daily politics in the United States, rendering those symbols as politically important in American culture as those that were being created elsewhere by Kallen and Bourne.
Those symbols were constructed in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, that great civil war that some progressive Americans had seen as the first salvo in the overthrow of capitalism, whose next installments they believed were represented by World War I and the Russian Revolution.19 Their cultural history is easy enough to understand. At roughly the same time that the armies of England and Germany were sending 120,000 men to their deaths at the Somme and that the Bolsheviks were destroying the social order of the czar, Mexico was busy destroying the Porfirian state and killing one million of its own people. This was Mexico at the dawn of the twentieth century, a nation in revolution that was doing its own part to destroy the fin de siècle order, wrote Manuel Gamio. Out of that war would rise a new man of steel, continued Gamio, one blended together from the panoply of ethnic cultures that represented Mexico’s distinctive peoples. Kallen and Bourne had used musical metaphors to describe the American melting pot. Gamio preferred the symbolism of metal. More than just a crucible where people mixed into one, Mexico was a giant smelter where the future of the nation was being forged by anvil-wielding revolutionaries, Gamio wrote.
It was in the spirit of such rebirth that Diego Rivera had been commissioned by Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos to emblazon the walls of the new secretariat building in Mexico City with murals depicting the postrevolutionary progress of the Mexican nation. Rivera was thirty-six when Vasconcelos hired him in 1922, alongside muralists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, on a government-sponsored art project that antedated the WPA murals project by more than a decade. He had recently returned to Mexico from studying art in Europe, and had just painted new murals in various locations throughout Mexico City. No one better captured in visual form the work of the Mexican state as it sought to create Mexico’s melting pot ideal from the spectrum of ethnic groups that composed the Mexican nation.
Rivera painted two murals on the walls of the secretariat that captured the relationship of the reconstituted Mexican state to the melting pot ideal. In Alfabetización: Aprendiendo a leer, a female schoolteacher looks with pride on a group of students surrounding her whose complexions and dress represent the diverse cultures of the Mexican peoples. A dark-skinned woman with African features sits next to a Maya Indian who is accepting a schoolbook from the teacher. Behind them stand two young men, one a light-skinned resident of the city wearing a gray beret, the other a ruddy-skinned mestizo wearing a straw hat typical of rural Mexico. Above the schoolteacher and her provincials stand three revolutionary soldiers, watching over the process of conversion signified in the textbooks being distributed by the teacher. They wear the bandoliers of the revolution, just recently concluded but still a tangible presence in the life of the country. Rivera painted a more dramatic image of the revolutionary melting pot project at the secretariat headquarters, as well. Whereas the first image of the state’s schoolteacher provides no clues about the geographic context for the education lesson that she is imparting, it is clear in La maestra rural that the schoolteacher has ventured away from metropolitan Mexico and into the countryside where Mexico’s agrarian workers cultivated their fields. Here, the schoolteacher is dressed in red, immediately training the eye on the nine individuals who surround her and the book that she has stretched out before them. They represent three generations, grandparent, parent, and child, sitting in a serene repose as the teacher underscores her latest point with an outstretched hand. But whereas the teacher and her circle had taken up two-thirds of the mural in Alfabetización, in the present one, two-thirds of the mural is an agrarian landscape framed by towering mountains in the background, with two teams of horses plowing a field in front of rural laborers who follow them, and an armed federal soldier mounted on horseback who guards the schoolteacher with a carbine rifle that he points at the sky. The state is present in each of the Rivera murals in the form of a teacher and a soldier, but in the latter mural, the melting pot ideal has been transformed from a metaphoric representation of unity into a dynamic panorama where the work that the state has set out for itself is more accurately rendered.
Rivera’s murals portrayed Mexico’s ethnic communities in their uniqueness as part of the project of national reconciliation that the postrevolutionary state builders had outlined for themselves. Represented quite clearly in his murals are the distinctive clothing, different skin tones, a diverse set of occupational labors, and both men and women as actors in the postrevolutionary drama. Rivera’s images suggest that he believed their discrete identities should be allowed to flourish as part of the reconstituted nation. The teacher is positioned as an agent of consolidation, but Rivera did not render consolidation as a threat to the regional cultures that were the constituent elements of the new Mexican nation. Difference abounds and is celebrated, even as books and public officials of the state are portrayed sympathetically. His depiction of the school as an agent of transformation also appears nonthreatening. Although Rivera assigned a centripetal function to the school, its task seems limited to creating bonds of citizenship among Mexico’s people, not destroying the variety of cultural forms of the twentieth-century republic. For Rivera, nationality seemed to reside above and alongside regional culture, not as a substitute for it or as a superior force to that of the provincial centers.
Figure 2. Alfabetización. Aprendiendo a leer, Diego Rivera, 1929. Secretaría de Educación Pública headquarters, Mexico City. 2014 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Three other images crafted by Mexico’s leading social theorists proved equally influential to race relations in the American West between 1930 and 1960. Manuel Gamio had crafted his image of cultural heterogeneity in a 1916 text, Forjando patria, that originated the phrase that scholars use to this day to describe the postrevolutionary project to rebuild the Mexican nation, forjar patria. Gamio opened Forjando patria with the image of a giant smelter in which Mexico’s diverse cultural communities were being melted into a single synthetic ore. The American continents had always acted as a giant forge in which indigenous Americans mixed with one another to form new communities. Only the arrival of Columbus had prevented a single indigenous superpower aggregated from America’s distinct native cultures from forming. That forge had overturned with the arrival of the Europeans, spilling the blend before it had hardened, however. The Europeans—the “men of steel,” as Gamio tagged them—refused to mix with the Native Americans—whom Gamio called the “men of bronze”—during the colonial era. Suddenly, however, the independence movements of early nineteenth-century nationalism had presaged a return to a universal mix of peoples. Gamio represented Bolívar, Morelos, and San Martín as Olympic titans, donning the blacksmith’s apron and taking up the hammer to forge an original metallic statue that contained all the metals of America’s peoples. That statue would have been immense, corresponding to the panhemispheric nation that the liberators would have forged from the ruins of the Spanish empire.20
The early idealism of independence was not to be. As the nineteenth century unfolded, smaller national communities had been established across the hemisphere, instead. A new monument had been forged, but rather than containing all Latin America’s ores, the statue had been forged out of iron—out of Europeans, in other words—and placed over a pedestal made of bronze—the Native Americans. This was Gamio’s way of critiquing the social segregation of Latin America in the national era and its failure to reach toward the equality of its ethnic communities. This era of a stillborn mixture had to an end with the Mexican Revolution, Gamio argued. Now that the revolutionaries of Mexico had deposed Porfirio Díaz and taken up the role of blacksmith, they would consummate the task of blending the iron of Europe and the bronze of America into an indestructible synthetic ore. The new nation would rise to challenge the might of Europe and the power of the United States. “There is the iron … and there is the bronze,” Gamio wrote in Forjando patria at the halfway point of the Mexican Revolution. “I implore you to mix, my countrymen!” he commanded Mexico’s people, hopeful that Mexico’s rise to continental prominence after a decade of bloody
