18. Portrait-of-a-Young-Painter-by-Mary-Kay-Vaughan.pdf

8/18/2019 18. Portrait-of-a-Young-Painter-by-Mary-Kay-Vaughan.pdf

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Portrait of a Young Painter

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Introduction Portrait of a Young Painter

Pepe Zúñiga in Mexico City, 1943–1972

I first met Pepe José Zúñiga in . Friends introduced meto him as a distinguished painter with a ascinating background—romchildhood he had lived in the Colonia Guerrero, a popular barrio in cen-tral Mexico City o legendary ame or its music and dance, its nightlie,

its color, its violence and violations. For many, the Colonia Guerrero wasa nostalgic site, a reminder o popular artistic effervescence, o romanticintimacy, and o gritty solidarity rom the s into the s. o livethere still, as Pepe does, was proo o the strength o his roots in this bar-rio o tenements (vecindades) that had housed so many migrants pouringinto Mexico City in those decades. He cut a commanding figure with histhick shock o white hair. He exuded an air o achievement and confi-dence: he was certainly comortable in his skin.

My riends told me he had been director o the La Esmeralda, theschool o painting and sculpture established by Diego Rivera, FridaKahlo, and Antonio M. Ruíz in as a popular, more flexible alternativeto the Academia de San Carlos. He told me o the wonderul years he hadspent in Paris in the s on a French government scholarship and in thes completing his master’s thesis at the École des Artes Decoratis. Iwent to his exhibits and visited his studio in the vecindad on Soto Street—walking up two flights o uneven cement stairs, dodging hanging laundryand barking dogs. Painted canvases, piles o books and albums and old records covered his studio’s tables and the creaking floor o aded wood.On the walls hung paintings, photos o French cathedrals, James Dean,


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2 Introduction

Elizabeth aylor, amily members, and himsel with riends, lovers, andthe amous—the painter Rufino amayo and art critic Antonio Rodrí-guez. Te smog-filtered sunlight flooded through a large window with its view o the dusty gray leaves o trees that lined the sidewalk below. Pepe’s

paintings immediately captivated me—I saw them as musical pieces oundulating sensuous human orms in careully crafed composition andcolor. He painted an aesthetics o sexuality—not a brutal sexuality butan affectionate one. Not one that objectified women. Rather, he painted arefined rhythm o tender, gender-neutral, erotic pleasure.

As we talked, I recognized he had a photographic memory befittinga painter. He could remember the shots, scenes, plots, and stars o everymovie he had seen. He had a refined ear as well—not surprising or a manwho began his career as a radio technician specializing in high fidelityand stereo sound. He remembered every song, classical composition, andmuch radio programming he had heard as a child. O course, many Mexi-can children remember the playul songs o the cricket Cri-Cri, but thoseo the risqué popular singer María Luisa Landín? Only Carlos Monsiváisseemed to know more than Pepe, and it was afer an evening with Carlos,reminiscing about and singing the songs o the U.S. Hit Parade they hadheard on the radio in the s, that Pepe asked me to write his biography.“I have a lot to say,” he told me. He knew that I was searching at the time

or a group o individuals, veterans o the Mexico City student move-ment o , who would share their stories with me. Although Pepe wasslightly older than most ’ers (he was born in and was no longer astudent in ), I knew rom our discussions that he had participated inthe broader youth rebellion o which the protests ormed a part. I de-cided he would be an ideal partner in my project—the more so because ohis openness and willingness to discuss his emotional history. Generallyconsidered private by Mexican men, emotional experience was precisely

what I wanted to probe.As a historian o education, I sought to understand learning experi-

ences o a generation o Mexico City youth, particularly represented inhigher education, that rebelled in the s against social and politicalauthoritarianism, hierarchies, convention, and repression. I expanded anarrow definition o education to include multiple learning sites: the am-ily, schools, neighborhood, church, movies, radio, theater, sports, work,leisure activities, proessional, social, and political associations. As theMexican youth movement had much in common with other rebellionsin Berlin, Paris, urin, New York, Madison, okyo, and elsewhere, I tookas a guide Norbert Elias’s oundational story o the s, his essay in Te


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Introduction 3

Germans. Elias suggested that rebellious middle-class and working-classyouth coming o age in the s shared certain experiences that influ-enced the contagious protest that swept the globe in . Born into aworld marked by war and scarcity, they moved into one o unprecedented

prosperity, consumption, and mobility acilitated by market and techno-logical development and the protection o the welare state. Teir basicneeds or ood, security, and protection satisfied, they could become con-cerned with personal meaning. Teir parents, argued Elias, were moreliberal and permissive with their children than their grandparents. Techildren shared a prolonged period o ormal schooling through whichthey bonded in a youth culture, assisted by the prolierating mass mediathat catered to their angst, their exploding libidos, and their ability tospend a little money. In the postwar, Cold War context, their educationwas highly ideological: it promised democracy, reedom, peace, racialequality, and well-being. Tey moved into expanded sites o higher edu-cation with great personal, social, and political expectations. Tey chaedat the repressive structures that contained them, clashed with their val-ues, and dashed their hopes.

