as the abolition [of violence], but rather as the modern transposition of the ancient ritual of the sacrifice of a victim.” 130 The immunitary dialectic that divides communitas into sovereign states is always rooted in an act of violence—​­war, for example—​­and the establishment of juridical order in its aftermath can only be enforced through the very violence it seeks to banish. Sovereign power both wields and suspends justice; it declares war and “export[s] violence from within its own borders outside.” 131 Thus, when Orozco depicts the anonymous soldier as a “Modern Human Sacrifice,” he recalls not only the “Ancient Human Sacrifice” of the Aztecs but also the victimization of Amerindians in “Cortez and the Cross,” whose sacrifice gave rise to the imposition of a new sovereign law in the Americas. And when Orozco links this founding act of violence to modern industry, the biopolitical states of the two Americas, and nationalist war, he demands that his U.S. American viewer see America not as the unique province of the American

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Dream but rather as a mounting catastrophe entangled in the melancholic plight of what is common.132 “If community is nothing but the relation—​­the ‘with’ or the ‘between’—​ ­that joins multiple subjects,” muses Esposito, “it cannot be a subject, individual or collective.” 133 Community, he proposes, is a “non-­entity . . . that precedes and cuts every subject, wresting him or her from identification with him or herself and submitting him or her to an irreducible alterity.” 134 In this sense, Esposito argues, melancholy is the very condition of community insofar as the term captures what Judith Butler calls “precarious life.” Life is precarious, she argues, because we are embodied, mortal, and therefore vulnerable and exposed to one another. Though we struggle for autonomy, vulnerability is what forges our relation in common. If we are to combat the immunitary impulse that arises from this relation to keep from reproducing a vengeful thanatopolitical regime in the name of security, we must convert our “grief” (the mourning that results from suffering violence) into a “resource for politics.” 135 Orozco’s Epic concurs. In its melancholic recasting of the American Dream, it calls upon the U.S. American subject to accept the limit of its condition of exceptional being as the condition, the originary obligation, that unites modern Americans in a common destiny or communitas. As Weheliye puts it, “once suffering that results from political violence severs its ties with liberal individualism [an imagined autonomy], which would position this anguish in the realm of a dehumanizing exception, we can commence to think of suffering and enfleshment as integral to humanity.” 136 By asking his U.S. American viewer to identify not with the liberal subject of Western history—​­Cortés—​­but rather with the pile of flesh that lies at his feet, Orozco challenges her to understand “enfleshment as integral to humanity,” to understand suffering as not the “dehumanizing exception” to liberal democracy but the rule, and to reconceive political action from the standpoint of immunity to one that proceeds from the embrace of precarity. It is only from this place—​­a place of precarity—​­he suggests, that we can avoid the thanatopolitical fate depicted on the wall. This discussion of sovereign law returns us to the question of political theology that subtended the first section of this chapter on Cortés’s conquest. We are now in a position to ask: How does Orozco’s invocation of eschatological history, in the way he frames the Modern half of the Epic, open a critique not only of violence and Anglo-­American exceptionalism but also of sovereignty in the Americas? Put another way: Should we read his explicit reference to eschatological history as an endorsement of the Spanish

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conquest and the aims of the spiritual conquest? Or does Orozco subject us to the grand narratives of Christian messianism in order to undermine the sovereign authority of eschatological logic, turn it against itself, and thereby open up possibilities for resistance? To recall Benjamin, does Orozco’s vengeful Christ bring about a “Messianic cessation of happening” within the historicist flow of eschatological history?137 Does his constellation of the present with the conquest augur the transcendent redemption of the end of history promised by the mendicants, liberal political theory, and even Rivera’s Marxist messianism? Or is it a contingent, homely, and indecisive representation that questions messianic redemption and, in so doing, offers Americans a “revolutionary chance in the fight for an oppressed past”?138 To address these questions, we turn now to a deeper engagement with the final panels of the Epic’s Modern sequence, “Modern Migration of the Spirit” and “Chains of the Spirit” (see figures i.9–­i.10).

PART III.

Cortés, Christ, and Weak Messianism

In Thesis IX of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin offers his most famous and extended allegory of history: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.139 In this passage, Benjamin conjures the theological tropes of angels and paradise to describe an ostensibly secular phenomenon. In doing so he reinforces his claim in Thesis I that historical materialism must enlist the services of theology if it is to “win” the philosophical game of history.140 Before proceeding to the final panels of Orozco’s Epic, it behooves us to work through this allegory to pull out the salient features of Benjamin’s critique of historicism. As a figure of history, Benjamin’s angel looks to the past not with

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the calm assurance and detachment of the victor but rather with the horror and emotional affect of its victim. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” he writes, the angel sees a “single catastrophe” hurled before his feet.141 The angel’s desire to repair the damage, to “make whole what has been smashed,” is thwarted by a storm, “blowing from Paradise.” 142 This storm, he writes, is “what we call progress.” 143 Here Benjamin intimates what he states more clearly in subsequent theses, that a critique of historicism must entail a critique of the concept of progress. This pertains not only to the extent to which historicism assumes the progression of mankind through what he calls “a homogenous, empty time” 144 but also the “politician’s stubborn faith in progress,” 145 which he argues has led both fascists and social democrats to constitute “technological progress” as a “political achievement.” 146 A faith in progress, he believes, has also corrupted working-­class politics, noting that by giving workers the “role of the redeemer of future generations,” the social democrats have erased the “historical knowledge” of the downtrodden.147 “This training,” he writes in Thesis XII, “made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.” 148 Forgetting the “tradition of the oppressed,” he asserts, is the corollary to the historicist’s “empathy” with the “victors” of the past.149 For, as Benjamin famously argued, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” 150 Conversely, empathizing with victors results in the “triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.” 151 Like the angel who looks aghast at the pile of wreckage hurled at his feet, Benjamin asserts that the historical materialist “cannot contemplate” the barbarism of civilization “without horror.” 152 To stem this horror, “make whole what has been smashed,” the historical materialist must bring time to a standstill and resist the winds of “Paradise” by distancing himself from the notion that history progresses and that progress is the goal of history. Redemption, not progress, he argues, is the goal of historical materialism. But if the angel of history cannot resist the winds of Paradise, who will “make whole what has been smashed”? For Benjamin, this is our task. “Like every generation that preceded us,” he argues in Thesis II, “we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power.” 153 This is a power “to which the past has a claim,” and that “claim,” he concludes ominously, “cannot be settled cheaply.” 154 Benjamin’s turn to theological metaphors raises questions about his conception of historical materialism. Moreover, his invocation of politicians, the oppressed, and the current “state of emergency” raises questions about

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how modern sovereignty—​­politics—​­relates to the theological metaphors he employs to allegorize history and the possibilities of redemption. Finally, how can we “settle the claim of the past” if even the angel cannot “make whole what has been smashed”? That is, what is the relationship between theology, sovereignty, and us? How might we conceive of ourselves as being in possession of a weak messianic power? How do we exercise this power? And how will theology aid us in the philosophical game of history? Scholars have long wrestled with the fact that modern sovereignty, despite its pretense toward secular and popular authority or its claims to break with the monarchical past, is nonetheless continuous, in key ways, with Christian notions of sovereignty. In his influential book Political Theology (1922), Carl Schmitt asserted that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” 155 Focusing on the concept of sovereignty, he famously argued that “the sovereign is one who decides on the exception.” 156 He acknowledged that calling a state of emergency in which normal laws are suspended—​­what he meant when he referred to the “exception”—​­was a “borderline” rather than a “routine” feature of sovereign authority.157 Nonetheless, he maintained that this feature was the key to understanding what constitutes the modern authority of the state.158 Because the exception cannot derive from the norms of law but is, rather, an anomalous condition imposed from outside of the law the authority to “decide on the exception” is what constitutes the actual power and authority of modern sovereignty.159 For Schmitt, the “sovereign exception” of modern political theory was premised upon the Christian conception of the miracle, wherein God intervenes in the world from beyond its physical limits. Modern political philosophy, he argues, rejected the theological conception of the miracle, secularizing it through the imposition of legal codes that “reject the exception in every form.” 160 Nonetheless, crises, during which sovereigns suspend the law and impose a state of emergency, demonstrate that sovereign power is derived not from the norms of law but rather from a power that exceeds the law, a power that cannot be grounded within the norms of law. Moreover, the sovereign gets to decide not only when the law can be suspended or reimposed but also what is within the law and what lies beyond it. That is, the sovereign determines the “states of exception,” those conditions, forms of being, and so on that lie beyond the protections of the law. For Schmitt, modern political theology is problematic not because of its Christian genealogy but rather because it disguises itself as secular. Unlike the liberal jurists he critiques, he endorses the omnipotent god-­like sovereignty of the modern

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state that he diagnoses (he would become a Nazi collaborator), arguing that it is inescapable. Like Schmitt, Benjamin also understood that modern sovereignty could only be understood if we grasp its indebtedness to Christian theology. However, he did not, therefore, endorse its authority; rather, he turned to political theology to advocate for what James Martel calls a “dissipated sovereignty.” 161 Martel argues that, for Benjamin, sovereignty “is a kind of idol or fetish,” part of the “‘phantasmagoria’ . . . that pass[es] for reality in our world.” 162 In Benjamin’s cosmology, the fetish does not obscure a reality we can discern (as it does for Marx); rather, reality is unknowable, and thus the fetish is all we have. This does not mean, however, that there is no reality, or that we should embrace fetishism. Rather, Benjamin advocates for an anti-­ fetishistic or nonidolatrous relationship toward the sovereign order of signs. This relationship does not seek the (divine) truth obscured by this order. Rather, it acknowledges that transcendent truth is irretrievably beyond human representation. “To be an anti-­fetishist,” writes Martel, “means to be aware of [the] inevitability of misreading, of the false promise of signs.” 163 A nonidolatrous sovereignty can only be achieved, therefore, if “time, order, progress and history” (the promises of sovereign order) are not the objective signs of destiny, justice, or redemption but rather are understood as “discontinuous and ‘in ruins.’” 164 For this recognition to occur, the anti-­ fetishist—​­what Benjamin calls the historical materialist as opposed to the historicist—​­must “scramble and dissipate the sovereign order,” shatter, cut up, and rearrange the phantasmagoria—​­not, Martel cautions, “to annihilate [sovereign order] altogether,” but, “in effect, [to] hollow[ ] it out . . . allowing its representational failures to be rendered legible.” 165 In chapter 1 we explored Benjamin’s constellation metaphor as a description of constructivist montage and its “imminent transcendentalism” with respect to divine or objective truth. Martel’s characterization of sovereignty as a form of representational idolatry (predicated on order, progress, and transcendent truth) that must be shattered and reordered returns us to this argument. The material historian is the anti-­fetishist who montages the shattered fragments of the phantasmagoria and “makes connections between phenomena in order to understand the truths that they constitute.” 166 Her melancholia derives from her recognition that the truth is inaccessible, that she “has no recourse to actual truth, no escape from representation.” 167 Her only option then, is to “turn[ ] deeper into [the phantasmagoria]—​­right down to the signs and symbols that we are subjected to—​­in order to possibly scramble and alter the overwhelming power and authority of sovereignty.” 168

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Only this offers us the opportunity to “re-­see and re-­read the world around us,” and therein the possibility for justice lies.169 In chapter 1 I argue that Orozco’s Epic should be understood as a constructivist image along the lines of Benjamin’s constellation. In this reading, Orozco’s melancholic acknowledgment of the “viewer’s share” cast him as the anti-­fetishistic material historian rather than the idolatrous historicist. In what follows I pursue this reading, seeking to understand how the Epic scrambles the historicist’s causal chain of events, how it dissipates the sovereign order of signs, and how it employs Christian theology to critique eschatological history, both Christian and secular messianism. In so doing, the Epic hails the redemptive politics of history and the “weak Messianic power” that Benjamin ascribes to “us.” Rivera’s National Palace: Technology, Progress, and Messianic Redemption

To better appreciate the way that Orozco’s Epic fractures the historicist’s presumption of progress and its relationship to the eschatology of Christian messianism, we return to Rivera’s National Palace mural. In chapter 1 I argue that the palace stairwell functions as a material embodiment of the empty, homogenous time that the historicist fills with “a mass of data.” 170 The north wall dedicated to the “The Ancient Indian World” serves as an “eternal” image of the past that establishes a causal connection between various moments in Mexico’s history and leads toward its messianic future (see figure 1.1). The present is thus construed as a transition from the violent dialectical process depicted along the large west wall, with the working class situated as the redeemer of future generations of Mexicans (see figure 1.2). And yet the oppressed classes are not the subjects of the history that Rivera seeks to convey. Rather, it is with the victors that Rivera empathizes. Like the nineteenth-­century liberal historians from whom he drew inspiration, Rivera’s chronicle of Mexican history emphasizes the individuals, both good and bad, who helped to constitute Mexico’s national epic. Victims appear, but they remain anonymous and are represented as the “passive recipients” of the actions of the historical agents on view.171 Even the heroic proletarian workers depicted on the south wall are shown to be enacting the authorized will of Karl Marx (see figure 1.3). And in fact, by depicting Marx’s dictum about history, Rivera, too, was endeavoring to educate the Mexican masses rather than reflect the organic insights of any working-­class organization. The barbarism depicted across the vast west wall not only serves to bolster claims for historical and political progress but also as a perverse

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spectacle of Mexico’s cultural treasures: the achievements of the great minds and talents who have shaped its juridical formation as well as the cultural spoils carried along in the triumphal procession of its national destiny. Mari Carmen Ramírez notes that between 1925 and 1932 Diego Rivera was the sole muralist supported by the Mexican government. These years align with the election of Calles in 1925 through the Maximato, the period from 1928 to 1934 during which he influenced the presidency from behind the scenes. During this period, Ramírez argues, Rivera’s murals enter a “historicist” period, “where a revision of Mexico’s history from the point of view of the Mexican State, was carried out and painted on the walls” of government buildings, most significant among them the stairwell at the National Palace.172 In chapter 2 we noted Rivera’s association with Calles and many of the key political figures of the period through the Quetzalcoatl Logia, a secret society. This affiliation impacted both the messianic politics of the cycle as a whole and his depiction of Quetzalcoatl as an enlightened teacher. This aspect of the mural represents its esoteric meaning. As for the exoteric message of the mural, we can also look to Rivera’s affiliation with the Calles regime, for his collaboration with and support for the Jefe Máximo was no secret. While Rivera was forced to resign from the Mexican Communist Party in 1924, probably because of concerns about his ties with the administration, the Calles regime maintained positive relations with the major left-­leaning social organizations of the period, including the Regional Mexican Worker’s Federation (Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, crom). Gilbert Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau go so far as to argue that “his first two years in office constituted the high-­water mark of the Sonoran Dynasty where its commitment to social reform was concerned.” 173 Not only did Calles increase agrarian reform by granting eight million acres of land to indigenous villages; he also enacted important restrictions on the foreign ownership of land and oil, thereby strengthening Mexican sovereignty. But Calles’s early administration is best known for its radical anticlericalism. His open opposition to the Catholic Church prompted a popular rebellion in 1926 known as the Cristiada, or Cristero Rebellion, a three-­year guerrilla war against the centralizing power and secularizing agenda of the state. Rivera began work on his National Palace murals at the outbreak of the Cristiada; thus his allegiance to the Calles administration can be seen as support for the state against the numerous social and political forces that sought to destabilize it and turn back the immediate gains of the revolution. Just as artists had aligned themselves with the regime in 1924 during the de la Huerta coup, Rivera would continue to support it even in the face

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of growing criticism from the left. And his original iconographic program bears this out. Early pencil drawings reveal differences in key passages of the mural that reflect Rivera’s adherence to the political goals of the Calles administration.174 These differences can be seen in the lunette that crowns the central arch of the west wall and in the iconography of the south wall. The iconography of the north wall and the other lunettes along the top of the west wall seem to have undergone little or no change from preliminary drawing to final work, thereby making the aforementioned differences all the more notable. Rivera’s original plan for the central lunette was similar to the final image in that it was organized around a portrait of Hidalgo. However, rather than creating a good/​­bad axial symmetry around his central figure, Rivera planned to include only the liberal heroes of the independence struggle. While the current lunette uses this good/​­bad symmetry to align the Sonoran Dynasty, represented by Obregón and Calles, with Iturbide’s imperial republic, the original design culminates with an allegorical female figure embracing a campesino and a worker before a mountainous landscape. Arrayed around this central allegory are figures who remain undelineated, save for the suggestion of a sombrero on one. This indicates that Rivera probably intended to include portraits of key figures from the agrarian faction of the recent revolution, likely similar to those he highlights in the resultant scene. We do not know who he might have included as representatives of the proletariat, but it is likely that those figures would have been anonymous workers like the many who populate his image of May Day or the coming proletariat revolution in his cycle at the Ministry of Public Education. Given Rivera’s allegorizing tendency, we can assume that the figure who embraces the campesino and worker is the Mexican nation in indigenized female guise. Thus this central axis of the west wall would have culminated in a conciliatory image of the modern nation embracing urban and agrarian workers shown forming a lateral alliance. This iconographic program resonates with the ideological thrust of Rivera’s Ministry of Public Education cycle, and it reflects Calles’s emphasis on the agrarian and labor sectors as well as the high levels of support he enjoyed among their leadership in the early years of his presidency. By the time the mural was completed in 1935, the central lunette had undergone major iconographic changes (figure 3.28). Rivera extended the good/​­bad axis of the colonial strata up through the central arch, and he added portraits of Calles and Obregón to the bad side of history, among other nefarious figures. He maintained his commitment to a lateral alliance between the agrarian movement and workers’ unions. However, rather than

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figure 3.28. Detail of central arch depicting the dialectical transition from independence to revolution to postrevolutionary Mexico. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: “From the Conquest to 1930,” 1929–­34, Fresco, west wall, stairwell, National Palace, Mexico City. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk.

having two anonymous figures personify these large factions, he depicts the historical leadership of the agrarian faction of the revolution at the top right and places an urban worker dead center. This worker is anonymous, but it is he who points the way forward. As indicated earlier, he looks toward the agraristas but gestures away in the direction of the south wall, where we now see Marx as the messiah and agent of Mexico’s future redemption. Through these changes, Rivera temporalizes the iconographic program of the central lunette. Rather than culminating in an allegory of horizontal brotherhood, the imagery now suggests a movement from the recent revolution toward a proletarian revolution to come. In this sense, Rivera has

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moved away from Calles’s corporatist engagement with social movements toward Cárdenas’s more radical endorsement of Marxist labor organizations, in particular his support of the Confederation of Mexican Workers and Peasants (Confederación General de Obreros y Campesinos de México, cgocm), which, under the leadership of the Marxist intellectual Vicente Lombardo Toledano, would become the powerful Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos, ctm) in 1936.175 Even though Rivera was expelled from the Communist Party, by 1934, when he was completing his mural, the shift from the Maximato to Car­de­ nismo was already well under way. It was at this point that Rivera’s overt endorsement of Marx became explicit in this mural. Consequently, he not only distanced himself from Calles, by implicating his former patron in postrevolutionary corruption; he also revised the south wall imagery to better reflect the turmoil of the early 1930s. In his original drawing, the south wall described a modernizing utopia, where the urban workers control an enormous crane and a farmer tills the land with a tractor. Agrarian and urban labor are represented as discreet sectors, but their horizontal alliance is made clear at the center of the wall, where a campesino and a factory worker clasp hands. An airplane soars above them, against the silhouette of a blazing sun. The airplane can be read as the technological apotheosis of Quetzalcoatl, who in this initial design is indicated just to its side in the image of a feathered serpent on a hill. This program limns an image of a proximate future saturated with the values promoted by the Calles administration in which technological progress (Quetzalcoatl-­as-­airplane) ensures political progress in the form of labor rights and vice versa. A photograph of the south wall in 1929 shows that once Rivera actually started painting, he had introduced some conflict into his program.176 We still see images of workers and campesinos coming together in political cooperation. But we also see armed peasants and striking workers amid scenes of wealthy capitalists and popular martyrdom. The laborers now appear to be oppressed rather than in full control of modern machinery. Instead of the lateral alliance at the center of the original drawing, we see here a trinity of worker, campesino, and soldier. They now stand before massive silos in what looks like a factory-­scape. Gone are the references to Quetzalcoatl or the rising sun, although we do still see an image of flight, in what is either an airplane or a blimp. Rivera laid out this version during the culmination of the Cristiada, when Mexico was in the grip of a severe economic crisis that resulted in the imposition of austerity measures. While Obregón had successfully run for the presidency in 1928, he was assassinated by a Cristero before he took office,

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leading to the imposition of a temporary candidate by Calles under the auspices of the newly formed National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, pnr). This period of economic and political instability is registered in the mural. However, the outline we see in the 1929 photograph is relatively tame when compared with the final version completed in 1935, notably after his return from the United States. In the final version (see figure 1.3), the composition remains largely in place, but Rivera elaborates the iconography in a highly compressed space filled with figures, some specified through portraiture, others representing general social factions or types. The final wall reflects Rivera’s growing obsession with technological progress and industry after his years in the United States. In the National Palace mural, however, he dispensed with the allegorical figures that troubled his account of industrialization in San Francisco and Detroit, settling instead for a variant of critical social realism that focuses less on worker cooperation and more on the kinds of social antagonism that are not explicit in his murals for capitalist patrons, with the infamous exception of his mural for Rockefeller Center. Whereas in the 1929 drawing of the south wall program, the barricading of foreign capitalists against the demands and struggles of the popular classes was present, on the wall these oppositions are spelled out clearly. The root of the chaos on view is the Church and its greedy collusion with the forces of capital, both foreign and national. At nearly every point in the mural Rivera calls out figures specifically associated with the recently fought Cristiada. Moving from the lower right-­hand corner of the image, we begin with a scene of armed generals oppressing campesinos at gunpoint. A hacendado wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Cross of Marquez, a symbol associated with the Caballeros of Colon, stands with his back to the viewer gazing up at a lynched worker and peasant. This figure represents the collusion between the Catholic Church and wealthy landowners against the populist gains of the revolution. As the viewer moves to the left she sees peasants radicalized by the Cristeros, placing coins in a donation box that feeds the gilded basilica dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Here Rivera takes aim at the beloved cult of the Catholic icon, characterizing popular devotion as an opiate that causes rural people to work against their own class interests. If we recall the role that the basilica and cult played in the rapprochement Díaz orchestrated between liberal and conservative political ideologies during the nineteenth century, Rivera’s explicit critique of this project broadcasts his deviation from the liberal tradition in favor of a more radical Marxist one. Next, we see the corrupted clergy cavorting with prostitutes while elites revel. And to

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the far left Rivera depicts a professor at the National University instructing students of several nationalities. He gestures toward a swastika, endorsing fascism in reference to the growing power of Sinarquismo (opposition to postrevolutionary reforms promoted by the Unión Nacional Sinarquista, a fascist political party) in Mexican intellectual and political life. Mexican fascism was not only hypernationalist and opposed to communism but also Roman Catholic, with the more educated figures associated with this tendency ultimately forming the conservative National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, pan) in 1939.177 At the center of the wall, in a series of spaces demarcated by a system of pneumatic pipes, we see state forces in gas masks repressing a workers’ strike. The points of their bayonets direct our attention to a series of crosses that morph into swastikas. Above this scene individuals representing capitalism collude with the Church and military. In one vignette Rivera depicts collusion at the national level, with Calles shown conspiring with a general and a member of the clergy. Just above and to the viewer’s left, a second vignette represents the forces of U.S. monopoly capitalism. Here we see one of Rivera’s favorite motifs, U.S. robber barons—​­John D. Rockefeller Sr., J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Durant, and Andrew Mellon—​ ­gathered around a gilded ticker tape machine tracking their immense fortunes through the financial markets. In opposition to political corruption, Catholic zealotry, economic exploitation, and false education, Rivera sprinkles references to the real education of the worker and the peasant. At the far left of the wall, we see a denim-­clad man grasping Marx’s Capital. In another scene at the bottom of the wall, Frida Kahlo and her sister Cristina represent rural teachers instructing children on their basic human rights. And, of course, at the top a monumental Marx holds a portion of his Communist Manifesto before the trinity of worker, peasant, and soldier. Unlike the colonial section along the west wall, on the south wall Rivera takes aim at the Church and offers no positive alternatives to the whoring, money-­grubbing, crypto-­fascist clergy on view. He takes his cue from Marx’s famous dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses” and savages the recent Cristiada while endorsing the secularizing and modernizing ethos of the state. Ironically, he implicates Calles in the Catholic corruption of the people, despite his notorious Jacobinism. It was Calles’s radical secularism and anticlericalism that led to the outbreak of the Cristero rebellion. But in Rivera’s mural, he appears to be orchestrating or at the very least benefiting politically from the bloody debacle. By 1935 it was clear that Calles had functioned as a strongman, controlling aspects of the presidency from behind the scenes. His successor,

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Cárdenas, distanced himself almost immediately from his predecessor, despite the fact that Calles had promoted his career and hand-­picked him for the presidency. With Cárdenas’s endorsement of the ctm, Marxism became a viable political position rather than a risky affiliation. Rivera’s attacks on Calles can therefore be seen as an attempt to distance himself from his earlier ties with the Maximato during a period of political transition. Moreover, it testifies to Rivera’s canny attempts to curry favor with each successive political regime. It also represents Rivera’s ongoing desire for readmission to the Communist Party amid constant attacks from the left, most notably from Si­quei­ros, who published his diatribe in the New Masses in 1934. Recall that it was in that article that Si­quei­ros took Rivera to task for “surrendering to the government” despite the Calles regime’s suppression of their communist organ El Machete.178 “The ‘master-­painter,’ the bourgeois intellectual dilettante of the revolution,” he writes, “saw himself forced to give himself over to a slow process of concessions in exchange for the right to continue painting walls.” 179 He accuses Rivera of painting “only general themes . . . pseudo-­Marxist lectures.” 180 Calling him a “friend of the pictorial political portrait,” he complains that, nonetheless, Rivera never depicts figures of the Mexican feudal (land-­owning) bourgeoisie who were in league with imperialism. Calles, its strong man, never appears on the scene in his role of demagogue-­hangman of the Mexican workers. He never painted Julio Antonio Mella, Guadalupe Rodriquez, Pedro Ruiz, none of the victims of the Mexican counter-­revolution. And Ambassador Morrow? Rivera could not very well portray politically his patron, the man who paid him twelve thousand dollars so that he would condemn the Spanish Colonials in his fresco, as the symbol of oppression of the Mexican people, to be presented as a gift to the government of the respective state.181 When we view the changes to Rivera’s mural through Si­quei­ros’s critique, it looks like a point-­for-­point refutation. In the place of a “vague, pseudo-­ Marxist lecture,” Rivera not only depicts the “feudal bourgeoisie” in the figure of the hacendado; he also characterizes Calles as a strongman on the south wall and as an imperialist leader through his association with Iturbide in the central arch. And while we do not see images of the many victims of the “counter-­revolution” that Si­quei­ros names (Rivera may have referred to Mella’s assassin in his Ministry of Public Education murals), Rivera does attack John D. Rockefeller Sr., who, like Ambassador Morrow, was one of his U.S. patrons. He had already criticized Rockefeller and most of the monopoly capitalists around him in his Ministry of Public Education cycle.

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However, by 1935 his commission at Rockefeller Center had been destroyed and several U.S. commissions had been canceled as a result. Thus, Rockefeller was perhaps the only U.S. patron he could savage without fear of repercussion as he sought to retain his position as the preeminent public artist in the Americas. Despite these changes, the south wall of Rivera’s mural still testifies to his vulgar Marxist faith in technological progress as the mechanism of political liberation and to the deeply messianic logic of his conception of working-­ class redemption and sovereignty. The working classes are not the subjects of history in this mural but rather are represented as labor power and idols of Rivera’s Marxist philosophy of history. Ultimately it is through Marx as a returned messiah that Rivera represents the working classes as the redeemers of the violence and exploitation of history. Like Si­quei­ros’s armed proletarian worker in the Electricians’ Syndicate mural, he swoops in as a secularized deity to deliver justice and instantiate a worker’s paradise in the form of the proletarian state promised by the world historical revolution of the working class. The eschatological logic of Rivera’s messianism is evident both in his “back to the future” veneration of Quetzalcoatl’s theological state and in his representation of Marx as a deus ex machina who arrives to deliver justice from the place of divine authority, a truth beyond the current phantasmagoria of capitalist exploitation. We should not let Rivera’s attacks on Catholicism or the Cristiada dissuade us from recognizing the profoundly eschatological logic of his Marxist utopianism. The fact that his Marx is but a secularized Moses bearing a manifesto-­cum-­commandments cues us to the deep ways that political representation is rooted in, rather than a departure from, the Christian iconography of sovereignty and salvation. Rivera’s iconographic program pits revelation and truth-­telling against the prevarications of religious, capitalist, and political authority at every turn: in the manifesto that Marx extends for the viewer and the postrevolutionary trio of populist factions who read about the “entire history of Mexico” as the “history of class conflict,” in the lessons that Kahlo and her sister offer to the rural peasants, and in the copy of Marx’s Capital that the proletarian organizer uses to educate his brethren. All of these representations draw from Marx’s theory of ideology wherein ideology is construed as a false representation that obscures the true workings of power. In this sense, Rivera’s Marxist political theology appeals to an external or transcendent truth that enables not only effective politics and thereby the capacity to judge and redeem but also the reimposition of sovereign authority.

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Following Martel’s argument, Rivera fetishizes truth, positing his representation of “Mexico of Today and Tomorrow” as truthful precisely because it unmasks the collusion of capitalism, the Church, and the Mexican state. His appeal to Marx’s Capital is an appeal to a truer account of history as the “history of class struggle.” He is thus an idolator producing a phantasmagoria insofar as he posits his representation as truth. “To believe that the truth lies just beneath the fetish,” Martel asserts, “is . . . to simply replace one set of fetishes with another.” 182 Likewise, following Martel, Rivera produces a “false sense of time,” wherein a “sequence of events [is asserted as] meaningful simply by virtue of temporal ordering.” 183 In opposition to Rivera’s idolatry—​­his lining up of events “like the beads of a rosary”—​­Orozco is an anti-­fetishist.184 “Both the idolator and the anti-­fetishist engage in . . . similar behavior,” Martel writes. “Both seek to make connections, tell stories about the world, read sense into it.” “The key difference,” he asserts, “is that the idolator thinks they are talking about truth while the anti-­fetishist knows that the truth is unavailable to them.” 185 Recalling that in his “Explanation,” Orozco called narrativity (story), history, and the idea of truth into question, I argue that through his engagement with theology (via the eschatological logic of the conquest) in the Modern half of his Epic, Orozco disrupts the flow of “homogeneous, empty time” and destroys the phantasmagoria of history as progress, and with it the notion that redemption will come as a consequence of messianic revelation. Rather than limning an image of “liberated grandchildren,” Orozco recalls the “enslavement of ancestors” and calls upon us to settle the claim of the past.186 Orozco and the Phantasmagoria of Sovereignty

Unlike Rivera’s putatively secular National Palace mural, Orozco’s Epic does not naturalize theological time. Rather, his brazen invocation of the theological foundations of Spanish dominion engages both the eschatological logic of historical time, in general, and the particular form of idolatry that sovereignty in the Americas has taken. Orozco’s invocation of a divine redeemer is put in the service of dissipating the sovereign order of time, progress, and history. Because of the physical structure of the reserve corridor, the Epic cannot help but invite a narrative or causal reading of history, and yet, as I’ve argued all along, Orozco interferes with that impulse by employing repetition as a differential device and the radical juxtapositions entailed in the destructive-­constructive technique of montage. Thus, the mural stages a confrontation of temporalities that challenges but does not entirely dispense

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figure 3.29. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Migration of the Spirit” (Panel 18), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.21.

with the concept of historical time. In the Ancient half, the linear thrust of the Quetzalcoatl sequence is undermined by the circular logic of its imperial frame (see figure i.6). By inaugurating the Modern half of the mural with a scene of conquest, Orozco evokes the teleology of eschatological history (see figure i.7). This would seem to be brought to fruition in the final episode, “Modern Migration of the Spirit,” where a Christian Apocalypse unfolds, complete with an image of Christ (figure 3.29). And yet what transpires between these two scenes confounds the linear tautologies of eschatology and both the providential claims of the conquistadors and the secular messianism of their twentieth-­century counterparts. “Modern Migration of the Spirit” brings the cycle to a fever pitch. While Orozco’s palette intensifies across the Modern half of the Epic, the acrid yellows, pungent greens, and vibrant orangey-­reds come together in this

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scene to craft Christ as a terrifying, vengeful, even necrotic figure. He stands astride his cross, wielding the ax with which it has been felled in one hand while the other is raised in a defiant fist. His body is positioned frontally like an X, recalling Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man but stripping him of any humanistic reassurances about the enlightenment or cultural renaissance. His face is impassive, recalling the Byzantine prototype of the Pantocrator or judge. But this is not the immaculate figure of Christ as divine judge but rather the mortified body of Christ in his human, postmortem state. His body is rent with the wounds of his sacrifice, with prominent holes in his hands and feet, a gaping wound in his side, and flesh that seems to be rotting. In some passages, such as his thighs, this has the effect of suggesting a snake shedding its skin, and in this way possibly nodding to the serpent motif in the Quetzalcoatl myth and Mesoamerican cosmologies more broadly. And yet we would be hard-­pressed to see in this Christ the figure of Quetzalcoatl returned. As I discuss below, Orozco seems to have deliberately eschewed any indication that this Christ represents the return of the repressed. The fallen cross forms an orthogonal that draws the eye into the foreshortened pictorial space. However, it does not recede toward a logical vanishing point. As with the cross in “Cortez and the Cross,” it seems to be pushed toward the picture plane by a pile of rubble that mounts toward the sky, obstructing visual recession into the scene. This pile of detritus is made up of the weapons of modern warfare: large-­caliber, high-­velocity guns, tanks, and gas masks. Additionally, Orozco includes prominent references to religious idolatry—​­a pagan column, a classical bust, and a Buddha—​­which in combination with the fallen cross suggest that Christ destroys not just the Christian culture instantiated in his name in the Americas but all religious systems. Here these religious systems are cast as forms of idolatry via the emphasis on cultural fragments and through their proximity to the implements of war, which conjure, in turn, the “Machine Totems” from the central walls of the corridor. However, if we recall Rivera’s casting of Quetzalcoatl as a bodhisattva on the north wall of his National Palace mural, we might determine that Orozco’s jab at pagan and Buddhist culture here is less an attack on these specific non-­Occidental faiths, and more a veiled commentary on the intellectual idolization of Greece and India in postrevolutionary Mexico. The fascination with India and the Buddha is evident not only in Rivera’s mural but also in the relief panels by Manuel Centurion that Vasconcelos had carved into the architectural corners of the interior courtyards at the Ministry of Public Education. In the Court of Labors, alongside references to de las Casas (Spain) and Quetzalcoatl (America), Vasconcelos included Plato (Greece)

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figure 3.30. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Chains of the Spirit” (Panel 19), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.20.

and the Buddha (India) to represent the educational prophets he looked to for inspiration. In Orozco’s mural, the Buddha, like the cross or Aphrodite, is just one other “cultural treasure” thrown onto the pile of civilization’s wreckage. Rather than positioning it for veneration, Orozco represents it as an idol fallen prey to the iconoclastic rage of Christ’s fury. It is not just the cross—​ ­the implement of his sacrifice for humankind—​­that he destroys but all of civilization. This fiery scene is followed by “Chains of the Spirit,” a gloomy, mostly gray-­green panel positioned over a doorway on the south wall of the corridor (figure 3.30). Here vultures donning clerical collars perch atop a pile of chains with padlocks, revolvers, and what appear to be the crossed keys of papal heraldry. If these are indeed the keys to the kingdom of Heaven,

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we arrive at the culmination of the cycle only to find ourselves locked out, victims of clerical greed and subject to ongoing threats of violence. Ending the Modern sequence with a scene of Christian Apocalypse, Orozco appears to endorse the messianic and eschatological claims of the Spanish after all. The putative title of this culminating scene, “Modern Migration of the Spirit,” would also seem to ratify the legacy of Fiore’s millenary kingdom among New World mendicants by implying that the apocalypse on view is but the prelude to the monastic utopia of the Age of the Spirit. However, these conclusions are troubled by both Orozco’s choice and his depiction of the biblical scene. If he were adhering to the mystical imaginary of the New World mendicants, Orozco would have culminated his mural with the iconography of the Last Judgment. As Jaime Lara has shown, the evangelization undertaken by the mendicant orders in the early stages of the spiritual conquest was enacted in part through vast liturgical dramas set in the large public spaces of open-­air churches covered with fresco cycles whose themes betray an “extended reflection on the Last Judgment.” 187 In one sense, we could view Orozco’s Epic and its Modern wing in particular as part of this colonial legacy, as a didactic, eschatological mural program that converts the reserve corridor into a quasi-­liturgical space wherein the drama of conquest and eschatological redemption play out. But “Modern Migration of the Spirit” is not a Last Judgment scene. Nor does it fit with the standard iconography associated with the “four last things (death, judgment, heaven and hell),” that mendicants emphasized in their visual programs.188 Rather, Orozco selects a theme that is somewhat obscure within the Latin Church: the Anastasis or the “harrowing of hell.” Like the Last Judgment, this episode from the Passion is part of the Eastertide liturgy. However, it emphasizes what Anna Kartsonis calls the “temporal ambiguity of Christ,” in that it refers to his resurrection, but it takes place during the three days and three nights that Christ’s body remained dead in the tomb.189 Thus, this is not a resurrected Christ returning to pass judgment but rather the mortal Christ, suspended in the liminal state of physical death prior to spiritual renewal, and thus his presence suggests eschatological uncertainty. Orozco’s evocation of the Anastasis is iconographically unorthodox in ways that force us to question its messianic function within the dramaturgy of conversion and the Eastertide liturgy. Typically, Christ is shown releasing Adam from the chains of bondage, often using his cross to skewer Hades while keys and locks are strewn about. In Orozco’s penultimate panels we have components of this program: a destructive Christ with a cross, locks, and chains. Like early Christian illuminators, Orozco refrains from depicting the Resurrection and thus the triumphal outcome that Christian

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figure 3.31. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: study of figure chopping the Cross for “Modern Migration of the Spirit” (Panel 18), 1932–­34, Graphite on tracing paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through gifts from Kirsten and Peter Bedford, Class of 1989; Jane and Raphael Bernstein, and Walter Burke, Class of 1944; Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Lombard, Class of 1953; Nathan Pearson, Class of 1932; David V. Picker, Class of 1953; Rodman C. Rockefeller, Class of 1954; Kenneth Roman Jr., Class of 1952; and Adolph Weil Jr., Class of 1935; D.988.52.207.

eschatology predicts. However, unlike the orthodox script of early Christian Passion cycles, the padlocks and vulturous clergy shown in “Chains of the Spirit” suggest that the spirit has not been released or migrated. Thus, this scene does not bring the prophecy to a close. Rather, it leaves us arrested in time, still waiting for messianic redemption and the end of days. While Orozco’s image partakes of the visual ambivalence about the Resurrection and the temporal ambiguities of conventional Anastasis iconography, it omits Adam’s rising up from Hades. If Christ’s rescue of Adam is meant to guarantee redemption, Orozco’s image refrains from any such guarantee. Orozco’s scene of a vengeful Christ does not satisfy the longing for messianic redemption that it would seem to solicit. Orozco toyed with the idea of rendering what appears to be an indigenized Christ in the final scene (figure 3.31). Had he done so, it would be more compelling to interpret this final scene as Quetzalcoatl’s return, much as Marx functions in Rivera’s mural. However, he abandoned this idea, preferring instead to keep the relationship between the three messianic figures in the mural ambiguous and unresolved by prophecy.

