Monthly Archives: February 2017

Reaction to the readings about Mexican Murals and the Maria Lionza cult

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(Same introduction as always) I explain in this blog my reaction to the readings of the week: a chapter from Mexican Murals in Time of Crisis by Bruce Campbell and the beginning of The Magic of the State by Michael Taussig.

The extract of Bruce Campbell’s work offers an overview of the history of Muralism in Mexico and an idea of why it is a complicated form of popular culture, with examples depicted. From what I understood, the first urban murals date from the 1920s and were commissioned by the new government to promote its ideals, like those of Vasconcelos. But progressively, muralists began to create more controversial pieces and three main figures appeared (“los Tres Grandes”). The 1930s-1940s were the golden age of the Mexican School of muralism. But since the death of the Tres Grandes, there seems to be a lack of successors. Art critics argue that remaining Mexican muralists are less ambitious and memorable. However, Campbell describes an episode when the creation and then destruction of a more recent mural had a clear social and political impact in a town near Mexico City. So Mexican murals, though they seem to have declined, can potentially be again an example of problematic popular culture (they are in public space but they can be offensive, especially for the government).

As for the text of Michael Taussig, we were told we would find it weird and indeed it is. But since I was already expecting it (unlike The Cosmic Race, in which the swift in tone caught me by surprise), I decided to look at what universe is implied by it rather than what the actual plot of the book. It seems to be a mixt of very romanticized autobiography (the narrator as the first chapters appears to be the writer), of fiction (without warning, the main character becomes a man called Mission) and of study of the Maria Lionza cult (even if this study is biased by the fact the writer follows this religion). I couldn’t really understand the actual plot: each chapter constantly changes focus, the main character changes,… But all in all, it offers an introduction to the bizarre world of this cult, where spirits roam Venezuela, sometimes possessing people. The main figure of this cult, the Spirit Queen, ruler of snakes and dragons, is quite unclear herself: the believers argue whether she was an indigenous or a mestizaje and what the conditions of her exile were, but they agree that she is now one with the mountain (even though she is able to interact humanly with the narrator). This text is strange, of course, but al least we now have an idea of the myths, rituals and beliefs of the followers of this Venezuelan cult.

Reaction to Mestizaje Readings

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I explain in this blog my reaction to two readings related to the theme of mestizaje in Latin America: an extract from The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos; and the chapter “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Life Experience” from the book Journal of Latin American Studies by Peter Wade.

 

The main message of The Cosmic Race is that Latin America has the potential to give birth to a new human “race”, fruit of the mixing of all the races the author counts, that could progressively extend to the whole world, beginning an age of prosperity. Despite such a supposedly benevolent topic, I found the reading quite disturbing, for several reasons: the strange paleoanthropological assumptions of José Vasconcelos, his radical views on history, his racist believes (though he does address the Nazi propaganda) and his idea of passive eugenics.

First of all, the reasoning begins with the idea that the first humans, forming an ethnically homogeneous culture, were the Atlanteans, living in the American continent several million years ago: they were incredibly advanced and perhaps this is the reason the writer advocates for the advent of a unique human type. Vasconcelos then exposes a biased version of the history of colonialism in the Americas (Pizarro is depicted as a very decent leader, for instance) and insists on antagonizing the Anglo-Saxon world (the United States, even independent, remaining indistinct from the United Kingdom). This brings him to call for unity between countries of Latin America and to embrace the culture and history of their original colonizer, Spain. In the process, Latin American countries have the opportunity to begin the birth of the Fifth Race, one that gather all the specific advantages of each race according to the writer. Additionally, since people choose their partner with an aesthetic reasoning, ugly/poor people will be bred out of society. Vasconcelos concludes by stating that, by counting the number of races and the number of evolutionary states by which one chooses a partner, he finds 8, which represents the equality of all men according to Pythagoras…

By the end of the extract, not much credibility is left.

 

“Rethinking Mestizaje” by Peter Wade was a more enriching reading: the writer actively uses his travels across the continent to try to define the phenomenon of mestizaje. He comes to the conclusion that two major definitions of it as an ideology can be found, and they are contradictory. The first one states the advent of a single culture/ethnicity in the country (instead of the three sides: White, Black and Indigenous) but it is actually a form of propaganda aiming at the extinction of cultural traits of Blacks and Indigenous and the survival of only White traditions. The second one puts the “mixing” more at the individual level: the mestizaje allows one to identify with traits from all three sides, without being restrained to one of them exclusively. Expanded at the level of a whole country in Latin America, this creates flexibility and a constant re-definition of the culture.