chapter 26 Post-Colonial Modernism in the Work of and José Carlos Mariátegui

Several years ago, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was travelling through the countryside of , the home province of the legendary revolution- ary leader Emiliano Zapata. Fuentes and his companions became lost in this mountainous region with its maze of rice paddies and sugar-cane fields. When they finally came to a village, Fuentes asked an old peasant the community’s name. The peasant from Morelos replied: ‘Well, that depends. We call it Santa María in times of peace. We call it Zapata in times of war’.1 This encounter reminded Fuentes of something often lost sight of in the West. At any given moment, especially in Latin America, there is more than one concept of time in operation – and each of them is replete with its own distinct- ive historical and spatial coordinates. One of the first artworks to encapsulate this multilateral ‘montage’ of various temporal modes – which I refer to here as ‘uneven development’ – was a magisterial 1915 painting by Diego Rivera entitled Paisaje Zapatista: El Guerrillero (Zapatista Landscape: The Guerrilla), and this is a work to which we shall return shortly. Inspired as it was by the from 1910–20, this commanding artwork reminds us immediately of what Fuentes has recently noted in Nuevo Tiempo Mexicano (New Time in ) from 1994, namely, ‘Only the Revolution made present all of Mexico’s pasts [with equal force] – and this is why it deserves a capital r’.2 Another encounter also made evident the distinctive set of historical conver- gences that were occurring in the 1920s not only in Mexico, but throughout the hemisphere as well. This interchange is represented by a little known but quite important portrait photo of Diego Rivera that was autographed by the Mex- ican artist and mailed to the editorial staff of a remarkable Peruvian journal, Amauta, to which it was also dedicated in 1926. The Rivera photograph was then published in the fifth issue, in January 1927, of this vanguard journal, which lasted from 1926 to 1930. It was founded as well as directed throughout its entire existence by the philosopher José Carlos Mariátegui, who is as import- ant to Latin American thought as Diego Rivera is to the art of the Ameri-

1 Fuentes 1981, p. 61. 2 Fuentes 1996, p. 18.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004235861_028 382 chapter 26 cas.3 There was more than an elective affinity linking them, since, as we shall see, their mutual admiration was firmly grounded in a comparable analysis of society that drew them to each other. Their similarly heterodox views of socialism, in tandem with an alternative concept of indigenismo, caused both of them to be denounced as ultra-leftists and populists by the orthodox leaders of the Communist Party and Comintern in these years.4 Moreover, the terms of their agreement politically also account for their almost equal distance from the centrist politics of José Vasconcelos, the one-time patron of Rivera’s murals in Mexico. Vasconcelos was someone with whom Mariátegui remained in contact even though Mariátegui criticised the ethnocentrism of the Mexican philosopher’s particular concept of mes- tizaje (or ethnic fusion), as well as its concomitant and quite condescending view of pre-colonial culture in the Americas.5 Before returning to Diego Rivera’s overlooked photographic tribute to Mar- iátegui and Amauta (which was reciprocated textually by Amauta), I should outline briefly the theoretical point of departure that will lead to a far more emphatic linkage of the art and thought of Rivera and Mariátegui than has so far been realised in the Diego Rivera literature. Even the wonderfully compre- hensive catalogue and chronology put out by scholars at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1986 overlooked this significant, indeed, signal relationship between Rivera and Mariátegui. Not surprisingly, then, the most recent biography of Rivera – by Patrick Marnham in 1998 – does not even mention Mariátegui, much less his noteworthy relationship with Rivera that I shall explore. As the contemporary Mexican philosopher Alberto Híjar has convincingly argued, the visual result of Rivera’s work from this period was a form of dis- sident or alternative indigenismo. This was particularly the case with Rivera’s brilliant mural cycle for the Secretaría de Educación Pública (the Ministry of Education) – nine panels of which appeared in black and white reproductions for Amauta in 1926–7, when it also published two articles about Rivera, and in 1929 Amauta even featured a drawing by Rivera on its front cover.6

3 Sánchez Vázquez 1990, pp. 3–14; and Unruh 1989, pp. 45–69. 4 Miroshevsky 1973, p. 6; and Craven 1997, pp. 93–9. 5 Mariátegui 1988 [1928], pp. 130–1. Both Néstor García Canclini and Gerardo Mosquera later agreed with Mariátegui’s criticisms of Vasconcelos. 6 Híjar 1986, pp. 37–72.