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“Modern Migration of the Spirit” thus confounds the providential claims set in motion by “Cortez and the Cross.” As a frame, these two scenes recall Benjamin’s observations about the antinomial character of the Trauerspiel, wherein “history—​­as a narrative of the human march toward redemption on the Day of Judgment—​­loses the eschatological certainty of its redemptive conclusion, and becomes secularized into a mere natural setting for the profane struggle over political power.” 190 Like the German mourning plays that Benjamin analyzes, Orozco’s mural lacks a deus ex machina or sovereign authority who can redeem the chaos and uncertainty of history. Instead, we have a sovereign who, to quote one of the playwrights, is not “a god from the machine . . . but rather a spirit from the grave.” 191 As a mortified Christ—​ ­another instance of the walking dead in the Modern wing—​­Orozco’s figure is at once “lord of the creatures” and a “creature himself.” 192 Moreover, in his ambiguous state as neither dead nor resurrected, he is a kind of “spirit from the grave,” conjuring the dramaturgy of redemption but undercutting its guarantees at the same time. Rather than the all-­knowing, all-­seeing messiah promised by eschatology, he is a rotting corpse and, as such, a reminder of our vulnerability, the precarity of biological life, a figure of enfleshment rather than transcendence. As Martel explains, in the plays Benjamin analyzes, the “the idols, or objects that are meant to represent and promote sovereign power turn against that very thing, undermining the idolatry they would otherwise be fomenting.” 193 Like the melancholy of the German playwrights during the Baroque, Orozco’s melancholic staging of colonial Spain’s providential claims helps to destabilize and expose the fictions of sovereign authority in the Americas. Rather than reveal a truth beyond the phantasmagoria of Christian eschatology—​­as Rivera attempts to do with his demonization of Mexican Christianity and the Cristiada as a Marxian opiate—​­he leaves “only the ruins and pieces of sovereign and eschatological logic.” 194 “Modern Migration of the Spirit” commutes the eschatalogical frame of the modern wing from an idolatrous assertion of Christian dogma or sovereign authority to “a site temporarily cleared of its idolatrous and mythological certainties.” 195 Neither a last judgment nor an anastasis, the component parts of orthodox Christian iconography, turn against their role in the “theatricality of sovereignty.” 196 Rather than reassert the “fate, order, and destiny” of the American epic, these fragments—​­“stage properties,” in the language of theater—​­enact a rebellion through which the contradictions of modern sovereignty and Christian theology play themselves out.197 This is what Benjamin calls “divine violence.” 198 For Martel, Benjamin’s divine violence connotes a kind of

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unexpected shock that disrupts the phantasmagoria and “opens up a space for resistance for the human actors who inhabit these narrative realms.” 199 Orozco’s invocation of eschatological history and the temporal logic of progress toward redemption on which it is based undermine the historicism of both postrevolutionary liberalism and Rivera’s Marxist messianism. For Orozco’s Christ is not the transcendent Redeemer that the Last Judgment augurs; he is a mortal and vengeful force come to “blast open the continuum of history” and to settle the claim that the past has on us.200 As Benjamin argues, it is the historical materialist’s task to destroy this concept of progress, to exchange the historicist’s concept of “homogeneous, empty time” with the historical materialist’s “constructive principle.” 201 Orozco’s mortified Christ offers the kind of shock Benjamin describes when “thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions.” 202 This “Messianic cessation of happening” disrupts the historicist flow of time and “grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.” 203 It is in this momentary arrest that the visitor-­cum-­historian may grasp the relationship our present has formed with the time of the conquest. And in that moment, the possibilities for justice in the (two) Americas can emerge. Or, as Orozco noted when suggesting that we imaginatively cut up and rearrange the plastic elements of the Sistine ceiling: “The order of the inter-­ relations between its parts may be altered, but those relationships may stay the same in any other order, and unexpected or expected possibilities may appear.” 204 Thus, in Orozco’s mural the ax-­wielding Christ becomes the viewer’s proxy, not the historicist’s transcendent redeemer. He is the historical materialist-­ as-­radical-­monteur, destroying the phantasmagoria of technological modernity, eschatological time, and sovereign representation. The fragments of this dissipated order have been recombined by the artist in such a way as to “radically resignify[ ] the order and structure of the world and our role in it.” 205 In this respect Orozco’s Christ is a figure of the “weak Messianic power” that Benjamin ascribes to us all, and that Orozco’s mural confers upon the viewer.206 Recall the slippage in Orozco’s MoMA statement, between the artist and the kind of active viewer his mural/​­poem/​­machine-­motor solicits.207 A similar slippage occurs between Orozco’s destruction and recombination of Christian iconography, Christ’s ax-­wielding destruction of modern civilization’s phantasmagoria, and the viewer, who, if we follow Orozco’s melancholic “explanation,” is called upon to “change the actual order of the plastic elements” of the Epic to bring about “unexpected” possibilities. Orozco, like Benjamin, turns toward the messianic; he “enlists theology” to expose “the vulnerabilities of the political that it would otherwise

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(idolatrously) underwrite.” 208 This is why Benjamin argues in Thesis I that historical materialism will “win all the time” if it “enlists the services of theology.” 209 Orozco’s vengeful Christ is a misrepresentation of eschatology’s redemptive promise. We are called to ally ourselves with the “cessation of happening” his violence enacts, to become historical materialists—​­radical monteurs—​­and thereby to take on the “weak Messianic” task of undoing sovereignty in the very place and via the very materiality that makes up its phantasmagoria.210 As I argue in chapter 1, Orozco’s approach to dialectics can be construed, like Benjamin’s, as pointing toward transcendence without any of the guarantees of truth. We do not destroy idolatry only to impose a new form of sovereign idolatry in its place. This would be akin to Rivera’s superposition of secular Marxism over Christian eschatology. Rather, all we can do is disrupt and dissipate the signs humans have created to represent God’s will. In turning away from the promise of transcendent deliverance, we stop waiting for justice to be delivered by the messiah and instead focus on our creaturely world and rethink our relationship to it. As “Chains of the Spirit” suggests, we may remain outside of the kingdom of Heaven. But the possibility divine violence affords us, to rethink our relationship to truth, God, justice, and sovereignty, is the space opened up for human responsibility, action, and agency. In this sense the messianic is the space of non­totalization that the clearing away of idols enables. Neither God’s kingdom nor the law, it is a nonidolatrous sovereignty. Sovereignty conceived of in these terms looks something like Orozco’s melancholy dialectics or Christ’s arresting and destructive act. And, Benjamin would argue, our own acts of self-­delivery when we exercise the “weak Messianic power” with which we have been endowed. In Orozco’s Epic, the messiah does not bring justice to the Americas. In fact, his Christ leaves us without any guarantees for redemption, justice, or restored order. But in the final suite of images, “Modern Industrial Man,” Orozco does offer us a homely and ambivalent figure. In the final chapter, I argue that this ambiguously racialized figure is an attempt to represent a nonidolatrous sovereignty that does not partake of the fetishes of Anglo-­or Hispano-­American nationalism. This figure intimates what justice in the Americas might look like and how we can be the agents of our own delivery.

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chapter 4 “M ODERN INDUSTRIAL MAN” AND THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE IN AMERICA

Orozco’s Epic ostensibly ends with “Chains of the Spirit.” But it is supplemented with a five-­panel sequence collectively titled “Modern Industrial Man” (see figure i.11). This sequence is situated within the niche across from the reserve desk on a series of three walls that were not a part of the original commission.1 Partially walled off from the cycle as a whole, this sequence refracts many of the themes developed throughout the Epic’s iconographic program. However, its meaning cannot be easily interpreted through the larger cycle’s constellation of Mesoamerican myth, eschatological history, or messianic politics. Both within and without the mural’s conceptual and iconographic engagement with American history, identity, and politics, it raises questions for the viewer, not the least of which is: What does it mean? How are we to read the figure of “Modern Industrial Man”? Is he an icon of revolutionary politics, whether conceived of through the discourses of U.S. American and Mexican nationalism or the international left? Or is he a demetaphorized figure that empties out the symbolic languages of nationalism and leftist politics? Is he a figure of identification for the viewer that seeks to consolidate individual or communal identity and resolve the problem of subaltern representation within the national imaginary? Or is he a figure of disidentification that compels the presumed spectator to engage in the critical work of decolonizing the postcolonial national imaginary? Finally, is he a figure with/​­out history within the discourses of nation-­statehood the Epic entails? Or is he an unassimilable remainder of the national-­colonial representations it hails? That is, does his apostatic relationship to the mural as

figure 4.1. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.23.

a whole position him beyond the borders of American nationhood and history? Or is he a site of embodied bordering that speaks to the exclusionary narratives of race, gender, and belonging that border nations across history and generations? Is he, in the end, a figure of redemption capable of healing the traumas of postcolonial nation-­state formation? Or is he a subaltern call for justice, a troubling presence that makes demands for the future in the ongoing process of decolonization? The Supplement

While Orozco was not contracted to paint the niche across from the reserve desk, he determined early on to occupy this last available wall space, exploring different ideas—​­such as the landing of the Vikings or Eleazar Wheelock teaching Native students—​­before working out what we see today. As indicated in chapter 1, the supplement is located within the space of crisis opened up by the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Its enigmatic figure raises questions about how the viewer might relate this sequence of images to the broader cycle as well as the crisis that the mural’s conceptual and physical rupture marks. Here the viewer stands, facing either the desk, where she might be checking out a book, or the wall, where she is confronted with an unconventional scene. A dark-­skinned worker reclines on his right elbow against an unnatural dark green backdrop that imbues the scene with a soothing quietude after the electric palette that culminates the Modern wing (figure 4.1). He holds a book in his gloved hands and reads with gentle, downcast eyes. To his right his sledgehammer stands upright, framing his body in a shallow space that is indistinct, save for the modern buildings that stand behind him, unfinished but pristine with the promise of new beginnings. Orozco uses a rational perspectival system so that the jutting corners of the building’s steel frame coincide with and echo the reclining worker’s silhouette. He is likewise under construction, with the open book, rather than the hammer, the

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figure 4.1 (detail)

means toward his completion. Rather than subjecting himself to the ministrations of a professor—​­a figure Orozco disparages in “Gods of the Modern World”—​­he educates himself (see figure 3.19). While more active and self-­possessed, this worker recalls the reclining figure in the “Coming of Quetzalcoatl” panel (see figure 2.1). He, too, augurs the potential for a new Golden Age. And like that earlier figure, his warm brown skin marks him as a person of color rather than the predominantly white protagonists who culminate Rivera’s and Si­quei­ros’s contemporaneous murals. The four panels that make up the frame for this central image situate “Modern Industrial Man” within competing scenarios of industrial labor (see figures 4.2, 4.3, 4.5, and 4.6). To our left, workers huddle together in a clump, not unlike the ambiguous town hall meeting in “Anglo-­America” (figure 4.3) They might be organizing or, just as likely, massing together for warmth. Whatever the cause, Orozco suggests that they are imperiled. A suspended I-­beam looms over the group, oriented along a diagonal that indicates deep spatial recession. However, two more I-­beams thrust upward in the immediate foreground. Their angled trajectories are at odds with one another and with the orthogonal relayed by their suspended counterpart. Rather than confirming the deep space of its vanishing point, they work at visual cross-­ purposes, reinforcing the picture plane and insisting upon a shallower compositional space. Together these building implements confound a sense of rational order and imply a virtual prison for the men gathered within the no-­ place their geometry describes. This irrational composition is reinforced in the adjacent panel, where “MODERN INDUSTRIAL MAN” AND THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE  209

figures 4.2 and 4.3. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (left panel, 1 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.22.

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a number of industrial objects are juxtaposed in a manner that obfuscates any sense of their heroic use (figure 4.2). In the immediate foreground an anvil sits in front of a series of wheels and bolts. An anchor and pulley are suspended by chains above, suggesting a port scene. And all lie before the tower of an industrial bridge, reminiscent of Orozco’s painting the Queensboro Bridge (1928). In an unusually detailed, and likely early, preparatory drawing, Orozco jotted down text to accompany his sketch. “Navigation—​ ­Ships; Engineering—​­Arch; Iron & Steel—​­anchor, plow, tools, anvil, wheel, horseshoe” (figure 4.4). At this phase, he divided the scene in two with an image of galleons along the top third of the panel (“Navigation-­ships”) and an array of industrial objects in the bottom two-­thirds (“Iron & Steele—​­anchor, plow, tools, anvil, wheel, horseshoe”).

figure 4.4. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: study for “Modern Industrial Man” (left panel, 1 of 3, Panel 20) 1930–­34, Graphite, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through gifts from Kirsten and Peter Bedford, Class of 1989; Jane and Raphael Bernstein, and Walter Burke, Class of 1944; Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Lombard, Class of 1953; Nathan Pearson, Class of 1932; David V. Picker, Class of 1953; Rodman C. Rockefeller, Class of 1954; Kenneth Roman Jr., Class of 1952; and Adolph Weil Jr., Class of 1935; D.988.52.222.

Ultimately, Orozco abandoned the ships and references to the Age of Exploration. However, he maintained the nautical scene, shifting the temporality from the fifteenth century to the present. By adding the bridge, he made the theme of engineering more prominent, associating it explicitly with recent industrial-­scale urban projects like the Queensboro Bridge. He retained most of the iron and steel inventions as implements associated with civilization and the progress of human industry. However, while the industrial landscape shown here is less dysfunctional than the one in “The Machine,” it is related insofar as neither shows human beings in control of the technics of civilization (see figure 3.16). Rather, humanity seems caught within industrialism’s web, menaced by swinging I-­beams and conglomerated into a faceless crowd.

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By comparison, the two panels to the viewer’s right reveal a scene of human cooperation. A raking line of workers climbs the wall (figure 4.5). They wield tools and bend and thrust in actions suggestive of skyscraper construction. While they, too, are anonymous, their labor is purposeful. Like their huddled counterparts, they are hemmed into a shallow pictorial space, with pickaxes and an I-­beam jutting up at odd angles in the foreground. However, as Leonard Folgarait observes, in this panel the axes and I-­beam seem continuous with the bodies of the workers, suggesting that “these workers are the very building they are constructing.” 2 The system of spatial recession is logical, like that used in many of the scenes in the Ancient half of the mural. This may not be a worker’s paradise, but the men who labor within the scene are builders and creators like their more heroic counterparts in the Ancient half of the mural who till, carve, and strive during Quetzalcoatl’s Golden Age (see figure 2.2). Adjacent to their striving forms we see yet another high-­rise under construction (figure 4.6). Its lines recede toward a single vanishing point, establishing a rational space that stands in clear opposition to the dense port scene on the opposite side of the niche. Like the two buildings that mirror the main worker’s form, they recall the modern skyscrapers in “Hispano-­ America” (see figure 3.18). However, unlike those earlier buildings, these do not lie fallow as monuments to the failed promises of revolution or the postrevolutionary order. Again, the built forms in this panel recall Orozco’s fascination with the industrial projects going up all over Manhattan during his stay in the late 1920s. In paintings like The World’s Tallest Structure (1928–­ 30), Eighth Avenue (1928), and Elevated (1929–­30), Orozco marveled at the strange new forms of U.S. America’s modern buildings.3 In his 1928 manifesto “New Worlds, New Races, New Art,” Orozco equates the modern skyscraper with his attempts to forge a new mural art commensurate with the novel spirit and racial culture that emerged in the Americas.4 The “architecture of Manhattan is a new value,” he proclaims.5 Mural art, like the Manhattan skyline, must eschew tradition and generate its own visual language within a new cycle of human creation. For Orozco, it is the public nature of mural art that elevates it above other art forms, for, as he claimed, “it cannot be hidden away for the benefit of a certain privileged few.” 6 Renato González Mello has shown that Orozco’s engagement with architecture during this period was inflected by period debates over the meaning of the skyscraper. Citing the arguments of Claude Bragdon and Lewis Mumford (both acquaintances of Orozco’s), he characterizes this debate as between a symbolic reading of architecture, understood as an organic expression of man’s “inner necessity for self-­expression,” and a more social or

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historical reading of architecture that “pointed to the contradictions between the structure and function of buildings.” 7 González Mello locates Orozco’s attitude toward Manhattan’s industrial landscape between these two approaches, noting that his “New Worlds, New Races, New Art” manifesto cleaves to Bragdon’s claims in Architecture and Democracy (1918) that the skyscraper represents the soaring hopes and spirit of the democratic impulse in the Americas. On the other hand, he argues, the Epic bears clear traces of Mumford’s discussion of the Brooklyn bridge in The Brown Decades (1931) and his preference for the low-­rise building over “modern architecture’s excess of verticality.” 8 In González Mello’s argument, Orozco’s Epic is allied with Mumford’s rejection of the skyscraper as spiritual achievement. However, I submit that Orozco’s Epic seems to restage this debate. As with so many of the panels in the mural, Orozco’s position is not decisive. Rather,

figures 4.5 and 4.6. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, The Epic of American Civilization: “Modern Industrial Man” (right panel, 3 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34, Fresco, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.934.13.24.

“MODERN INDUSTRIAL MAN” AND THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE  213

he conjures both the celebration of skyscraper symbolism and the critique of its function within a rapidly advancing capitalist system. In the opposing industrial scenes we see vestiges of both arguments: industrial architecture as an expression of spiritual rebirth and as a feature of the modern Babylon. The sequence offers the viewer a choice. She can look to her left (a glance that will reimmerse her in the violence and destruction of modern America’s phantasmagoria) or she can look right (a view toward ancient America’s more pacific reign of Quetzalcoatl). And yet the sequence forecloses any return to a prelapsarian, indigenized Golden Age. Unlike Rivera’s National Palace mural, where Marx directs our gaze to an immaculate industrial landscape, Orozco’s Epic does not encourage the viewer to go “back to the future,” nor does it suggest a secular socialist utopia. This supplement situates us within the now of messianic time. It places us firmly within the modern world, one that bears a close resemblance to the modernity wrought by Cortés’s conquest. Yet this image of modernity represents yet another repetition with a difference. In a sense, we are suspended within two possible presents. In one, nothing has changed; the weak messianic call for justice has been unheeded and the phantasmagoria continues. In the other, a “slight adjustment” has been made in the world.9 And the racialized worker appears to be the key. In this final sequence, neither the justice that Quetzalcoatl’s prophecy promises nor the redemption that Christ’s sacrifice entails are delivered. For we are not looking at a paradise realized. Rather, we glimpse the ever-­present potential for a justice that is already here. However, if this justice is already here, it is spectral, buried, and encrypted. It is a justice that cannot be represented. Rather, it must be intuited by the “[wo]man singled out by history at a moment of danger.” 10 As a call for justice and/​­or redemption, Orozco’s worker seems unheroic. He is not the monumental fighter of Si­quei­ros’s Electricians’ Syndicate mural nor can he be read as a modern Quetzalcoatl, like Rivera’s Marx. Rather, he is just a man. As an image of the Messiah, he is indeed weak. However, following our discussion of Benjamin’s notion of divine violence, I suggest that this figure represents an attempt at a nonidolatrous representation of sovereignty, one that reifies neither the idolatries of U.S. or Mexican nationalism nor the visual orthodoxies of Marxist art. He is not the worker as messiah, and yet he is a figure of decolonial critique, and as such he suggests ways that we, the contemporary viewer, might grapple with what a nonidolatrous sovereignty can be in the Americas. Following James Martel, he asks, “what kind of justice can we have when we do not live in . . .

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expectation [of perfect delivery], when we do not look to the state, or to God (or both) to deliver truth to us?” 11 In what follows, I survey the myriad discursive formations of U.S. and Mexican nationalism that the mural entails as well as those of the international left, wherein the worker instantiates a redemptive politics of revolutionary freedom. In so doing, I demonstrate the non-­iconic status of Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man.” I am aided by Ranjana Khanna’s theorization of “colonial melancholy,” wherein she characterizes melancholia, following Freud, as “an affective state caused by the inability to assimilate a loss, and the consequent nagging return of the thing lost into psychic life.” 12 “Theorizing melancholia,” she continues, “involves theorizing a relationship to the other, and the manner in which the other is manifested.” 13 In this sense, Orozco’s racialized worker conjures the many exclusions or raced populations within national colonial representation, asking us to review the manner in which they are manifested or not manifested within the Epic as a whole or the broader discourses of the colonial nation-­state and postcolonial politics it activates. In this sense he is a “specter of colonialism,” an unassimilable remainder. Remainders, Khanna writes, “are nonidentificatory, and are not driven by a conscious desire for nationhood or community. They do not build a sense of belonging, and are not employed in the service of community building through establishing shared histories or memories. On the contrary, they manifest an inability to remember, an interruption, or a haunting encryption that critiques national-­colonial representation.” 14 As such, they alert us to the critical agency of colonial melancholy and “inform the work of seeking justice in the period after colonialism.” 15 This is a critical project that Khanna ascribes to organic intellectuals, following Antonio Gramsci. Within the Benjaminian language I have elaborated throughout my analysis of Orozco’s Epic, it is the work of the material historian/​ ­critical monteur. And within the dynamics of Orozco’s melancholic dialectics, it is the work of the viewer whose reenactment of the mural’s ritual answers its encrypted call for justice. Neither Dartmouth Man nor Emiliano Zapata

The sequence of sketches Orozco prepared for the central panel of “Modern Industrial Man” reveals that the artist modeled the figure after a Dartmouth student (figure 4.7). This square-­jawed man sports a crew cut and wears what looks like a sport coat or, possibly, a letterman’s jacket (the sleeves seem to be elasticized, but there are also traces of lapels). His posture is identical with

“MODERN INDUSTRIAL MAN” AND THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE  215

his counterpart on the wall; however, the student is slightly more erect, with rectilinear shoulders and a long face, suggesting the physiognomy and bearing of the iconic white “Dartmouth Man.” These sketches reveal that Orozco paid particular attention to his hands, with several passages devoted solely to his long fingers as they tenderly grasp the large book by its spine and left cover (figure 4.8). At this stage, Orozco may still have been considering the theme of education at Dartmouth in deference to his patron. And certainly it continues the theme of education that appears throughout the larger cycle in panels like “Anglo-­America” and “Gods of the Modern World.” Whether or not Orozco’s subject was merely a life model or an abandoned idea to focus on the current student population, the artist switched gears in the preparatory process. Subsequent sketches reveal that he set about changing not only the racial identity of the figure but also his class. The resultant figure’s shoulders are more rounded; he dons a worker’s cap and what appear to be shapeless coveralls and black boots (figure 4.9). His face has been broadened, with prominent cheekbones, a wider, flatter nose, and almond-­shaped eyes as opposed to the more angular features in the earlier sketch. On the wall, his skin is a warm orangey-­brown with cool highlights in the same bluish-­green that surrounds him. While the sketches are not colored, once Orozco begins to delimit this figure, he shades in the face with pencil strokes, making clear that he was intended to be dark-­skinned long before Orozco started applying pigment to the wall. Most conspicuously, the figure’s bare hands become gloved (figure 4.10). Again, Orozco lavishes extra attention on studies of the hands, shifting from generalized digits to detailed renderings of their presence beneath a swirling, gathered, fabric envelope. These gloves link this figure to the laboring men in adjacent panels.16 They, too, wear white gloves to do their work. But in the central panel the gleaming whiteness of the gloves stands out within a composition that is otherwise somber-­hued. Moreover, they contrast with the man’s skin tone, calling even greater attention to his racialized physiognomy. What are we to make of the fact that Orozco presents the viewer with a racialized worker as reading subject? Why does he shift from the Dartmouth Man to the kind of subject who would have had little or no access to the resources of the reserve reading room then or now? How is the viewer, especially one engaged in the act of checking out a book, meant to understand her relationship to this man? Is she expected to engage in a cross-­race, cross-­class, and possibly even cross-­gender identification? Is the worker a symbol of the radical racial and cultural mestizaje espoused by Mexican artists through the postrevolutionary period? Or is he rather a symbol of the working-­class politics of the period, the Marxist “worker who reads history”?

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figure 4.7. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: figure study for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1930–­34, Graphite on tracing paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through gifts from Kirsten and Peter Bedford, Class of 1989; Jane and Raphael Bernstein, and Walter Burke, Class of 1944; Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Lombard, Class of 1953; Nathan Pearson, Class of 1932; David V. Picker, Class of 1953; Rodman C. Rockefeller, Class of 1954; Kenneth Roman Jr., Class of 1952; and Adolph Weil Jr., Class of 1935; D.988.52.228.

figure 4.8. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: study of hand for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1930–­34, Graphite on tracing paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through gifts from Kirsten and Peter

Bedford, Class of 1989; Jane and Raphael Bernstein, and Walter Burke, Class of 1944; Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Lombard, Class of 1953; Nathan Pearson, Class of 1932; David V. Picker, Class of 1953; Rodman C. Rockefeller, Class of 1954; Kenneth Roman Jr., Class of 1952; and Adolph Weil Jr., Class of 1935; D.988.52.232.

figure 4.9. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: study for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34, Graphite on tracing paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through gifts from Kirsten and Peter Bedford, Class of 1989; Jane and Raphael Bernstein, and Walter Burke, Class of 1944; Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Lombard, Class of 1953; Nathan Pearson, Class of 1932; David V. Picker, Class of 1953; Rodman C. Rockefeller, Class of 1954; Kenneth Roman Jr., Class of 1952; and Adolph Weil Jr., Class of 1935; D.988.52.237.

figure 4.10. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: study of hand for “Modern Industrial Man” (central panel, 2 of 3, Panel 20), 1932–­34, Graphite on tracing paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through gifts from Kirsten and Peter Bedford, Class of 1989;

Jane and Raphael Bernstein, and Walter Burke, Class of 1944; Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Lombard, Class of 1953; Nathan Pearson, Class of 1932; David V. Picker, Class of 1953; Rodman C. Rockefeller, Class of 1954; Kenneth Roman Jr., Class of 1952; and Adolph Weil Jr., Class of 1935; D.988.52.234.

To entertain these questions, it behooves us to consider this panel’s relationship not only to the orthodoxies of U.S., Mexican, and working-­class visual discourses but also to Orozco’s engagement with those idolatrous formations within the mural itself. For the sequence of panels—​­“The Machine,” “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America”—​­forecast this constellation of period political identities and, in a sense, help us to appreciate what Orozco opted not to do in his supplement. In eschewing both the scene of Wheelock educating Native students and the Dartmouth Man, Orozco rejected any impulse to pay homage to Anglo-­American visual repertoires that privilege the supposedly universal (that is, racially unmarked) elite, white, male subject. In this sense, his figure gestures toward the working-­class politics of Mexico’s postrevolutionary nationalism. And while the figure’s racial assignments would certainly situate him within the visual politics of indigenismo, he is, in many ways, non-­iconic within that tradition. Nothing makes this clearer than comparing him with the doomed guerrilla at the center of “Hispano-­America.” As indicated in chapter 3, this figure closely resembles Emiliano Zapata, with his characteristic mustache, peasant dress, broad sombrero, rifle, and cartridges.17 He thereby conjures the iconography of revolutionary nationalism that, in the 1930s, was put in the service of “hero cults” designed to forestall armed warfare through the promise of La Revolución.18 Nicole Fleetwood defines the non-­iconic as “an aesthetic that resists singularity and completeness in narrative; one that exposes the limitations of its framing and the temporality and specificity of the moment documented.” 19 Fleetwood focuses on photography because of its indexicality and truth claims within visual discourses about racialized subjects. However, the category of the non-­iconic proves useful when engaging with the visual discourse of the Mexican Revolution because it, too, has been so thoroughly codified through photographic “icons of revolution.” 20 Andrea Noble has shown that Mexico’s icons of revolution have been produced through the vast photographic record of the Casasola Archive. While Noble emphasizes the photographic as a particular kind of iconic image, she shows how their status as icons rests on more than their indexicality, to include their conventional visual codes and their repetition within civic ritual and performance.21 In this sense the photographic icons of revolution take their meaning from and contribute to a much wider image environment that includes, but is not limited to, mural paintings, monuments, festivals, and even currency. Ilene V. O’Malley and Thomas Benjamin have shown that a key axis of iconicity in postrevolutionary Mexico is the pantheon of hero cults lauding

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the caudillos (strongmen) of the revolution—​­Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, Venustiano Carranza, and Álvaro Obregón, among others.22 They show how these flesh-­and-­blood men were converted into counterrevolutionary myths that serve the interest of the state and ruling party rather than the popular classes with whom they are metonymically associated. While the mystifying capacities of these hero cults are ongoing, the period of the 1920s and 1930s witnessed their consolidation. A period during which Zapata, the so-­called Attila of the South and mortal opponent of liberal reformers such as Francisco I. Madero and Venustiano Carranza, became the “Apostle of Agrarianism” and a privileged member of an idealized “revolutionary family” that included his aforementioned enemies as well as subsequent presidents who sought to lay claim to his radical legacy.23 The muralists, Rivera in particular, played an important part in reifying and ramifying Zapata’s hero cult. As Noble points out, their representations of the agrarian leader relied heavily on photographs from the Casasola Archive. And, in fact, we find literal copies of these photos in Rivera’s murals, such as one of the two portraits of Zapata in his History of Cuernavaca and Morelos (1929–­30) mural. Mari Carmen Ramírez has likewise shown that in his Ministry of Public Education murals Rivera overtly courted the favor of the Sonoran Dynasty by eliminating any direct references to Madero, Carranza, or Villa and instead lionizing Zapata’s platform for agrarian reform.24 While Zapata was dead by the time Rivera painted his cycle, Rivera shows him actively engaged in the Obregón government’s land reapportionment, effectively crediting the current regime with carrying out Zapata’s will. In Rivera’s murals Zapata is beatified as a secular saint. Orozco, too, contributed to the Zapata hero cult, depicting him multiple times in oil paintings executed between 1930 and 1931. While these paintings are generally sympathetic to the rank-­and-­file Zapatistas, they also betray Orozco’s characteristic ambivalence about the revolution and its violence. For example, in Zapata (1930), the mustachioed revolutionary stands in a doorway as peasants kneel before him. One raises her arms, entreating him. His impassive expression and looming presence suggest retribution more than salvation, a theme we see throughout Orozco’s drawings and paintings of the “horrors of the Revolution.” 25 In other, less morally ambiguous images, such as MoMA’s Zapatistas (1931), he leads a cadre of generals on horseback while his followers march on foot. Their diminutive stature suggests a distance between the cause that mobilized them and the leadership itself. Already, in this image, Orozco seems to intimate his awareness of the tendency to glorify revolutionary leaders as larger-­than-­life figures whose agenda does not necessarily align with that of the anonymous and victimized masses.

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figure 4.11. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, Zapatistas (Generals; Leaders), 1935, Lithograph on wove paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Gift of Marc F. Efron, Class of 1965, and Barbara Bares; PR.2001.44.2.

By 1935, when Orozco had returned to Mexico, this theme reappears in a lithograph entitled Zapatistas (sometimes also listed as Generals or Leaders), where he characterizes Zapatistas as grotesque and even simian men moving in a mindless mass toward an unknown goal (figure 4.11). Three generals stand on a rocky elevation, outfitted as charros with enormous sombreros and bushy mustaches. Unlike the earlier oil paintings, the Zapata-­esque figure here is not rendered in his mythical state as a stoic peasant leader but rather as the vain, barely literate campesino who loved horses and was notorious for sexual aggression. In this print the distance between the leaders and the rank and file is more stark than in the earlier oil paintings. Taken together, these portable works on the theme of Zapatismo suggest that while Orozco engaged this hero cult often, he did so in ways that not only disrupted its iconic claims but also called attention to the difference between the man and the myth. In the Epic, Orozco conjures Zapata in all of his conventionalized iconicity (see figure 3.18). He stands posed against his rifle in peasant dress; cartridge belts crisscross his torso, while his dark skin, sad eyes, and outsized mustache recall Zapata’s most famous photographic portrait. In every way this figure seems to align with the iconic hero cult of postrevolutionary nationalism. And, in fact, as I argue in chapter 3, this panel does stand

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for a conventional articulation of Hispano-­America within the transnational imaginary of period pan-­Americanism. In his iconicity, this figure in “Hispano-­America” stands in stark contrast to the only other subaltern subject depicted in the Modern half of the mural. The Worker Who Reads

Returning to “Modern Industrial Man,” we can now see just how different this formulation of Mexico’s indigenized working classes is from the iconic visual repertoire of revolutionary nationalism wherein Zapata stands in for a heroic indigenismo. While his skin is dark, and he is a working-­ class man, there is no reference to the visual codes and conventions of the rural peasantry. Instead, if he indexes Mexico’s revolutionary politics, it is via reference to the urban worker rather than the revolutionary combatant or campesino. John Lear demonstrates that, after the campesino-­peasant, the urban worker is almost as common in postrevolutionary Mexican art, noting that “if the first image was fundamental to Mexico’s past, the second was essential to its modern future.” 26 However, unlike the campesino, who was often embodied by Zapata, the urban proletariat had no such “iconic personality” to figure it forth.27 Rather, he (and he nearly always is a he) is recognizable through a conventionalized iconographic program that had its origins in the satirical penny press of the late nineteenth century, but that became consolidated in the mid-­1920s and again in the mid-­1930s by artists, photographers, and printmakers working in league with Mexico’s working-­ class organizations and, in many cases, the Communist Party. While there is a tendency in the 1920s to conflate the campesino and the urban worker, by the mid-­1930s the latter comes to the fore as a consequence of the Popular Front policy and Lázaro Cárdenas’s embrace of labor movements. This archetype—​­what Lear calls the “worker-­victim-­militant”—​­is nearly always depicted in blue overalls, wielding a tool of some sort (most often a hammer), and exploited by “foreign capitalists, the postrevolutionary elite, and the leaders of the official labor movement,” which was viewed as irredeemably corrupt by communist artists.28 While victimization is emphasized in the 1920s, in the 1930s the worker becomes more active in his own liberation, often, Lear notes, as a consequence of the “enlightenment offered by the radical artists affiliated with the Communist Party.” 29 Blue denim overalls were an iconic feature not only of the urban worker but also of the radical artist, who increasingly crafted himself as a skilled manual laborer rather than an intellectual. If bourgeois women were encouraged to express their affinity to the nation by donning huipiles and wearing 222  CHAPTER 4

their hair in traditional braided styles, their male counterparts fixated on the urban proletariat, donning overols while up on the scaffold to assert a virile and militant commitment to Mexico’s “once and future Revolution.” 30 They organized themselves into a union—​­the Mexican Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors—​­and asked for laborers’ wages from their government patrons. They published a manifesto in El Machete, the union’s official newspaper, in which they asserted that campesinos, city workers, and “Indian soldiers” were on their “side,” and pledged to “socialize artistic expression” by making “monumental” rather than “bourgeois” art.31 They argued that, unlike easel painting, this art was not only of “real use to the general public” but also “collective,” like the “popular expression” of Mexico’s “indigenous traditions.” 32 While these artists sought to anchor their call for a collective public art in the authenticity of the indigenous past, their emphasis on collectivity was equally derived from the nature of industrial labor. Thus, when signing off on the manifesto, they proclaim not Zapata’s slogan of “Land and Liberty” but rather the international communist dedication, “For the world proletariat.” 33 Folgarait echoes the artists’ sentiments, arguing that the production of a mural was, in itself, the product of the “labor of many people.” 34 “In most cases,” he writes, the presence of the mural means the presence of the working class. Men in overalls and straw hats, carpenters, plasterers, clean-­up crews, are surrounded by students from the upper classes, government bureaucrats, or union members and officials. Because this site looks more like a construction site than an art studio, and the team like workers rather than artists (especially Rivera and Si­quei­ros, always in their overols), the end product can appear more as a thing manufactured than “created,” a functional rather than an aesthetic object.35 The syndicate’s commitment to Mexico’s rural and urban working classes is borne out in the imagery of public murals during this period. Orozco depicts the triumvirate of worker, peasant, and soldier in Social Revolution, his fresco at the Industrial School of Orizaba (1926). More familiar, these figures are stock features in Rivera’s attempts to visualize an ideal postrevolutionary order throughout the 1920s. His Ministry of Public Education mural draws an explicit connection between indigenized folkways, agrarian reform, and proletarian revolution, despite the fact that these factions were not automatically in league.36 Likewise, in his National Palace mural he also makes repeated references to the lateral alliance between the rural peasantry and the urban proletariat that was an ideological commonplace within

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the liberal political discourse of the Maximato. However, after his return from the United States, he privileges the urban working class more than the rural peasantry, as the final program of “Mexico of Today and Tomorrow” on the south wall of the National Palace indicates (see figure 1.3). There we see any number of dark-­skinned workers clad in blue overalls and engaged in radicalizing acts. They wield hammers in homage to the crossed hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag; they strike, organize, and educate their brethren. And, in each instance, their action is clearly guided by orthodox Marxist principles, and implicitly by Rivera’s own ministrations, for it is he who paints the many instructive texts that workers are shown reading. At the top of the arch, the revolutionary triumvirate stands before Marx as he educates them about the history of class struggle. In another passage a worker holds Marx’s Capital while gesturing toward the scene as he endeavors to raise the consciousness of one of his comrades. Rivera’s representation of working-­class politics is as iconic as his representations of Zapatismo. The worker-­victim-­militant is the agent of history. His experience on the shop floor informs an organic understanding of his exploitation at the hands of foreign monopolists, corrupt politicians, and Catholic clergy, but he requires Marx’s texts and (implicitly) Rivera’s instruction to fulfill his prophetic function in bringing about the world proletarian revolution in Mexico.37 As with the hero cults of La Revolución, Rivera’s image of the worker cleaves to the idolatries of working-­class political representation in Mexico. In his mural, the state, guided by Marxist principles, promises to deliver justice to the worker. By comparison, Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” appears as non-­iconic within this conventionalized system of representation. He is a worker and he holds a book, but the title of that book is not provided and his agency is not vested in his identity as a laborer but rather as a leisured subject, a “worker who reads.” 38 He has set his hammer aside and picked up a book. While he bears a pictorial kinship to the workers we see on either side of him, he has been singled out from the victimized and laboring masses. We are asked to contemplate him as a self-­edifying individual rather than as an iconic metonym for a larger group. As an image, he resists narrative closure within the visual systems of proletarian representation. He exceeds or slips away from its ideological orthodoxies. Despite the proliferation of images of workers in both Mexico and the United States during this period, we have far fewer that celebrate the worker while he is engaged in the leisured act of reading. An earlier image will help us to better appreciate the non-iconic quality of Orozco’s “Modern Industrial

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figure 4.12. Tina Modotti (1896), Worker Reading “El Machete,” 1928, photograph. © Galerie Bilderwelt/ Bridgeman Images.

Man.” Worker Reading “El Machete,” a 1928 photograph by Tina Modotti that was first published in El Machete captures an unidentified man close up and engaged, intently in the act of reading the communist newspaper (figure 4.2). She situates her camera just below his line of sight, thereby giving his diminutive frame a sense of monumentality. The quiet drama of his act is intensified by a vertical slash of natural light that illuminates his newspaper, torso, and face while casting his hands and the space around him in relative shade. The high contrast of light and dark suggests that he has taken a break during his workday. He reads “on the fly”; his leisured act is framed implicitly by labor, not time off. As is typical of Modotti’s formalist aesthetics, the figure is posed in such a way that the masthead of the newspaper and its blaring headline—​­“Down with the War against Russia!”—​­are visible, thus setting up a visual tension between the highly aesthetic, almost still life–­like quality of the scene and its polemical message. Despite the dramatic lighting and effects of Modotti’s camera angle, the worker in question appears delicate, with fine features and small hands. His

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skin is dark and his long lashes accentuate his downcast eyes, giving him a graceful, even feminine, appearance. He wears several layers of clothes, with canvas coveralls on top. And rather than the sombrero that marks most of Modotti’s images of the laboring masses, he wears a high black hat with a white brim and horizontal stripe that Lear identifies as a style typical of striking railroad workers in this period. These strikes had been regularly covered in El Machete, as railroad workers were lauded as a militant exception during a period of “tight control over labor movements.” 39 “Skilled and situated in the strategic transport sector,” Lear argues, the railroad worker was the ideal proletarian and the ideal reader of El Machete, which, Modotti’s image argues, is the source of his militancy.40 In many respects, this worker who reads corresponds with Orozco’s industrial man. Both have graceful features and dark skin. Both are actively engaged in the cerebral act of reading rather than the physical demands of manual labor. Each is identified with the proletariat by the telltale signs of their dress. And both are isolated and solitary. However, Modotti’s photograph is indexical in a way that Orozco’s mural image cannot be. And more significant, she shows us what the worker reads: El Machete. This newspaper signifies both her affiliation with organized working-­class politics and the collective’s attempt to cultivate a working-­class readership. Her photograph speaks to Lear’s observation that working-­class agency was often attributed to the ministrations of artists in postrevolutionary art that pictured the proletariat. In focusing on a singular individual performing a recognizable act at a specific time of day, and even an identifiable moment in historical time, Modotti’s reading worker lends itself to narrative closure in a way that Orozco’s panel does not. Folgarait argues that this figure, while solitary, implies a collective, “perhaps including all readers of this journal and all who wrote and designed it.” 41 This reading rests upon knowledge of Modotti’s larger oeuvre, in particular her more famous photograph, Campesinos Reading “El Machete” (1929). Here she places the worker within a larger laboring population. While the rural workers in this photograph read about land apportionment, not the government’s persecution of communists, the image similarly centers the newspaper within its highly formalist composition. Taken from above, we see only the campesinos’ ubiquitous straw sombreros encircling the front page, on which we can make out a print featuring Zapata, who likewise wears a sombrero. Their act of reading as a collective makes the purpose of their gathering explicit and radical via its articulation to both Zapatismo and El Machete’s communist platform. Taken together, these two images of reading

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workers serve the purpose of iconicity. Paraphrasing Fleetwood, they serve as a site for the imagined nation to gather around the seeing of labor, an act necessary for the cohering of the postrevolutionary nation as a proletarian community.42 Consequently, they reveal how non-­iconic Orozco’s image of workers huddled together on the worksite really is, for in his panel we cannot see what they are doing; their gathering does not signal a radical political purpose like those implied in this and other of Modotti’s photographs of the mobilized masses. Orozco briefly worked as an illustrator for El Machete, a period that coincided with his ambivalent flirtation with communism in the mid-­1920s. As a member of the syndicate and a signatory of their manifesto, he was deemed a fellow traveler, despite having never officially joined the Communist Party.43 His drawings for El Machete depict several instances of the overall-­clad worker, shown as a victim of foreign capitalists, state policies, and corrupt labor leaders, in particular Luis Morones, the rotund leader of the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, crom). While Lear acknowledges that these images generally reflect El Machete’s party line, they nonetheless express “little faith that workers might bring about their own redemption.” 44 His concurrent frescoes at the National Preparatory School, wherein he depicts feuding urban workers in Banquet of the Rich or workers as victims blinded by ideology in The Revolutionary Trinity, likewise present the worker as complicit in his own exploitation. By the 1930s Orozco’s ambivalence about mass politics was shifting toward overt hostility. The Epic is situated in this transition period, after the “mass-­as-­subject” emerges in his mural art but before his scathing indictments of the “Carnival of Ideologies” that we see in his projects in the late 1930s.45 There are vestiges of worker-­as-­victim in the group of huddled workers in the left panel of “Modern Industrial Man.” But we would be hard-­pressed to interpret the central worker in this way. He is neither victim nor virile proletariat. As an image of the artist/​­viewer as proletarian, he suggests an affinity with the indigenized working classes without the dogma of the workers depicted in El Machete. To the extent to which he “lessens the weight” placed on the image of the worker to resolve the problems of the postcolonial and postrevolutionary nation, he is non-­iconic.46 I will return to the theme of the mural artist’s affinity with urban labor below; for now it is useful to consider that while the figure in “Modern Industrial Man” does not wear the telltale blue denim overalls of the urban worker, his nondescript clothing might be interpreted as the kind

“MODERN INDUSTRIAL MAN” AND THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE  227

figure 4.13. José Clemente Orozco painting Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life, Painting, n.d., Baker Library, Hanover, NH. Rauner Special Collections Library, Folder 1362, Orozco_ Frescoes-­Release, 129322.

of coveralls Orozco often wore when painting his murals. It is noteworthy as well that in these photographs Orozco does not strike the pose of virile manual laborer. Rather, he slumps or stands, caged by the scaffolding, and is nearly always shown in solitary scenarios rather than with a team of masons and assistants (figure 4.13). While he always wore a collared shirt and tie under his overalls/​­coveralls, and his skin tone and physiognomy do not read as indigenous, there is a kinship between the contemplative affect he exudes and that of the contented worker who reads in “Modern Industrial Man.”

