Okay so I have 3 midterms this week and only had time to read Mexican Muralism and the Offical Public Sphere so my blog will mainly focus on that. Before I get into the actual text, throughout the reading I found myself googling a lot of the art work of the artists mentioned and I found a really cool website that has most of these artists work compiled –  https://www.wikiart.org/en/artists-by-nation/mexican

All three of the main muralists have pretty much every mural uploaded in High Rez and i spent about an hour looking at artists from latin america.

Getting into the actual article I found it very interesting. I didn’t know too much regarding the history of muralism in mexico, but I was familiar with some of the murals and their themes. Primarily, I think the main takeaway from this article is that Muralism wasn’t an entirely natural artistic movement. What I mean to say by this is that the roots of Mexican Muralism were somewhat forced. This most obviously struck me when talking about Vasconcelos vision as education minister. The article denotes his plans for muralism and his intended effects of its institution in national identity. Most importantly there is one section where Vasconcelos expects the recreation of certain western classical literary themes in his commisioned murals. During this time the artists behind the creation of murals where instead focusing on indigenous mexican history. Another interesting part of this article was the Author defining a clear purpose of murals. Murals can so successfully transmit nationalist themes through their place in a community and can also offer easily understood political discourse to a less educated population. Throughout the article it struck me that the muralism of mexico was very anti-capitalist and the big 3 had murals that empowered the proletariat as well as depicted a communal sense of creation(the rich people, 1924, Orozco/ death of the capitalist, Rivera 1929/ death to the invader, Siquieros, 1941) The irony of the state sanctioned murals was their obvious stance against the state. Beyond from what I’ve said I had a hard time understanding a lot of the actual history but i think the main point was that the government played a heavy role in the politicization of these artworks and this resulted in the decline of the form as an artistic industry.

Right of the bat Cosmic Race has me intrigued with mentions of evolution and race superiority and relating it to the mestizaje. The words Cosmic Race lead me to believe this will be about the eventual race mixture of every child in the world. Not sure if how I feel about him saying that christianity was the factor that led to the “civilizing” of the south american indigenous. The author is definitely talking about atlantis because he knows this paper is gonna be to boring for anyone to stick around. \okay this guy is so wild I have no clue what he’s on about talking about like the anglo saxon/hispanic racial war. He discusses how we should find pride in our colonizers and laments/blames latin americas loss in the new world on napoleon. He also briefly mentions the 5th stage of humanity that will be ushered in by the white culture, not really sure what he means. Also Black, indian, mongolian, and white is a pretty simple way of putting it lol. “No Race Returns” he makes a pretty convincing argument in this paragraph that there’s no escaping the latinization of the continent. The “ethnic vision” has got me a little cautious reading this but I understand what he’s getting at in saying that the color of humanity will reach an end point. “the final empire of white supremacy” This dude has me inspired I have no clue what is going on but his argument is so captivating and understandable. The latin american tendancy to mix race vs the anglo saxon attempts a perserving a single race. This whole subject feels a little controversial but his argument makes a lot of sense and definitely isnt like an ethnic cleansing perspective.  OKay so I skipped towards the last 6 pages and this guy has a really elaborate plan/prophecy for the joining of races that im not entirely sure is plausible. It seems to me that a lot of his argument is rhetoric and he spends most of his time convincing rather than proving. His end goal is a cosmic fifth race made up of all the best elements of each race as well as all their cultures combined. This is definitely an interesting perspective on culture or the future of it because so far I think a lot of us can agree that there is some boundary to mixture of cultures or the expansions of it (mosaic kind of thing)

Federico