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Between Mestizaje and Minstrelsy

Throughout this discussion, I have been treating the racialized worker as though he were unquestionably meant to be read as an indigenized worker. This is logical given Orozco’s origins within the cultural promotion of mestizaje during the heady revolutionary years. It is suggested as well by the E ­ pic’s division of American civilization into Mesoamerican and Euro-­American ­epochs, which seems to reiterate Mexico’s mestizo logic of racialized culture. However, this figure is more often read by visitors as African American, and in fact his racialized features correspond as much with the assumed phenotypical markers of blackness in U.S. America as with those ascribed to Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The slippage between reading him as indigenous or black opens up an unexplored homology between the primitivism that underpins Mexican artistic indigenismo and racial stereotypes in the United States, particularly as it manifests within the tradition of blackface minstrelsy. Here we should recall that Orozco substitutes a racialized figure for a white one, which in and of itself can be read as a form of blackface. Likewise, the white gloves that the “Modern Industrial Man” so prominently displays are not only signifiers of the laboring classes, they are also signifiers of “vestigial blackface” within the period animation that so famously characterized U.S. America’s most admired and feared form of popular culture.47 The very possibility of this figure’s blackness tells us something about how Orozco was navigating the color line in the United States as well as his own status as an artist within a cultural project that in its socializing ethos approximated some of the most anxious features of labor under industrializing capitalism. While I believe that this figure is deliberately ambiguous, my argument does not rest upon a claim about Orozco’s intentions. Instead, I read the potential blackness of this figure as an encryption of the racial inequities that structure both U.S. and Mexican nationalism. There is ample reason to read the figure as indigenous. In one of the preparatory sketches, in particular, his geometricized features bear a striking resemblance to a stone mask from Teotihuacán (dated third to seventh century) known to have been in the collections of Rivera and then André Breton (currently at the Louvre). While this Classic period mask is one of many of its type, this particular one was well known among period artists and is famously featured in Frida Kahlo’s My Nurse and I (1937) (figure 4.14). In that painting, one of Kahlo’s most important and cogent meditations on the gendered politics of indigenismo and mestizaje, we see a dark-­skinned wet nurse breastfeeding Kahlo, who has depicted herself with the body of a

“MODERN INDUSTRIAL MAN” AND THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE  229

figure 4.14. Frida Kahlo (1907–­54), My Nurse and I, 1937, Oil on tin, Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño. Photo by Bob Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.

child and an adult head. The nurse sits naked in a verdant landscape. Her exposed breasts express milk from mammary glands that form a delicate web of white flowers on her dark skin. These, in turn, echo the white droplets of rain that dot the stormy sky. The mask obscures her face, rendering what we presume to be a working-­class indigenous servant a living artifact of the nation’s hallowed indigenous past. This painting was one of many in which Kahlo used the circumstances of her life to engage the nationalist discourse of mestizaje. While Kahlo spoke of memories of an indigenous nursemaid, the surreal distortions of the painting make clear that this is not a realistic document.48 Rather, by literalizing her physical dependence upon this woman’s body as a child, Kahlo asks us to consider her cultural dependence upon indigeneity as an adult. For it is not the baby Kahlo that receives nourishment but rather the adult artist. Kahlo, the modern mestiza, is nourished by an Indian Madonna. That this image engages with cultural mestizaje is clear in its material qualities, for, as was often the case during this early phase in her artistic career, Kahlo has appropriated the folk genre of the ex-­voto by painting on a small piece of tin. Like ex-­votos, her composition is divided into a large pictorial register with an illusionistic 230  CHAPTER 4

scroll beneath, ready for an inscription. Typically, ex-­votos would record an illness or accident along with an expression of thanks to a saint, Christ, or the Virgin Mary for their miraculous intervention. Painted by the victim or an amateur artist in their stead, these devotional objects would then be tacked to the doorway of a local church as an offering. Kahlo usually leaves the scrolls in her paintings blank, leading some scholars to conclude that her paintings do not commemorate salvation so much as they recall trauma. In this and other paintings of the period, Kahlo emphasized her mestizo heritage via her mother’s line and her Austro-­Hungarian lineage from her father’s side. As a lived condition of hybridity, this racio­cultural blend fell short of the indigenous-­Spanish ideal celebrated by nationalists. Thus, Kahlo had an unusual sensitivity to the limits of mestizaje as a discourse, and, in particular, to the violent ways it circumscribed identity, mobility, and participation in the postrevolutionary project of nation-­building. Moreover, she shows that her identification with a feminized indigenous labor is complicated by her own race and class privilege despite the fact that her claim on mestizaje was suspect. Kahlo was not the only artist to superimpose an ancient cultural artifact over the pictorial body of an indigenous person. Rivera often rendered indigenous women in his murals as living statues modeled after stone goddesses and relief carvings from the Mesoamerican civilizations of central Mexico (cf. Flower Day [1925] or the female corn goddess that anchors The Mechanization of the Countryside [1926] in his Ministry of Public Education mural). Likewise, Si­quei­ros executed a powerful painting a few years after Kahlo (Ethnology, 1939), wherein he covers the face of a defiant male peasant with a wooden Olmec mask. Needless to say, neither Rivera nor Si­ quei­ros ever painted an image in which they implicate their own labor or identities as artists within the exploitative racial and class dynamics of the urban middle class. Moreover, neither ever demonstrated any sensitivity to the ways that mestizaje radically limited women’s self-­expression and autonomy as modern subjects.49 In fact, both fostered the gendered discourse of mestizaje, wherein femininity and indigeneity were equated and women were encouraged to perform their loyalty to this ideal by eschewing modern dress and mores in favor of those derived from Mexico’s “typical” regions. Kahlo’s adoption of the Tehuana costume in both art and life was not the only example of this vogue among the wives of artists, but it was certainly the most infamous. Like his male peers, Orozco was not particularly sensitive to the plight of women within Mexico’s mestizo cultural project.50 However, he was increasingly critical of official indigenismo, as discussed in chapter 2. Within this

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context it is possible to read Orozco’s racialized worker as one such figure, donning the mask of indigeneity. And given the resemblance between his sketch and the mask from Teotihuacán, it is tempting to see his worker as harking back to the Golden Age of Quetzalcoatl’s Tollan. Recall that Tollan was speculated to have been the site of the abandoned city of Teotihuacán by Manuel Gamio, and further, that Orozco situated Quetzalcoatl’s arrival at the crossing of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon in this ancient city in accordance with this theory (see figure 2.1). However, it is unlikely that artists at that time knew that this mask was Toltec. Moreover, Orozco did not paint the figure in such a way that we might read his face as a literal mask. Moving from the schematics of a sketch to the realized painting on the wall, he significantly softened the architectonic features of the worker’s face, making it impossible to read it this way. This does not preclude us from thinking about the racialized man as donning a mask in a figurative sense, for his black features might also suggest the practice of applying greasepaint or burnt cork to the faces of performers within the theatrical genre known as blackface minstrelsy. Anita González discusses the long tradition of indigenous and mestizo communities in Mexico donning masks with stereotyped black features in fiestas. These performance characters, known as negritos (“little Negroes”), are common in coastal areas with large populations of Afro-­Mexicans. Unlike the popular theatrical tradition of blackface minstrelsy, where the purpose of the performance is to solidify essentializing stereotypes about all people of African descent, these performers are embedded in diverse community rituals wherein the performance of blackness signifies different things. Some negritos recycle negative stereotypes about Afro-­Mexicans as foreign agents of disorder, while others narrate their contributions to society. While the phenomenon of negritos and their distinctive masks was well known when Orozco was painting at Dartmouth, his figure bears none of the features conventionally associated with these masks or the negrito costume. And given the fact that he hailed from Jalisco and Mexico City (rather than from Mexico’s coastal regions), it is likely that his references to racial performance are specific to his urban milieu.51 Reading Orozco’s worker as a blackface figure may be a stretch. However, when we recall that blackface minstrelsy emerged within a context of what Eric Lott calls “love and theft,” its affective homology with the more politically acceptable practices of cultural indigenism is suggestive. I would not be the first person to equate blackface with the “redface” of playing Indian. However, despite decades of critical scholarship on Mexican indigenismo, scholars are reluctant to read it through the politics of U.S. American racism.

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Mexican indigenismo, albeit radical, is an expression of the dominant settler class, as Kahlo’s paintings attest. Nonetheless, it registers the violence done to indigenous populations and posits the solution to the identity crisis of the modern Mexican/​­American in recognizing that the colonial subject is not an external other that shores up the ego boundaries of the civilized self but rather an internal other that radically challenges normative claims to civilization. Thus, the degraded internal other must be recuperated and brought into the cultural imaginary, and the self must be thought through this relation. In this double move, Mexican artists give voice to the peculiar condition of being a postcolonial subject in a settler state. In this sense, they differ from the inventors of blackface. However, it is useful to recall that indigenismo was also inflected by a colonial dynamic of identification and denigration of the Indian in Mexico. The very same intellectuals and government officials who venerated indigenous cultures were also endeavoring to solve the so-­called Indian problem by coercing indigenous groups to assimilate, often forcibly, into the mestizo mainstream.52 This dynamic of identifying with the authentic lifeways of indigenous peoples while at the same time seeking to distinguish the normative mestizo from its degraded indigenous component is similar to Lott’s observation that blackface minstrelsy was “underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear.” 53 As Lott demonstrates, the genre was originated by white actors in the urban Northeast drawing upon interracial contact with migrated blacks and black culture.54 “Drawn to blackness,” these actors, he argues, “inaugurated an American tradition of class abdication through gendered cross-­racial immersion which persists, in historically differentiated ways, to our own day.” 55 Without losing sight of the racial and racist imaginaries that structured this “working class white structure of feeling,” Lott demonstrates that it contributed to the emergence of a “new public whose tastes the popular amusements now represented.” 56 Part and parcel with the shifting demographics and class politics of Jacksonian America, this low-­rent, often vulgar art form was wildly popular with white, predominantly male, working-­class audiences and had the unintended effect of “blackening national popular culture,” even as it exploited and exacerbated the color line. Like the artists who contributed to cultural indigenismo by imaging indigenous peoples or emulating their folkways and cultural traditions, minstrel performers did not perform “black culture” per se but rather a “set of white responses to it . . . let[ting] loose an iconography of racial difference” that, while coded as inferior, nonetheless came to be understood as an authentically American popular culture.57

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While the genre was waning by the early twentieth century, it was at this time, owing to the folk revivalism of the interwar period, that blackface minstrelsy was celebrated as an authentic “African-­American people’s culture,” and even, in the estimation of some, the only truly authentic contribution of U.S. America to the theatrical tradition. Lott shows that this appreciation drew from the laudatory sentiments of nineteenth-­century populists such as Walt Whitman or Margaret Fuller, and that it actively ignored contemporaneous critiques of minstrelsy as a racist distortion of black culture by figures like Frederick Douglass.58 In this sense, both blackface minstrelsy and indigenismo, while the by-­product of different class cultures and racial imaginaries, have long genealogies within the colonial politics of emergent nation-­states, and both experienced powerful revivals in the 1920s and ’30s as part of the intellectual desire to exploit a “usable past” in projects to identify a popular culture that was autochthonous to the Americas.59 Thus, even though blackface minstrelsy was invented by white performers, it became overwhelmingly associated with slave culture. And even though its origin was in the urban Northeast, it came to symbolize a nostalgic vision of the Old South. Ultimately, black performers participated in the genre, and some, such as Bert Williams, became famous as its most accomplished entertainers. The heyday of blackface minstrelsy was in the 1860s and ’70s, but it persisted as a theatrical genre well into the twentieth century as part of vaudeville theater and then migrated into other visual art forms, most notably film and animation. And while Orozco was likely familiar with the practice of “blacking up” to emulate “Negro” culture in Mexican popular theater too, he certainly knew its U.S. American counterpart.60 The only lithograph that Orozco made on an urban theme while living in the United States depicts a vaudeville show in Harlem. Teatro de Variedades en Harlem (Vaudeville in Harlem, 1928) situates the viewer in the back of an ornate theater (figure 4.15). An arch, supported by a column, frames the upper limit of our view of the orchestra pit and proscenium where a contortionist bends his rubbery body, drawing our attention to the stage. Wildly gesticulating figures cavort on either side of him. We see shadowy figures with blocky, indistinct bodies flinging their arms in the air while seemingly hopping up and down. The bright footlights bleach the stage, casting the rest of the theater in darkness. Our view of the performance is partial and obstructed, suggesting that the real subject of the print is the audience and not the performers on stage. The theatergoers face forward; their heads are silhouetted against the white light, eradicating any individual features in favor of an undifferentiated mass, save for two men who stand behind the seating area and to the left of the column. One wears a bowler hat and has the angular profile of a

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figure 4.15. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, Teatro de Variedades en Harlem (Vaudeville in Harlem), 1928, Lithograph on wove Rives bfk paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through the Robert J. Strasenburgh II 1942 Fund; 2015.1.2.

Caucasian man. The other is bareheaded, with a rounded profile, indicating that he might be read as an African American man. They serve as points of identification for the viewer, for we, too, seem to be standing rather than seated in the deepest recesses of the theater. While the staged scene is antic, the image, as a whole, exudes a somber mood. Rather than emphasizing the raucous call and response of audiences energized by vaudeville theater, Orozco stresses alienation. He/​­we are simultaneously a part of the scene and isolated from the viewing community. The column bars our immersion in the scene, just as the dramatic chiaroscuro renders it hard to see. Ultimately, it is the title that cues us to its social content. Not only does it designate this as vaudeville theater (as opposed to the opera, symphony, or other more elite forms of entertainment), it also places the performance in Harlem, the locus of black culture and entertainment and one of the few places in Manhattan where black and white audiences intermingled.61 Orozco’s print may refer to the Lincoln Theater, the only theater where black patronage was encouraged and audiences were truly integrated. At the Lincoln, audiences were differentiated only by price. Those willing to pay around twenty-­five cents sat in orchestra seats and those with only five cents to spare sat or stood in the balconies. Or he could be referring to the Crescent, just down the street, where the more common practice of relegating

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audiences of color to the balcony was still in place.62 In either case, the vantage Orozco provides suggests that we are situated with patrons distinguished by either their poverty or their subordinate race. Thus, the alienation that suffuses the print may be the result of the psychic effects of the differentiated space within the theater itself, something that Orozco, as an ambiguously raced and impoverished patron, might have felt. The scene on stage is likely some form of minstrelsy, given the exaggerated movements of the performers on either side of the central act, whose waving arms and legs akimbo are reminiscent of the “clowning,” aggressive, and even threatening personae that riddled blackface performance. Thus, the emotional tenor of the print could just as easily reflect Orozco’s uneasy relationship with this denigrating spectacle. As a creole and a white-­ identified artist, Orozco’s status as a Mexican in the United States had certainly sensitized him to the humiliation of racialization. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that Orozco would have identified with U.S. American blacks or that his consciousness about the racism of blackface minstrelsy was raised. Given the presence of blackface performances in Mexico and the generalized antiblack racism in Mexico (both then and now), Orozco was, in many ways, more akin to the average white man of the 1930s than to the “race men” celebrated by artists and intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance.63 At best, Orozco’s subjectivity with regard to U.S. racialization was conflicted. Orozco’s print is suggestive, however, given my desire to consider the homologies between blackface minstrelsy and the primitivizing practices of cultural indigenismo. In fact, Orozco would satirize the perversity of indigenous peoples being coerced into primitivizing performances of “their” culture in a 1935 print entitled Echate la Otra (Dancing Indians; see figure 2.12) and again in a 1941 oil painting titled El Gran Pato. In both images, grotesquely gesticulating and inebriated “Indians” don silly costumes and dance outside of pulquerías with the names Echate la Otra and El Gran Pato, respectively.64 Each image articulates the desecration of indigenous culture by alcoholism and indigence. And in the print, the name of the pulquería—​­Echate la Otra—​ ­means “down another” but could be translated (phonetically) as “make yourself into the other.” In both cases Orozco viciously satirizes those indigenous Mexicans who resort to public performances of an inauthentic indigenismo as a result either of economic conditions that offer few respectable outlets or of a personal weakness that manifests in alcohol dependency. Orozco’s satire mobilizes some of the worst stereotypes about indigenous Mexicans in order to level its social critique. His print does not situate the dancing Indians within a broader socio-­or geopolitical context, leaving it less clear to the

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viewer as to who is responsible for this degradation of Indian life. Given the fact that Orozco’s image was a print issued in multiples, the target audience was likely foreign tourists eager to purchase works that lionized Mexico’s indigenous heritage from a muralist closely associated with the postrevolutionary renaissance. However, we don’t know much about how many of these prints were sold, who bought them, or even why Orozco turned to such dark topics upon his return to Mexico from the United States in the mid-­1930s.65 Orozco makes the seething rage behind his social commentary clear, precisely by limning an image of indigeneity that no consumer could find attractive. Thus, his recourse to visual stereotype serves a critical purpose, in a sense driving home his point rather than tempering it to appeal to folkloric tastes. While Orozco’s satires of dancing Indians postdate his 1928 print of vaudeville in Harlem, both suggest that Orozco was sensitized to the humiliations of racialized performance. Further, there is a visual homology between the dancing Indians in his 1935 print and those gesticulating figures on stage in his vaudeville scene. Ralph Ellison raised the specter of a “primitive tribesman dancing himself into the group frenzy necessary for battle” in his critique of the “counterfeiting” of black culture that blackface represents.66 However, rather than likening African Americans to the “primitive tribesman,” he was writing about white Americans in their attempts to contain the “chaos and disorder” of race mixing.67 The black mask of blackface, he asserts, is thereby “the projection of an internal symbolic process” outward, one of the ways that white Americans prepare themselves “emotionally to perform a social role” within a highly stratified and racist social system.68 Given the possibility that the performance we witness in Orozco’s print is a grotesque blackface performance, the emotional tone of the scene may speak to the melancholy of race in U.S. America, and in particular to Orozco’s own ambivalent relationship with the color line, wherein, to paraphrase Nicholas Sammond, blacks serve as a baseline against which racial mutability is measured.69 Anne Anlin Cheng reminds us that racialization is central to the formation of American identity, which, in turn, is structured by the psychic conflicts that Freud ascribed to melancholia. Similar to the dynamic of “love and theft” that Lott assigns to white uptakes of black culture in blackface minstrelsy or to the “projection of internal symbolic processes” that Ellison attributes to white Americans as they prepare to “perform their social role,” Cheng argues that the “dominant, standard, white national ideal . . . is sustained by the exclusion-­yet-­retention of racialized others.” 70 Paraphrasing Michael Rogin, she attests that while U.S. America is predicated upon a “narrative of

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liberty and individualism,” racial exclusion—​­chattel slavery, Indian wars, the annexation of Mexican territory, Chinese exclusion, and so on—​­is the very condition of that freedom.71 Citing the Declaration of Independence as paradigmatic in its demands for freedom from enslavement to England while simultaneously preserving the institution of slavery within the new nation, she asserts that this ideological dilemma haunts white identity to this day, posing a “vexing problem: How does the nation ‘go on’ while remembering those transgressions? How does it sustain the remnants of denigration and disgust created in the name of progress and the formation of an American identity?” 72 Responses to this question run from the racist vilification of racialized people to the liberal denial of racial vilification altogether. One response that is now familiar to us, and likely was to Orozco as well, was that put forth by Waldo Frank in America Hispana. There he hailed the “Indian or Negro” as a “seed of creation” that could break the “machine body” of Anglo-­Saxon America and transform its ethos of “other-­annihilation” into the revolutionary spirit that characterizes the Hispanic world.73 In Frank’s estimation, both the Indian and the Negro embody Hispano-­America, and both are understood to be excluded from Anglo-­America. Like many liberal intellectuals in the 1930s, he associated Mexico’s recent revolution with overcoming the historical oppression of the Indian. And, in equating the Indian and the Negro, he was likely associating Mexico’s revolution with the Haitian Revolution of 1792, the first of its kind in the Americas and one that stood as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for any would-­be revolutionary to follow. While Frank locates indigeneity and negritude in Hispano-­America, his promotion of the epiphanic union of the “two American Half-­Worlds,” reveals the very melancholic dynamic that Cheng describes. For his lament about Anglo-­America is rooted in its simultaneous exclusion of and desire to retain the denigrated remnants created in the formation of American identity. Frank’s answer to the vexed questions of liberation and racial exclusion is to project U.S. America’s externalized racial “others” onto Hispano-­America, only to conjure them back to foster the cause of American progress. But their return can only be configured as a foreign invasion, a violent seduction of Anglo-­America that at once “breaks” her while supposedly making her whole again. Lorgia García-Peña provides some historical context for Frank’s easy conflation of the Indian and the Negro as well as his figurative conflation of the Mexican and Haitian revolutions by showing how these revolutions helped to forge U.S. American attitudes about blacks and the vexed cause of freedom in the Americas. She argues that both the denigration of blackness and its identification with liberty and freedom were generated by the Haitian

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Revolution and the anti-­Haitian sentiments it produced within the United States. Not only did a “fear of Haiti” structure emergent conceptions of U.S. blackness; it also incentivized the United States’ political, economic, and military expansion over Latin America, a process that was “foundational to the production of Latino/​­as as a U.S. racial category and consequently to the process of U.S. cultural bordering that continues to render Latino/​­as as foreign.” 74 Thus, Latino/​­as are not simply located along the U.S. color line by virtue of their skin color; they are constituted as racialized others by the very melancholic condition that has produced it. While the Latino/​­a identity category did not exist in the 1930s, Orozco’s experience as a Mexican living in the United States subjected him to the cultural bordering that renders all Mexicans as foreign nationals regardless of their place of birth. Moreover, Orozco’s U.S. stay coincided with one of the high points of xenophobia, with the imposition of immigration restrictions and the forced repatriation of Mexicans during the Depression. While he may have found solace in Frank’s praise of Hispano-­America, it is unlikely he could have seen himself in either Anglo-­America’s machine body or Hispano-­America’s “Indians” and “Negros.” As indicated in chapter 3, Orozco’s Epic rejects Frank’s thesis and thereby questions the very mechanisms of exclusion that would divide America into racially and ethnically opposed “half-­worlds” in the first place. Whereas Orozco may not have fully identified with either Indians or Negros, he was aware of both the grotesque features of black racial stereotype and the violence of racism in U.S. America.75 In a caricature attributed to him from 1925, titled “In New York,” and published in the Mexican satirical magazine l’abc, we see a white man and a black woman in a postcoital scene of prostitution. The john dresses while his conquest displays her stereotyped nude body to the viewer. Arms behind her head and legs spread, she is a debased odalisque without any of the Orientalizing features that made that convention desirable to a Western viewer. Her broad lips and curly hair recall the exaggerated features that blackface minstrelsy pioneered. González Mello argues that this caricature was linked to Orozco’s humiliating experience on the U.S.-­Mexican border during his first trip to the United States in 1917, when his watercolors of brothel scenes were confiscated by border guards and destroyed for being immoral. This experience alerted Orozco to the different moral codes in the Protestant United States, where the nude in art was still circumscribed and, relatedly, prostitution was criminalized (in Mexico, prostitution was legal). That Orozco viewed the irrational morality of the United States as akin to its equally irrational racial codes is suggested by the man’s comment to his consort that she “wear no makeup and as little

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clothing as possible so those Yankees can’t accuse me of ‘white slavery.’” 76 González Mello notes that Orozco’s attribution of hypocrisy and racism to the United States alone lets Mexico off the hook for racism and sexism. Moreover, he observes that there “seems to be no critical self-­reflection in the caricature.” 77 One could say the same thing about Orozco’s caricatures of dancing Indians, among other satirical prints he executed on the topic of peasant and working-­class degradation. However, Orozco did respond to racial violence in the United States with greater sympathy for the victimization of African Americans, if no greater sensitivity to the politics of rendering the black body in pain. In 1933 he contributed a print to the naacp’s anti-­lynching exhibition, entitled Negroes (Negros colgados, or Hanged Black Men) (figure 4.16). In this work, part of a portfolio of prints by several artists sold to raise money for the organization’s campaign for a federal anti-­lynching law, Orozco reinterprets a well-­known photograph of a brutalized African American man who had been castrated and burned alive before he was strung up for the camera and mob to see. This photograph also served as the source for Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture Death (Lynched Figure) of 1934. Likewise, Diego Rivera quotes it in his portable mural cycle, Portrait of America (1933).78 While Noguchi and Rivera home in on the single figure, aestheticizing his tortured body into a series of strangely beautiful abstracted curves, Orozco depicts at least four lynched men. He deploys an angular and coarse style that strips these figures of any sense of humanity, focusing instead on the contortions of a body engulfed in flames. The use of heavy lines reinforces the carbonization of the flesh and equates it visually with the ruddy bark of the trees from which these bodies are suspended. The flames lap at their feet, while they twist and flail in agony. The squared-­off shape of these lynched figures and their jointed legs are eerily reminiscent of the shadowy forms that cavort in Orozco’s earlier vaudeville scene. The theme of lynching was not new to Orozco; it had been a mainstay in his drawings of the “Horrors of the Revolution.” In Orozco’s mind, there was likely a connection between the violence he witnessed during the revolution and the violence against blacks in the United States that the naacp was publicizing. And while the victims of revolutionary violence were drawn from across the class and race spectrum, Orozco typically emphasizes the suffering of the peasantry and rural poor in his images of the war, populations that were overwhelmingly associated with indigenous communities. In addition to Orozco’s critiques of lynching, revolutionary violence, and ultimately fascism, David Alfaro Si­quei­ros also equated lynching in the U.S. with the violence of war and fascism.

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figure 4.16. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­1949, Negroes (Negros colgados, Hanged Black Men), from the portfolio The Contemporary Print Group: American Scene No. 1: A Comment upon American Life by America’s Leading Artists, 1933, Lithograph on wove [bfk rives france] paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Transferred from the Dartmouth College Library; 2007.57.6.

In Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939), a lynched black man is suspended from the beak of the imperial eagle representing both the Allied and Axis powers (see figure 1.7). And in his triptych at the Palace of Fine Arts from 1941, he framed an image of “New Democracy,” allegorized by the female nude, with portable murals depicting “Victims of War” and “Victims of Fascism.” While Democracy is shown to triumph over the prostrate body of a slain conquistador, the victims of war and fascism allude to the violence of more proximate wars. The former depicts a slain mother and child, evoking the peasant victims of the Mexican Revolution, but also the Russian peasants streaming down the Odessa steps in Sergei Eisen­stein’s film The Battleship Potemkin (1925). The “Victims of Fascism” are allegorized by a powerful black male figure with a scored back and bound wrists (figure 4.17).79 The scored back equates this figure with the slave as well as the debt peon, thereby drawing a

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figure 4.17. David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, Victim of Fascism, 1944–­45, Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo Credit: Schalwijk/Art Resource, NY.

conceptual and historical connection between the racism of fascist regimes, the abuse of peasants on haciendas, and slavery in the Americas. Given these examples, it is plausible that Orozco was troubled by the race question throughout his U.S. sojourn. And this may have manifested itself in the ambiguously raced worker in “Modern Industrial Man,” wherein the figure vacillates without resolution between two signifying systems of racial subordination and victimization—​­the Mexican subordination of the Indian and the subordination of African Americans in the United States. Vestigial Blackface, Artistic Freedom, and the Poetics of Plasmatics

One other iconographic feature of Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” suggests his identification with blackface minstrelsy: his prominent white gloves. While workers’ gloves were a standard feature of proletarian art, they are typically represented as bulky, often dark or tan, and when white, as in the workers who labor nearby, somewhat inconspicuous. The central figure’s gloves, by contrast, are conspicuous, to say the least. Orozco added them to the figure and spent some time crafting their appearance in his

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preparatory drawings. When Orozco was painting in the reserve reading room, the rare book collection was one floor above. At that time patrons were required to don white cotton gloves to handle the books. This is likely the origin of Orozco’s representation. However, rather than fitted archival gloves, his worker’s gloves are large and oversized, almost cartoonishly so. They contrast markedly with his dark skin and draw our attention to his hands as well as to the book he holds. Scholars of blackface minstrelsy have commented on the ubiquity of white gloves as part of the conventionalized costume of the blackface performer. Dandified figures wore gloves as a sign of affected gentility. Their whiteness conjured both the white hands of the master and the gloved hands of the house slave.80 According to Barbara Lewis, they lampooned the class aspirations of blacks while also making fun of “bourgeois racial tolerance.” 81 Moreover, white gloves signified the very absurdity of black aspiration. Within the genre, they mark the exclusion of black subjects from all things “civilized.” 82 In his book on early animation, Nicholas Sammond demonstrates how this blackface trope migrated to many of the recurring cartoon characters—​­such as Mickey Mouse—​­of classic American animation. Some scholars and animators have insisted that these characters wear gloves because they are easier to draw than hands; Sammond, however, maintains that white gloves are “markers of minstrelsy.” 83 As the industry advanced and the characters became more standardized, these “markers of minstrelsy” became “vestigial,” carrying but “rarely referring directly to the tradition itself.” 84 In this sense, Sammond distinguishes the animated minstrel from the vicious racial caricatures of African Americans that also populated the genre.85 The latter, he argues, have a specificity and explicitness that the animated minstrel does not. Both draw upon the blackface performance of African American life, but the latter are meant to be read as black, while the former mobilize a host of ideas linked to blackness—​­the subjugation and objectification of the enslaved, his recalcitrance and resistance, his laziness, the excessive violence done to him, or the fear of the violence he might enact—​ ­without referring to any specific historical figure or circumstance, such as plantation slaves, cannibals, or Jazz Age performers, to name only a few of the racial caricatures one finds in animation.86 One of the many ideas embedded in minstrelsy is a white working-­class protest against wage labor. Just as the blackface performer’s exaggerated laziness or tendency to pursue his libidinous desires reflects a nascent resistance on the part of the white working-­class entertainers and audiences who popularized the genre, Sammond notes that early animators, too, were reacting to the rapid industrialization of their craft when they invented disobedient

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recurring characters. “Faced with depersonalization within emerging industrial modes of production, yet clinging to a craft model of production, animators created a commodity that appeared to speak back to its creators and assert its independence from the social and material order of its making.” 87 In early animated sketches, one would often see the live animator himself drawing his creation into being, only to witness the character slip the bonds of his control. As part of the routinized script of these shorts—​­which originated in the “lightning sketches” of vaudeville—​­the animator would eventually punish his creation for his disobedience, thereby reasserting his control and drawing the figure back into the inkwell from whence he came. In this sense, Sammond argues, the animated minstrel becomes a vestige of the “commodity who speaks,” the objected and abjected slave, and a stand-­in for the “animator as artist-­for-­hire.” 88 “There is hardly a better model for alienated labor,” he argues, for, “like the chattel slaves from which they ostensibly sprang,” the recurring character was “granted free will as a necessary fiction: they appeared to act and be acted upon of their own accord, but only to demonstrate the ultimate constraint placed on that seeming free will, its conscription into the master’s self-­congratulatory narrative.” 89 Over time animators lost their prominent role as named and visible artisans. Their labor was routinized through a Fordist and Taylorist process that significantly sped up and streamlined, but also deskilled, the craft. At this point, the animator, or his disembodied hand, disappeared from the screen. What was left behind, however, was the animated minstrel who continued to perform a “compulsive ritual of rebellion and its suppression” only now without any visual reminder of the “social and material relations” that conditioned his disobedient performance in the first place.90 Historians of animation’s recollection of the social and material relations encrypted within the plasticity of the animated character offer provocative new ways to consider Orozco’s expressive distortions of form. Orozco’s expressionism was certainly a by-­product of artistic avant-­gardism and its commitment to estrangement—​ ­an embrace of and reaction to modernity. And, as I argue in chapter 1, Orozco’s approach to mural art emphasizes rather than masks the seams that mark day work while also subjecting the viewer to radical leaps in time and subject as part of a dialectical rather than a narrative approach to sequencing. Placing the development of figuration in painting alongside parallel forms of expressive figuration in other culture industries provides an opportunity to recontextualize Orozco’s avant-­gardism, to see it also as a response to the social and material relations conditioning muralism under the unique conditions of patronage in the United States. Within this context there are more similarities between the mural artist and the animator than appear at first glance.

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As with the avant-­garde’s attacks on academic illusionism, references to the artist’s hand and personae in early animated shorts kept the “shock of the modern” in full view of audiences, as animators exposed the “seams of the illusion” through their “own intruding hands.” 91 As the genre shifted toward narrative realism and the animator disappeared, the animated character became detached from labor’s rebellion, which became sublimated in the violent “plasmaticness” of the form itself. Period critics of the emergent culture industry noted, with a mixture of admiration and trepidation, the contradiction embedded in animated characters. Most famously, both Benjamin and Eisen­stein gave voice to this view.92 Each understood that there was a relationship between the violence of routinized labor and the extreme distortions of form that made up the plasticity of the animated character. And yet both also expressed admiration for the metamorphic possibilities of animation as a sign of expressive freedom nonetheless. Scott Bukatman comments on the tension between labor and anima in early animation. He argues that despite its mode of production, it also represents a poetics of freedom that is necessary for conceiving of revolutionary change. Following Eisen­stein’s argument about “plasmaticness,” he explains that the mutability of cartoon characters is a “near-­constant reminder of our polyformic potentialities, with the preservation of folk traditions, with the return, not to a childlike innocence but to a childhood state in which immutability of form is not yet a given, in which change is still a possibility.” 93 This dialectic, while most apparent in the industrial production of cartoon animation, also structures the production of high art. Bukatman explores the examples of Henri-­Georges Clouzot’s film of Pablo Picasso painting (Le mystère Picasso, 1955) and Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock executing his famous drip paintings. In these examples, he argues, “what begin as avowed attempts to document the process of producing images instead become arenas for the image’s liberation; labor is superseded by a created world invested with a thoroughgoing animism.” 94 Bukatman situates the dialectic between the regulatory forces of Fordism and the exuberant excesses of animated form within the context of the early twentieth-­century United States, a nation, he writes, that was not only energetic but one that “worshipped energy.” 95 While he is interested in how animation and cinema emerged within this “vitalist context,” Robin Veder has shown how important this was for the emergent American avant-­garde as well. She calls this “kin-­aesthetic modernism” and argues that labor and anima were not necessarily in tension insofar as “aesthetic modernism and industrial modernity were equally concerned with energy-­resource management.” 96 Writing against the tendency of critics of industrial modernity to

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emphasize the fragmentation of the senses and the alienation of the self, she shows how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American culture embraced kinesthesia as part of a modernist sensorium in which phenomenology and physiology were integrated through embodiment and movement. Art making and viewing, she argues, were inflected as much by proprioception as perception. She thus calls our attention to what she names the “period body”—​­to displace the disembodied concept of the “period eye” in art history—​­and shows how it pertained to everything from questions about how art affected viewers to how artists understood their own mark-­making. Veder’s insights into the “period body” and the “energy economy” that gave it meaning help us to better appreciate why Orozco would refer to the idea in his Epic as “energy creating matter” or to painting as a “stimulus.” 97 Moreover, it helps us to better understand why he would lament the “stories and other literary associations” in the minds of spectators while also insisting that the “organic idea of every painting, even the worst in the world, is extremely obvious to the average spectator with normal mind and normal sight.” 98 He ends his statement by avowing the Americanness of his idea, “developed into American forms, American feeling, and, as a consequence, into American style,” and proclaims, now in a collective voice that speaks not only for the artist but for his American audience as a whole, that “this is our own effort, to the limit of our own strength and experience, in all sincerity and spontaneity.” 99 He links ideas about regional autonomy to form as well as feeling, emphasizing physiological attributes of strength and lived experience while also hailing spontaneity over a slavish adherence to “tradition.” It is this, he insists, that links us to the unbroken “line of Culture,” or what Veder calls the “living line” of culture.100 Spontaneity speaks to an unmediated, perhaps empathic relationship to that line. This is a relationship that unites rather than divides the artist from the viewer through the perceptive body, its capacity to feel as much as to think. Orozco had been schooled in this approach to life drawing at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. There he encountered a life drawing curriculum wherein the academic tradition of anatomical drawing had shifted from copying to the early use of live models and an emphasis on movement and speed of execution. Working from life in this manner was believed to help the artist to bypass academic formulas as well as convey their personality through form without the intrusion of conscious thought.101 This, they believed, was essential to cultivating and expressing personal style. While Orozco was trained to court the spontaneous in his drawing method, this approach did not determine his murals. Unlike paintings or

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drawings executed for the private market, public murals must be meticulously planned. This is due to the particularities of the fresco medium as well as to the fact that in painting on public walls one often works within a system of patronage and loose oversight in relationship to an idea about the public for which one is painting and the idiosyncrasies of extant architectural structure. Unlike a square canvas or sheet of paper, a wall could be curved, interrupted, too high or too low, and so on. Thus, a mural artist, regardless of their medium, has to carefully calibrate their imagery to a set of architectural constraints over which they have little or no control. And whereas there is some room to improvise on the wall, pure spontaneity of the kind ascribed to Pollock’s drip is not possible. Because the muralists associated personal style with bourgeois easel painting, González Mello notes, they “built a fortress of restrictions having to do with the public character of that painting,” namely, eschewing subjectivity in favor of claims to offer “facts” or a “higher truth.” 102 He shows that Orozco did not seek to erase or transcend the line between his own expressive purposes and the pedagogical mandate of public art. “What he did,” he avows, “was make that theoretical artifact productive.” 103 He characterizes this stance as a kind of negotiation between painting—​­its expressive color and form—​­and architecture, with its monumentality, historicity, and preexisting structure. It is at Dartmouth, he concludes, that this relationship becomes “critical” for Orozco, signaled in the liberation of color and form that we see in the Epic.104 Unlike his earlier murals, where he used thin organic pigments and experimented with stilted compositional formats, at Dartmouth Orozco “attacked” the walls with strident color and rejected academic technique.105 “Chromatic contrasts reorganize architectural space,” he asserts; they “constitute the episodes and interact with the symbolic formations of allegory.” 106 In sum, the mural’s coloristic attack on its architectural host signals its rejection of narrative realism and its claim to facticity while also activating the mural’s melancholic relationship to ideal truth through its montage aesthetic. As an academically trained artist working under new conditions of patronage and with a public mandate in mind, Orozco, too, was confronting the loss of expressive freedom that animators experienced. And while mural artists were not subjected to the Fordist and Taylorist forms of labor management with which animators were grappling, within the mural movement there was a fetishization of the depersonalization of industrial labor as artists sought to construe their craft as a trade, akin to the manual labor of proletarian work. Thus, the identification with the worker went beyond the symbolic donning of overalls, to encompass a rhetorical commitment to

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collective labor and, in the extreme case of Si­quei­ros, the embrace of industrial techniques, materials, and production. Si­quei­ros’s position is particularly relevant here. For at the same time that Orozco and Rivera were working in the United States, Si­quei­ros was pioneering his cinematographic approach to mural art, first in Los Angeles and then in Buenos Aires, where he executed his key transitional work, Plastic Exercise (1933), with a team of local artists (Antonio Berni, Lino Eneas Spilimbergo, Juan C. Castagnino, and Enrique Lázaro) in the basement of a bar. In a polemical pamphlet about the experimental work, Si­quei­ros refined an argument he had been developing since the late 1920s regarding both the proper techniques and the methodology that should guide the execution of modern mural art and the extent to which an animated pictorial art could move the viewer toward revolutionary action. These principles found their ultimate expression in Portrait of the Bourgeoisie. In his polemic, he lays out the Plastic Exercise’s “Technical Aspects” first, noting his team’s exclusive use of “mechanical elements”—​­a camera, airbrush, precolored cement, artificial lighting, silicate paints, and so forth—​ ­instead of the traditional implements and media of fresco painting.107 He emphasizes the fact that they worked consciously as a “poly- ­graphic team” in which the creative capacities of individuals were subordinated to a collective design in a thoroughly experimental process wherein “flexible rules,” rather than academic dogma, guided their work.108 The mural was painted in a sculpted space, with rounded corners and “faceted units” that the artists sought to harmonize into a “spatial totality” calibrated to the “spectator’s movements” and derived from the “geometry of the space.” 109 “The work,” he proclaims, “was the legitimate fruit of its own architectural loins, the organic complement of its geometry.” 110 Armed with a roving camera, the mural team orchestrated the mural experience based on what they deemed to be an “average spectators [sic]” likely path. In this way, they believed they were eschewing both the static perspectival systems of traditional painting and the “objective [tradition] of photographic reproduction.” 111 Their mural would reward the “dynamic spectator’s path through the work” because it was “preconceived as cinematographable.” 112 That is, the mural was painted with its photographic reproduction and circulation in mind, thereby, Si­quei­ros argues, providing “the foundation for a new sense of photographic reproduction of artworks that has a unique creative militancy in and of itself, independently of the work reflected.” 113 He proclaims the “filmic-­pictorial-­plasticity of the work,” not its representational content, to be their main achievement.114 By blending

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monumental painting with cinematography, he and his team believed these techniques and this approach to the execution and organization of images on a wall would give murals the efficacy of film, “the most powerful form of popularizing graphic art among the masses.” 115 While positing Plastic Exercise as only an initial experiment, they placed it within a “living class of plastic, visual, and graphic art,” its mechanical technique and collectivity rendering it an “expressive vehicle of our age.” 116 In this pamphlet, Si­quei­ros speaks to the very dialectic of labor and anima that Bukatman identifies in the poetics of plasmatics. Moreover, his embrace of both the machine and vitalistic metaphors situates this manifesto squarely within the “energy economy” of kinesthetic modernism. Like the animators and artists Bukatman discusses, Si­quei­ros and his team viewed the morphological possibilities of plastic form as a mechanism for capturing and directing revolutionary energies. And like the animated cartoon, their dynamic mural is produced via an industrial process that constrains individuality, artistic autonomy, and the hand of the artist. The artists subordinate themselves to the “geometric topography” of the architectural space; they replace inner vision with the mechanical eye of the camera and collectively produce a pictorial experience calibrated not to the vanishing point of a monocular ideal spectator but rather to the dynamic movements of an embodied viewer who is either physically present or experiencing the mural through portable photographic reproduction. Thus, even as Si­quei­ros emphasizes the collective labor that went into the production of the mural, and even as he equates his craft with the productivity of the industrial worker in order to enhance his own identity as a worker, the animated object takes on a life of its own. To quote Bukatman, the team’s “labor is superseded by a created world invested with a thoroughgoing animism” that acts not only on the artists but also upon the viewers who will experience the work in situ or in reproduction.117 This was the cornerstone of Si­quei­ros’s theory of the revolutionary capacities of the mural form, one he worked out, in part, through extensive discussions with Eisen­ stein while under house arrest in Taxco between 1930 and 1932. For Si­quei­ros, there is no necessary tension between the simulated conditions of industrial labor and the liberatory potential of the mural’s polymorphic plasticity. And, as Jennifer Jolly has pointed out, his understanding of the “average viewer” whose dynamic movement would correspond with the artistic team’s projected views was flawed, for he could not imagine or account for the experience of a disobedient viewer.118 But Orozco could. Unlike Si­quei­ros (and even Rivera, who, despite his “antiquated technique,” also routinely equated murals with movies), Orozco grappled with the tension

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between expressive freedom and constraint, between conceiving of a painting as either a poem or a machine, between the “organic idea” released by the plastic elements of the mural and the “story” in the “minds of the viewer” who “hears” but cannot “see.” 119 Orozco had experienced the repetitive labor of industrial art when he was employed to hand-­paint movie posters during his first trip to the United States. “No such painting by hand was actually called for,” he recalled. “The colored lithographs that they gave us as models could be pasted onto cardboard and given three or four brush strokes of oil paint . . . we could do the whole job in less than an hour.” 120 Likewise, he had spent a considerable part of his career as an illustrator for satirical magazines. And during his time in the United States he became acutely aware of the trials and tribulations of the private art market as he found himself modifying the themes of his work to appeal to consumer tastes and developing a print career to supplement the slow work and low pay of mural painting.121 Even his murals were subject to the whims of patrons. While at Pomona he had come up against moral censorship of the male nude, and at Dartmouth, in the midst of his project, he became embroiled in a public controversy over the content of his murals.122 At the very same time, Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center was being whitewashed and eventually destroyed by his corporate patrons. And while Orozco’s Epic survived, it was due to the support of his patron, Dartmouth College President Ernest Hopkins, who defended the mural against its many critics for years. For an artist who had extolled the public mural as “the most disinterested form” of art because it “could not be made a matter of private gain” or “hidden away for the benefit of a certain privileged few,” 123 coming up against the limits of private patronage in the United States—​­and in the case of Pomona and Dartmouth Colleges, the private institution—​­was particularly unnerving. Together these experiences revealed to Orozco that, like the commercial or industrial artist, he was an artist-­for-­hire. He, too, was a commodity that speaks, a wage laborer who does not own the surplus value produced by his own work. Orozco commented sardonically on this condition when, in 1940, he was coerced by MoMA to paint his portable fresco, Dive Bomber and Tank, live, for the public (see figure 1.10). In an anecdote relayed by gallerist Ines Amour, he reportedly complained privately that he was “working as a clown” in a “circus.” 124 This sentiment is evident in period films of the artist at Dartmouth, wherein he “paints” (i.e., half-­heartedly passes a dry brush over a completed fresco) for the camera. In fact, we might reread his commissioned “explanation” as a meditation on this very condition as well as an attempt to reconcile the vitalistic capacities of the plastic arts with the working conditions of

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the artist-­for-­hire within a privatized system of patronage and the ethos of industrial capitalism. Disidentification and the Melancholy of Race in America

In the foregoing history of the animated minstrel, I suggested that we read the “Modern Industrial Man’s” white gloves as a vestigial trope of blackface minstrelsy. In this sense, he is a figure who, like Mickey Mouse, carries the “markers of minstrelsy” without “referring directly to the tradition itself.” 125 In so doing, he becomes a “tense locus of contradiction” between the “American fantasy of self-­invention and refashioning” and “its frustration and constraint.” 126 And while Orozco’s figure is not animate, like the cartoon “commodity who speaks,” his identification as a racialized worker—​­a sub­ altern subject—​­may index Orozco’s own concerns about the transformation of his art form in a period when the emergent culture industry of film and animation threatened the primacy of painting, and when the artist’s labor was increasingly constrained by both the demands of publicness and the whims of corporate and private patrons. Despite their anxious overidentification with the proletariat, muralists were no more industrial workers enslaved to the Taylorist and Fordist mechanics of industrial time than they were “wage slaves” or, for that matter, actual slaves. So what does it mean that they so readily and eagerly identified with figures of subordination? Orozco may not have been an animator facing mechanical obsolescence; however, his expressive aesthetic partakes of the metamorphic possibilities and plasticity of form that critics like Benjamin, Eisen­stein, and Bukatman celebrate in animated figuration. While Bukatman argues that the metamorphic nature of animated figures takes them beyond minstrelsy, opening up infinite possibilities of becoming that are denied to racial caricatures, Sammond insists that because these characters were minstrels in their “resting state,” they “always invoked the thingness lurking behind being human, that from which . . . Americans were expected to transform themselves as they became American.” 127 In sensing the objected slave encrypted within the performance of freedom that metamorphosis entails, Sammond joins Cheng in arguing that bondage is the very condition of American freedom and, in this case, artistic vitalism. U.S. American conceptions of self-­invention run through the silenced and buried body of the racialized subject, without which there would be no condition from which to self-­actualize. Thus, the chattel slave is retained within plasmatic form even as it excludes fixity in its performance of possibility. In that sense, we might view Orozco’s expressive aesthetic and working

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method, wherein a Dartmouth man morphs into a racialized worker in the shift from paper to plaster, as an index of the psychic conflicts of nation-­ state subjecthood in the Americas. In the act of “blacking up” his avatar of Modern Man, Orozco makes a demand upon his (presumably) elite white viewers. He asks them to see themselves in this figure, to perform an imaginative act of identification that carries with it all of the pitfalls and utopian possibilities of cross-­racial identification. Lott characterizes the cross-­racial identification that forged blackface minstrelsy as a “racial structure of feeling.” “Minstrelsy,” he writes, “brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the very edge of semantic availability, which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood.” 128 I suggest that in configuring cultural labor’s discontents through the plasmatic form of a vestigial blackface minstrel, Orozco was giving voice to a racial structure of feeling “residing at the very edge of semantic availability” and “only dimly . . . felt” in his time. This “American feeling” expressed through “American form” and authorizing his “American style” can only be read symptomatically by attending to the demetaphorized figure of the racialized worker. His status as a figure of freedom and possibility lies in his iconic capacities; however, as I’ve argued throughout this chapter, he defies that status more than he embodies it. He is more like the “shadow of the lost object” that haunts the national ego, a figure of reproach and self-­ denigration that cannot be assimilated into the normative ideals of American identity.129 In that sense he might be read as the “Negro”/​­“Indian” of America’s revolutions who haunts the “white zombies” in “Anglo-­America.” “Haunting,” Khanna reminds us, “occurs at the moment when encryption is in danger of being deciphered. Haunting constitutes the work of melancholia . . . the work of melancholia has a critical relation to the lost and buried . . . it does not merely call for inclusion, assimilation, reparation or retribution. It calls for a response to the critical work of incorporation, and the ethical demand that such incorporation makes on the future.” 130 If this is so, if the racialized worker is a specter of the “exclusion-­yet-­ retention” of the racialized populations who found American freedom while simultaneously impeding the formation of a truly just postcolonial national identity, then what work does this figure demand of the viewer? If the response it calls for is not merely the inclusion and/​­or assimilation of the racialized object, or even retribution for the injustices done to that objected subject, then what is it? How can the viewer exercise her weak messianic power to seize hold of the memory of an oppressed past as it “flashes up” in this image of a racialized worker situated within the very space of crisis that marks the violent foundations of the modern nation-­state?

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In response to these questions, I offer a reading from one of my Dartmouth students, Nichola Tucker, who was given the task of writing about “Orozco’s mural and the epic form” in a senior seminar. Tucker argues that it is the viewer who plays the part of epic hero in Orozco’s cycle. Treating the fresco as a performative rite through which the viewer undergoes a radical reeducation in the American epic and emerges transformed, she suggests that the racialized worker “embodies the new state the Dartmouth student initiate enters after performing the cycle.” 131 In this new state, the hero of America’s epic is transformed from the hegemonic privileged white subject—​­the Dartmouth Man—​­into a working-­class Afro-­mestizo. She is no longer the progeny of a Euro-­American eschatological history but rather the hybrid offspring of the violent encounters between Europeans and their colonized or enslaved “others.” In this figure, the viewer encounters the violent bordering occasioned by the Black Legend and anti-­Haitian sentiment, a bordering that constitutes Anglo-­America as an exclusively white, Anglo-­ Saxon, and Protestant nation-­state and that constitutes Hispano-­Americans as racialized others within U.S. America, excluding yet retaining them in the formation of white racial identity. As a black worker, he alerts us to a “history of racial inequality that is in part constituted through visual discourse.” 132 His appearance within a cycle that never explicitly addresses the history of enslaved Africans within the American epic makes him, however, an apostate, which, following José Rabasa, is a figure that is literally and figuratively “with/​­out” history.133 Our desire to read him as iconic, which, following Fleetwood, would render him “a site for black audiences and the nation to gather around the seeing of blackness,” puts pressure on this image to “solve the very problem it represents: that seeing blackness is always a problem in a visual field that structures the troubling presence of blackness.” 134 As I’ve argued throughout this chapter, he is non-­iconic, a figure that eschews the singularity of visualizations of collective identity, thereby resisting the impetus to ask the visual to “resolve that which cannot be resolved.” 135 “Modern Industrial Man” does not solve the problem of white racial melancholy. As a racialized figure, he does not even cohere or settle into a singular racial identity. He is at once mestizo, indigenous, and black; he could be Filipino or Dominican, Senegalese or Korean, for that matter. All we know is that he is not white. He does, however, require the white viewer-­as-­epic-­hero to engage in the uncomfortable act of donning blackface through the fantasy of racial cross-­identification he offers. He makes palpable the limits of the universalizing discourses of recognition that underpin democracy through the particularity of his racialized body. And yet his particularity does not grant him subjecthood within the

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melancholic racial formations of the Americas. In this sense, he manifests the lost object that haunts white racial melancholy and engages the viewer in the critical work of decolonization. Tucker’s reading is radical and speculative. It locates Orozco’s mural within the ethos of postrevolutionary Mexico’s cultural nationalism and its grappling with the paradoxes of the postcolonial settler subject. She reminds us that Orozco was painting (and to a great extent still exists for) a predominantly white, upper-­middle-­class, student audience. Her reading inverts the classic scenario of education as a mode of assimilation—​­the achievement of universal subjecthood unmarked by the particularities of race, nation, class, or gender—​­and instead imagines that the outcome of a Dartmouth education would be to reinsert the student into a hemispheric imaginary in which the self must be thought through its relation to its internalized racialized populations. To recall Esposito’s arguments about the nonentity of community, the “Modern Industrial Man” is not a figurative “subject, individual, or a collective.” 136 He is a figure of community-­as-­relation. Community, understood in this sense, is the opposite of the collective identity that inheres through iconicity and group identity politics. As Esposito describes, it “precedes and cuts every subject, wresting him or her from identification with him or herself and submitting him or her to an irreducible alterity.” 137 Alexander Weheliye also characterizes this submission as a “relation.” 138 But rather than seeing the distinction as one between the liberal subject and bare life—​­“an irreducible alterity”—​­he views it as the “constitutive potentiality of a totality that is structured in dominance and composed of the particular processes of bringing-­into-­relation.” 139 Rather than seeing bare life as the prepolitical substance of community, he suggests that we understand “relation-­as-­community” as a potential constituted by the political violence that establishes a distinction between the subject and bare life in the first place. Given that racialized populations have been constituted as bare life and denied the status of liberal subject/​­full humanity through the political violence of conquest and colonization, any relation we might forge with this “irreducible alterity” has been “structured in dominance.” As a racialized worker, “Modern Industrial Man” speaks to the fact that it is the racialized body that has been constituted as an “irreducible alterity.” In asking the presumably white viewer to identify with him, he represents the threat of community that Esposito describes. But as Weheliye demonstrates, as a male subject, he also speaks to the fact that Man, conceived of as the master-­ subject, excludes racialized populations from the domain of the human. This is the challenge he poses to the viewer, who is asked to see him as a representation of this master-­subject. Thus the “bringing-­into-­relation” of

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“Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­America,” between the wasp viewing subject and a working-­class racialized man, or between blackness and mestizaje that he augurs can only be conceived as a potential totality structured in dominance even as it seeks utopian alternatives to that dominance. In imagining this kind of gendered, cross-­class, cross-­racial identification, is Tucker’s argument no different from the forms of “love and theft” that Lott ascribes to the working-­class whites who invented and consumed blackface minstrelsy? Is it at all different from the retained-­yet-­excluded dynamics of white racial melancholia that Orozco himself was subject to? Yes and no. Cheng and Khanna note that we cannot will ourselves out of melancholia; rather, the only mechanism for justice is the critical agency that melancholia performs on the subject. “This critical identification with the lost object,” Khanna writes, “constitutes . . . the traumatic undoing of self and lost object as a result.” 140 In this sense, to engage in the critical work that the supplement invites, the viewing subject engages in an act of fantasy that not only undoes the normative ideal of white nationalism but also reworks the objectified, racialized subject that that ideal retains yet excludes. José Muñoz calls this work “disidentification.” “Like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object,” he writes, “a disidentifying subject works to hold on to this object and invest it with new life.” 141 Muñoz crafted his concept of disidentification to capture the process by which minoritized subjects labor to produce affirmative identities, subjects who must “work with/​ ­resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates.” 142 “To disidentify,” he continues, “is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject. It’s not to pick and choose what one takes out of an identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components within an identificatory locus. Rather, it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide the ‘harmful’ contradictory components of any identity. It is an acceptance of the necessary interjection that has occurred in such situations.” 143 The white student-­initiate that Tucker imagines is not compelled to do this work by the dominant culture. In fact, as a beneficiary of the dominant culture’s production of the very conditions of (im)possibility that racialization produces, to engage in this labor is to risk the counterfeiting of racial masquerade. Nonetheless, it is a necessary risk that the mural seems to impress upon its white viewers. To take this risk, she must accept the shameful as well as the affirmative components of the identificatory locus of blackface in order to rework the energies, or psychic conflicts, of U.S. American national subjecthood. Orozco was not above or beyond this problematic.

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Rather, the racial ambiguity of his figure forces us to grapple with it, just as he likely was, as a Mexican artist working in the United States, enjoying the privilege of his nonblackness while also confronting the exclusion of his racialized foreignness. In constructing a ritual reenactment of the traumatic event of European conquest, his mural does not commemorate the conquest as the “chosen trauma” of Mexico’s imagined community.144 Rather, he insists that the violence of this trauma haunts U.S. American identity too, undoing its claim to exceptionalism within the postcolonial Americas. “Cortez and the Cross” is a marker of messianic—​­not eschatological—​­time, manifesting “the secret embedded in nation-­state formation: that the concept of nation-­statehood was constituted through the colonial relation, and needs to be radically reshaped if it is to survive without colonies, or without a concealed (colonial) other” (see figure 3.1).145 The critical response to nation-­state formation that this radical act of cross-­racial disidentification encourages reveals that the specter of colonialism that haunts the postcolonial nation-­state is also the specter of justice. Orozco leaves us with the figure of a subaltern man, situated as a specter of a different, repressed call for justice within the colonial melancholy of modern America. This may be what Orozco was pointing to when he characterized the myth of Quetzalcoatl as a living one that points “clearly by its prophetic nature to the responsibility shared equally by the two Americas of creating here an authentic New World civilization.” 146 But what of those viewers who do not embody the white normative ideal of U.S. American nationalism? What of those viewers whose skin color or physiognomies may be more akin to those featured in Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” than to the Dartmouth Man on which he was modeled? What of those viewers who are more likely to see themselves or the historical experience of their communities in the abjected bodies laid waste by Cortés than in the zombified white students who represent Anglo-­America? Does “Modern Industrial Man” afford them a site of identification rather than disidentification? Can his representation as a subaltern subject (a racialized man reading a book) provide the kind of recognition necessary for commuting objectification to subjecthood? This contented and self-­possessed man may hail the racialized viewer and offer her a positive image with which to identify. However, to seek that kind of solution to the problem of sovereignty (in this case the sovereignty of Man) is to reimpose the very idolatry that the mural attempts to shatter. Cheng argues that the racialized minority is equally melancholic within the melancholic politics of race in America. She identifies this melancholy as a disarticulated grief that crosses generations and that manifests itself

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in the political act of lodging grievances as a form of agency within racist systems of oppression. These grievances, however, are rarely redressed in a way that can put to rest the intergenerational grief that generates them, in part, Cheng argues, because grievance is a “luxury to which racially melancholic minorities have little or no access.” 147 To lodge grievances in the name of racial grief risks being accused of cultivating a “cult of victimization,” thereby denying the very agency it is meant to confer. Likewise, the “logic of commensurability and quantifiability” that underpins the legal concept of justice-­as-­compensation can lead to “perverse versions of justice” wherein one grievance is weighed against another or the aggrieved subject adopts the practice of racializing another group in order to claim full subjecthood.148 We might think of this in terms of representation wherein the assertion of the white male body constitutes the universalizing precondition of liberal subjecthood, thereby excluding all racialized groups from the category of Man via their marked and embodied difference from that universalizing norm. One solution to this grievance (the lack of representations of racialized people as subjects within the visual field) would be to assert an embodied racial subject as a different universal ideal. This is one way of thinking about Orozco’s substitution of a racialized worker for the Dartmouth Man. However, if we take the racialized worker to be an iconic figure of an “othered” race, he threatens to become another exclusionary norm, excluding other “others” from the normative status of this new universal (and perpetuating Orozco’s exclusion of women altogether). If we read him as an icon of indigeneity, we exclude blackness, much as the racial imaginaries of both Mexican mestizaje and U.S. American wasp identity do. If we decide he is a mestizo, we uphold a normative figuration of Mexican national identity at the expense of its racialized exclusions. As García-Peña reminds us, mestizaje is a concept that borders blacks and Latino/​­as via its constitution through a “fear of Haiti.” Yet if we read him as black, we lose sight of Orozco’s critique of official indigenismo as it pertains to both Mexican and U.S. nation-­formation. Finally, if we read him as hybrid over and against the essentializing identity of Anglo-­America, we reify Mexican discourses of mestizaje without critically investigating their denigration of the Indian or Afro-­Mexicans. This approach to the figure can lead to attempts to quantify minority representation in order to ascertain which group is the most “othered” or objectified by the visual field and who may claim an authentic identification with Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man.” As Fleetwood’s discussion of blackness reminds us, visual icons cannot resolve the “history and system of racial inequality that is in part constituted through visual discourse.” 149 A singular representation of a racialized male

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worker reading cannot solve the problem of the denial of subjecthood and agency to racialized peoples. This is not only because this figure, conceived of as an object of identification that can confer psychic wholeness upon the racialized viewing subject, cannot encapsulate all the possible racialized subject positions, not to mention genders, that might encounter it but also because of the conflicted nature of psychic identification itself. Identification, Cheng reminds us, “is a process that is multiple, unmanageable, contradictorily incorporating, incorporated, ensnaring, and distancing.” 150 Thus, she argues, we need to “reconsider the nature of the political.” In our case, we need to reconsider the nature of representation, away from the desire for affirmative representations—​­iconicity/​­idolatry—​­and toward an appreciation for the impossibility of the “Many in One” logic that underpins our conception of “democratic body politics” whether that body is conceived as Anglo, black, mestizo, indigenous, or Hispanic.151 To return to Weheliye’s concept of “relation,” he, too, argues against “the grammar of comparison,” which tends to “reaffirm Man’s existent hierarchies rather than design novel assemblages of relation.” 152 Like Cheng, he sees the “path of wounded attachments in search of recognition from the liberal state” as insufficient and calls instead for an understanding of “suffering and enfleshment as integral to humanity” rather than simply a “dehumanizing exception.” 153 In this he echoes Judith Butler’s claims about the utopian possibilities of “precarious life.” 154 He therefore suggests we eschew the category of Man in favor of reconceptualizing the human as enfleshment. He asks whether there might not be “freedom” in identifying with “the suffering that results from political violence,” or what Cheng refers to as the intergenerational grief that constitutes the melancholy of those who have been racialized by and through U.S. American national identity.155 What might this “pain that most definitely cannot be reduced to mere recognition based on the alleviation of injury or redressed by the laws of the liberal state” offer? Might it open onto different “forms of emancipation, which can be imagined but not (yet) described?” 156 In resisting the temptation to read Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” as an icon of racial subjecthood, as a subaltern figuration of the liberal subject that leaves the category of Man intact, I propose that we read him as a figure for an emancipatory politics that is rooted in suffering, precarity, and enfleshment. This is a politics of emancipation that is encrypted within Orozco’s Epic, and in answering its call for justice, it is one that we “can imagine but not (yet) describe.” Cheng finds the allegorical figure for this kind of relation in the theatrical performances of Anna Deavere Smith, a black woman who impersonates a host of subjects—​­a white male police officer, a female Korean shop

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owner, a Latino father, a black female senator, a black gang member, an Indian postcolonial theorist—​­in her docudramas. By embodying conflicting subject-­positions through the singularity of her raced and gendered body, her performance “reveals presence as liminality . . . delineates borders even as it breaks them.” 157 She does not identify with these other subjects but rather acts them out, forging an uncomfortable awareness in the viewer of the incommensurability of their expressed views as well as the incommensurability of her body with theirs. Her performance foregrounds the intra-­and intersubjective dynamics of race as she immerses herself in these subjects, an immersion that at times corresponds with the significations of her racialized and gendered body, while at others, her body makes visible the violence of their points of view. This dialectic of identification and exclusion is not acted out by her but rather felt by a viewer who seeks, continuously, to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, to parse out, definitively, the space between subject and object, between Smith and the people she animates. The incommensurate experiences of the subjects she portrays coexist within the same space and time of her performance as well as her racialized and gendered body, leading Cheng to characterize her performance as the “in-­between place” of twilight.158 She derives this term from one of Smith’s projects, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a docudrama in which she explores the violent aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. In this project Smith juxtaposes two intertexts on the concept of “twilight,” one articulated by post­ colonial theorist Homi Bhabha and the other by a Los Angeles gang member named Twilight Bey, who helped to broker a gang truce during the three days of rioting that followed the verdict. For Bhabha, twilight, or dusk, is a moment of “ambivalence and ambiguity” when something can become something other than what it “is” in the hard light of day, when in order to see we have to “make ourselves part of the act, we have to interpret, we have to project more.” 159 For Bey, twilight refers both to the time of day during which he wandered the city seeking to enforce the truce and a kind of historico-­temporal “limbo” that brings the past into the present.160 Drawing connections between his efforts to broker a truce earlier in 1988 and the contemporary moment in which it became “realistic,” he argues that his name, “Twilight,” symbolizes “knowledge, knowing.” 161 This is a kind of knowing that is untimely, awaiting the moment when it can become “realistic.” It reveals the extent to which the injustices of the past have not been settled while also shedding light on the present for the purposes of articulating contingent ways forward. For Cheng, twilight as characterized in Bhabha’s metaphorics and Bey’s actions signifies a relationship between ethics and politics that eschews the

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demands of one-­on-­one identification in favor of the “sustainment of multiple conflictual positions.” 162 Like Bhabha’s “in-­betweenness” or Bey’s “limbo,” it signifies a radical sense of space and time similar to Benjamin’s conception of messianic time. Twilight also signals an approach to identification that understands it as “an unruly psychical activity” that obliges us to “make ourselves part of the act,” to “take on the view of the other” even as that is “also an impossible perspective” for us to inhabit.163 Like Smith’s performance, I believe that the performative relationship Orozco’s mural obliges the viewer to enact when confronting “Modern Industrial Man” is conflictual rather than identificatory: “it is to occupy a place where you either do not want to be or cannot remain even if you want to.” 164 This is true for those viewing subjects who are living with the “ghost of the alien within” their racialized national identity as for those who are “living as the ghost in the gaze of another.” 165 This negotiation, Cheng argues, is the ethical precondition for any politics of justice. It is neither hopeful nor nihilistic but rather the melancholic labor that Muñoz calls disidentification. Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” does not offer iconic redemption for the melancholy of race in the Americas. He is no Marx or Zapata or even a Dartmouth Man delineated against the blazing sun of a new day. Rather, he signals the “perceptual shift” that takes place when daylight shifts to twilight, when the hard identificatory edges between “us” and “them” disappear and we immerse ourselves in the enfleshment and suffering of racialized people while remaining ourselves.166 The cool but soothing green that surrounds “Modern Industrial Man” obliterates temporal as well as spatial markers within the pictorial scenario. It is thus apt to consider it as the very “in-­between place” of twilight. Rather than a new day, we are suspended in the hazy light of twilight: “a shadow that allows us to see.” 167 In order to make out the connections that daylight obscures, we have to “make ourselves part of the act, we have to interpret, we have to project more.” We have to project ourselves onto the racialized worker, we have to introject him, even if that means donning blackface, even if it means sacrificing the illusions of psychic wholeness and agency and inhabiting the space of negativity that the racialized object has been made to signify. We have to become a protagonist in the melancholic epic of America, to grapple with the pain of racial grief without any clear mechanism for redemption or recompense. We are made responsible to the unanswered call for justice from an oppressed past and challenged to decrypt the secret of the postcolonial nation-­state without creating another colonized other. We do not need to wait for a messiah; this is a justice that is already here.

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CONCLUSION

How have viewers responded to the call for justice encrypted in Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization? Reception is notoriously difficult to ascertain, and my argument about the demand the mural makes upon its viewers is avowedly speculative. In this conclusion I survey two artistic responses to the mural that constitute forms of reception and that give us insight into the various ways that viewers have responded to it. These cases reinforce Orozco’s claim that “there are as many literary associations [stories] as spectators,” while also demonstrating that the “American idea” animating his mural is indeed “energy creating matter.” 1 The first case, Walter Beach Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” (1939), derives from the very period during which Orozco was painting the Epic. The second, Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective’s site-­specific performance piece, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, took place in 2002. These two responses dramatize the distinctions I have drawn between the racial masquerade of playing Indian that characterizes the politics of identification in U.S. America and the identity-­ affirming melancholia of disidentification that the vestigial blackface of Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” puts in play. This distinction is also one between the imagined community of the U.S. nation-­state and the more radical and precarious conception of community-­as-­relation that seeks to destabilize the borders and bordering that national imaginaries enact. Finally, as indicated in the introduction, these distinctions are predicated upon differential conceptions of time, between the eschatological time of historicism and the messianic time of the material historian-­cum-­monteur.

“Greening the Epic ”: The “Hovey Mural” I’ll never go “Mex,” I’ll picture no necks Ground down ’neath a rebel’s rough shoe; My forms aboriginous will all be indigenous To the haunts that as students we knew. —​­Walter Beach Humphrey, “The Song of Five Hundred Gallons: A Proposed Mural Picturization of Richard Hovey’s ‘Eleazar Wheelock’; Not Art for Art’s Sake,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, October 1937

Throughout his time at Dartmouth, critics, faculty, students, and alumni reacted in print and private correspondence to Orozco’s mural. Art critics generally viewed the work positively and wrote glowing appraisals of Dartmouth’s foray into the contentious world of modern art.2 Students and faculty seem to have been equally smitten with Orozco and his cycle, viewing it as a somewhat bewildering but nonetheless important contribution to modern culture.3 Many alumni, on the other hand, expressed outrage. Then-­president Ernest Hopkins responded personally to a torrent of letters decrying his decision to employ not only a modernist but also, and more disturbingly, a Mexican to desecrate the walls of their beloved New England institution. Their criticism ranged from an erroneous assumption that Diego Rivera had painted the frescoes, to a general antipathy for “modernistic” art (and along with it jazz and modernist poetry), to a more explicitly racist reaction to the Mexican (and French as well as Jewish) influence on U.S. taste and culture.4 These alumni were particularly offended by the “Anglo-­America,” “Gods of the Modern World,” and “Modern Migration of the Spirit” panels (see figures 3.17, 3.19, and 3.29). President Hopkins stood firm on his commitment to both Orozco and his mural. While routinely claiming to be ignorant in matters of art criticism, he nonetheless praised the artist, defended the fresco on the basis of its ability to catalyze liberal debate, and valiantly condemned the many nativist objections to a “work by a Latin-­American . . . placed in a colonial building.” 5 He averred that art and learning have no nationality and insisted that only time would determine whether or not Orozco’s Dartmouth cycle was a work of genius or mediocrity. While President Hopkins corresponded with several aggrieved alumni and even some widows, his exchange with Walter B. Humphrey (Dartmouth class of 1914) is the most substantive and revealing. Their debate was inaugurated by a pamphlet written and published by Humphrey decrying Orozco’s Epic. At times jocular and at other times testy, these two old chums 262  CONCLUSION

debated the wisdom of the college’s endorsement of Orozco’s radical vision and style. Of particular interest are Humphrey’s arguments put forward in a ten-­page, handwritten letter to Hopkins dated August 23, 1934.6 Humphrey begins by parrying Hopkins’s defense of “controversy” as a sign of a work’s potential significance. He argues instead that “a truly great work of art is seldom a matter of serious controversy or a subject of bewilderment.” 7 Drawing a contrast between works of great beauty and the “modernist” disposition, which “seems gauged by the degree of excitement or shock which a work can produce,” he asks, “is the college ready and willing to hold up these decorations as the example of what art really is?” 8 He continues that Orozco’s mural neither describes the world accurately nor presents ideas appropriate for their setting. “A mural project,” he writes, “is a very circumscribed thing”; the artist is not a “free agent” but rather is “bound by the ideas of his patron or the policies of an institution . . . and by the type, nature, and use of the building in which he works.” 9 Humphrey’s complaints were motivated by more than the antipathy of a commercial illustrator for the work of a modernist mural artist. He had a modest career as a public mural artist as well, and had long sought a commission at the college. He and his supporters began lobbying the college while Orozco was still painting. A few years later, in the 1937 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, he proposed to illustrate a drinking song penned by Dartmouth alumnus and poet Richard Hovey (class of 1885). Throughout August of 1937, Humphrey negotiated with President Hopkins for the commission.10 The near completion of yet another campus building afforded the president the opportunity to quell his friend’s ire by offering up the walls of the grill in the basement of Thayer Hall (now the Class of 1953 Commons). True to his word, he proposed and executed “decorations” for the Hovey Grill that were consistent with the ideas and values of their patron (class of 1914), the institution (Dartmouth College), the assumed audience (Dartmouth Men), and the masculine aesthetics of a rathskeller. Like Orozco, Humphrey labored over his mural for two years, completing it in the spring of 1939. However, there the similarities end. Orozco worked in fresco; Humphrey executed his mural in oil on canvas affixed with various adhesives to the grill’s plaster walls. Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” is easily legible and executed in an illustrational style that is often described as “Disney-­ esque.” Whereas Orozco’s mural is situated in the semipublic space of the library, Humphrey’s is in a semiprivate upperclassmen’s (and faculty) eatery (figure c.1). Orozco imagined a broad public made up of Dartmouth students and faculty as well as visitors to the college, who enjoy free entrance to the Orozco Room. He therefore took on an erudite topic and painted with

CONCLUSION  263

figure c.1. Dartmouth students and faculty dining in the Hovey Grill, ca. 1958. Commencement 1958—​­Huess, Hanover, NH/Hovey Grill, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. Rauner Special Collections Library, 55891.

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an eye toward art-­world posterity. Humphrey, on the other hand, imagined a very restricted audience of Dartmouth undergraduates engaged in evening revelry and celebration. As a consequence, his cycle is embedded within the speech codes and sense of humor of a fairly homogeneous and homosocial cultural and linguistic community. Orozco was an outsider who endeavored to challenge the aesthetic and ideological convictions of his U.S. public; Humphrey was an insider who sought to ingratiate himself with Dartmouth Men past, present, and future. Thus, Humphrey presents a scene of Euro-­ American encounter that is not only more in keeping with the standard U.S. American narrative of European settlement and Manifest Destiny but also specific to the founding of Dartmouth. And yet, despite his antipathy to “Oroz,” he nonetheless structured his interpretation of Hovey’s lyrics with The Epic of American Civilization in mind. Taking his cues from the carousing, comic spirit of Hovey’s “Eleazar Wheelock,” Humphrey converts the college’s founding as a school for Native American youth into a carnivalesque sequence of encounter, corruption, and drunken fall from grace. Illustrating the first stanza and chorus,

the “Hovey Mural” depicts Wheelock’s foray into the wilderness paradise of the Hanover Plain with a “Gradus ad Parnassum a Bible and a drum, and five hundred gallons of New England rum.” 11 There, amid the region’s flora and fauna, he encounters the “Sachem of the Wah-­hoo-­wahs” and his “ten squaws.” The cycle culminates with a scene of matriculation, wherein the chief and Wheelock are shown drunk as a consequence of a “whole curriculum . . . [of] five hundred gallons of New England rum.” The chorus, located in a separate panel over the fireplace, shows yet another scene of Wheelock ladling rum into the tankards of inebriated men, accompanied by the song’s repeated refrain: “Fill the bowl up! Fill the bowl up! Drink to Eleazar, and his primitive Alcazar, Where he mixed drinks for the heathen In the goodness of his soul.” Using Orozco as a foil, Humphrey “Greens” his encounter narrative by presenting Wheelock, not Quetzalcoatl, as the white god who brings civilization to the Americas.12 Humphrey relies on the Christian trope of the Fall, with the region’s forests construed as a Garden of Eden, indigenous Americans as Native Adams and Eves, and New England rum as the forbidden fruit. However, this Fall is not presented in a critical vein as a comment on the effects of colonialism but rather as a lighthearted source of frat-­boy humor. Orozco’s recourse to the story of Quetzalcoatl was an attempt to ground his American epic in an autochthonous myth. His perspective on European encounter and modernity is rooted in a critique of conquest and colonization. Humphrey’s reliance on the biblical story of the Fall reveals that his perspective on European colonialism is structured by the eschatological worldview and “imperialist nostalgia” of the settler, the very things Orozco addressed melancholically in his Epic.13 Accordingly, indigenous peoples are “doomed to perish” not because modes of European settlement forcibly displaced and dispersed their communities and ways of life but because of an unfortunate incompatibility between nature (Native Americans) and culture (Euro-­American settlement).14 The settler mourns this loss but views it as inevitable, and therefore he is neither culpable nor implicated in the processes of acculturation that he laments. Humphrey’s mural betrays its imperialist nostalgia in the stereotypical portrayal of its Native American subjects. Indigenous men lurk throughout the early scenes of Wheelock’s arrival, their comportment likened to the animals that populate the New England woods. In the first panel we see Native men crouching along the forest floor, hiding behind a tree, and poking their heads around Wheelock’s five-­hundred-­gallon barrel of rum (figures c.2–­c.3). They seem to sniff and skulk like feline predators, their attitudes conveying the same range of curiosity and potential alarm as the bear and

CONCLUSION  265

figure c.2. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–­ 1966, “Oh, Eleazar Wheelock Was a Very Pious Man . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 1), 1938, Oil on canvas adhered to wall (Marouflage), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.939.19.1.

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moose that accompany them. Humphrey suggests that Wheelock’s presence augurs trouble by pairing him with a skunk. In the two scenes that follow, Wheelock’s rotund physique is contrasted with the exaggerated physical perfection of the Sachem, a “noble savage” indeed (figure c.4). Their encounter is depicted as cordial and uncoerced, with a trade implicit. Wheelock stands to the left with his Bible, drum, and rum and doffs his hat to the chief, who takes his hand in friendship while gesturing toward his “ten squaws.” This scene replicates a common motif in early American paintings and material culture, such as Benjamin West’s William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771–­ 72), which served as propaganda for settler claims to indigenous lands.15 By presenting the two parties on equal ground and offering up goods for trade, the inequities of power in the colonial arrangement are assuaged. The following two panels present renderings of seminude indigenous women in an assortment of poses that allow Humphrey to reveal the idealized female form in its entirety while also offering his exclusively male audience a life-­size pinup spread (figures c.5–­c.6). In dedicating nearly a third of the grill’s walls to these “cute little Nannies, their fronts and their fannies Exposed to the rays of the sun,” Humphrey expanded their significance from a brief mention in Hovey’s song to a major visual element in his Paradise theme.16 While Eve was instrumental to the Fall of Man, these women betray a childlike innocence as they play dress-­up in Wheelock’s outerwear and examine his book upside down. Situated as contraband and on the margins of Wheelock and the chief’s transaction, they contribute to the

figure c.3. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–­1966, “Five Hundred Gallons of New England Rum . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 2), 1938, Oil on canvas adhered to wall (Marouflage), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.939.19.2.

figure c.4. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–­ 1966, “The Big Chief That Met Him Was . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 3), 1938, Oil on canvas adhered to wall (Marouflage), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.939.19.3.

Edenic theme by presenting gender inequality as part of the natural order of things. Their overt appeal to a sexualized male gaze rejects Orozco’s critique of heterosexual coupling as the conduit for cross-­cultural cooperation in his “Anglo-­” and “Hispano-­American” sequence, and their status as pinups reminds us that inclusion within the visual field does not necessarily enable gender (or racial) equity. As the foregoing description suggests, Humphrey’s mural takes the motif of encounter and civilization from Orozco’s cycle but strips it of its critical

CONCLUSION  267

figure c.5. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–­ 1966, “He Had Tobacco by the Cord . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 4), 1938, Oil on canvas adhered to wall (Marouflage), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.939.19.4. figure c.6. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–­ 1966, “Eleazar and the Big Chief Harangued . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 5), 1938, Oil on canvas adhered to wall (Marouflage), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.939.19.5.

standpoint in favor of a founding story that is more ideologically consistent with the nativist self-­mythologizing of white, Anglo-­Saxon, Protestant America. This contrast is even more evident in the scenes depicting matriculation and the chorus. Not only does he offer up an alternative vision of education to Orozco’s “Gods of the Modern World” but his “forms aboriginous” are also a rescripting of Orozco’s critical mestizaje. To further unpack the thematic parallels and reversals of intent, I turn again to Humphrey’s verse for Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, where he pro268  CONCLUSION

claims, “I’ll do a design that will never malign All learning as skeletal dust.” 17 It might be surprising, given Humphrey’s concerns about Orozco’s attack on academic learning, that Humphrey, too, lampoons Dartmouth’s founding mission as a drunken swindle (figure c.7). We see Wheelock and the Sachem seated on chopped-­down tree trunks, legs akimbo as they consume the whole curriculum. Each holds a pipe, while all around them are signs of their debauchery. Wheelock’s shaving cup is turned on its side, suggesting an unkempt man; the big chief’s admission papers, grades, and composition books lie strewn about the forest. Likewise, the latter has added a silver crown to his feathered headdress, as if to suggest a Falstaffian buffoon. A rustic wooden placard announces the founding of the college as animals flee the scene on either side, with the exception of a serpent that intercedes between the master and his pupil. Humphrey equates the “big chief’s” matriculation with the destruction of the wilderness through his inclusion of a freshly cut tree stump and ax. While this is a reference to Wheelock’s clearing of a small part of the forest to build classrooms after the college’s founding, it also resonates with a predominant motif in American landscape painting that recalls the centrality of the “woodsman’s ax” in James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America. Pace Adams’s unfettered faith in American destiny, Barbara Novak argues that the tree stump is a “double-­edged symbol of progress” as it conjures “the axe that destroys and builds.” 18 This icon, she contends, is an expression of

figure c.7. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–­ 1966, “They Founded Dartmouth College . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Panel 6), 1938, Oil on canvas adhered to wall (Marouflage), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.939.19.6.

CONCLUSION  269

Euro-­American ambivalence regarding the effects of “man’s traces” on “nature’s nation.” 19 The felled tree is analogous to the “noble savage,” displaced onto the landscape. As an anxious emblem of settler identification with nature/​­Native Americans, it betrays a desire for and a fear of the wild. U.S. American painters even painted small, nearly indiscernible Native Americans hiding or warily eyeing civilization within the wild passages of the landscape. At one with their habitat and stripped of signs of cultural organization, they imply that, like the wilderness, indigenous life will be extinguished by the inevitable encroachment of progress. But can we assume that Humphrey’s inclusion of this landscape trope is his way of speaking to the deleterious effects of European settlement on the region’s indigenous people? Not exactly, for the indigenous figures in Humphrey’s mural are not representations of indigenous peoples but rather images of Dartmouth Men. As a writer for Dartmouth Alumni Magazine noted early in the mural’s progress, “certain anomalies” appear in Humphrey’s interpretation of Hovey’s song, most notably, “the Big Chief who met him will wear a large d.” 20 “Bleeding Green” and imbibing in college drinking traditions, the big chief is none other than a natural letterman. The figures and objects gathered in the panel over the grill’s hearth illustrating the chorus reveal that these men are Dartmouth students in Indian disguise. Humphrey proclaimed as much in his Dartmouth Alumni Magazine piece when he wrote, “My forms aboriginous will all be indigenous to the haunts that as students we knew.” 21 In this final image filled with visual codes that would be legible to any Dartmouth Man, Wheelock dons a friendship medal and ladles rum from a metal bowl (figure c.8). This is likely a reference to the silver montieth given to Wheelock by royal Governor John Wentworth at the college’s first commencement ceremony in 1771 and passed on subsequently by each president to his successor at his inauguration. Not only does the big chief sport a green “d” on his broad chest (a reference to the “war paint” Dartmouth students slathered on their bodies for athletic events); he also wears the green key pendant on a chain around his neck, signifying his membership in one of Dartmouth’s traditional honorary service societies. The physiognomies of the Native men in this panel no longer resemble the noble or savage profiles seen in earlier scenes. Rather, they appear suspiciously like portraits of white men in redface. It is known that Humphrey based his image of Wheelock on his father-­in-­ law, and it is rumored that one non-­Native woman (a Smith student) posed for all the images of indigenous women in the mural. It is therefore likely that Humphrey immortalized students or friends in this final scene. This is

270  CONCLUSION

figure c.8. Walter Beach Humphrey, American, 1892–­ 1966, “Fill the Bowl . . . ,” Mural illustrating Richard Hovey’s Song “Eleazar Wheelock” (Title and Chorus, Panel 7), 1938, Oil on canvas adhered to wall (Marouflage), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Commissioned by Trustees of Dartmouth College; P.939.19.7.

particularly evident in the man who places his tankard between Wheelock’s legs to catch the stream of golden rum cascading from his bowl. His features are too specific and anglicized to be those of a generic indigenous figure. The location of the stream evokes thoughts of urine and lore about hazing rituals in male fraternities, an inside joke that is underlined by the fact that this man wears a “freshman beanie” signaling his lowly status within the group. Playing Indian was in keeping with the tendency at the college to don indigenous disguise or engage in faux Indian rituals during key ceremonial moments, such as athletic games or graduation. As part of the now-­banned practices associated with the “Dartmouth Indian,” the “Hovey Mural” represents what Philip Deloria chronicles as a “persistent tradition in American culture,” from the Tea Party Mohawks to the contemporary New Age movement.22 He writes that at different historical moments, “Americans have returned to the Indian, reinterpreting the intuitive dilemmas surrounding Indianness to meet the circumstances of their times.” 23

CONCLUSION  271

Humphrey’s mural embodies the contradictory attitude toward Indianness that structures national identity within the United States. Through the contrast between Wheelock and the Sachem, the mural sets up a familiar opposition between the civilized white settler and his savage Indian Other. But at the same time the indigenous men are emblems of an authentic Americanness in their relationship to the regional landscape and their healthy athletic physiques. “By imagining Indian Others as a kind of us rather than a them,” Deloria explains, “one could more easily gain access to those Indian/​­American qualities and make them one’s own.” 24 But while Humphrey’s mural is consistent with early American modes of playing Indian, it also betrays what Deloria describes as a shift in the modern period from identifying with an “internal” Indian Other to constructing the Indian Other as an “exterior authenticity.” 25 This shift coincides with the final stages of the reservation system. White perceptions of the negative consequences of this policy for Native Americans—​­“drinking, tramping, and laziness”—​­were now viewed by some as “examples of the corrosive evil of modern society.” 26 As if to counter this perceived threat to Americanness, antimodernists now hailed an Indianness exterior to mainstream society, paradoxically embracing these “sins” as evidence of a more authentic lifestyle. Thus, Deloria writes, “laziness became freedom from labor, tramping became a carefree lifestyle, and refusal to leave the reservation meant a folk rootedness to rural place.” 27 In this respect, playing Indian in the 1930s was akin to the racial structure of feeling that motivated the white working classes to invent blackface minstrelsy a century earlier. In Humphrey’s comic celebration of drunkenness, we see this paradoxical imaginary at work. His Indians demonstrate the evils of civilization, while the very effects of this Fall (drunken debauchery) are lovingly embraced as evidence of a robust, masculine life lived outside the moral constraints of modern society. “Going Native,” in this instance, represents an antimodern primitivism that contrasts with the modernist primitivism of Orozco’s mural. It is telling that Humphrey executes the scene that Orozco decided not to portray in his supplement, where he eschewed not only a panel devoted to Wheelock teaching indigenous students but also an image of a square-­jawed athletic male undergraduate (figure c.9). Orozco converted the Dartmouth Man into a working-­class racialized subject, reflecting a radically subaltern image of the subject who performs the mural’s epic.28 Humphrey, on the other hand, reflects the Dartmouth Man as he prefers to see himself, as an American Indian in disguise. Instead of making a bid for a future in which the colonial legacies of encounter and conquest might be redressed, he endorses settler identity politics.

272  CONCLUSION

In this elision between the Native body and the Dartmouth undergrad, Humphrey repeats, albeit “in a lighter vein,” Wheelock’s betrayal of both Samson Occom and the college’s original mission when he converted his school for Native youth into a college for elite white men. The insensitive, symbolic politics of playing Indian at a college that had only recently reactivated its commitment to Native education is why Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” came under attack in the 1970s and Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization did not. For while colonial melancholy and playing Indian are both expressions of settler identity politics, the former was articulated to a radical, anticolonial social and cultural agenda, and the latter partook of a reactionary, antimodernist colonial revival. Ironically, Humphrey’s solicitous attempt to avoid controversy with a “real Dartmouth mural” would backfire, as his “Hovey Mural” was viewed as not only kitsch but also a source of cultural harm out of step with Dartmouth’s increasingly diverse faculty and student body.29 The presence of women as well as nonwhite and working-­class students ruptured the homosocial community that Humphrey assumed, calling into question his representation of indigenous women as pinups and his cavalier perpetuation of the “drunken Indian” stereotype. President Hopkins defended Orozco’s mural against calls for its destruction in the 1930s, but President John Kemeny decided, reluctantly, to shutter Humphrey’s mural in 1979 amid a chorus of protests against censorship. As part of a broader attempt to squelch the multifarious modes of playing Indian at Dartmouth, the concealing of Humphrey’s murals was an initial step in the college’s efforts to reckon with the legacies of its origins in the material and symbolic violence of colonialism.30 Since that time the mural was reopened as a site of instruction before a decision was reached, in 2018, to remove it and place it in storage. The public that encounters both murals today is not only gender diverse but also consists of visitors from a variety of cultural, national, racial, and

figure c.9. José Clemente Orozco, Mexican, 1883–­ 1949, The Epic of American Civilization: study of Eleazar Wheelock with Indians, 1932–­34, Graphite on cream paper, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Purchased through gifts from Kirsten and Peter Bedford, Class of 1989; Jane and Raphael Bernstein, and Walter Burke, Class of 1944; Mr. and Mrs. Richard D. Lombard, Class of 1953; Nathan Pearson, Class of 1932; David V. Picker, Class of 1953; Rodman C. Rockefeller, Class of 1954; Kenneth Roman Jr., Class of 1952; and Adolph Weil Jr., Class of 1935; D.988.52.265.

CONCLUSION  273

ethnic backgrounds. These audiences bring different concerns to bear upon the murals and are more likely to view Orozco’s Epic as consistent with Dartmouth’s institutional aspirations than Humphrey’s unapologetically exclusive vision of the college as a den of white, Anglo-­Saxon, Protestant male privilege. Humphrey’s mural revels in stereotypes about indigenous peoples that have long served the formation of U.S. national identity without any intimation of the serviceable ghosts that haunt this imaginary. Some six decades later, a second artistic response to Orozco’s mural would address these stereotypes head-­on and explore the very dialectic of “envy . . . [and] repulsion, sympathetic identification . . . [and] fear” that scholars like Lott, Cheng, and Weheliye, among others, have identified as the structure of racial feeling that animates U.S. America’s melancholic relation to its lost but retained racialized populations.31 Performing the politics of disidentification, this response to Orozco’s Epic activated the twilight condition encrypted in the supplement, suggesting emancipatory possibilities that eschew the politics of affirmative recognition in favor of something “which can be imagined but not (yet) described.” 32 The “Evil Grandchildren of Orozco”: Orozco ­MEXotica “I am the aesthetic grandchild of Orozco.” —​­Guillermo Gómez-­Peña (2004)

In 2002 the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts, fittingly named after President Hopkins, commissioned the artist Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and members of the performance art collective La Pocha Nostra to stage a performance on campus over two nights in the spring term (May 17 and 18). The artists—​­Gómez-­Peña, Michelle Ceballos, and Juan Ybarra—​­sited their work in the Orozco Room, using the mural as backdrop and inspiration for their exploration of identity and stereotype, or what Gómez-­Peña calls the dialectic of fear and desire that constitutes the “First World’s” relationship to the “so-­called Third World Other.” 33 The commission was coordinated with Professor Douglas Moody’s course, “Representations of/​­from Latino/​­as in the Media and the Arts,” and it involved student volunteers who participated in a several weeks–­long workshop with the artists to create what would become Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­ Peña Underground at Dartmouth. The artists brought a radical theater pedagogy they had developed over many years to design the performance.34 Ultimately, several students joined the performance collective. Together they created a two-­hour multimedia event that incorporated screens with

274  CONCLUSION

figure c.10. Detail of Occom Pond Singers in front of “Migration” panel, contributing to the soundbed of Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002, Orozco Room, Baker Berry Library, Dartmouth College.

projected “video-­graffitis,” 35 theatrical lighting, an aural montage of live drumming by members of Dartmouth’s Occom Pond Singers, a powwow drum group, and recorded European opera, U.S. American rock, hip-­hop, and pop music as well as musical genres, such as Nortec, Banda, and roc en español (figure c.10). As the video-­graffitis bombarded viewers with quick edits, Spanglish lectures, and horror-­style film montages, this “soundbed” constituted the Orozco Room as an “aural border,” a geographically disarticulated marker of place—​­through sound—​­that gives voice to the “interstitial hybridities and identities-­in-­flux that have been generated along the border since it was arbitrarily drawn in 1848.” 36 Each performer was stationed in front of one of Orozco’s panels as “emblematic tableaux vivants.” 37 They acted out these exaggerated personae, rooted in exotic stereotypes, through embodied scripts while engaging with one another as well as with members of the audience who were invited to participate in the performance. Other performers circulated through the crowd, while “docents” commented on the meaning of the work using a “conceptual libretto” consisting of excerpts from art criticism, theory, and history. Toward the end of the performance, volunteers from the audience were invited to participate in a “human mural.” 38 They donned props and costumes provided by the artists and were posed in various configurations by Gómez-­Peña. The two-­hour event culminated with a ritual crucifixion to the strains of Johnny Cash’s “Jesus, I Don’t Want to Die Alone,” while the performers and audience members gathered as witnesses. At the song’s end

CONCLUSION  275

the performers walked silently out of the corridor, thus bringing the event to a close. While Orozco ­MEXotica was site-­specific, Gómez-­Peña, Ceballos, and Ybarra each performed a variant of their stock personae as “ethno-­cyborgs” and invited the students to invent their own. Gómez-­Peña calls these personae “artificial savages,” writing that these “composite identities [are] . . . manufactured with the following formula in mind: one quarter stereotype; one quarter audience projection; one quarter aesthetic artifact; and one quarter unpredictable personal/​­social monster.” 39 These “ethno-­cyborgs” reflect the desires and fears that dictate cultural stereotyping and the forms of political violence they authorize. As an open performance in which viewers are invited to participate, the experiences that Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra orchestrate involves people in consensual games in which they are required to make aesthetic, ethical, and political decisions that allow them to reflect upon the extent to which the “other is you.” 40 As Gómez-­Peña writes, “We are all racist and sexist; we are all horny, tender, playful and violent; it’s human nature; we are all implicated in this madness. Let’s figure it out together. Let’s cross each other’s borders and see what happens.” 41 At the start of the performance Ceballos, stationed in front of the “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” panel, stood with her breasts exposed and a strap-­on dildo obscuring her pubis. Positioned in front of a large cross, she donned a face mask in homage to Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista uprising and combined it with a huge sombrero akin to those worn by Mexican charros. Throughout the performance she deployed a number of props, embodied the dominatrix, and provoked viewers and participants with sexually explicit language, inviting them to engage in transgressive acts such as simulated fellatio, lap dances, and French kissing (figure c.11). Ceballos’s performance of “extreme sexuality” apes the extent to which such sexual “perversion” is a mainstay of what Gómez-­Peña calls the “mainstream bizarre.” 42 The mainstream bizarre is his term for “global culture gone wrong,” the result of the ramifying processes of globalized media and corporate multiculturalism that has “blurred the borders” between audience and performer, marginal and mainstream.43 Whereas a decade earlier the explicit performances of the nea Four had precipitated the defunding of federal support for the arts, by the early 2000s, Gómez-­Peña observes, “Baroque forms of racialized transsexuality, teen prostitution, incest and family love triangles performed by ‘normal’ working class Americans are displayed daily on talk shows,” while “sexual fetishes, hardcore s&m, and theatrical sex are regular topics on hbo and Bravo.” 44 Far from representing a loosening of morality, these spectacles of “extreme sexuality,” he argues,

276  CONCLUSION

figure c.11. Detail of Michelle Ceballos in her guise as a Zapatista dominatrix with viewer/participant in front of “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002, Orozco Room, Baker Berry Library, Dartmouth College.

belie a “profound puritanism” born of the alienation and disconnection of a wired body politic.45 Within this context, the search for such spectacles is on a continuum with other extremist desires: neo-­Nazi websites, recipes for bombs, snuff films, and so on. Thus, Ceballos’s persona as a dominatrix captures this cultural phenomenon while also returning it to an interactive experience with another body. She performs the fantasies that animate the mainstream bizarre, inviting audience members to act out the desires that motivate such searches but in public and for an audience. By linking the quest for extreme sex to other forms of power and resistance, such as the Zapatistas’ exploitation of social media to disseminate their resistance to the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), the Mexican state, and its neoliberal policies of privatization, Ceballos links sex, race, and power to the geopolitical and economic policies of globalization. Ceballos’s persona literalizes the desires that led Humphrey to paint a pinup array in the “Hovey Mural.” His construction of indigenous women as “cute little Nannies” with their “fronts and their fannies Exposed to the rays of the sun” speaks to the erotic fixations of white male students at an all-­male college in the 1930s.46 Safely ensconced behind the doors of their private club, they were free to enjoy the prerogatives of the colonizer to visually consume the land and its indigenous inhabitants as sexualized objects. Ceballos’s dominatrix confuses the First World / ​­Third World relation that Humphrey’s mural presumes, as men and women respond to her sexual advances. Her participants are often blindfolded, removing the scopic pleasure of the gaze and subjecting themselves, willingly, to simulated sex

CONCLUSION  277

acts in front of the audience. At another moment she takes off the blindfold and begins passionately kissing her “victim/​­customer,” an act that could be read either as a welcome invitation to live sex acts or as a gross violation of their trust. There is never a moment in her performance that the audience can retreat to the private sphere and passively consume extreme sex, and the mixed-­gender space of the corridor makes the kind of homosocial comfort that Dartmouth Men once enjoyed in the Hovey Grill impossible. Ybarra also performed nude. He set up initially in front of the “The Machine” panel with Nortec blaring from the speakers around him (figure c.12). He painted his body blue with yellow stripes, like that of Huitzilpochtli, the Aztecs’ patron deity, depicted as one of the banished pagan gods in the “Coming of Quetzalcoatl” scene as well as in effigy in “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (see figures 2.1 and 2.10). He covered his body with a mix of signifiers of indigeneity, technology, and bondage while wielding a number of props that included a neon cross, a rubber alien mask, military clothing from armor to desert camo, a spear, sunglasses, a chicken carcass, and bread, among other things. Throughout the performance he pantomimed a series of violent acts against his own person, vocalizing in a faux-­indigenous tongue. By its end he placed the alien mask over his head and mounted the giant cross in an act of auto-­crucifixion. Mimicking the crucified Mexican laborer at the center of David Alfaro Si­quei­ros’s partially destroyed Tropical America (1928) mural on Olvera Street, he referenced the political violence enacted against so-­called illegal aliens post-­nafta with the passage of laws like California’s Proposition 187. In this sense, he carried the theme of sacrifice from Orozco’s mural into the performance but reversed its primitivizing figure c.12. Detail of Juan Ybarra in front of “The Machine” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco M ­ EXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002, Orozco Room, Baker Berry Library, Dartmouth College.

278  CONCLUSION

figure c.13. Detail of Guillermo Gómez-­Peña engaging student/viewer/ participant in a tableau vivant. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002, Orozco Room, Baker Berry Library, Dartmouth College.

disdain for the Aztecs. Rather than crafting Huitzilopochtli as the grisly purveyor of ancient human sacrifice, his crucifixion at the end of the performance spoke to the way that Aztec culture was sacrificed through the spiritual conquest and converted into syncretic Christian rituals that do not bear the same stigma as ritual sacrifice. Gómez-­Peña positioned himself in front of the “Hispano-­America” panel, in homage to his Mexican origins (figure c.13). Donning a variety of elements that he has developed over the years in his “border-­brujo,” “Mexterminator,” “Naftaztec,” and “robo-­xolotl” personae, he broadcast a verbal montage, gesticulated wildly, and dressed up in a number of costumes associated with touristic stereotypes, from a Zorro-­type mask and cape, to ruffled skirts associated with the women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to a crazed hula dancer. However, rather than using clothing that appears to be authentic, his costumes are riddled with shiny, cheap, and glittering trim, recalling the highly commodified touristic curios one finds in airport souvenir shops. In addition to functioning as a dj within the M ­ EXotica soundbed, he invited audience members to confess their desires and to interact with him. At one point, he erotically licked and sucked on a realistic replica of a human heart, playing the part of the stigmatized cannibal and recalling the human sacrifice that Orozco depicts in the “Ancient Human Sacrifice” panel. At another, he allowed a viewer to place a rifle in his mouth, conjuring the violent erotica of the mainstream bizarre. And at yet another, a spectator was given a leash that was tethered to a collar on Gómez-­Peña’s neck. He was instructed to hold the leash while the artist leaned and swayed, making the spectator/​

CONCLUSION  279

figure c.14. Detail of Dartmouth student performing the stereotype of black “super-­predator/lynching victim” in front of the “Modern Migration of the Spirit” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002, Orozco Room, Baker Berry Library, Dartmouth College.

p­ articipant increasingly responsible not only for keeping him upright but also for enacting a form of physical violence against his body. The students concocted a series of characters, from a Haitian “voodoo princess,” to a Kabuki club girl, to a Miss Mexico dressed as a calavera, to a flamenco dancer, to a dead pachuca lying amid flowers with a rosary wrapped around her clasped hands. One student, Amit Arnaud, dressed as a “transgender revolutionary.” From the waist up, he was a stereotypical Mexican guerrilla with rifle, cartridge belts, a white cotton shirt, and sombrero. From the waist down, he was a sexualized table dancer in a scarlet tutu and high heels. Echoing the Zapata-­esque revolutionary in the “Hispano-­ America” panel, he sought to embody classic gender stereotypes about Mexicans: the macho, on the one hand, and the sexualized Latina, on the other (see figure 3.18). As a racially ambiguous queer student, he wanted to challenge gender norms to explore identity and different conceptions of physical and sexual power. Wandering throughout the stations, he confronted other performers as well as visitors with his rifle, observing their responses to the fake weapon. Yet another student, a Haitian American man, created a student-­graduate character in reference to the matriculating fetuses in the “Gods of the Modern World” panel (figure c.14). In addition to a mortarboard, he wore a white T-­shirt riddled with bloody bullet holes and a blue bandana, akin to those associated with Los Angeles street gangs. Performing a hybrid student / ​ ­gang-­banger / ​­black male “super-­predator,” he situated himself in front of the “Modern Migration of the Spirit.” During the performance he sat, staring

280  CONCLUSION

menacingly, stroking a chicken with a noose around his neck and periodically dragging off of a lit cigarette. From time to time he would growl “What the fuck you looking at?” to spectators, playing the part of the threatening black male. This stereotype was famously conjured by President Bill Clinton to justify the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which critics argue contributed to the precipitous rise in the sentencing and incarceration of poor people of color. It has also authorized the shooting of unarmed black men from Amadou Diallo to Philando Castile, to name only two high-­ profile cases from then and now. In this sense, he brought the terror perpetuated through lynching, a topic Orozco responded to in his prints, to bear upon the contemporary criminal justice system’s treatment of black lives. By linking U.S. American racial fears to the mural, he brought out the encrypted fear of Haiti that structures its meditation on the two Americas. Moreover, his bloody T-­shirt marked him as the walking dead, giving visual expression to the specter of the Haitian zombie that haunts the mural’s Modern half. As this rough catalog of characters suggests, the student performers selected personae in response to both the iconographic program of Orozco’s Epic and their own experience of identity. Another student-­performer noted that she chose the “voodoo princess” because of her Haitian heritage (figure c.15). However, until she workshopped her character, she had no real relationship to this stereotype of Haitian religious traditions, imported as a consequence of the U.S. occupation of the island. Through her research

figure c.15. Detail of Dartmouth student performing the stereotype of a “Voodoo Princess” in front of “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl” panel. Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Under­ground at Dartmouth, 2002, Orozco Room, Baker Berry Library, Dartmouth College.

CONCLUSION  281

figure c.16. Detail of Dartmouth student performing the stereotype of a “Kabuki club girl.” Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and La Pocha Nostra Collective, Orozco ­MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-­Peña Underground at Dartmouth, 2002, Orozco Room, Baker Berry Library, Dartmouth College.

and the development of her choreography, she came to realize that Haitian Vodun “does mean something, [it’s] not a magic trick.” Reflecting on the Pocha Nostra process ten years later, she wrote, “growing up with a Haitian culture and the rich mixed legacy of Brooklyn, I had my fill of personas—​ ­what people expected of me . . . the Mexotica [sic] performance made me reach into those experiences and face what made me most frustrated, hurt, annoyed, or perplexed. It was like becoming and owning what people feared I was, giving the world what they want.” “The stereotypes themselves were complex, multifaceted characters that evolved on their own,” she continued. “They were unlike me, but in many ways were still me.” 47 Similarly, the “Kabuki club girl” engaged the fetish of the Japanese geisha in homage to her ethnic heritage as an Asian American (figure c.16). Using the stylized gestures and facial expressions associated with Kabuki theater, she combined this erotic performance tradition with modern “club girls,” the female sex workers who populate bars in Japan’s red-­light district. While Kabuki began as a female art form, it was converted into an all-­male theatrical genre in the mid-­seventeenth century when women were banned from performing and adolescent men took on the female roles. Thus the genre, once a low and erotic art form and now understood as a hallowed national tradition, has long been immersed in a border-­crossing ethos, combining gender-­bending and sexual fantasy with class confusion as well as a shift from low to high cultural categories. Her performance, thereby, combined the exotic stereotype of the inscrutable Orient with the global commodity of the cute and sexually available club girl. In the process she tapped into 282  CONCLUSION

the more radical ethos and gender trouble of the Kabuki genre, lifting it out of the somber category of national treasure and placing it back into the ribald context of popular entertainment. In this way, her investigation of “her” culture through the theatricality of ethnic and gender stereotype enacts the kind of disidentification that Orozco’s supplement demands of its viewer. By siting Orozco ­MEXotica in the Orozco Room, the artists activated the utopian dimension of the Epic’s critique of U.S. American conceptions of history and national identity. Regarding his decolonial strategies, Gómez-­ Peña describes the spaces they create as “fictional center[s] . . . [that] push the dominant culture to the margins, treat it as exotic and unfamiliar.” 48 Operating via “contingencies and inversions,” they ask: “What if Latinos were in power and could decide the terms of the debate? What if the United States was Mexico? What if Spanish was the official lingua franca? What if imagination was a form of political praxis? What if Anglo-­Americans were mere nomadic minorities?” 49 In response to these questions, they convert the space of performance into a heterotopia and an audiotopia, substituting the “brown house” for the white house, asserting Spanglish as the dominant language and hybridity as the dominant culture.50 In many ways, the Orozco Room is just such a heterotopia. With his Epic, Orozco—​­a Latino avant la lettre—​­decided the terms of debate about American civilization and our collective responsibility. He also deconstructed the bordering discourses of the two Americas, demanding that U.S. Americans understand themselves as an empire akin to that of both the Aztecs and the Spanish. By emphasizing the indigenous and Spanish heritage of the American antiempire, he marginalized Anglo-­American experience and history, revealing the settler state to be a colonial state, subject to the same specters of violence and injustice that haunt Mexico’s postcolonial national imaginary. Orozco’s mural, despite its queering of Frank’s fantasy of pan-­American copulation, is relentlessly homosocial in its imaginary. In this sense it is more like Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” than Orozco M ­ EXotica. Nonetheless, it is Orozco’s insight into the embodied experience of geopolitical borders that the Pocha Nostra performers ramified. For this reason, Gómez-­Peña joked that they were “Orozco’s evil grandchildren,” polymorphously perverse, where Orozco was heteronormative, reveling in their status as “impure” “cultural traitors”—​­Chicanglos—​­whereas Orozco returned to Mexico and never really revisited the messy feelings induced by racialization that he experienced during his time in Gringolandia.51 As a radical act of the imagination, Orozco’s Epic proposes itself as a form of political praxis. The supplement evokes the twilight space of projection necessary for radical forms of identification that decenter the category of

CONCLUSION  283

Man, premised as it is on the white, male subject. Through the darkened theatrical space of Orozco ­MEXotica, the Orozco Room became the kind of twilight space that Cheng describes in her analysis of Anna Deavere Smith’s docudramas. Participants had to make themselves part of the act, to interpret, and to project. Like Twilight Bey, one of the characters Smith impersonates, the Orozco ­MEXotica performers create a historico-­temporal limbo where a repressed past continuously erupts into the present. In this way, the performance establishes yet another temporality for the mural, eschewing the eschatological time of Humphrey’s Fall from Paradise in favor of the messianic time of Orozco’s Epic. Amelia Jones argues that by inhabiting the fetish for such long durations during performances like Orozco ­MEXotica, Gómez-­Peña and the members of La Pocha Nostra enact an “anamorphic distortion on the perspectival logic of objectification.” 52 By “strategically immersing themselves within the field of seeing and knowing,” she argues that these artists bring the fetish “elsewhere, other than back to the putative centered white, male, heterosexual, middle class subject of identity politics discourse.” 53 In so doing they shift the concept of identity from the fixed categories of “self” and “other” to a psychodynamic and intersubjective process that is open-­ended, rooted in violent fantasy but also potentially transformative. The transformative possibilities of this kind of identity politics are rooted in Gómez-­Peña’s experiences as a “Chicanoized Mexican.” Like Orozco, Gómez-­Peña crossed the U.S.-­Mexican border to pursue professional opportunities. Fleeing the stultifying Mexican art world and the state’s promotion of an ossified official culture, he, too, rejected the cultural discourses that were in formation during the 1930s and against which Orozco had labored. Like Orozco, his experience in the United States caused Gómez-­Peña to question his relationship to the nation-­state and to consider the ways that the national border is embodied. Whereas Orozco only intimates these insights through the encrypted specters that haunt his fresco, hybridity, borders, and identity have been the centerpiece of Gómez-­Peña’s practice as a performance artist. Describing his early experiences as a migrated Mexican living in California, he writes, “We simply couldn’t escape our marked bodies. Being a Mexican ‘alien’ in southern California meant to wake up every day and choose to remain so by consciously performing our Mexicanness.” 54 Ultimately, he credits Chicano/​­as and U.S. Latino/​­as with helping him to convert this experience of self-­alienation into a performance art practice. “Through them,” he writes, “I discovered that my art could be developed as a means to explore and reinvent my multiple and ever-­shifting identities (something that had been unthinkable in Mexico).” 55 As a consequence of

284  CONCLUSION

meeting politicized Latino/​­as in the United States, he began to understand himself not as a globe-­trotting Mexican artist (an idealized and majoritarian category in his homeland) but as an ethnic minority, a stigmatized racial subject within the U.S. body politic. This shift in self-­perception he attributes to the U.S. racial environment, which projects violent and constraining stereotypes onto the bodies of migrated Mexicans. Living in and through these enforced stereotypes helped Gómez-­Peña to understand identity as mutable and situationally produced. I believe Orozco had a similar insight while working in the United States. I have argued that this insight forms the political unconscious of his Epic, a racial structure of feeling “residing at the very edge of semantic availability” and “only dimly . . . felt” in his time.56 This “American feeling” encrypted within the “idea” that animates Orozco’s mural was activated by Orozco M ­ EXotica through the deterritorialized borderscape of the performance and its anamorphic distortions of the racial fetish. The messianic time of the performance suggests that the way through our melancholic condition is to “radically resignify[ ] the order and structure of the world and our role in it.” 57 Both Orozco and Gómez-­Peña imagine a “fictional center,” radically resignifying the American epic and positing racial justice as the responsibility shared equally by the two Americas. In their inducements to the viewer, as performer or participant, they task us with the job of taking on the concerns of a repressed past as our own, to disidentify with the racialized object, to inhabit the stereotype, and to establish community-­as-­relation, structured as it is in dominance, but emancipatory nonetheless. As the command at the end of the Orozco ­MEXotica performance claims, we “exit this way.”

CONCLUSION  285

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notes

Introduction

1 José Clemente Orozco, “The Dartmouth Frescoes: Their Significance,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, November 1933, 7–­8 (emphasis in original). 2 Handwritten statement written by Orozco during his second visit to Dartmouth in early May 1932 for a press release issued on May 25, 1932. Cited in Jacquelynn Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization: The Mural at Dartmouth College (1932–­24),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 158. 3 Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. 4 The scholarly literature on Quetzalcoatl is vast. Some of the key texts to question or nuance its role in the conquest are Davíd Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myth and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition, rev. ed. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000); Enrique Florescano, The Myth of Quetzalcoatl, translated by Lysa Hochroth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Susan D. Gillespie, The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–­1813, translated by Benjamin Keen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); James Lockhart, ed., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings, and the Translation of Empire, 1492–­1637 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Camilla Townshend, “No One Said It Was Quetzalcoatl: Listening to the Indians in the Conquest of Mexico,” History Compass 1 (2003): 1–­14; and Camilla Townshend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 659–­87. 5 Susanne L. Wofford, “Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale: Virgil, Ovid, Spenser, and Native American Aetiology,” in Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community, edited by Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),” 241. 6 Wofford, “Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale,” 242.

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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25 26

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Wofford, “Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale,” 242. Wofford, “Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale,” 244. Wofford, “Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale,” 257. See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); and Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–­80. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verson, 1983), 206. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 206. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22–­26. See Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement: 1920–­1925” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1989). Leonard Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual: Diego Rivera’s National Palace Mural,” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 1 (1991): 18–­33. David Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997), 119–­24. Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist, 110–­24. Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist, 122. Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist, 122. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). Wofford, “Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale,” 242. See “The Charter of Dartmouth,” accessed October 7, 2017, http:/­​/w ­ ww​ .dartmo​.com​/­charter​/c­ harter.html. For a biography of Occom and the documentation pertaining to his role in the college’s founding, see “The Occom Circle” project at http:​/­​/­www.dartmouth​ .edu​/­~occom​/­. See Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), for a history of “playing Indian” in the United States; and Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), for the history of Dartmouth College’s relationship to slavery. José Clemente Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography, translated by Robert C. Stephenson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962), 157–­58. See Colin G. Calloway, “The Indians Wheelock Knew,” in Walter Beach Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” at Dartmouth College: A Cultural History, edited by Brian P. Kennedy and Katherine Hart (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2011). María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-­Whiteness, and Anglo-­American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxiii. Austen Barron Bailly, ed., Thomas Hart Benton: American Epics (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2015), 30–­36.

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 404. Adams, The Epic of America, 307. Adams, The Epic of America, 9. Adams, The Epic of America, 3. Adams, The Epic of America, 21. See Claire Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). See Alberto L. Hurtado, “Bolton and Turner: The Borderlands and American Exceptionalism,” Western Historical Quarterly 44 (2013): 5–­20. For Turner’s thesis, see Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Where Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History, edited by David J. Weber and Jane M. Rausch (Lanham, MD: sr Books, 1994). Antonio Barrenechea, “Good Neighbor​/­Bad Neighbor: Boltonian Americanism and Hemispheric Studies,” Comparative Literature 61, no. 3 (2009): 233. Herbert Eugene Bolton, “The Epic of Greater America,” American Historical Review 38 (1933): 451. Lorgia García-­Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 5. I take the term melancholy dialectics from Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama; and Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968). Judith Butler, “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 469. Butler, “Afterword,” 469. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 253–­64. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. Eng and Kazanjian, “Introduction,” 4. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4 (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 153. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 154. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 155. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 155. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 159. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 155. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 155. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  289

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

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Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 9. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 9. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 10. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 11. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 25. Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 17. Khanna, Dark Continents, 28, Khanna, Dark Continents, 27. Khanna, Dark Continents, 29. Khanna, Dark Continents, 22. Khanna, Dark Continents, 22. Khanna, Dark Continents, 25. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 10–­11. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 12. Cheng makes reference to Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2013); and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 13. Karim Murji, “Race,” in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (London: Blackwell, 2005), 291. See R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–­1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); John Kicza, “Native American, African, and Hispanic Communities during the Middle Period in the Colonial Americas,” Historical Archeology 31, no. 1 (1997): 9–­17; Maria Elena Martinez, “The Black Blood of New Spain,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2004): 479–­520; Bobby Vaughn, “Afro-­Mexico: Blacks, Indígenas, Politics, and the Greater Diaspora,” in Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-­Latinos, edited by Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 117–­36. See Magali Marie Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Painting (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), and Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-­ Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). See Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage, 1946), and Ben Vinson, Afroméxico: El Pulso de la población negra en México, una historia recordada, ovidada y vuelta a recorder (Mexico City: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004). José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, La raza cósmica, translated by Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1925] 1979), 40. See Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–­1940,”

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in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–­1940, edited by Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 17. See Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Emiko Saldívar Tanaka, “‘We Are Not Racists, We Are Mexicans’: Privilege, Nationalism, and Post-­Race Ideology in Mexico,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 4–­5 (2016): 515–­33; and Federico Navarrete Linares, México racista: Una denuncia (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2016). Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, “Flows and Counterflows: Latinas/os, Blackness, and Racialization in Hemispheric Perspective,” in Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos, edited by Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler, 3–36 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Here I am using Rabasa’s concept of being “with​/­out” history to characterize the eccentric relationship of the supplement to the mural proper. See José Rabasa, Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 181. Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 181. Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 181, in reference to Elin Diamond, “The Violence of the ‘We’: Politicizing Identification,” in Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentification: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12. Muñoz, Disidentification, 74. Muñoz, Disidentification, 74. Ilit Ferber, “Melancholy Philosophy: Freud and Benjamin,” E-­rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone 4, no. 1 (2006): 2. Ferber, “Melancholy Philosophy,” 8. Ferber, “Melancholy Philosophy,” 8. Ferber, “Melancholy Philosophy,” 8. Richard Iton, “Still Life,” Small Axe 17, no. 1 (2013): 33. Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 21. Holly, The Melancholy Art, 21. Holly, The Melancholy Art, 83. Holly, The Melancholy Art, 83. Alejandro Anreus, “Los Tres Grandes: Ideologies and Styles,” in Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greely, and Leonard Folgarait, eds., Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 42. Lott, Love and Theft and Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Steven Pokornowski, “Vulnerable Life: Zombies, Global Biopolitics, and the Reproduction of Structural Violence,” Humanities 5, no. 3 (2016): 71–­92.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION  291

97 Christopher Moreman and Cory James Rushton, “Introduction: Race, Colonialism, and the Evolution of the ‘Zombie,’” in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-­Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher Moreman and Cory James Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 7, in reference to A. Stinson, “Zombified Capital in the Postcolonial Capital: Circulation (of Blood) in Sony Labou Tansi’s Parentheses of Blood,” in Moreman and Rushton, Race, Oppression and the Zombie. 98 “Enfleshment” is Alexander Weheliye’s proposed alternative to the heuristic of “Man” put forth in his treatise, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 99 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8. 100 Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Party (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 101 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 101. 102 Orozco’s Dartmouth commission has been chronicled in a number of extant sources from which my summary has been derived. See Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization”; Laurance P. Hurlburt, “Dartmouth College, 1932–­34,” in The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 56–­88; and Sharon Lorenzo, “The Walls of My Dreams: The Commissioning of José Clemente Orozco’s Mural The Epic of American Civilization at Dartmouth College,” in Men of Fire: José Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock, with contributions by Mary K. Coffey, Sharon Lorenzo, Lisa Mintz Messinger, and Stephen Polcari (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2012), 55–63. 103 See Orozco, José Clemente Orozco. 104 For full access to every preparatory work that the college owns, see Dartmouth’s Digital Orozco website (http:​/­​/­www.dartmouth.edu​/­digitalorozco/). Orozco likely prepared many more studies for this mural. However, we do not know of or have access to the remaining sketches, assuming they still exist. 105 See Hurlburt, “Appendix A,” in The Mexican Muralists in the United States, 253–­56, for a discussion of the various media and techniques used by the Mexican muralists. 106 The Hood Museum of Art manages tours for late elementary, middle school, high school, Geisel Medical School, Tuck Business School, teachers, docents, and adult groups from the community on an annual basis. Tour statistics have been collected since 2010 that show numbers served running between 700 and 1,200 annually, with an uptick since 2015 when the museum was closed for renovation and this kind of education was oriented almost exclusively through the Orozco room. In addition to the museum’s programming, the development office and alumni affairs contract tours with faculty for their purposes. Professors from surrounding colleges and universities regularly bring their students to the mural. These tours are not counted in the museum’s statistics. 107 See the Digital Orozco website, which was created in 2012, and see the Hood 292  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

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Museum’s website dedicated to the mural, http:​/­​/­hoodmuseum.dartmouth​ .edu​/­explore​/­news​/­jose-­clemente-­orozco-­epic-­american-­civilization. As with the statistics cited above, those for curricular use have only been tabulated since 2010. However, in that time the number of tours the museum has coordinated for Dartmouth courses ranges from about two to nine annually, serving between 29 to 140 students in any given year. These numbers are low, as many of the curricular uses of the mural are managed by professors rather than museum staff. I, for example, integrate the mural into nearly all of my courses, as do many of my colleagues in the Art History Department and in other fields such as anthropology, theater, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean studies, English, comparative literature, studio art, history, and Spanish and Portuguese, to name only a few. Correspondence between Artemas Packard and José Clemente Orozco between March and April 1934, Box dl 34 (2) in folder 13, “Orozco Murals, 1934–35” file, Rauner Rare Book Room, Dartmouth College. Orozco, José Clemente Orozco; José Clemente Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 7, no. 4 (1940): 2–­11; José Clemente Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth,” in The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth, edited by Albert I. Dickerson (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1948); and José Clemente Orozco, “New World, New Races, and New Art,” in ¡Orozco! 1883–­1949 (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 46. Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 2–­11. Iton, “Still Life,” 33; and Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8. Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 100–­111. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Peter Osborn and Mathew Charles, “Walter Benjamin,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, accessed on May 26, 2013, http:​/­​/­plato.stanford.edu​/­archives​/­win2012​/­entries​/­benjamin​/­. García-­Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad.

Chapter 1: Orozco’s Melancholy Dialectics

Epigraph: Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 34. Walter Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 466. 1 Lamadito was Orozco’s derogatory term for his early paintings. According to one of his Dartmouth assistants: “Lamido is what a dog does when he licks his wounds. ‘Lamidito,’ applied to painting, means that the artist goes over

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION– CHAPTER 1  293

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

294  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

the same area again and again, like an artisan not like an artist painting with bravura. . . . Lamidito is something like a school exercise.” Unpublished letter from Carlos Sánchez to Jacquelynn Baas, quoted in Renato González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting: Easel Paintings, Drawings, Graphic Arts, and Mural Studies,” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­ 1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 78. I am relying in a general sense on Deleuze’s arguments about repetition as a function of difference rather than of identity. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Rivera and Si­quei­ros had been competing for years before formalizing their debate in 1934–­35. See David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counterrevolutionary Road,” New Masses, May 19, 1934, 16–­19, for Si­quei­ros’s published attack; and Maricela González Cruz Manharrez, La Polémica Si­quei­ros-­Rivera, planteamientos estético-­políticos, 1934–­1935 (Mexico City: Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, 1996), for a description and analysis of the public debate they staged subsequently in various venues in Mexico City. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counterrevolutionary Road,” 16–­19. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counterrevolutionary Road,” 19. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counterrevolutionary Road,” 19. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counterrevolutionary Road,” 19. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counterrevolutionary Road,” 19. Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix: Theory and Practice of the Cinematographic Mural in Si­quei­ros,” in Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, 1930–­1940, edited by Kafael Tovar et al. (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1997), 68–­95. See Jennifer Jolly, “Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, Josep Renau and Their Collaboration at the Mexican Electrician’s Syndicate,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (2008): 129–­51. Ida Rodríguez ­Prampolini, “Rivera’s Concept of History,” in Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, edited by Cynthia Newman Helms (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 134. Prampolini, “Rivera’s Concept of History,” 133. Prampolini, “Rivera’s Concept of History,” 133. Leonard Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual: Diego Rivera’s National Palace Mural,” Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 1 (1991): 18. Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual,” 25. Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual,” 25. Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual,” 25. Folgarait, “Revolution as Ritual,” 25. The mural was originally titled Portrait of Fascism; however, after Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov–­Ribbentrop nonaggression pact on August 23, 1939, aligned artists were instructed to drop their anti-­fascist activities and to treat

20 21 22

23

24

25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34

World War II as a battle between capitalism and fascism rather than characterizing socialism as the world-­historical opposition to fascism. This resulted not only in a name change but subtle changes in the iconography of the main wall as the team of artists endeavored to come into line with Comintern policy. See Jolly, “Art of the Collective.” Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 234. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States, 236. For detailed descriptions of the team’s analysis of the visual space, planning, and execution of the mural, see Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States, 232–­45; and Jolly, “Art of the Collective.” David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, “Qué es ‘Ejercicio Plástico’ y Cómo Fue Realizado,” in Palabras de Si­quei­ros, edited by Raquel Tibol (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1933] 1996); cited in Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix,” 71. See David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, “Los Vehículos de la Pintura Dialéctico-­ Subversiva,” in Palabras de Si­quei­ros, edited by Raquel Tibol (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1932] 1996); and Si­quei­ros, “Qué es ‘Ejercicio Plástico’ y Cómo Fue Realizado.” Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix,” 80. Si­quei­ros, “Los Vehículos de la Pintura Dialéctico-­Subversiva,” cited in Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix,” 77. For an analysis of Rivera’s influence on Eisen­stein’s Mexican film, see Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisen­stein’s Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Joanne Hershfield, “Sergei Eisen­stein’s Que Viva México! As Ethnography,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). For a discussion of Eisen­stein’s film theory, see Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisen­stein, translated by Leed Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Richard Taylor and William Powell, eds., The Eisen­stein Reader (London: British Film Institute, 1998); James Goodwin, Eisen­stein, Cinema, and History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and Dana Polan, The Political Language of Film and the Avant-­ Garde (Ann Arbor, MI: umi Research Press, 1985). Polan, The Political Language of Film, 46. Polan, The Political Language of Film, 47. Diego Rivera and Gladys March, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Dover, 1960), 79. Renato González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar (Mexico City: unam, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2008), 208, 230. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 210. José Clemente Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth,” in The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth, edited by Albert I. Dickerson (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1948).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  295

35 José Clemente Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography, translated by Robert C. Stephenson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962), 96. 36 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 96. 37 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 96. 38 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 96. 39 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 96. 40 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 96–­98. 41 José Clemente Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 7, no. 4 (1940), reprinted in Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes, eds., José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934 (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 308. 42 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 308. 43 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 44 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 45 James Oles, “Orozco at War: Context and Fragment in Dive Bomber and Tank (1940),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 203. 46 Oles, “Orozco at War,” 201. 47 Rita Eder, “Against the Laocoon: Orozco and History Painting,” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes, 230–­43 (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 237. 48 Jan Mieszkowski, “Art Forms,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 45. 49 Mieszkowski, “Art Forms,” 45. 50 Mieszkowski, “Art Forms,” 45. 51 Mieszkowski, “Art Forms,” 46. 52 Mieszkowski, “Art Forms,” 46. 53 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 81. 54 Peter Osborn and Mathew Charles, “Walter Benjamin,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, http:​/­​/­plato.stanford​ .edu​/­archives​/w ­ in2012​/­entries​/­benjamin​/­. 55 Howard Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83–­89. Caygill compares Warburg’s argument in “Pagan-­Antique Prophesy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920), reprinted in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ­translated by David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 760–­74, with Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl’s Melancholia I: Eine quellen-­und ­typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig: Teubner, 1923), and with the later Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panosky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and

296  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73

74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964), with Benjamin’s arguments about the engraving in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” 86. Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” 87–­88. Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” 88. Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” 88. Walter Benjamin, Thesis VII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256. Benjamin, Thesis VII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. Benjamin, Thesis XIII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261. Benjamin, Thesis VII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” 95. Walter Benjamin and Knut Tarnowski, “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian.” New German Critique 5 (1975): 29. Caygill “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” 90. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 170. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Michael W. Jennings, ed., The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, translated by Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 148. Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” in Jennings, The Writer of Modern Life, 29. Walter Benjamin and Knut Tarnowski, “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian,” New German Critique, 5 (Spring, 1975): 29–30. Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” 93. Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Jennings, The Writer of Modern Life, 160. This is the title of one of Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire; see Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Jennings, The Writer of Modern Life, 46–­133. Walter Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 463. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 72. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 72. Benjamin, Thesis XVII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263. Benjamin, Thesis IX in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. Benjamin, Thesis XVII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262. Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Jennings, The Writer of Modern Life, 161. Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Works, translated by Michael Winkler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 172–­73. Howard Caygill, “Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction of Tradition,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–­31.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1  297

83 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 72. 84 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 72. 85 Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth.” 86 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 303. 87 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 303. 88 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 306. 89 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 308. 90 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 91 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 92 The linotype was introduced in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth it dominated the market worldwide and was used broadly to print newspapers. Its popularity was due to its ability to cast a whole line of text, making the design of a page of news faster and more efficient, thereby making newspapers longer and easier to produce. One can find videos of linotypes in motion on YouTube. 93 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 94 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968). 95 Rivera’s contemporary mural, Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Better Future (completed in 1933, destroyed in 1934, repainted in Mexico City at the Palace of Fine Arts in 1934), commissioned for the rca tower in Rockefeller Plaza, was explicitly about mass communications through film, television, and radio. In his statements to the press about this mural, Rivera routinely argued that murals, as works of public art, were forms of mass communication. For reproductions of Rivera’s press statements, see Irene Herner de Larrea, Diego Rivera: Paraiso Perdido en Rockefeller Center (Mexico City: edicupes, s.a. de c.v., 1986). For an analysis of Rivera’s mural and its critical take on mass communications and the nascent technology of television, see Robert Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised: Rivera at Rockefeller Center,” Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 2 (1994): 48–­62. 96 Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, 34. 97 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 70. 98 Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, 36. 99 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 70. 100 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 72. 101 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 238–­39. 102 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, 237. 103 Sergei Eisen­stein, “The Prometheus of Mexican Painting,” in Mexico According to Eisen­stein, edited by Inga Karetnikova, with Leon Steinmetz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991).

298  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

Chapter 2: Colonial Melancholy and the Myth of Quetzalcoatl

Epigraphs: Handwritten statement by Orozco during his second visit to Dartmouth in early May 1932 for a press release issued on May 25, 1932. Cited in Jacquelynn Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization: The Mural at Dartmouth College (1932–­24),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 158. Davíd Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myth and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition, rev. ed. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2000), 151. 1 Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Works, translated by Michael Winkler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 172–­73. 2 The scholarly literature on Quetzalcoatl is vast. For this chapter I have drawn from Neil Baldwin, Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God (New York: United States Public Affairs, 2008); Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire; Enrique Florescano, The Myth of Quetzalcoatl, translated by Lysa Hochroth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Susan D. Gillespie, The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–­1813, translated by Benjamin Keen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); James Lockhart, ed., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Gesa Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings, and the Translation of Empire, 1492–­1637 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); Camilla Townshend, “No One Said It Was Quetzalcoatl: Listening to the Indians in the Conquest of Mexico,” History Compass 1 (2003): 1–­14; and Camilla Townshend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 659–­87. 3 The term Aztec refers to the Nahuatl-­speaking indigenous ethnic groups living in central Mexico between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Mexica refers specifically to the Aztec peoples living in the city of Tenochtitlán. 4 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 176. 5 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 176. 6 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 176. 7 Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence, translated by Albert G. Bork, with Kathryn R. Bork (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 9–­10. 8 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, xxiii–­xxiv. 9 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 198. 10 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 177. 11 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 104. 12 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 134.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  299

13 See, for example, Townsend, “No One Said It Was Quetzalcoatl”; and Townsend, “Burying the White Gods.” 14 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 150. 15 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 150. 16 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 151. 17 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 150. 18 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 151. 19 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 151. 20 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 138. 21 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 133, 138. 22 For extended discussions of the conversion of Quetzalcoatl into St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl, see Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 56–­58; Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 183–­85; and Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, 177–­206. 23 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 184. 24 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, 200. 25 See Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 100–­183. 26 Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria (pro nacionalism) por Manuel Gamio (Mexico City: Porrúa Hermanos, 1916); and Manuel Gamio, La población del Valle de Teotihuacán, el medio en que se ha desarrollado; su evolución étnica y social, iniciativas para procurer su mejoramiento, por la Dirección de Antropología, siendo director de las investigaciones, Manuel Gamio (Mexico City: Dirección de Taller Gráfica, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922). 27 Itzel Rodríguez Mortellaro, “El Renacimiento Posrevolucionario de Quetzalcóatl,” in La Imagen Política, edited by Cuauhtémoc Medina (Mexico City: unam, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2006), 336. 28 José Vasconcelos, José Vasconcelos, discursos (1920–­1950) (Mexico City: Botas, 1950), 112–­14. 29 Rodríguez Mortellaro, “El Renacimiento Posrevoucionario de Quetzalcóatl,” 340. 30 The discourse on the “Indian problem” in Mexico is vast. For an overview of the period from 1917 to 1946, see Alexander S. Dawson, Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); for specific discussions of the ironies of cultural and political indigenismo, see David A. Brading, “Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 7, no. 1 (1988): 75–­90; and Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–­1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–­1940, edited by Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 31 I am indebted to Jade Gasek, who argued in his analysis of “The Pre-­ Columbian Golden Age” that these three figures visualize civilizational advance from the establishment of agriculture to more developed signs of cultural achievement. See his essay posted at www.dartmouth.edu /­digitalorozco​/­app​/­. 32 For a contemporary example of the fetishization of indigenous profiles, see the “Prologue” to Sergei Eisen­stein’s ¡Qué Viva México! (1930). For a discussion of

300  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56

the use of indigenous profiles in this way, see Masha Salazkina, In Excess: Sergei Eisen­stein’s Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 21–­53. James Oles, “Mexican Pyramids on American Walls: Revivals, Restorations, Reinventions,” Manton Foundation Orozco Lecture, delivered at Dartmouth College, October 5, 2012. Handwritten note by Artemas Packard from his May 1932 discussions with Orozco. Quoted in Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 167. John Hubert Cornyn, The Song of Quetzalcoatl (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1931). Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Lives of Celebrated American Indians (Boston: George C. Rand Press, 1843), 87–­90. Patricia Martínez Gutiérrez, “Iconografía prehispnicas del mural de Orozco en el Colegio de Dartmouth,” 9. Cited in Renato González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar (Mexico City: unam, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2008), 221. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 219–­20. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 220. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 220. Handwritten statement by Orozco during his second visit to Dartmouth in early May 1932 for a press release issued May 25, 1932. Cited in Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. José Clemente Orozco, “New World, New Races, and New Art,” in ¡Orozco! 1883–­1949, by David Elliott (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 46. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, La raza cósmica, translated by Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1925] 1979). Orozco, “New World, New Races and New Art,” 46. Orozco, “New World, New Races and New Art,” 46. Orozco, “New World, New Races and New Art,” 46. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 11–­20. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 15. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 15. González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 17. Oles, “Mexican Pyramids on American Walls.” The identification of Quetzalcoatl’s raft with a litter derives from a personal correspondence with James Oles, July 30, 2013. See Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Aztec Pictorial Histories: Records without Words,” in Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). González Mello, La Máquina de Pintar, 342. Rodríguez Mortellaro, “El Renacimiento Posrevolucionario de Quetzalcóatl,” 338. For information about the Quetzalcoatl Logia, see Renato González Mello, “Manuel Gamio, Diego Rivera and the Politics of Mexican Anthropology,” res 45 (2004): 161–­85.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  301

57 Vasconcelos, José Vasconcelos, discursos, 39–­50, quoted in Rodríguez Mortellaro, “El Renacimiento Posrevolucionario de Quetzalcóatl,” 338. 58 Rodríguez Mortellaro, “El Renacimiento Posrevolucionario de Quetzalcóatl,” 343. 59 Diego Rivera and Gladys March, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Dover, 1960), 79. 60 See Mary K. Coffey, “‘All Mexico on a Wall’: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the Ministry of Public Education,” in Mexican Muralism, A Critical History, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adele Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 61 Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 65. 62 Giorgio Agamben, “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited by Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 63 See preliminary drawings and period photographs of the mural under way, reproduced in Diego Rivera, Diego Rivera: Catálogo General de Obra mural y Fotografía Personal (Mexico City: sep, inba, 1988), 118, 135. Note that the basic outline of this preliminary composition was already traced onto the south wall in 1929, although in that version we do not see the pyramid with plumed serpent motif. We do see generalized images of workers gathering, laboring, and organizing, with the triumvirate of peasant, soldier, and worker at the center of the composition, roughly equivalent to the placement of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl in the north wall panel. In this sense, this mural is similar to those at Chapingo and the sep minus overt references to communism. Rivera may or may not have planned to add these later to avoid censorship at the start of his cycle. But there can be no doubt that his conception of the south wall changed dramatically in 1935. 64 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 138. 65 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 98. 66 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 98. 67 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 101. 68 Walter Benjamin, Thesis VII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 216. 69 Benjamin, Thesis VII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 216. 70 I am indebted to Leandra Barrett for her sensitive analysis of the way that human touch unites the figures in this panel as opposed to the isolation of the sacrifice in the “Modern Human Sacrifice” panel. See her essay on “Ancient Human Sacrifice” at www.dartmouth.edu​/­digitalorozco​/­app​/­. 71 Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. 72 Quote in Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. 73 Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. 74 Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. 75 Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158.

302  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

76 77 78 79 80

Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 159. Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 159. Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 159. Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 159. José Clemente Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography, translated by Robert C. Stephenson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962), 104. 81 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 109. 82 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 108. 83 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 110. 84 For essays that situate Dartmouth’s tradition of “playing Indian” within a broader national context, see Brian P. Kennedy and Katherine Hart, eds., Walter Beach Humphrey’s “Hovey Mural” at Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2011). 85 Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, 151. 86 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, xxiii. 87 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, xxiii. 88 Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 72–­73, quoting from J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 77–­78. 89 Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 73. 90 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, xxix. 91 Gillespie, The Aztec Kings, xxiii. 92 Mackenthun, Metaphors of Dispossession, 135, 93 Susanne L. Wofford, “Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale: Virgil, Ovid, Spenser, and Native American Aetiology.” in Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Poetics of Community, edited by Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 239–­69. 94 Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire, 204. 95 Roger Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 48. 96 Steiner, Walter Benjamin, 172–­3. 97 Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 72. 98 Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 195. 99 Khanna, Dark Continents, 22. 100 Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy, 18. 101 Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy, 18 102 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Grove, 1985). 103 Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy 54, 35. 104 See Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 155; and Khanna, Dark Continents, 22.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  303

Chapter 3: American Modernity and the Play of Mourning

1 See Winston A. Reynolds, “The Burning Ships of Hernán Cortés,” Hispania 42, no. 3 (1959): 317–­24. 2 Hernán Cortés, Five Letters, 1519–­1526, translated by Bayard Morris (London: Routledge, 1928); and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, translated by J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963). 3 Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico: From the Aztecs to Independence, translated by Albert G. Bork, with Kathryn R. Bork (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 91. 4 Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 81. 5 For example, Florescano cites Cortés’s unabashed claims of killing many people from his Five Letters, in Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 78. 6 Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 79. 7 Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 68–­76. 8 John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–­1604) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 6. 9 Jaime Lara, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 68–­69. 10 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 1. 11 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 6. 12 Phelan points out that Mendieta never cites Fiore, but he argues that, nonetheless, his writings are saturated with the mystic’s ideas. 13 See Jennifer Jolly, Creating Pátzquaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). 14 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 106. 15 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 109–­10. 16 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 110. 17 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 110. 18 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 104. 19 This is historian Enrique Krauze’s term from Mexico, A Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–­1996, translated by Hank Heifetz (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 40. 20 Quote in Krauze, Mexico, Biography of Power, 40. 21 For discussion of nineteenth-­century history paintings, see Stacie G. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-­Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Claudia Barragán Arellano and María Estela Duarte, eds., Los Pinceles de la Historia: La Fabricación del Estado, 1864–­1910 (Mexico City: Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte, a.c., Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2003); and Oscar E. Vázquez, “Translating 1492: Mexico’s and Spain’s First National Celebrations of the ‘Discovery’ of the Americas,” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (1992): 21–­29. 22 Krauze, Mexico, A Biography of Power, 1–­11. 304  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

23 Justo Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, translated by Charles Ramsdell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 62. 24 Jaime Cuadriello, “La Corona de la Iglesia Para La Reina de la Nación: Imágenes de la coronación guadalupana de 1895,” in Los Pinceles de la Nación: La Fabricación del Estado, 1864–­1910, edited by Claudia Barragán Arellano and María Estela Duarte (Mexico City: Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte, a.c., Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2003), 150–­83. 25 For discussions of this distinction, see Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National, 78–­121. 26 José Vasconcelos, A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography, translated by W. Rex Crawford (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 170. 27 José Clemente Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography, translated by Robert C. Stephenson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962), 108. 28 Mary K. Coffey, “‘All Mexico on a Wall’: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the Ministry of Public Education,” in Mexican Muralism, A Critical History, edited by Ale­jandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adele Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 29 David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counter-­Revolutionary Road,” New Masses, May 19, 1934, 16–­19. 30 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 104. 31 Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans, 104. 32 Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, trans­ lated by Rhiannon Noel Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 101. 33 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 101. 34 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 101. 35 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 101. 36 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 101. 37 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 101. 38 Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National, 134. 39 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 40 Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Mu­seums, and the Mexican State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 7–­8. 41 For discussions of the shifts in Orozco’s iconography over the course of this commission, see Jean Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920–­1925 (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), 225–­40; Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–­1940: The Art of a New Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33–­75; and Laurence E. Schmeckebier, Modern Mexican Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1939), 52–­54. 42 Victor Jiménez, “Arquitectura de Composición,” in Hospicio Cabañas (Mexico City: Landucci Editores, s.a. de c.v., 2001). 43 Renato González Mello, “La Guadalajara de Orozco,” Artes de Mexico 41 (1998): 59–­63. NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  305

44 Jennifer Jolly, “Si­quei­ros’ Communist Proposition for Mexican Muralism: A Mural for the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate,” in Mexican Muralism, A Critical History, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 45 Walter Benjamin, Thesis XVIII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 263. 46 Benjamin, Thesis XVIII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263. 47 Benjamin, Thesis XVIII in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263. 48 José Clemente Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, 7, no. 4 (1940): 309. 49 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 50 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 51 Richard Iton, “Still Life,” Small Axe 17, no. 1 (2013): 33. 52 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 5. 53 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 66. 54 Organization men is a term I borrow from William H. Whyte’s critique of organizational logics over individual creativity in The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). While Whyte’s book was not published until over two decades after Orozco painted “Anglo-­America” in the Epic, as with so many of the features of this panel, Orozco’s engagement with U.S. American society was prescient. 55 María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-­Whiteness, and Anglo-­American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxv. 56 DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow, xxiii. 57 DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow, xxiii. 58 DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow, xxiii. 59 DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow, xviii. 60 For a detailed discussion of the town hall meeting as a cornerstone of U.S. American democracy within period discourses, see Mary Cooper, “New England as America: José Clemente Orozco’s Anglo-­America,” Collegiate Journal of Art 4 (2008): 82–­96. Preparatory sketches reveal that Orozco contemplated placing the townsfolk around a large table, making the scene appear to be a kind of business​/­town hall meeting. However, in the final image, he left the space around which the figures gather empty or inscrutable. 61 “Walking dead” evokes the contemporary graphic and television serial, in which the zombie trope has been deracinated and stripped of its origins in the U.S. colonial occupation of Haiti. Nonetheless, as Moreman and Rushton argue, the Haitian zombie remains “revenant but phantom” in much of contemporary popular culture’s obsession with the zombie. Moreman and Rushton also argue that, “aside from being monsters, what all of these ideas [about zombies] share in common is an idea of subjugated agency.” Christopher 306  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80 81

Moreman and James Rushton, “Introduction: Race, Colonialism, and the Evolution of the ‘Zombie,’” in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-­Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 3. Jerry Lathrop, one of the two art professors responsible for the commission and a confidant of Orozco’s while he was at Dartmouth, claims that Orozco was heartsick that the children came out looking so severe and washed out. He argues that this was due to Orozco’s experiments with new pigments. While this is possible, I find it unconvincing, given that it is not only the color of the children but also their affectless bodies and expressions that gives them the appearance of characters in a horror film. So while he may have been unhappy with his palette, the critical tone of the entire Modern wing suggests to me that he intended the figures in this panel to appear in a more negative light. Esposito, Terms of the Political, 123. Esposito, Terms of the Political, 125. Esposito, Terms of the Political, 123. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 3. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 4. Esposito, Terms of the Political, 124. Esposito, Terms of the Political. Esposito, Terms of the Political, 128. Esposito, Terms of the Political, 129. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 5–­6. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Bio-­Politics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–­ 1979, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Esposito, Terms of the Political, 130. Moreman and Rushton, “Introduction,” 2. Ann Kordas, “New South, New Immigrants, New Women, New Zombies: The Historical Development of the Zombie in American Popular Culture,” in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-­Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 15–­30. Moreman and Rushton, “Introduction,” 7, in reference to A. Stinson, “Zombified Capital in the Postcolonial Capital: Circulation (of Blood) in Sony Labou Tansi’s Parentheses of Blood,” in Race Opppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Corey James Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011); and Steve Shaviro, “Capitalist Monsters,” Historical Materialism 10, no. 4 (2002): 281–90. See Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017). García-Penˇa, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 7. Kordas, “New South, New Immigrants, New Women, New Zombies,” 17–­18. NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  307

82 Steven Pokornowski, “Vulnerable Life: Zombies, Global Biopolitics, and the Reproduction of Structural Violence,” Humanities 5, no. 3 (2016): 8. 83 Pokornowski, “Vulnerable Life,” 8. 84 Waldo Frank, America Hispana: A Portrait and a Prospect (New York: Scribner, 1931). 85 Michael A. Ogorzaly, Waldo Frank, Prophet of Hispanic Regeneration (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994), 13. 86 Frank, America Hispana, 330. 87 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 128. 88 Frank, America Hispana, 320. He attributes this to Calvinism’s dissociation of the human from the mass of life in its doctrine of predetermination. He contrasts Calvinist predetermination with Catholicism’s universalizing “beatitude,” which recognizes that “each soul is a part of all.” 89 Frank, America Hispana, 329. 90 Frank, America Hispana, 340. 91 Frank, America Hispana, 338. 92 Frank, America Hispana, 338. 93 Frank, America Hispana, 340. 94 Frank, America Hispana, 340. 95 Frank, America Hispana, 340. 96 Frank, America Hispana, 341. 97 Waldo Frank, The Re-­Discovery of America: An Introduction to a Philosophy of American Life (New York: Scribner, 1929), 191. 98 Frank, The Re-­Discovery of America, 191. 99 Frank, The Re-­Discovery of America, 191. 100 Frank, The Re-­Discovery of America, 191. 101 Frank, The Re-­Discovery of America, 191. 102 Frank, The Re-­Discovery of America, 191. 103 Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–­1935, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995). 104 Claire Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 7. 105 Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth Century Latin America, translated by John D. Blanco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 7. 106 Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 10. 107 Diego Rivera, “Scaffoldings,” translated by Emily Joseph, Hesperian (Spring 1931), n.p. 108 Anthony Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 72. 109 Lee, Painting on the Left, 86. 110 The iconographic identifications throughout my discussion of Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural are indebted to Linda Downs’s comprehensive survey of

308  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

111 112

113

114

115 116

117

118 119 120 121 122 123

the mural in her catalog, Diego Rivera: the Detroit Industry Murals (Detroit: Detroit Institute of the Arts, 1999). Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010). Rivera would depict this mask in other murals, most notably in his History of Medicine: The People’s Demand for Better Health mural at the Hospital de la Raza (1953). See Gabriela Rodriguez Gomez, “Re-­Conceptualizing Social Medicine in Diego Rivera’s History of Medicine in Mexico: The People’s Demand for Better Health Mural, Mexico City, 1953” (PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2012). Downs cites Dorothy McMeekin, Diego Rivera: Science and Creativity in the Detroit Murals (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1986), for the identification of the scientists, Lucienne Bloch’s diary for Rivera’s intention to craft these scientists as “ecumenical wise men,” and Stephen Dimitroff for the claim that the baby was modeled after the Lindbergh child. She also notes that Dimitroff stated that Rivera modeled the nurse after Jean Harlow and the doctor after Wilhelm Valentiner, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts who commissioned Rivera to paint the mural. Given the notoriety of Harlow’s overtly sexual persona, the controversy over Rivera’s blasphemy likely resulted as much from his conflation of Christian and secular iconography as it did from casting the Virgin Mother as one of Hollywood’s most notorious screen vixens. See Downs, Diego Rivera, 111. Rivera was already friendly with Lindbergh and Morrow as a consequence of his work for Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow, Anne’s father, in Cuernavaca on his History of Cuernavaca and Morelos mural (1929–­30). Esposito, Terms of the Political, 61. Max Kozloff, “The Rivera Frescoes of Modern Industry at the Detroit Institute of Arts: Proletarian Art under Capitalist Patronage,” in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, edited by Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1978). Anthony Lee, “Workers and Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Mark Rosenthal, “Diego and Frida: High Drama in Detroit.” In Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). Lee, “Workers and Painters,” 213. Lee, “Workers and Painters,” 216. Lee, “Workers and Painters,” 216. Kathryn E. O’Rourke, “Science and Sex in Diego Rivera’s Health Ministry Murals,” Public Art Dialogue 4, no. 1 (2014): 33. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  309

124 Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 125 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 156. 126 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco, 156. 127 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 71–­72. 128 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 72. 129 Esposito, following Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” Terms of the Political, 129. 130 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 129. 131 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 129. 132 James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931). 133 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 29. 134 Esposito, Terms of the Political, 29. 135 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 30. 136 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 14. 137 Benjamin, Thesis XVII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262. 138 Benjamin, Thesis XVII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262. 139 Benjamin, Thesis IX, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257–­58. 140 Benjamin, Thesis I, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 253. 141 Benjamin, Thesis IX, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 142 Benjamin, Thesis IX, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 143 Benjamin, Thesis IX, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 258. 144 Benjamin, Thesis XIII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261. 145 Benjamin, Thesis X, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 258. 146 Benjamin, Thesis XI, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 258. 147 Benjamin, Thesis XII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 260. 148 Benjamin, Thesis XII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 260. 149 Benjamin, Thesis VII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. 150 Benjamin, Thesis VIII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. 151 Benjamin, Thesis VII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. 152 Benjamin, Thesis VII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. 153 Benjamin, Thesis II, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254. 154 Benjamin, Thesis II, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254. 155 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36. 156 Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 157 Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 158 Schmitt, Political Theology, 5. 159 Schmitt, Political Theology, 6. 160 Schmitt, Political Theology, 37. 161 James Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2012).

310  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173

174

175 176 177

178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190

191

192

Martel, Divine Violence 11. Martel, Divine Violence, 11. Martel, Divine Violence, 7. Martel, Divine Violence, 7–­8. Martel, Divine Violence, 49. Martel, Divine Violence, 49, 50. Martel, Divine Violence, 54. Martel, Divine Violence, 52. Benjamin, Thesis XVII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262. Florescano, Memory, Myth, and Time in Mexico, 81. Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement: 1920–­1925” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1989), 399. Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 98. My ability to trace the development of Rivera’s iconographic program is indebted to the documentary materials published in Diego Rivera, Diego Rivera: Cátalogo General de Obra mural y Fotografía Personal (Mexico City: sep, inba, 1988), 115–­35. Joseph and Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution, 128–­29. The photograph is reproduced in Rivera, Diego Rivera, 135. Héctor Gómez Peralta, “Las raíces anti-­sistémicas del Partido Acción Nacional/​­The Anti-­Systematic Roots of the Partido Acción Nacional,” Revista mexicana de ciencias políticas y sociales 57, no. 214 (2012): 187–­210. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counter-­Revolutionary Road,” 18. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counter-­Revolutionary Road,” 18. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counter-­Revolutionary Road,” 18. Si­quei­ros, “Diego Rivera’s Counter-­Revolutionary Road,” 18. Martel, Divine Violence, 50. Martel, Divine Violence, 50. Benjamin, Thesis XVIII A, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263. Martel, Divine Violence, 50. Benjamin, Thesis XII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 260. Lara, City, Temple, Stage, 77. Lara, City, Temple, Stage, 77. Anna D. Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 6. Peter Osborn and Mathew Charles, “Walter Benjamin,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, accessed May 26, 2013, http:​/­​/­plato.stanford.edu​/­archives​/­win2012​/­entries​/­benjamin​/­. Benjamin quotes this playwright in The Origins of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 134, cited in Martel, Divine Violence, 58. Martel, Divine Violence, 57.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  311

193 194 195 196 197 198

Martel, Divine Violence, 58. Martel, Divine Violence, 59. Martel, Divine Violence, 59. Martel, Divine Violence, 59. Martel, Divine Violence, 59. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913–­1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–­52. 199 Martel, Divine Violence, 59. 200 Benjamin, Thesis XVI, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262. 201 Benjamin, Thesis XVII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262. 202 Benjamin, Thesis XVII, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262. 203 Benjamin, Thesis XVIII A, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263. 204 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309. 205 Martel, Divine Violence, 62. 206 Benjamin, Thesis II, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254. 207 Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains,’” 309 208 Martel, Divine Violence, 63. 209 Benjamin, Thesis I, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 253. 210 Martel, Divine Violence, 63. Chapter 4: “Modern Industrial Man” and the Melancholy of Race in America

1 Jacquelynn Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization: The Mural at Dartmouth College (1932–­24),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 181. 2 Leonard Folgarait, “José Clemente Orozco’s Use of Architecture in the Dartmouth Mural,” in Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 103. 3 Folgarait quotes from Orozco’s letters to Jean Charlot in which he expresses his admiration for and excitement about American building. José Clemente Orozco, The Artist in New York: Letters to Jean Charlot and Unpublished Writings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 31, quoted in Folgarait, “José Clemente Orozco’s Use of Architecture,” 93–­94. 4 José Clemente Orozco, “New Worlds, New Races, New Art,” in ¡Orozco! 1883–­ 1949, by David Elliott (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 46. 5 Orozco, “New Worlds, New Races, New Art,” 46. 6 Orozco, “New Worlds, New Races, New Art,” 46. 7 Renato González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting: Easel Paintings, Drawings, Graphic Arts, and Mural Studies,” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane

312  NOTES TO CHAPTERS 3–4

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28

Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art), 73–­74. González Mello is quoting Claude Bragdon, Architecture and Democracy, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 39. González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting,” 74. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 134. Walter Benjamin, Thesis VI, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 235. James Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2012), 69. Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 16–­17. Khanna, Dark Continents, 16–­17. Khanna, Dark Continents, 21. Khanna, Dark Continents, 16. Folgarait, “José Clemente Orozco’s Use of Architecture,” 105. Scholars variously identify him as like either Pancho Villa or Zapata; Folgarait even dubs him “Pancho Zapata.” However, like Folgarait, I believe the figure’s iconographic treatment is more consistent with Zapata than Villa. See Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 177; and Folgarait, “José Clemente Orozco’s Use of Architecture,” 101. Thomas Benjamin, La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 64. I take this term from Andrea Noble, Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011). Noble, Photography and Memory in Mexico, 8–­10. Ilene V. O’Malley, The Myth of the Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920–­1940 (New York: Greenwood, 1986); and Benjamin, La Revolución. Benjamin, La Revolución. Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement: 1920–­1925” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1989). This was the collective title given to Orozco’s series of drawings, and later prints, depicting the revolution. See Anna Indych-­López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Si­quei­ros in the United States, 1927–­1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 12–­74, for a discussion of this series and the ways the artist altered it for a U.S. print-­buying market. John Lear, Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–­1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 1. Lear, Picturing the Proletariat, 9. Lear, Picturing the Proletariat, 12.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  313

29 Lear, Picturing the Proletariat, 12. 30 This is Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau’s term, from Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 31 David Alfaro Si­quei­ros et al., “Manifesto del sindicato de obreros técnicos, pintores, y escultores de México,” El Machete 2, no. 7 (June 1924), republished in Mari Carmen Ramírez and Hector Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-­Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 461. 32 Si­quei­ros et al., “Manifesto del sindicato,” in Ramírez and Olea, Inverted Utopias, 461. 33 Si­quei­ros et al., “Manifesto del sindicato,” in Ramírez and Olea, Inverted Utopias, 461. 34 Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–­1940: The Art of a New Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30. 35 Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 30. 36 See Mary K. Coffey, “‘All Mexico on a Wall’: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the Ministry of Public Education,” in Mexican Muralism, A Critical History, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adele Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 37 Si­quei­ros et al., “Manifesto del sindicato,” in Ramírez and Olea, Inverted Utopias, 461. 38 My use of this term is indebted to Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads.” 39 Lear, Picturing the Proletariat, 154. 40 Lear, Picturing the Proletariat, 154. 41 Leonard Folgarait, Seeing Mexico Photographed: The Work of Horne, Casasola, Modotti, and Álvarez Bravo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 72. 42 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 10. 43 Lear, Picturing the Proletariat, 106. 44 Lear, Picturing the Proletariat, 108. 45 For a discussion of the “mass as subject,” see Renato González Mello, “Mysticism, Revolution, Millennium, Painting,” in José Clemente Orozco: Prometheus, edited by Marjorie L. Harth (Pomona, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2001) 47–­62. 46 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 9. 47 This term is from Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 48 Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 12–­13. 49 See Adriana Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2010). 50 See Mary K. Coffey, “Angels and Prostitutes: José Clemente Orozco’s Catharsis

314  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

51

52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60

and the Politics of Female Allegory in 1930s Mexico,” cr: The New Centennial Review 4, no. 2 (2004): 70–­71. Anita González, “Archetypes of Race: Performance Responses to Afro-­ Mexican Presence,” in Afro-­Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality, edited by Anita González et al. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). See David A. Brading, “Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 7, no. 1 (1988): 75–­90; Mary K. Coffey, “‘The Mexican Problem’: Nation and ‘Native’ in Post-­Revolutionary Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art in the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Diana Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); and Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–­1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–­1940, edited by Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2013), 9. Lott, Love and Theft, 37–­43. Lott, Love and Theft, 54. Lott, Love and Theft, 67–­68. Lott, Love and Theft, 17. Lott, Love and Theft, 7. See Susan Noyes Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, ­Americanism: A History of Cultural Activism during the Depression Years (New York: Midmarch, 1999), 31–­48. The scholarship on blackface in Mexico is undeveloped. While there are many blogs and websites dedicated to documenting instances of blackface in contemporary Mexican popular culture, and while the controversy over the cartoon figure Memín Pinguín entailed comparisons with blackface in U.S. American popular culture, to my knowledge there are no full-­length studies of the phenomenon in Mexico. However, there are studies of the performance of blackness in Mexican culture, such as Anita González, “Archetypes of Race,” 85–­110; and Anita González, “Navigations: Diasporic Transports and Landings,” in Black Performance Theory, edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Anita González (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Likewise, there is scholarship detailing the genre in other Latin American contexts, most notably Cuba and Puerto Rico. See Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840–­1895 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Yeidy M. Rivero, Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Finally, there is some scholarship on the performance of indigeneity among Mexican American communities in the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands. See Elaine A. Peña, “More Than a Dead American Hero: Washington, the Improved Order of Red Men, and the Limits of Civil Religion,” American Literary History 26, no. 1 (2014): 61–­82.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  315

61 David Freeland, Automats, Taxi Dances, Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 140. 62 Freeland, Automats, Taxi Dances, Vaudeville, 141. 63 While there has been little exploration of how Orozco might have been racialized while living and working in the United States, there has been some discussion of this with respect to his younger peer, Rufino Tamayo. Unlike Orozco, Tamayo was dark-skinned and had been racialized as indigenous, and therefore as a natural primitive, in Mexico and while living in New York. Nonetheless, we might consider parallels anyway, as both were non-­fluent English speakers, and both were positioned racially and culturally as non­ American Mexicans. For discussion of Tamayo, and especially his time in the United States, see Diana Du Pont, ed., Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007); and Evelyn Carmen Ramos, Tamayo in New York (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Museum of American Art, 2017). 64 Orozco treated this subject several times in paintings and prints. Echate La Otra was a pulquería (working-­class bar) located in Coyoacán, reportedly around the corner from his studio. However, this is hardly a documentary image. Given his many works dedicated to the theme of intellectual and touristic fascination with indigenous folklife and drunken spectacles, it seems that Orozco’s intent was to satirize the desire for such spectacles more than to document the spectacle itself. See José Clemente Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: Graphic Works (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 60. 65 Clemente Orozco argues that the artist intended to make 120 prints of this image but ended up making about 254 copies. Of these, 110 were signed and numbered, 8 were signed, and 136 remained unnumbered and unsigned. This suggests that while he had hoped to sell a lot of copies of this print, he only found buyers (or gallerists) for less than half of them. These numbers are typical for his prints from the 1930s. While he made more copies of this image than most, he numbered and signed about the same number, suggesting that his gallerists were taking about a hundred or so of each, and the rest were likely sold to friends and collectors, while most remained unsold. Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: Graphic Works, 71. 66 Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), 45–­49. 67 Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 45–­49. 68 Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 45–­49. 69 Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 59. 70 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10. 71 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 11. 72 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 11. 73 Waldo Frank, America Hispana: A Portrait and a Prospect (New York: Scribner, 1931), 338–­41.

316  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

74 Lorgia García-­Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 10. 75 In Orozco’s mural for the New School for Social Research, he represented several figures of African descent, including an African American seated at the “Table of Universal Brotherhood” alongside members of many nationalities, including an indigenous and Jewish man representing the “despised races.” In this mural he also addresses slavery; however, rather than situating the scenes of slave rebellion within the Americas, he locates them in Africa and India, thereby indicting European colonial powers rather than America’s settler states. This mural preceded his work at Dartmouth. Their overtly propagandistic nature was controversial. And aesthetically they were deemed a failure. It is likely that these themes were present in his thinking as he turned his attention to the American epic. It may also explain why he shifted from an explicitly political approach to one that is more allegorical and melancholic. See Diane Miliotes, “The Murals at the New School for Social Research (1930–­31),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art). 76 Renato González Mello, “Orozco in the United States: An Essay on the History of Ideas,” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art), 33. 77 González Mello, “Orozco in the United States,” 33–­34. 78 Diego Rivera, Portrait of America by Diego Rivera; with an explanatory text by Bertram D. Wolfe (New York: Covici, Friede, 1934). 79 See Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 200–­ 206; and “The Scourged Slave’s Back,” The Liberator (Boston), September 4, 1863, 3. 80 Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 25–­26. 81 Barbara Lewis, “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Daddy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in 19th Century Blackface Minstrelsy, edited by Annemarie Bean, James Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 269–­70. 82 I am indebted to Kellen Hoxworth for drawing my attention to this. 83 Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 257. 84 Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 218. 85 An interesting comparison might be made to Memín Pinguín, a beloved cartoon character created in 1943, whose adventures have been chronicled in historietas (little stories/​­comic books) for decades. Sometimes referred to as the “Mexican Mickey Mouse,” Memín Pinguín is an overt racial caricature of Afro-­Mexicans. His features are consistent with global stereotypes of African Americans that have their origins in blackface minstrelsy. In this sense, Memín Pinguín is more akin to the racial caricatures that Sammond

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  317

86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93

318  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

distinguishes from the vestigial blackface of Mickey Mouse. Unlike Mickey Mouse, whose genealogy in the racial stereotyping of blackface is barely recognized (outside of academic literature), Memín Pinguín has been critiqued within and without Mexico for trafficking in such stereotypes following the transnational controversy that erupted in 2005 when Mexico issued a commemorative stamp with his image on it, prompting black leaders in the United States to demand an apology and a retraction. Despite this, his enormous popularity in Mexico motivated many cultural brokers to pen op-­eds defending the character. They argued that unlike racially stereotyped figures in U.S. popular culture, Memín Pinguín is a positive figure who models desirable behavior. Even as scholars of race in Mexico have started to explore the legacies of blackface or racial performance in Mexico, they are eager to point out that unlike stereotypes in the United States, which have morphed into racist archetypes, black performance in Mexico is more fluid and not exclusively focused on denigration. For discussions of the Memín Pinguín controversy, see “‘Memín Pinguín’: Racist or Just a Harmless Little Comic Book Story?,” a compendium of journalism on the controversy at https:​/­​/­kathmanduk2.wordpress.com​/2­ 008​/­07​/­08​/­memin-­pinguin-­racist​ -­or-­just-­a-­harmless-­little-­comic-­book-­story​/­; Ezekiel Mobley, “Relations between Hispanic and African Americans in the U.S. Today Seen through the Prism of the ‘Memín Pinguín’ Controversy,” at http:/​­/​­www.americansc​.org​ .uk​/­Online​/­Ezekiel.htm; and Bobby Vaughan and Ben Vinson III, “Memín Penguin, Changing Racial Debates, and Transnational Blackness,” at http:/­/​ ­hemisphericinstitute.org​/­hemi​/­en​/­e-­misferica-­52​/­vaughnvinson. For a discussion of the fluidity of black performance in Mexico’s fiestas, see Anita González, “Navigations.” For a discussion of how the controversy reveals the way that the discourse of Mestizaje obscures anti-­black racism in Mexico, see Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Emiko Saldívar Tanaka, “‘We Are Not Racists, We Are Mexicans’: Privilege, Nationalism, and Post-­Race Ideology in Mexico,”Critical Sociology 42, no. 4–­5 (2016): 515–­33. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 28–­29. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 110. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 242. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 110. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 110. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 42. See Walter Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Sergei Eisen­stein, Eisen­stein on Disney, edited by Jay Leyda, translated by Alan Upchurch (Kolkata: Seagull, 1986). Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 107.

94 Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland, 109. 95 Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland, 4. 96 Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 4. 97 José Clemente Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth,” in The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth, edited by Albert I. Dickerson (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1948). 98 Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth.” 99 Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth.” 100 Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth.” 101 González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting,” 64. 102 González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting,” 86, 95. 103 González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting,” 95. 104 González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting,” 81. 105 González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting,” 81. 106 González Mello, “Public Painting and Private Painting,” 81. 107 David Alfaro Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” translated and republished in Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, edited by Mari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 499. 108 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 499. 109 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 499. 110 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 499. 111 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 499–­500. 112 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 500. 113 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 500. 114 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 500. 115 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 500. 116 Si­quei­ros, “Ejercicio plástico,” 500. 117 Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland, 109. 118 Jennifer Jolly, “Si­quei­ros’ Communist Proposition for Mexican Muralism: A Mural for the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate,” in Mexican Muralism, A Critical History, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 89. 119 Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth.” 120 Orozco, José Clemente Orozco: Graphic Works, 64–­65. 121 Anna Indych, “Made for the USA: Orozco’s Horrores de la Revolución,” Annales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 79 (2001): 153–­64. 122 See Mary K. Coffey, “‘The Hovey Mural’ and the ‘Greening’ of Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization,” in Walter Beach Humphrey’s ‘Hovey Mural’ at Dartmouth College: A Cultural History, edited by Brian P. Kennedy and Katherine Hart (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2011). 123 Orozco, “New World, New Races, and New Art,” 46. 124 James Oles, “Orozco at War: Context and Fragment in Dive Bomber and Tank (1940),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–­1934, edited by

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  319

125 126 127 128 129 130 131

132 133

134 135 136

137 138

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

320  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), 191. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 218. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 58. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 61. Lott, Love and Theft, 6. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 10. Khanna, Dark Continents, 25. Nichola Tucker, “The Epic of American Civilization as Performative Epic: Student Viewers as Heroes and the Re-­Enactment of History,” Collegiate Journal of Art 4 (2008): 108. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 10. José Rabasa, Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 172–­204. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 3. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 9. Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 29. Esposito, Terms of the Political, 29. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 12. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 13. Khanna, Dark Continents, 22. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 6. Muñoz, Disidentifications, 12. Khanna, Dark Continents, 14. Khanna, Dark Continents, 25. Handwritten statement by Orozco during his second visit to Dartmouth in early May 1932 for a press release issued on May 25, 1932. Cited in Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization,” 158. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 174. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 174–­75. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 3. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 187. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 189. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 13. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 14. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).

155 156 157 158 159

160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167

Butler, Precarious Life. Butler, Precarious Life, 15. Butler, Precarious Life, 188–­89. Butler, Precarious Life, 190. A quote from an interview between Anna Deavere Smith and Homi Bhabha, published in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. On the Road in Search of an American Character (New York: Anchor, 1994), 232–­33, cited in Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 190. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 190. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 190. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 192. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 191. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 195. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 194. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 192. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 191.

Conclusion

1 José Clemente Orozco, “The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth,” in The Orozco Frescoes at Dartmouth, edited by Albert I. Dickerson (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 1948), 7. 2 (Epigraph: Walter Beach Humphrey, “The Song of Five Hundred Gallons: A Proposed Mural Picturization of Richard Hovey’s ‘Eleazar Wheelock’; Not Art for Art’s Sake.” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, October 1937, 15.) See, for example, “A Synthesis of Life in America: Orozco’s Mural at Dartmouth College,” Survey Graphic (March 1934): 119; and Lewis Mumford, “Orozco in New England,” New Republic 80 (1934): 231–­35. 3 See articles written by Churchill Lathrop, Stacy May, Artemas Packard, Kimball Flaccus, William Gaston Raoul, and Gobin Stair in Orozco at Dartmouth: A Symposium, edited by Kimball Flaccus (Hanover, NH: Arts Press, 1933). 4 See personal correspondence between President Hopkins and Ellen A. Lewis of March 8, 1934; personal correspondence between President Hopkins and Albert I. Dickerson of August 1, 1934; personal correspondence between President Hopkins and Lucia Ames Mead of November 7 and 13, 1934; personal correspondence between President Hopkins and Lewis Parkhurst of April 20, 1934; personal correspondence between President Hopkins and Harvey Watts of August 7, October 11, and October 16, 1934; and personal correspondence between President Hopkins and Albert Frye of August 5, 1935, in “Orozco Murals, 1934–­35” file, Rauner Rare Book Room. 5 See personal correspondence between President Hopkins and Walter B. Humphrey, August 27, 1934, and Roald Morton, August 10, 1934, respectively, in “Orozco Murals, 1934–­45” file, Rauner Rare Book Room. 6 Personal correspondence between Walter B. Humphrey and President

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4– CONCLUSION  321

7 8 9 10

11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

322  NOTES TO CONCLUSION

Hopkins, letter dated August 23, 1934, in “Orozco Murals, 1934–­35” file, Rauner Rare Book Room. Personal correspondence between Walter B. Humphrey and President Hopkins, letter dated August 23, 1934. Personal correspondence between Walter B. Humphrey and President Hopkins, letter dated August 23, 1934. Personal correspondence between Walter B. Humphrey and President Hopkins, letter dated August 23, 1934. See Hopkins–­Humphrey–­Hayward correspondence in reference to the “Rathskeller Room” murals in dp-­11 (262): Thayer Hall files at Rauner Rare Book Room. All quotations about the narrative of the mural are from Hovey’s song, unless otherwise noted. “Green” is a reference to Dartmouth’s school color. It is used in phrases such as “bleeding green” to refer to the alumni’s excessive identification with and loyalty to the college. Imperialist nostalgia is Renato Rosaldo’s term. See Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989). For a discussion of the “doomed to perish” ideology, see Katheryn S. Hight, “‘Doomed to Perish’: George Catlin’s Depictions of the Mandan,” Art Journal 49 (1990): 119–­24. See Ann Uhry Abrams, “Benjamin West’s Documentation of Colonial History: William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians,” Art Bulletin 54 (1982): 59–­75. Humphrey, “The Song of Five Hundred Gallons,” 43. Humphrey, “The Song of Five Hundred Gallons,” 43. Barbara Novak, “Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure,” in Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–­1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 157. Novak, “Man’s Traces,” 157. “Gradus ad Parnassum,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine 30, no. 7 (April 1938): 4. Hovey, “The Song of Five Hundred Gallons,” 15. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7. Deloria, Playing Indian, 7. Deloria, Playing Indian, 103. Deloria, Playing Indian, 104. Deloria, Playing Indian, 105. Deloria, Playing Indian, 105. For an elaborated discussion of this figure’s relationship to the presumed viewer, see Nichola Tucker, “The Epic of American Civilization as Performative Epic: Student Viewers as Heroes and the Re-­Enactment of History,” Collegiate Journal of Art 4 (2008): 97–­110. Rebecca Tsosie argues that the appropriation of Native American culture, rituals, or symbols by non-­Native Americans is a form of cultural harm because

30 31 32

33

34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

it interferes with Native Americans’ ability to define their own identity; it can result in the creation of derogatory stereotypes about Native Americans; it can transform cultural practices through commodification and the exacerbation of intragroup conflict; it allows outsiders to materially benefit from Native American culture while Native Americans are often denied access to the markets that exploit them; and it can convert Native American culture into property, further depriving Native American communities of the right to protect and safeguard their ways of life, rituals, and cultural practices. See Rebecca Tsosie, “Reclaiming Native Stories: An Essay on Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Rights,” Arizona State Law Journal 34 (2002): 299–­358. See campus letter from President Kemeny, September 21, 1979, in “Hovey Grill 1979” file, Rauner Rare Book Room. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2013), 9. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 15. (Epigraph: Douglas Moody, “Interview with Guillermo Gómez-­Peña,” Latino Intersections 2, no. 1 [2004].) Guillermo Gómez-­Peña et al., “Cross-­ Contaminations: The Performance Activism and Opposition of La Pocha Nostra,” Latino Intersections 2, no. 1 (2004). For a book-­length explanation of this pedagogy, see Guillermo Gómez-­Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy (London: Routledge, 2011). Gómez-­Peña’s La Pocha Nostra live art lab, www.pochanostra.com. Josh Kun, “The Aural Border,” Theater Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 5. Gómez-­Peña et al., “Cross-­Contaminations.” See Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “Creating Human Murals,” in Ethno-­Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (London: Routledge, 2005), 119–­22, for a description of this exercise as it relates to La Pocha Nostra’s performance art pedagogy. Gómez-­Peña et al., “Cross-­Contaminations.” Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London: Routledge, 2012), 109. Gómez-­Peña et al., “Cross-­Contaminations.” Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “Culturas-­in-­Extremis,” in Ethno-­Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (London: Routledge, 2005), 51. Gómez-­Peña, “Culturas-­in-­Extremis,” 51. Gómez-­Peña, “Culturas-­in-­Extremis,” 56. Gómez-­Peña, “Culturas-­in-­Extremis,” 57. Humphrey, “The Song of Five Hundred Gallons,” 43. Private correspondence with Doug Moody from May 19, 2012, in response to his request that his former students reflect on their experience, ten years ­ EXotica. earlier, in M

NOTES TO CONCLUSION  323

48 Eduardo Mendieta and Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “Theatricalizations of Postcolonial Theory: A Colombian Philosopher Interviews a Chicano Performance Artist,” in Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-­Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy, edited by Elaine Peña (London: Routledge, 2005), 246. 49 Mendieta and Gómez-­Peña, “Theatricalizations of Postcolonial Theory,” 246. 50 Heterotopia is a term coined by Foucault to characterize spaces of ortherness where utopian possibilities can be imagined or enacted. Josh Kun extends this term to the aural realm when characterizing the sound beds of Gómez-­Peña’s performances as “audiotopias.” See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (spring 1986): 22–­27; and Kun, “The Aural Border.” 51 Gómez-­Peña explains that the collective’s name, “Pocha Nostra,” derives from a Mexican slang term, “pocho/​­a,” which refers to migrated Mexicans and translates to “cultural traitors,” combined with the Italian word nostra from the phrase “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “our thing,” in reference to the Mafia. Thus, the phrase can be translated loosely as “the cartel of the cultural traitors” or poetically as “our impurities.” See Tess Thackara, “Interview with Guillermo Gomez-­Pena,” April 13, 2011, at www.artpractical.com​/­feature​ /­interview_with_guillermo_gomez_pena/​­, accessed June 21, 2017. Chicanglos is one of Gómez-­Peña’s many Spanglish neologisms. It combines the Mexican slang term chilangos, which refers to residents of Mexico City, with the words Chicano and Anglo to connote a Mexican living in the United States who identifies with Chicano/​­as, who are politicized Mexican Americans. Gringolandia is Mexican slang for the United States. 52 Jones, Seeing Differently, 109. 53 Jones, Seeing Differently, 109. 54 Guillermo Gómez-­Peña, “On the Other Side of the Mexican Mirror,” in Ethno-­ Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (London: Routledge, 2005), 7. 55 Gómez-­Peña, “On the Other Side of the Mexican Mirror,” 8. 56 Lott, Love and Theft, 6. 57 James Martel, Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2012), 62.

324  NOTES TO CONCLUSION

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index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations and captions. Adams, James Truslow, 10–11, 269 affect, affects, 16, 17, 21, 154, 159, 185, 215, 307n62; affective power of art and, 61; Eisenstein’s and Siqueiros’s theory of, 46, 58, 59; history and, 14; Orozco and, 61, 104; visual politics of, 53–60. See also melancholy, melancholia, the melancholic African Americans, 237; culture of, 232; Orozco and, 19; in Orozco’s Epic, 229; in Orozco’s prints and other murals, 235, 317n75; racial caricatures of, 243; Rodney King riots and, 259; stereotypes of, 243, 317n85; subordination of in United States, 242; victimization of, 240. See also black, blacks; blackface minstrelsy; #blacklivesmatter; blackness Africans, 160, 232; enslaved, 18, 158, 253 Afro-Mexicans, 232, 257, 317n85; Afro-Mestizos and, 19, 253 Agamben, Giorgio, 100, 157 agriculture, 82, 89, 109, 110, 111, 113, 170, 300n31; reform of, 220, 223 Alamán, Lucas, 130 allegoresis: melancholic, 9, 40, 70; of Orozco’s Epic, 9, 39, 120 allegory, 258; Baroque, 60, 63, 64–65; irony of empire and, 101–15, 117–18; in Orozco’s murals, 63, 76–77, 105,

118, 119; in Rivera’s murals, 9, 190, 193 Allegory of California (1930–31, Rivera fresco), 167 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 130 Alvarado, Pedro de, 135 America/Americas, xv, 1, 3, 12, 13, 27, 80, 120; American Dream and, 11, 17, 179–84, hemispheric cooperation in, 152–84, 285; history of, 1, 12; as idea, 3, 261; melancholy of race in, 41, 207–60. See also antiempire, U.S. American; Mexico; United States “Ancient Human Sacrifice” (Panel 3 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 32, 32, 77, 86, 105, 107, 109, 179, 182, 278, 279; description of, 106–8; Orozco on, 154 Anderson, Benedict, 7 “Anglo-America” (Panel 13 of Orozco’s Epic), 2, 5, 33, 40, 43, 77, 153, 155, 180, 219, 255, 267, 306n54, 306n60; alumni offended by, 262; architecture in, 111; as racialized nation-state, 158, 161; town hall in, 154, 209; zombies in, 26, 35, 154, 159, 180, 256 animation, animators, 243–45 antiempire, U.S. American, 21, 39, 121, 153, 154, 179, 283; borders of identity and, 9–14, 40; DeGuzmán on, 11, 153–54 anti-Semitism, 16 archaeology, 16, 85, 91, 96, 232

architecture, 35, 104, 212–14; of BakerBerry reserve room, 3, 78; Orozco and, 43, 95, 213 Arenal, Luis, 53 Arnaud, Amit, 280 art and art history, 76, 222–23; melancholy and, 22–23; Orozco on, 1–3, 70 Asian Americans, 18, 282 avant-garde, 8, 30; Mexican muralists and, 11, 49, 244; montage and, 15, 57, 60, 66 Aztecs, 6, 7, 12, 32, 50, 81, 101–2, 130, 149–50; cosmogony of, 106; cyclical calendar of, 84; Orozco’s negative view of, 105, 111, 145; Quetzalcoatl mythologem and, 3, 6, 34, 81, 90, 104, 117; in Rivera’s National Palace mural, 46, 47, 133, 138; Tenochtitlán and, 9, 82; Toltecs and, 81, 82–83, 104 “Aztec Warriors” (Panel 4 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 32, 33, 86, 101, 102, 104, 111, 117; description of, 102–3; sources of images in, 91–92 Bailly, Austen Barron, 11 Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth College, 1, 3, 28, 29, 78, 91. See also Orozco Room barbarism, 12, 14; Benjamin on, 66, 68; civilization and, 9, 105, 109; in Orozco’s Epic, 105–6, 110, 111, 114, 120; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 188 Bartra, Roger, 118, 120–21 Baudelaire, Charles, 67–68, 119 Benjamin, Thomas, 219 Benjamin, Walter, 23, 105, 114, 117, 120, 121, 158, 184, 188; allegory and, 64–69; on angel of history and progress, 184–85; on animation, 245, 251; historicism opposed by, 75, 184–85; on history and historical materialism, 66, 120, 150, 184, 185, 205, 216; on idea, 22; Marxist dialectics and,

342  INDEX

60, 64–69; melancholy dialectics and, 14–15, 21–22, 23–24, 37–38, 64–69, 75, 77; messianic time and, 204, 260; notion of divine violence by, 214; On the Origins of German Tragic Drama, 14, 63; on sovereignty, 187; on Trauerspiel (mourning plays), 9, 14, 203; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 23, 72 Benton, Thomas Hart: American Historical Epic, 11 Berdecio, Roberto, 53 Berni, Antonio, 248 Bey, Twilight, 259 Bhabha, Homi, 259–60 black, blacks, 24, 161, 175, 237, 239, 243, 257; culture of, 26, 232–35, 237, 243; dichotomy of whites and, 18, 19; “Modern Industrial Man” as, 25, 27, 41, 229, 232, 253; Orozco and, 236; performances by, 258–59, 280–81; in United States, 19, 24, 236, 238, 240; violence against, 57, 240–41; white fears of, 159, 281 blackface minstrelsy, 232–36, 315n60; cross-racial identification and, 252, 253; melancholy of race and, 237, 260; Mickey Mouse and, 243, 317n85; playing Indian and, 272; vestigial, 242–50; white gloves and, 26, 229; working class whites and, 255 Black Legend, 126, 153; as bordering device, 40, 253; Cortés and, 131, 152; in U.S. national formation, 13, 115. See also Spanish conquest of Americas #blacklivesmatter, 24, 25, 281 blackness, 19, 41, 239, 243, 257–58; denigration of, 238–39; of “Modern Industrial Man,” 25, 229. See also African Americans; black, blacks Blake, William: Book of Job (ca. 1827), 93, 93–94; Job Rebuked by His Friends, 93

blood pudding, 112, 113, 114 Bolton, Herbert Eugene: “The Epic of Greater America” (1932), 13 borders, bordering, xv, 13, 14, 216, 276, 283; in Adams’s The American Epic, 12–13; violence of, 40, 41 bourgeoisie, 8, 9 Bragdon, Claude: Architecture and Democracy (1918), 212, 213 Brecht, Bertolt, 8, 314n38 Breton, André, 229 Buchenau, Jürgen, 189 Buddha, 96, 97, 98, 199–200 Bukatman, Scott, 245, 249, 251 Butler, Judith, 15, 183, 258 Cabañas, Juan Ruiz de, 145 Calles, Plutarco Elías (“Jefe Máximo”), 7–8, 98, 144; modernization and, 100, 101; pnr and, 52, 193; Rivera’s History of Mexico and, 50, 99, 138, 189–90, 192, 194 campesinos, 190, 222 capitalism, 53, 214, 294n19; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 138, 193, 194; in Siqueiros’s Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, 54, 149 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 8, 98–99, 222; Cardenismo and, 192; Rivera and, 192, 195 Carpenter Hall, Baker Library, 28 Carranza, Venustiano, 220 Carrasco, Davíd, 80, 82; on Quetzalcoatl mythologem, 79, 83, 104, 114, 118 Carrillo Puerto, Felipe, 96 Casasola Archive, 219, 220 Castagnino, Juan C., 248 Castile, Philando, 281 Catholicism, Catholic Church, 131, 144, 308n88; Calles and, 189; evangelization and, 18; fascism and, 194; mendicant orders of, 105, 127–28, 129, 131, 134, 135, 137, 145, 146, 201; Orozco and, 27; in Rivera’s

History of Mexico, 193, 194. See also Christianity Caygill, Howard, 65, 66, 68 Ceballos, Michelle: Orozco MEXotica and, 274; performance of, 276, 277, 277–78 Centurion, Manuel, 199 “Chains of the Spirit” (Panel 19 of Orozco’s Epic), 5, 34, 34–35, 36, 184, 200, 200–201, 202, 205, 207 Charles V, 80, 82 Charlot, Jean, 312n3 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 21, 251, 258, 274; on equality, 17–18; on melancholia and race theory, 15–16, 237–38, 256–57; on Smith’s performance art, 20, 258–59, 284 Chichén Itzá, 96 Christ: as critical material historian, 40–41; images of, 124, 145; indigenized, 202, 202; as Messiah, 116; in “Modern Migration of the Spirit” panel, 27, 36, 44, 198, 198, 200, 201–2, 204; mortified, 203, 204; redemption by, 202, 214; vengeful, 27, 114, 184, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205 Christianity: Adam and The Fall in, 202, 265, 272, 284; Anastasis in, 201, 203; Apocalypse and, 1, 124, 198, 201; Day of Judgment in, 64, 203; eschatology of, 114, 188; iconography of, 196; modern political theory and, 40; Rivera and, 203; of Spanish conquerors, 83–84, 104, 125–27; temporality of, 3; theology of, 188 civilization: barbarism and, 9, 68, 105, 109; Benjamin on, 66, 185; in Hovey Mural, 267–68, 272; ideal, 88; implements of, 211 Clinton, Bill, 281 Clouzot, Henri-Georges: Le mystère Picasso (1955), 245 Coatlicue, 107, 176; -as-stamping press, 176–78

INDEX  343

codex, codices, 80, 87, 90, 91, 92, 96, 100, 106, 133 Codex Telleriano-Remensis (ca. mid1500s), 96 CoFIRED (Coalition for Immigration Reform, Equality, and DREAMers), 25 colonialism and colonial subjects, 6, 17, 20, 151, 215 “Coming of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 5 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 33, 44, 87, 180, 209, 278; Ceballos performs before, 277, 277; description of, 32, 34; pagan gods in, 86, 87, 87, 93; pyramids in, 91; sight lines in, 88; sources of imagery in, 92–93; Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl myth in, 86–89 communism, communists: artists’ union and, 223; Cárdenas and, 8, 98–99; iconography and, 222; internationalism of, 53, 294n19; internecine struggles of in 1930s, 45; El Machete and, 226; Orozco and, 145, 149–50, 227; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 50. See also Communist Party; Marx, Karl; Marxism; Marxists Communist Party, 222; Orozco and, 227; Rivera and, 98–99, 189, 192, 195 communitas, 40, 157–61, 164, 167, 179, 182, 183 community, 26, 161; Esposito on, 156, 157–58, 162, 183, 254; imagined, 256, 261; Khanna on, 215; mestizo, 156; Orozco and, 156, 159–60, 162, 256, 264; proletarian, 227; violence and, 144, 156, 159 Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos, ctm), 192, 195 Confederation of Mexican Workers and Peasants (Confederación General de Obreros y Campesinos de México, cgocm), 192

344  INDEX

conquistadors, 131, 179; chronicles of, 125–26; indigenous women raped by, 48; in Orozco’s Epic, 33, 34, 101, 103–4; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 133 constellations: Benjamin and, 68, 69, 73–74, 187; as metaphor for mosaic of loss, 22; in Orozco’s Epic, 37, 44, 75, 77, 114, 182, 184, 188; in Orozco’s other murals, 45 Cornyn, John Hubert: The Song of Quetzalcoatl (1931), 91, 92, 103 Cortés, Hernán, 50, 80, 100, 102, 164, 179, 183, 214; Cartas de relación (Letters from Mexico, 1568), 124–25; legacy of, 130–33; Mendieta on, 128, 130; in Orozco’s Epic, 33, 34–35, 39, 111, 118, 123–26, 140–46; Quetzalcoatl’s return and, 3, 34, 82–83, 84–85, 94, 104; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 133, 134, 135, 137, 139. See also Spanish conquest of Americas; and “Cortez” in panel titles Cortés, Martín, 132; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 133, 134, 135 “Cortez and the Cross” (Panel 11 of Orozco’s Epic), 2, 5, 33, 44, 117–19, 124, 125, 145, 152, 182, 203; cross in, 199; meanings of, 151–52, 157–58, 256; Spanish conquest and, 34, 151 Cossacks, 147, 149 Craven, David, 8–9 creoles, 19, 129–30 Cristiada (Cristero Rebellion), 189, 192–93, 194, 203 critical agency, and melancholia, 15, 17, 121, 215, 255 critical philosopher (Benjamin), 68–69; Orozco as, 70–76, 77; viewer of Orozco’s Epic as, 76 cross: of Marquez, 193; in Orozco M ­ EXotica, 275, 278; in Orozco’s Epic, 103, 124–26, 199 Cuauhtémoc, 7, 50, 131

cultural politics, of postrevolutionary Mexico, 9, 24, 80 culture: Anglo-Protestant American, 154, 246, 271; black, 26, 232–35, 237, 243; central Mexican, 96, 109; diffusionist theory of, 91; Latin American, 176; Mesoamerican, 17, 80, 117; Mexican, 95, 115, 315n60; Native American, 322n29; Orozco on, 3 Curry, John Steuart, 154 Dadaists, 57 Dartmouth College: alumni of, 31, 262, 263; Art Department, 28; Art History Department, 293n108; artworks at, 29; author at, 23–25; Baker-Berry Library, 1; culture wars at, 24; Hood Museum of Art, 32, 292n106; Hovey Mural’s version of founding of, 264– 74; Native American students at, 10, 11; origins of, 9–10, 269; Orozco at, 11; Orozco on, 10; response to Orozco’s Epic, 262; Thayer Hall, 263; traditions of, 270, 271 Dartmouth College Alumni Magazine, 263, 268, 270; Orozco’s statement in, 1, 41 Dartmouth College faculty: author as member of, 23–26; of color, 24, 25; courses of, 274; diversity of, 273; integrating Orozco’s Epic into their courses, 31; of 1950s, 264; response to Orozco’s Epic, 262 Dartmouth College students, 1, 25, 264, 280, 281, 282; author and, 24–25, 26; diversity of, 273; joining performance of Orozco MEXotica, 274–84; minority, 21, 24; as model of “Modern Industrial Man,” 215–16, 256; as mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, 10, 115; as Native Americans, 25, 270; Native American cultural appropriation by, 11; protests by, 24–25; response to Orozco’s Epic, 262

Dartmouth Man, 215–16, 219, 252, 253, 256, 257, 260, 270, 272 da Vinci, Leonardo: Vitruvian Man, 198 decolonialism and decolonialization, 6, 7, 14, 16–17, 22 de Gante, Pedro: in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 134, 136 DeGuzmán, María, 11, 153–54 de la Huerta coup, 143, 189 de las Casas, Bartolomé, 131, 131, 133; as Dominican, 128, 130; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 134, 134, 135, 136; Vasconcelos and, 98, 199 Deleuze, Gilles, 294n2 Deloria, Philip, 271–72 Department of Indian Affairs, 113 “Departure of Quetzalcoatl” (Panel 7 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 33, 43, 89, 281; Quetzalcoatl myth in, 86, 89–90, 109; Quetzalcoatl’s finger in, 31, 34 de Sahagún, Bernardino. See Sahagún, Bernardino de de Velasco, Luís, 128 dialectical approach, Orozco’s, 13, 76–78, 105 Diallo, Amadou, 281 Diamond, Elin, 20 Díaz, Porfirio, 48, 131–32, 193 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal: Verdadera historia de la conquista de México (True History of the Conquest of Mexico, ca. 1520s), 125 Dimitroff, Stephen, 309n113 disidentification, 256; melancholia and, 20, 251–60; politics of, 274 Dominicans, 127–28 Duchamp, Marcel, 61 Durant, William, 194 Dürer, Albrecht: Melancholy I (1541, engraving), 65 eagle: Orozco’s imagery of, 91, 102; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 50; in Siqueiros’s Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, 57

INDEX  345

Eder, Rita, 63 education, 215; indigenous, 113; liberalism and, 85–86 ego, 14–15, 16 Éhecatl (wind god), Quetzalcoatl and, 81 Eisenstein, Sergei, 46, 57–59, 76; on animation, 245, 251; Battleship Potemkin, 241 Electricians’ Syndicate, 46, 54, 75, 149, 196, 214 El Greco, 30, 124 Ellison, Ralph, 237 enfleshment, 26, 26, 183, 203, 258, 260, 292n98 Eng, David, 15 epic, epics, 11–12, 285; Orozco’s conception of, 6, 9 Epic of American Civilization, The (1932–34, Orozco mural): allegory and, 63, 76–77, 105, 118, 119; American idea in, 3, 261; Ancient half of, 37, 77, 100, 101, 109–10, 111, 117, 198, 29; asymmetrical analogies in, 43–44; author and, 23–24, 25; brushwork and palette of, 30, 43, 198–99, 307n62; conceptual complexity of, 44; constellation in, 37, 44, 75, 78, 188; controversy over, 30; as counter­ narrative, 6, 117; decorative panels of, 32, 32, 36–37; designated U.S. National Historic Landmark, xv; as dialectical image, 50, 76–78; as discourse about two Americas, 161–62; formal incongruities in, 43; as fresco, 28, 31; layout and location of, 1, 9–10; melancholy and, 27–28, 37–38, 39, 40, 63–78, 111, 115, 119, 203, 205; as messianic cessation of happening, 120; minority students and, 21, 24; Modern half of, 26, 29, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 77, 110–11, 117, 183, 197, 201, 203, 229, 307n62; montage aesthetic of, 21, 22, 197; national commemoration

346  INDEX

scenes in, 181; nationalist warfare in, 149–50; Orozco on, 2–3; overview of, 4–5; painting process of, 30–31, 227, 228, 228, 307n62; payment for, 30; politics of emancipation encrypted within, 258; popularity of, 31; preliminary planning and studies for, 109, 110, 211, 217, 218, 273, 273, 292n104, 306n60; Quetzalcoatl mythologem in, 12, 27–28, 32, 39, 80, 86–95, 142; Rivera’s Detroit Industry compared to, 152–84; Rivera’s History of Mexico and, 7, 100, 151, 179; temporalities in, 197–98; themes of, 29, 140–41, 179; as Trauerspiel, 14–15; viewers of, 9, 11; women nearly excluded from, 21; Zapata in, 221. See also viewers of Orozco’s Epic; and titles of individual panels eschatology, 13; Christian, 114, 119, 124, 127; historicism and, 216; history and, 116, 188, 198, 207; in Hovey Mural, 265; Orozco and, 27, 183–84, 204; redemption and, 14, 41, 64; of Rivera’s History of Mexico, 8–9, 101, 196; Spanish conquest and, 27 Escuela de Bellas Artes, 246 Esposito, Robert, 152, 162, 182; on biopolitics, 158–59; on community, 183, 156, 157, 254; on philosophy as history, 40, 140; on violence, 156–57 Excelsior (Mexico City), Orozco’s autobiography serialized in, 38–39 exceptionalism, U.S. American, 13, 183; Black Legend and, 40, 115; Orozco’s Epic critiques, 11; themes of, 11–12 ex-votos, 230–31 fascism, fascists, 53, 179, 294n19; Mexican, 194; Nazis, 16, 158, 182, 187; Orozco and, 145, 149–50; Sinarquismo and, 194; in Siqueiros’s Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, 57

Ferber, Ilit, 21–22 fetishization, fetish, 197, 284; anti-, 187, 197; of indigenous culture, 111; of technology, 14, 179 figuration, 26, 244; animated, 251; El Greco’s, 124; La Malinche as, 141; normative, 257; Orozco’s approach to, xv; Rivera’s mode of, 45–46, 52; Siqueiros and, 55; subaltern, 258 film, 72; Constructivist, 66; as mass media, 46; theory of, 46, 57, 58 Fleetwood, Nicole, 219, 227, 253, 257–58 Florentine Codex (Sahagún), 80, 90, 91, 92, 96 Florescano, Enrique, 100, 116, 125, 126 Folgarait, Leonard, 52, 223, 226, 312n3, 313n17; on Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man,” 212; on Rivera’s History of Mexico, 8, 49–50, 117 Fordism, 244, 245, 247 Foucault, Michel, 158, 324n50 Fox, Claire, 166 fragmentation, 65, 67, 73, 169; avantgarde and, 60, 66; constellation as, 22, 75–76; in Orozco’s Dive Bomber and Tank, 45, 63, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76–77; in Orozco’s Epic, 44, 75, 105, 119, 154, 204; in Orozco’s other works, 150 Franciscans, 80, 127–28, 129–30, 142, 146–47 Frank, Waldo, 161–63, 239, 308n88; America Hispana, 238; pan-American fantasy of, 165, 283 freedom, 41, 159, 238 fresco, frescoes, 30, 44; Orozco’s Dive Bomber and Tank as portable, 38, 44–45, 62; Orozco’s Epic as cycle of, 1, 3, 28, 31, 263; Siqueiros on, 45 Freud, Sigmund, 15, 120; melancholy and, 14–15, 21–22, 121, 215, 237 friars, in Orozco’s Epic, 33, 34, 118 frontier thesis (Turner), 13

gachupínes, 129–30 Gamio, Manuel: excavation of Teotihuacán, 85, 98, 103, 232 García Peña, Lorgia, 238–39; on fear of Haiti, 41, 160, 257 Gasek, Jade, 300n31 gender, 167, 169, 208, 216, 227, 255, 259; geopolitics of, 164; hierarchy and inequality of, 157, 267; Latin America and, 176; mestizaje and, 231; metaphors of, 40; norms and stereotypes of, 280, 282–83; Orozco and, 254; Rivera and, 175, 177, 178; violence of, 24 genocide, 10, 55, 85, 119, 120, 359 Gillespie, Susan, 81, 82, 85, 115–16 globalization, 277; sex workers and, 282–83 gloves, white: and blackface, 26, 216, 229, 242–43, 251 gods, Mesoamerican: creator, 81; in Orozco’s Epic, 34, 44, 86, 87, 87, 180 “Gods of the Modern World” (Panel 15 of Orozco’s Epic), 2, 5, 33, 35, 165, 179, 209, 268, 280; alumni offended by, 262; “The Coming of Quetzalcoatl” and, 44; echoed by student protest, 25; skeletons in, 164–65; thanatopolitics in, 164 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 283–85; on mainstream bizarre, 276, 277, 279; migration experience of, 19; Orozco MEXotica and, 21, 261; performance of, 279; on La Pocha Nostra, 324n51 González, Anita, 232 González Mello, Renato, 60, 86, 93–94, 95, 212, 213, 239–40, 247 Goodrich, Samuel: Lives of Celebrated American Indians (1843), 92, 92, 93 Gramsci, Antonio, 215 grief, 183, 256; Freud and, 15; race and, 16, 21, 257, 260

INDEX  347

Guadalajara, Orozco’s commissions in, 124, 141, 144–45 Guadalupe, Virgin of, 132 Guadalupe Posada, José, 164 Haiti: culture of, 282; fear of, 41, 159, 238, 257, 280; Haitian Revolution and slave rebellion, 26, 160, 238–39; U.S. occupation of, 281. See also zombies and undead Hamblen, Emily, 94 Hambidge, Jay, 30 Hanover, NH, 10 Hanover Plain, 265 Harlem, 235, 236, 237 Harlow, Jean, 309n113 Heartfield, John: “Adolf, the Superman: Swallows gold and spouts rubbish,” 57 hero cults, 219–21, 224 Hidalgo, Miguel, 50; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 138 “Hispanics”: heritage of, xv, xvi; ideological construction of, 153–54 “Hispano-America” (Panel 14 of Orozco’s Epic), 2, 5, 33, 35, 40, 43, 156, 180, 212, 219, 221, 255, 267, 280; critiquing foreign exploitation of Mexico, 154–56; as image of chaotic violence, 159; Orozco MEXotica performance before, 279; racialized guerrilla in, 159–60, 161; ratifying Frank’s vision of America Hispana, 163 historians, critical, 14, 22, 114, 120 historical materialism, 66, 120, 184, 185, 187, 204, 204, 205, 216 historical time, 198; Trauerspiel and, 9 historicism, 22; of Adams’s The American Epic, 12; Benjamin on, 66, 187; critics of, 14; eschatological time and, 216; of Mexican muralists, 7; Orozco’s anti-, 9, 24, 123; of Rivera’s History of Mexico, 7, 40, 75, 101, 189 history: Adams’s narrative of, 11–12; American, 207; Butler on, 15; as

348  INDEX

class struggle, 47–48, 99, 196, 197; as discourse in Rivera’s murals, 46–52; eschatological, 118, 207; Hegelian terms of, 58, 101; Judeo-Christian notion of, 116, 118, 127; Marxism as philosophy of, 14, 101; material, 67, 68; melancholy and, 119; myth vs., 118; Orozco’s and, 27, 140–41; philosophy as, 40, 63, 150; as progress, 9, 14; as ruin, 63; Western conceptions of, 40 History of Mexico, National Palace mural (Rivera), 46–52, 50, 51, 117, 188–97, 191, 302n63; “The Ancient Indian World,” 47, 188; Buddha in, 199; changes to, 190–93, 195; circulation of preparatory sketches of, 100; “From the Conquest to 1930,” 48, 134, 135, 136, 137; historical figures in, 48–49; as historicist, 7, 188; human sacrifice downplayed in, 109; interpretations of, 8–9; location of, 9; “Mexico Today and Tomorrow,” 49, 50; notable features of, 101; original iconographic program of, 190, 192; Orozco lampoons, 113; Orozco’s Epic and, 179; patron of, 98; Quetzalcoatl in, 85, 96–101, 110, 115; ruling elite and, 114; U.S. robber barons in, 194; visual complexity of, 49 Hitler, Adolf, 147, 149 Hobbes, Thomas, 158 Holly, Michael Ann, 22–23 Hollywood, 11, 309n113 Hopkins, Ernest, 28, 274; defense of Orozco’s Epic against alumni attacks, 250, 262 Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts, 274 Hovey, Richard: “Eleazar Wheelock” (drinking song), 10, 263, 264 Hovey Grill, 263, 264, 278 Hovey Mural (Humphrey), 21, 41, 261, 262–74, 283; cultural harm of, 273, 322n29; Fall from Paradise in,

265, 272, 284; models for, 270–71; Orozco’s Epic contrasted with, 263–64, 273; Panel 1 (“Oh, Eleazar Wheelock Was a Very Pious Man . . .”), 265–66, 266; Panel 2 (“Five Hundred Gallons of New England Rum . . .”), 266, 267; Panel 3 (“The Big Chief That Met Him Was . . .”), 266, 267; Panel 4 (“He Had Tobacco by the Cord . . .”), 266, 268; Panel 5 (“Eleazar and the Big Chief Harangued . . .”), 266, 268; Panel 6 (“They Founded Dartmouth College . . .”), 269; Panel 7 (“Fill the Bowl . . .”), 264, 270, 271; removal of, 273 Huehueteotl (god of fire), 87, 87 Huitzilopochtli (god of the Sun and war), 110, 113, 278; birth of, 176; human sacrifice and, 85–86, 106, 107, 107, 111, 145, 279; in Orozco MEXotica performance, 279; in Orozco’s Epic, 87, 87; Quetzalcoatl and, 81 human sacrifice, 279; banned by Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, 82, 85–86, 90; in Orozco’s Epic, 105–9, 111; Orozco on, 112–13, 114; Spanish conquest as punishment for, 84 Humphrey, Walter Beach: Hovey Mural and, 261; on Orozco’s Epic, 262–63 iconography, 219–20, 222, 242 ideas: Benjamin and, 73–74; as extant in material world, 22; Orozco on, 1–3, 22, 60, 70, 76 identity, 39; American, 207; as bordering process, 14; Indianness and, 272; mutability of, 285; Orozco MEXotica’s exploration of, 274, 276, 280; politics and, 284; racial, 21 imperialism: Aztec, 6; competing, 101; Spanish, 7 independence, Mexican, 19; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 47 indigenismo, 7, 26, 132–33, 232–33;

colonial politics of, official, 17, 160; critical ironies of, 14; gendered politics of, 229; of Mexican muralists, 77, 223; nationalism and, 130; Orozco and, 111, 113, 231–32, 240; postrevolutionary Quetzalcoatl myth and, 39, 85–101; primitivizing practices of, 236; racial point of view of, 115; visual politics of “Modern Industrial Man” and, 219 indigenous: as aesthetic resource, 112; degradation of, 236–37; in federal nation-building, 113; homage to in Orozco’s Epic, 36–37; mendicant orders and, 127–28; Mexicanization of, 86; in Orozco’s works, 111, 142; Quetzalcoatl and, 97; as racial category, 19; in Rivera’s works, 133–36 Industrial School of Orizaba, 223 industry, 121; implements of, 210, 211; labor and, 209; in Orozco’s “The Machine,” 152; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 100–101 Inquisition, 135–36, 136 Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, pri), 52 International Team of Plastic Artists, with Siqueiros, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, 53–58 Iton, Richard, 22, 151 Iturbide, Agustín de, 48; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 138, 190, 195 Izaguirre, Leandro: The Torture of Cuauhtémoc, 131 jaguar, 102, 102; Orozco’s imagery of, 91, 102; Quetzalcoatl and, 81 Jalisco, 232 Jesuits, 127 Jiménez, Francisco M.: Monument to Cuauhtémoc, 131 Joachim of Fiore, 127–29, 304n12 Jolly, Jennifer, 249 Jones, Amelia, 284

INDEX  349

Joseph, Gilbert, 189 justice, 17, 188, 204; Orozco’s “Modern Industrial Man” and, 205, 214–15, 260 Kahlo, Frida, 196, 233; miscarriage of, 170, 174–75, 177; My Nurse and I (1937), 229, 230, 230–31; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 194, 196; as Rivera’s wife, 170 Kartsonis, Anna, 201 Kemeny, John, 10 Khanna, Ranjana, 252, 255; on colonial melancholy, 16–17, 120, 121, 215 knowledge, knowing, 6, 84, 135, 158, 179, 185, 259, 284 Kordas, Ann: on zombies, 159 Lafaye, Jacques, 115 La Pocha Nostra Collective, 21, 324n51; Orozco MEXotica, 261, 274, 283, 284 Lathrop, Jerry, 28, 307n62 Latin America, xv, xvi, 19, 152, 166; racialized culture of, 13; U.S. America and, 161, 169, 178, 239 Lawrence, D. H., 144 Lázaro, Enrique, 248 Leal, Fernando: Feast of the Lord of Chalma (1922–23), 124 Lear, John, 222, 226, 227 Left, leftists, 7, 8, 9, 14, 45, 98–99. See also communism, communists; Marxism; Marxists Lewis, Barbara, 243 liberalism, liberals, 8, 20, 26, 97; education and, 85–86; humanism and, 40; individualism and, 183; in postrevolutionary Mexico, 86, 96; Rivera shifts from, 193 Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, 309n114 Lindbergh, Charles, 309n114; baby of, 174, 309n113 linotypes, 298n92; Orozco on, 71–72 Locke, John, 158 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 192

350  INDEX

loss and lost object, 17, 22, 120, 121; melancholy and, 15, 20; mosaic metaphor and, 21–22 Lott, Eric, 18, 26, 274; on blackface, 232–33, 252, 255 Lozowick, Louis, 152 lynchings, 56, 57 Machete, El, 223, 225, 226 “Machine, The” (Panel 12 of Orozco’s Epic), 2, 5, 33, 34–35, 111, 119, 151, 153, 211; analysis of, 152–165; as backdrop for Ybarra performance, 278, 278 “Machine Images” (Panel 10 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 5, 37, 38, 199, 219 machinery: fetishization of, 14; in Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life (Orozco mural), 29, 29; modern idolatry of, 37 Mackenthun, Gesa: on Quetzalcoatl myth, 27, 83–84, 104–5 Madero, Francisco I., 220 Malinche, La. See Malintzin Malintzin (Doña Marina), 132, 157, 163; in Orozco’s works, 141–42; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 133, 134, 135 Man: universalizing discourses of, 29; as Western liberal subject, 26, 40 Manhattan, 212 Manifest Destiny, 11, 12 Manilla, Manuel, 164 Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life (Orozco’s “secret mural”), 28–29, 29, 228; palette of, 30 Martel, James, 41, 187, 197, 203–4, 214–15 Martínez Gutiérrez, Patricia, 93 Marx, Karl, 7, 187, 260; Capital, 194, 196, 197; Communist Manifesto, 50, 99; material dialectics of history of, 47, 50, 58, 59, 60; as messiah, 191, 196; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 50, 99–100, 116, 120, 139, 188, 191, 192, 196, 202

Marxism, 14, 60, 78, 100, 195, 203; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 46, 99–100, 139–40, 193–94; Rivera’s messianic, 41, 204 Marxists, 27, 77, 192; utopianism of, 78, 113, 196 mass media: film as, 46; murals as, 72 Maximato, 7, 8, 189, 192, 195, 224 Maya, 80, 96 melancholy, melancholia, the melancholic, 9, 203; allegoresis and, 9, 40, 70; art history and, 22–23; Benjamin’s dialectics of, 14–15, 21–24, 37–38, 64–69, 75, 77; borders and bordering and, 14; Cheng on, 237– 38, 256–57, 258; colonial, 120, 179; community and, 183; critical agency and, 15, 17, 121, 215, 255; critical historian and, 22; disidentification and, 20; fragmentation and, 75; Freud on, 15; haunting as work of, 252; of Mexican intellectuals, 120; Orozco’s Epic and, 37–38, 40, 63–78, 80, 111, 115, 119, 205, 256; of race, 41, 237, 251–60, 274; race and performance and, 14–21; Spanish conquest and, 77; as structure of feeling, 20–21; white racial, 255 Mella, Julio Antonio, assassination of, 195 Mellon, Andrew, 194 Memín Pinguín, 315n60, 317n85 Mendieta, Gerónimo de, 146, 150, 304n12; Historia eclesiástica indiana, 128–30, 136, 147; Rivera influenced by, 133, 139–40 Mendoza, Juan de: in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 135, 136 Mesoamerica, 27; civilization of, 48, 118, 120; concept of time in, 82, 100; cosmogony of, 81, 96, 100, 106; cosmology of, 199; culture and culture groups of, 17, 80, 117; human sacrifice in, 109; myths and gods of, 87, 207

messiah: justice and, 205, 260; Marx as, 191, 196; post-Aztec Quetzalcoatl as, 85; subaltern, 121 messianic power and leadership, messianism, 8, 40, 74, 95, 114; Agamben on, 100; of Benjamin and Freud and, 14, 114; Marxism and, 41, 101, 113, 114, 184, 191, 196, 204; of medieval Christianity, 127, 184, 188; in Orozco’s Epic, 114; politics and, 85–101, 123; Quetzalcoatl myth and, 39, 85, 114; secular, 188, 198; weak, 76, 114, 120, 121, 185, 188, 204, 205 messianic time, 150, 184, 214, 260, 261, 284, 285 mestizaje (race-mixing), 7, 19, 25, 26, 257; Cortés as representation of, 142–43; as dominant trope in Mexican racial context, 18, 94; gendered politics of, 229; Malintzin and, 132; national discourse of, 230–31; Orozco’s conception of, 94, 151, 268, 272; racial politics and, 160; statecraft of, 39; as symbolic process, 141; U.S.-based discourses on race and, 21; utopian ethos of, 20; women and, 231 Mestizo nation, 13; birthing of, 7, 48; modernity of, 79, 121 mestizos, 25; middle-class, 19; as racial trope and category, 19, 94 metalepsis, 8 Mexica, 50, 105; Aztecs as, 82, 299n3; toponym of, 133, 138 Mexicanidad, 7 Mexican national identity and history, 3, 13, 21, 41, 112, 133–40, 257 Mexican Revolution, 7, 160, 238; civil war and, 8, 180; as institutionalized myth, 8; Orozco returns to, 221; in Orozco’s work, 140; photographic iconography of, 219; as representative of threat of chaos, 161; La Revolución and, 180, 181; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 47, 190, 191, 193

INDEX  351

Mexicans: Dartmouth alumni’s prejudice against, 262; U.S. America repatriation of, 18, 239 Mexican Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, 223; Orozco as a member of, 227 Mexico, 79; in Adams’s The American Epic, 12; central, 80, 81; depicted as victim of corruption, 159; economic crisis in, 192; foreign ownership of natural resources in, 154–56; independence of, 129; independence celebrations of, 132; independence movement of, 138; Marxism in, 139–40; race and, 18; slave trade in, 19 Mexico City, 7, 46, 85, 96, 114, 232 Michelangelo, 30, 72 Mickey Mouse, 26, 243 Mictlantecuhtli (god of death), 87 Mieszkowski, Jan, 64 Mignolo, Walter, 6 “Migration” (Panel 1 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 32, 32, 37, 44, 86, 105, 106, 111; Occom Pond Singers performance before, 275 Moctezuma I, 82 Moctezuma II, Cortés and, 27, 82–83 “Modern Human Sacrifice” (Panel 17 of Orozco’s Epic), 2, 5, 34–35, 36, 61, 77, 108, 179–80, 182; description of, 108–9; skeletons in, 164–65; thanatopolitics of, 164 “Modern Industrial Man” (Panel 20 of Orozco’s Epic), 5, 208, 210, 213; as black, 25–26; detail of, 209; encryption of presence of, 20; gloves in, 251; huddled workers in, 227; as icon of racial subjecthood, 258; meaning of, 207–60; melancholia of disidentification in, 261; race and, 207–60; racialization, bordering, and body in, 14, 29; racialized worker in, 205, 208, 214–19, 229, 242, 251, 252, 254, 256, 257, 260;

352  INDEX

as space of crisis, 37, 120; studies for, 211, 217, 218; as supplement to Orozco’s Epic cycle, 1, 41, 283–84; twilight and, 260; “worker who reads” in, 224, 227, 228, 256 modernity and modernization, 39, 121; American, 77–78; Calles and, 100, 101; capitalist, 65, 67; failed, 121; indigenous and, 113; intellectual practice of, 118; mestizo, 79; in Orozco’s Epic, 123, 119; Orozco’s expressionism and, 244; postrevolutionary state and, 114; ushered in by Cortéz, 214; Veder on, 245–46 “Modern Migration of the Spirit” (Panel 18 of Orozco’s Epic), 2, 5, 34–35, 36, 184, 198, 198–99, 201, 203; alumni offended by, 262; Buddha in, 198, 199, 200; Christ in, 44; Last Judgment Scene in, 27, 35–36; students perform before, 280, 280–81; study for, 202 Modotti, Tina, 225–26; Campesinos Reading “El Machete” (1920), 226; photographs of, 227 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 147 montage, 8, 54, 71, 74, 187; Benjamin and, 66; Eisenstein and, 60; Orozco’s Epic and, 9, 21, 22, 37, 39, 60, 197; Siqueiros and, 75, 76; sound, 275, 279, 324n50; Surrealist, 66 monteurs, radical, 39, 72; Orozco’s Christ as, 204 Montenegro, Roberto, 143 Monument to the Revolution, 180 Moody, Douglas: “Representations of/ from Latino/as in the Media and the Arts” (course), 274 Mora, José María Luis, 130 More, Thomas: Utopia, 129 Morelos, José María, in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 138 Morgan, J. P., 194 Morones, Luis, 227 Morrow, Dwight W., 195, 309n114

mosaic, 21–22; of fragments of nationalisms, 22 Motolinía, Toribio de Benavente, 130 mourning plays. See Trauerspiel Moya de Contreras, Pedro: in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 135, 136 Mumford, Lewis: The Brown Decades (1931), 12, 213 Muñoz, José, 20–21, 255 mural art, murals, 7, 101, 223; debates over form of, 38, 50; Orozco on, 62–63, 212 muralism, muralists, 112; commercial, 263; indigenismo and, 77; Mexican, 11, 21, 45–63, 95; movement of, 61; Siqueiros’s cinematographic form of, 46, 53–60; U.S. American, 11 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York City): Orozco and, 62; Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940), 44–45

naacp, Orozco’s donation of Negroes to, 240 Nahuatl language, 82, 91, 299n3 Namuth, Hans, 245 narration, narratives: colonial, 22; counter-, 6; national, xvi, 6, 7, 14–15, 40; Orozco’s antipathy to, 3; progressive, 14–15 National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, pan), 194 National Historic Landmark (U.S.), Orozco’s Epic designated as, xv nationalism, 6, 7, 20, 27; cultural, 112; deradicalized, 180; in eighteenth-century, 130; iconography of, 219; Mexican, 214–15, 219, 221, 222, 254; rise of, 36; triumphalism of, xvi, 101; U.S. American, 40, 214–15; white normative ideal of, 18, 255, 256 National Palace (Mexico City), Rivera’s History of Mexico in, 7, 8–9, 39, 46–52, 75, 133–40

National Park Service (United States), Landmarks Committee, xv National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, pnr), 52, 193 nation-state, 78, 80; bordering and, 13; building of, 113; Freud and, 16; history painting and formation of, 7; lost ideal of, 17; modern, 180, 181; postcolonial, 83; redemption within political ethos of, 14; U.S., 216; violent origins of, 6, 9 Native Americans: Abenakis, 10; at Dartmouth, 25; Dartmouth students’ identification with, 21; Dawes Act and, 115; education of by Wheelock, 219; Mohegans, 10; mythologized as Adams and Eves in Hovey Mural, 265; of New England, 10; stereotypes of, 265–66, 274; white society’s cultural appropriation of, 10–11, 322n29 Native American studies, at Dartmouth, 10 negritos, 232 negritude, 238 New England, 114; influence of, 9, 12; represented in Orozco’s Epic, 33, 35 New Indian Church, 130 New Masses (journal), 45 New School for Social Research, New York City, 11, 317n75 New Spain, 129, 140; administrative center of, 96; slaves and, 18 New World civilization: creation of, 3, 39; prophetic nature of Quetzalcoatl myth and, 94, 114, 256 Noble, Andrea, 219–20 Noguchi, Isamu: Death sculpture, 240 Noreña, Miguel: Monument to Cuauhtémoc, 131 North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), 277, 278 north wall of Orozco Room, 1, 44, 110, 117; Ancient Wing of, 33;

INDEX  353

north wall of Orozco Room, (continued): architecture of, 43; Modern Wing of, 33; positive aspects on, 111; west wing of, 86 Novak, Barbara, 269–70 Novo, Salvador, 144 nudes: in Orozco’s Epic, 32, 239, 266; in Orozco’s other works, 142, 145, 146, 241; in Rivera’s works, 168, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179 Obama, Barack, xv, 24 Obregón, Álvaro, 220; assassination of, 192–93; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 138, 190 Occom, Samson, 10, 273 Occom Pond Singers, performance at Orozco MEXotica, 275, 275 odalisques, 239 Oles, James, 63 Olmecs, 96 O’Malley, Ilene V., 219 Order of the Sisters of Guadalupe, 132 origin stories, 6, 156 Orozco, José Clemente: academic training of, 89; on “Anglo-America,” 159; as anti-fetishistic material historian, 188, 197; anti-narrative sensibilities of, 63; avoidance of publicity, 38; on being an artist-for-hire, 250–51; as Benjamin’s critical material historian, 120; controversies of, 144; at Dartmouth, 11; on “energy creating matter,” 246–47; The Epic of American Civilization, painting of, 1, 207, 228; esoteric visual languages and, 93; European tour of, 30, 180, 181; experience of losing expressive freedom, 247; history and, 140–41; as illustrator for El Machete, 227; invoking singular American civilization, 161; on living myth of Quetzalcoatl, 17, 39, 79; on lynching, 240; as middle-class mestizo, 19; mural art and, 37–38; on painting and art, 1–3,

354  INDEX

24, 62, 70, 76; palette of, 30; poetic image of, 60–64; political theology of, 41; prints of, 234–37, 240; Quetzalcoatl myth, framing by, 142; relationship to blackface minstrelsy, 242; on rural education missions, 133; as skeptic of orthodoxy, 39; socialism and, 143; social satire of, 36; urban background of, 232; use of machine aesthetic by, 152; use of stock figures by, 223; U.S. experience of, xv, 236, 239, 316n63; on viewers, 61; on violence constituting community, 156; as visiting professor, 28; white racial melancholy and, 255; on womanhood, 164; Zapata hero cult, contribution to, 220 Orozco, José Clemente, artwork of: Banquet of the Rich (1923–26, National Preparatory School mural), 44, 124, 141–43, 227; Despotism (1938–39, fresco), 147, 149; The Dictators (1938– 39, fresco), 149, 149; Dive Bomber and Tank (1940, portable fresco), 38, 44–45, 62, 62–63, 70, 76–77, 150, 250; Dumping Ground (1935, print), 111; Echate La Otra (Dancing Indians; 1935, print), 111, 112, 236–37, 316n64, 316n65; Eighth Avenue (1928, painting), 212; Elevated (1929–30, painting), 212; El Gran Pato (1941, painting), 236–37; The Franciscan and the Indian (1926, mural), 141–42, 142; The Franciscans (1938–39, fresco), 141, 146, 146–47; Hernan Cortés and “La Malinche” (1926, mural), 141, 142, 144, 145; “Horrors of the Revolution” (drawings), 240; Hospicio Cabañas mural cycle (1938– 39, Guadalajara), 44, 141, 144–45, 150–51; “In New York” (caricature in L’abc magazine), 239–40; Las Masas (The Masses; 1935, lithograph), 147, 148; Maternity (1924), 124; The Mechanized Masses (1938–39, fresco), 147,

148; Mexican Peasants Working (1929, print), 112; Negroes (Negros colgados, Hanged Black Men; 1933, lithograph), 240, 241; “New Democracy” (1941), 241; Portrait of Cortez (1938–39, fresco), 141, 145, 146; Queensboro Bridge (1928, painting), 210, 211; The Revolutionary Trinity (1923–26, fresco), 227; Rocks (1935, print), 111; Social Revolution (1926, fresco at Industrial School of Orizaba), 223; The Spanish Conquest of Mexico (1937, fresco at Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara), 144–45; Teatro de Variedades en Harlem (Vaudeville in Harlem; 1928, lithograph), 234, 235, 235–36; The World’s Tallest Structure (1928–30, painting), 212; “Victims of War” (1941, portable mural), 241; Zapata (1930), 220; Zapatistas (Generals, Leaders; 1935, lithograph), 220, 221, 221. See also Epic of American Civilization, The Orozco, José Clemente, writings of: autobiography of, 10, 38–39, 61, 112, 181; Dartmouth statement of, 60–61, 62, 70; “New Worlds, New Races, New Art” (1929 manifesto), 94, 111, 112, 212, 213; “Orozco Explains” (for MoMA, 1940), 62, 70, 71, 151, 197, 204 Orozco MEXotica: Guillermo Gómez-Peña Underground at Dartmouth (2002 performance), 21, 41, 261, 274–85, 279, 280, 281, 282 Orozco Room: as deterritorialized borderscape, 14; fetish and, 284; as heterotopia, 283, 324n50; images of, 2; location of, 1; Orozco MEX­ otica performance in, 274; tours of, 292n106 Ortiz Rubio, Pascual, 7 other: exclusion of, 257; Indian as, 272; melancholia and, 16; racialized, 6, 16, 18

Packard, Artemas, 28, 91, 109, 111; naming of mural panels of Orozco’s Epic, 31 painting: Orozco on, 1–3; violence in historical, 156–57 Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, relief panels from, 29 pan-Americanism, 13, 179, 182; context of, 40; discourse on, 165 Pan American Union (pau), 165–66 panels of Orozco’s Epic: images of, 2, 4–5; layout of, 1, 4–5; naming of, 31, 32; number of, 1. See also titles of individual panels Panofsky, Erwin, 65 Parra, Félix, 132, 134, 156; Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, 131, 131, 134, 141, 143; Guadalupan cult and, 132; The Massacre of Cholula, 130 Paseo de la Reforma, 131 peasants, 100, 111, 112, 160 Pensky, Max, 37, 68–69, 73–75 performance, performativity, and melancholy of race, 14–21 phantasmagoria (Scheinwelt), 22, 68–69, 187; of Christian eschatology, 203; exploding of, 119; of modern sovereignty, 40, 197–205; Orozco’s Epic’s dialectical relationship and, 80 Phelan, John Leddy, 128, 130, 304n12 Philip II, 128; Orozco’s depiction of, 147 Picasso, Pablo, 30 Plato, 199 “playing Indian,” 115, 261; compared to blackface minstrelsy, 272; at Dartmouth, 10, 271, 273 poetry, painting as, 62, 71 Pokornowski, Steven, 160–61 Polan, Dana, 59 politics: American, 207; grief and, 183; messianic, 207; postrevolutionary Mexican, 85, 219; working-class, 226 Pollock, Jackson, 31 popular class, 8

INDEX  355

popular culture, U.S. American, 26 Popular Front policy, 222 Portes Gil, Emilio, 7 Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939–40, Siqueiros and International Team of Plastic Artists), 53, 53–58; details of, 54, 55, 56, 58; symbolism of lynched black man in, 241 postcolonialism: lost objects and, 22; nation state and, 14, 17; of Rivera’s History of Mexico, 8; subaltern scholars and, 21 precarity, 183, 203, 258 “Pre-Columbian Golden Age, The” (Panel 6 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 33, 34, 88, 300n31; Quetzalcoatl myth in, 86, 89 Prieto, Miguel, 53 privilege of white males, 277 progress, 76; Benjamin on, 184–85; in Hovey Mural, 269–70; Rivera’s view of,119 proletariat, 226; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 188, 190; Siqueiros on, 59–60 propaganda: communists and, 45; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 99; settler, 266 “Prophecy, The” (Panel 8 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 33, 86, 101, 103, 117, 118, 126; as break in mural, 34; brushwork of, 43; description of, 103–4; as first panel painted, 30 prostitution, prostitutes, 193, 239–40 Protestantism, 9, 12, 239; Calvinism, 64, 308n88; at Dartmouth, 27; ethos of, 13; Lutheranism, 64; represented in Orozco’s Epic, 35 protests: by Dartmouth students, 24–25, 25; by white working-class against wage labor, 243 provincialism of U.S. American historians, 13 psychoanalysis, 16–17 Pujol, Antonio, 53

356  INDEX

pyramids, 106; in Orozco’s Epic, 86, 90, 91, 232 Quetzalcoatl and Quetzalcoatl mythologem, 27, 199, 250; -as-airplane, 192; as allegory, 104–5, 118; Aztec use of, 102; as boundary figure, 81, 86, 94, 103; Carrasco on, 79–80, 82, 83; in commercial print culture, 91; as creator god, 81, 96; as critique of U.S. American antiempire, 121; as enlightened ruler, 81, 88–89, 93, 96, 189; exile and departure of, 89–90, 96, 97, 101; as fragmentary, 105; Golden Age of, 32, 44, 86, 90, 101, 102, 114, 120, 212, 214, 232; grappling with freedom and constraint, 249–50; images of, 92; justice promised by, 214; living, 17, 256; lost object and, 17; as messianic leader, 85, 114; mystification of violence of origins by, 7; as New World Moses, 92, 92, 93; as New World prophet, 84; 1930s renaissance of, 85, 86; Occidentalized, 83–84, 85, 86, 91, 93, 97, 101; as origin tale, 6; Orozco on, 3; in Orozco’s Epic, 12, 27, 32, 33, 34, 39, 77, 86–95, 104, 142; Orozco’s melancholic critique of postcolonial nation-state through, 80, 256; in Orozco’s The Spanish Conquest of Mexico, 145; postconquest sources of, 80, 84–85, 96; postrevolutionary messianic politics and indigenism and, 85–101, 115; in pre-invasion visual culture, 80; as priest, 81; prophesied return of, 82–85, 94, 101, 104, 110, 111, 115, 116, 119, 202; representing unification of duality, 94; return of, 3, 17; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 7, 39, 85, 46, 91, 96–101; Rivera’s Marxist interpretation of, 50; St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl, 84, 85, 86, 91, 93, 98; Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, 82–83, 84, 85, 86, 96, 97, 98,

302n63; as white and bearded, 25, 84, 86, 91, 96, 97, 101 Quetzalcoatl Logia of Rosicrucian brotherhood, 98, 189 ¡Que Viva México! (Eisenstein), 57 Quijano, Aníbal, 6 Quiroga, Vasco de (“Tata”), 128–29; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 134, 136 Rabasa, José, 253, 291n78 Rabel, Fanny, 53 race, races, 14, 18; castas, 19; colonial violence and, 6; contemporary politics of, 24; critical theorists on, 21; exclusion of, 238, 239, 257, 259; fusion of, 19; identity and, 26, 253; inequities of, 229; integration of, 86; justice and, 285; melancholy of, 16, 41, 207–60; in Mexico, 18, 229, 236; mixing of, 7, 18–19; political violence and, 151 racism, racialization: in Americas, 14, 159, 255; antiblack, 19; Asian American stereotypes and, 282–83; black stereotypes and, 281, 281, 317n85; Cheng on, 237–38; of fascist regimes, 242; of nation-state, 158; Orozco in United States and, 236, 316n63; politics of, 78; in United States, 19, 179; violence and, 239, 240 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 7, 57, 189, 220 Raphael, 30 reading in Orozco’s Epic, 14, 36 realism: narrative, 245, 247; Rivera and, 49; social, xv, 193 redemption, 41, 78; Benjamin and, 14, 64, 67, 69, 185–86; Marx and, 191; narrative of, 121; of national state, 22, 116; Orozco’s Epic and, 80, 120, 202; through Rivera’s working class, 188; world without, 76 Reed, Alma, 110 Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana, crom), 189, 227

Renau, Josep, 53 reserve corridor and room, Baker-Berry Library, 28; architecture of, 3, 78, 197 reserve desk, Baker-Berry Library, 34, 37, 38, 110; aesthetic function of, 1, 77, 117; “Modern Industrial Man” and, 36 Revueltas, Fermín: Allegory of the Virgin Guadalupe (1922–23), 124 Rivera, Diego, 70, 72, 95, 119, 209, 220; autobiography of, 59; career and politics of, 189–90, 192; collections of, 229; demonization of Christianity, 203; Detroit Industry mural (1932– 33), xv, 155, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 193, 309n113; epic modernism of, 8; equating murals with movies, 249; fees of, 30; History of Cuernavaca and Morelos (1929–30), 220, 309n114; The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man (1926–27, fresco), 168; Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Better Future (completed 1933, destroyed 1934), 298n95; messianic Marxism of, 41, 151, 184, 205, 214, 224; Ministry of Public Education mural, 124, 190, 195, 223, 231; mural in rca tower at Rockefeller Plaza, 30, 193, 196, 250, 298n95; painting in Mexico City, 114; pan-American cooperation and, 165–79; political opportunism and, 52, 195; Portrait of America, 240; as Rosicrucian, 98; secularizing prophetic return, 116; Siqueiros’s attack on, 38, 45–63, 195; in United States, 193; U.S. commissions of, 40; use of scenes of modern industry, 152; use of stock figures by, 223–24; vision of industry, 165–79. See also History of Mexico, National Palace mural Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich, 28 Rockefeller, John D., Sr., 194, 195

INDEX  357

Rodríguez, Abelardo, 7 Rodríguez Luna, Antonio, 53 Rodríguez Mortellaro, Itzel, 85 Rodríguez Prampolini, Ida, 47–49, 99 Rogin, Michael, 237–38 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 130, 139; Florentine Codex (ca. 1519–40), 80, 90, 91, 92, 96; The General History of the Things of New Spain (1499–1590), 129; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 134, 135, 136, 139 schoolteacher, in Orozco’s Epic, 164 Sammond, Nicholas, 26, 243–44, 251 Sample, Paul, 154 Saxl, Fritz, 65 Schapiro, Meyer, 8 Schmitt, Carl, 40, 186–87 Seabrook, William: The Magic Island (1929), 160 serpents: carved on pyramids, 81, 103; eagle and, 50; in Hovey Mural, 269, 269; in Orozco’s Epic, 89, 90, 91, 109; phallic, 176; plumed or feathered, 47, 81, 82, 91, 96, 100, 103, 109, 192, 302n63; Quetzalcoatl and, 47, 96, 81, 82, 91, 199; raft of, 82, 96, 301n53; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 47, 96, 100, 192, 302n63; Tlaloc and, 87 settler, settlers, 118, 265; class of, 233; identity politics of, 272; propaganda of, 266; states of, 6, 115, 283; U.S. America narrative of, 264 sexuality: extreme, 276–77; Orozco’s Epic and, 21 Sheeler, Charles, 152 Sierra, Justo, 132 Sinarquismo, 194 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 72, 231; arrest of, 57; Colegio Chico mural of, 124; dialectical-subversive approach of, 50; Electricians’ Syndicate mural, 149, 196, 214; lectures of, 57; montage and, 75, 76; Ministry of Public

358  INDEX

Education mural, 57; on lynching, 240; Plastic Exercise (1933), 248–49; in overols, 223; Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (with International Team of Plastic Artists), 53–58, 248; Rivera, debate with, 38, 45–63; Tropical America (1928), 278; Victim of Fascism (1944–45, mural), 242; white protagonists in murals of, 209 skyscrapers, 212–14 slavery, slaves, 19, 242; colonial enterprise and, 10; discourses of freedom and, 41; in New Spain, 18–19; trade in, 19; in “Victims of Fascism,” 241 Smith, Anna Deavere, 20, 258–59, 284 “Snake and Spears” (Panel 2 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 32, 32, 86 snakes. See serpents socialism, 8, 53, 113, 133, 139, 143, 168, 294; Orozco and, 143; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 138 social justice, 24, 41, 50 Sonoran Dynasty, 189, 190, 220 south wall of Orozco Room: “Modern Industrial Man” supplement on, 1, 36 sovereignty, 78, 203, 256; Christian theology and, 187; dissipated, 41; Mexican, 189; Orozco’s critique of, 27, 39; phantasmagoria of, 197–205; political theology and, 40, 183, 186–87, 196; violence of, 182 Soviet Union, 147 space: architectural, 43, 47, 77; of crisis, 37, 120; of problem, 39 Spain: Orozco’s depictions of, 147; Spanish Armada, 12 Spanish conquest of Americas, 115, 182; as antithesis, 48; chronicles of, 80; as genocide, 85; juxtaposed with present in Orozco’s Epic, 77, 120, 153, 208; in Mexican historiography, 40; Orozco on, 112; Quetzalcoatl myth and, 3, 17, 27, 105; represented in Orozco’s Epic, 1, 33, 34, 39–40, 114, 141–42, 144–45; in Rivera’s History of

Mexico, 40, 47, 97, 133–37; violence of, 11, 119 Spanish imperialism: claims of, 127; race management and, 18–19; resistance to, 7 spectator, Orozco on, 1 Spilimbergo, Lino Eneas, 248 spiritual rebirth, and architecture symbol, 214 Stalin, Joseph, 147, 149 state: centralization of, 85; messianic politics of, 9; Mexican, 277; modernizing postrevolutionary, 7, 90, 97, 115, 120 Steiner, Uwe, 69 stereotypes, 121; of Asian Americans, 282–83; blackface minstrelsy and, 232–33; of blacks and African Americans, 229, 239, 281, 281, 317n85; of indigenous Mexicans, 236; of Native Americans, 265–66, 274 story, Orozco on, 1, 3, 6, 60–61, 70 St. Thomas Quetzalcoatl, 84, 85, 86, 91, 93, 98 subalterns, 121, 207, 208, 222, 251, 256, 258, 272 Subcomandante Marcos, 276 “Symbols of Nationalism” (Panel 16 of Orozco’s Epic), 5, 34–35, 36, 180, 181 Syndicate of Revolutionary Painters and Sculptors: formation of, 143; Manifesto of, 61; Orozco and, 227 Tamayo, Rufino, 316n63 technology: industrialized future and, 7; in Rivera’s National Palace mural, 192–93, 196 Tehuana, costume of, 231 Temple of Quetzalcoatl (Teotihuacán), 91, 103 Tenochtitlán, 299n3; Cortés’s destruction of, 9, 83; founding of, 50; Spanish occupation of, 136; symbolic power of, 96; temple precinct of, 9, 177; Tollan and, 82, 83

Teotihuacán: Gamio’s excavations at, 85, 91, 232; in Orozco’s Epic, 86, 91; stone effigy of Quetzalcoatl in, 103; stone mask from, 229, 232 Tezcatlipoca (god of magic), 81, 82, 87, 87, 92, 102 thanatopolitics, 40, 151, 158–65, 178, 182, 183 “Tierra y Libertad” (Zapatista slogan), 99 time and temporality, 115, 117, 216; Aztecs’ conception of, 81–82, 84, 115–16; Benjamin and, 69; dissolution of, 15; linear, 7; Mesoamerican, 3, 100; now, 68, 69, 119; Orozco’s Epic and, 109, 119, 123–24, 197–98, 284; Western Christian, 3, 116 Tintoretto, 30 Titian, 30 Títlacáhuan, the necromancer, 92, 92 Tlaloc (god of rain and storm), 87, 87, 92 Tollan, 82, 83, 101, 232; Quetzalcoatl as semidivine ruler of, 81, 96; Teotihuacán as, 85, 91 Tolsá, Manuel, 144 Toltecs, 101, 232; achievements of, 89; Aztecs and, 82, 83, 104, 105, 109; king of, 81; in Orozco’s Epic, 89; Quetzalcoatl myth and, 3, 80, 81, 82–83, 86, 98, 116; Rivera and, 110 Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, 82–83, 84, 85, 86, 96, 97, 98, 302n63 Torquemada, Juan de: Monarquía Indiana (Indian Monarchy; 1604), 130 totalitarianism, 145, 149, 151 “Totem Poles” (Panel 9 of Orozco’s Epic), 4, 36–37, 37 tradition: Orozco and, 29; Orozco on, 2–3 Trauerspiel (mourning plays): Benjamin and, 14–15, 64; modern America as, 121, 123; in Orozco’s Epic, 41, 105, 203; Rivera’s History of Mexico and, 9

INDEX  359

Trotsky, Leon, 45 Tsosie, Rebecca, 322n29 Tucker, Nichola, 253, 254, 255 Turner, Frederick Jackson, frontier thesis of, 13 twilight, 90, 259–60, 274, 283, 284 Tzontémoc (god of underworld, death, setting sun), 99 Unión Nacional Sinarquista (National Synarchist Union), 194 U.S. America, 162; blackface in, 232–36; cultural heritage of, xv; deracinated social imaginary in, 160; intervention in Latin America by, 161; melancholy of race in, 21, 261, 237, 258; Mexican artists in, xv; National Historical Landmarks of, xv; Orozco and creation of authentic New World civilization by, 80; race relations in, 16; triumphalism of national narrative of, xvi; xenophobia in, 239 U.S. Constitution, racialized groups buried in, 18 Valentiner, William, 309n113 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 194 Vasconcelos, José, 98, 113, 133; commissions given by, 143; as Minister of Public Education, 85–86, 144, 199–200; La Raza Cosmica (The Cosmic Race; 1924), 19, 94 Veder, Robin, 245–46 Venus (planet): Quetzalcoatl and, 81, 90, 99 victimization, 222, 241–42 viewers of Orozco’s Epic, 9, 11, 31; as border-subjects, 14; of color, 256; demands on, 20, 21, 41, 80, 115, 118, 179, 182–83, 261; first-time, 43; intended, 263; as postcolonial subjects, 179; Quetzalcoatl myth and, 79, 121; as radical monteurs, 39, 72

360  INDEX

Villa, Pancho, 220, 313n17 violence: colonial, 10, 120; of conversion, 146; divine, 123; in epics and origin tales, 6, 7; guerilla as emblem of, 160; mestizaje and, 143; of Mexico’s past, 50, 233; of modern America’s phantasmagoria, 214; Orozco’s view of, 156, 183; political, 183, 258; racial, 24, 26–27, 55, 239; of Spanish conquest, 1, 11, 119, 159, 182; symbolic, xv, 273; of U.S. antiempire bordering, 40, 41 Virgin of Guadalupe, 193 Warburg, Aby, 65 Weheliye, Alexander, 26, 40, 151, 160, 182, 183, 254, 258, 274, 292n98; on biopolitics, 157 Wentworth, John, 10, 270 West, Benjamin: William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771–72), 266 west wall of Orozco Room, 1, 32, 32, 43, 86, 105–6, 110, 111 Wheelock, Rev. Eleazar: betrayal of Occom, 10, 273; Dartmouth College founded by, 9–10; myth of, portrayed in Hovey Mural, 265–71, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271; Orozco’s sketch of, 273, 273; teaching native students, 219 White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (wasps), 257; Dartmouth and, 115, 274; imaginary of, 12; redemption and, 77; self-mythologizing of, 268; thanatopolitics of, 40 whiteness: disidentifying with, 20; of heroic man in Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life (Orozco mural), 29; privilege and, 24; of Quetzalcoatl, 25 Whitney Museum of American Art, 11 Widdifield, Stacie, 141 Wofford, Susanne, 6, 7, 117 women: allegorical representation of, 190; as artists, 229–31; docudramas

by, 258–59; donning huipiles and wearing traditional hairstyles, 222–23; idealized Native American, 266–67; of Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 279; nearly excluded from iconographic program of Orozco’s Epic, 21, 257; Orozco’s vision of U.S., 163; Orozco’s wife, 38; rape of indigenous, 48; as saints, 193; as zombies, 159, 164 Wood, Grant, 154 Worker Reading “El Machete” (1928, Modotti photograph), 225, 225–26 workers, 100, 226; blue denim overalls of, 222; exploitation of, 99; iconic images of, 219, 224, 225, 225; Marxist, 27; misery of, 111; Orozco draws in El Machete, 227; racialized, 214; represented in Orozco’s Epic and supplement, 1, 14, 25–26, 36, 41, 208–9, 212, 214; revolutionary, 55; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 191, 194; urban, 222 working class, 8; Benjamin on, 185; indigenized, 222; pnr and, 52; politics of, 226; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 50, 188, 196; in Siqueiros’s Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, 54

World War I: Orozco and, 181 World War II, 16, 55, 147, 150, 294n19 Xipe Totec (god of greed), 87, 87 Ybarra, Juan: Orozco MEXotica and, 274; performance of, 278, 278, 279 year One Reed (ce acatl), 82, 101; Cortés’s arrival in Mexico in, 84; feathered serpents and, 81; Quetzalcoatl’s prophesied return in, 3, 82, 84–85 Zapata, Emiliano, 48, 50, 180, 219, 226, 260, 313n17; hero cult of, 220–22; in Orozco’s work, 140; in Rivera’s History of Mexico, 138; slogan of, 163, 223 Zapatismo, Zapatistas, 99, 163, 226, 276, 277, 280 zombies and undead, 203, 306n61; citizens in “Anglo-America” characterized as, 154, 159, 180; Haitian, 281; power and rebellion associated with Haitian, 161; as symptomatic of white Americans’ fear of racialized people, 26, 159–61; White Zombies (1932), 159, 164

INDEX  361

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