I these were key shared actors across borders, what distinguishedparticular national, local, and personal experiences? What was at stakein this broad social movement was subjectivity—the cognitive, active,

eeling, experiencing sel. I already knew that a critical, reedom-seeking,libidinous subjectivity flourished in the Mexican youth movement. Weknow it rom literature, testimonials and autobiography, studies o mu-sic and art movements, rom analysis o gender openings and conflictswithin a still very patriarchal, heteronormative society. We know itrom participants’ historical reflections and rom accounts and analy-sis o transormative social relations in the estive street democracy thatreigned in the summer o .

o this dialogue, biography can bring insight into the socializing, ed-ucational experiences that produced the subjectivities o this generation.Unlike traditional biography, new biography is less interested in a personor his or her unique contribution to history or the arts and more inter-ested in how an individual lie reflects and illuminates historical pro-cesses. New biography pushes back against cultural history’s tendency toinscribe onto the individual a set o social discourses and representationsalready embedded in society. It probes the principle that individuals aresituated “within but not imprisoned in social structures and discursiveregimes.” What defines human beings or phenomenologist MauriceMerleau-Ponty is “the capacity o going beyond created structures in or-


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4 Introduction

der to create others.” Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Michel de Certeau,Anthony Giddens, and Andreas Reckwitz, Gabrielle Spiegel has suggesteda neophenomenological approach “ounded on the re-evaluation o theindividual as historical subject . . . a belie in individual perception as the

agent’s own structure o knowledge about and action in the world—aperception mediated and perhaps constrained but not wholly controlledby the cultural scaffolding or conceptual schemes within which it takesplace.”

We are talking about subjectivity as a condition o subjection, that is,being subjected to the power o prevailing institutions, messages, andspecific events, and the individual capacity to appropriate messages andexperiences intellectually, affectively, physically. Biography allows usto see how individuals negotiate educational encounters. Individualsare not simply written upon by external texts: they become authors otheir own text as they move through multiple experiences, bringing theiraccumulation o prior experiences to their interpretation o new ones. Scholars usually examine a single institution (cinema, the school, the juvenile court) and deduce its messages rom analysis o ormal texts orprograms. Few venture into the complicated field o reception, and evenewer explore how the individual appropriates and combines messagesrom multiple institutions, reflects, and acts upon them. Biography can

bring to light a surprising heterogeneity o discourses (dominant, resid-ual, marginal, and spatially circumscribed) that an individual encoun-ters; the complicated ways in which he/she combines them to constitutesubjectivity; and the conditions through which new, ofen subversive dis-courses emerge to become dominant, to join the polyphony, or to be rele-gated to the margins. Trough intimate, detailed ocus on one individual,biography gives us insight into the sociocultural conflicts that gnaw atestablished structures and conventions and can produce enormous cre-

ativity and historical change, even when that change is tempered by thestrength o existing structures and conventions. O course, examinationo one individual lie can never achieve a level o generalization. Yet thisapproach to biography as educational process tackles a gamut o institu-tions and events that affected (in different combinations, levels o expo-sure, and intensity) a sector o society scholars have deemed significantor historical analysis—in this case, a generation o youth that in theirdecade o rebellion played a critical role in Mexico’s movement toward amore democratic and pluralist politics in public and private lie, in art,culture, and affairs o state.

I use this introduction to point out both the general and the specific


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Introduction 5

in Pepe Zúñiga’s growing-up and coming-o-age experience. First, I de-scribe how we constructed this story. I begin by noting a discourse osel that Pepe and I likely share with many who came o age in the s.How ormative or us was a notion o some special intrinsic creativity

we strove to realize through a combination o sel-discipline, rationallearning, and libidinal intensity. Pepe and I come rom different coun-tries. We are o distinct social background and gender. Yet we broadlyshare an affective-intellectual ramework and experience. By listening toPepe’s story, I became more aware o how shaped we were by post–WorldWar II notions o child and personality development that ormed part omodernization theory and politics and how moved we were by the ideao the artistic sel, promoted by the movies and neohumanism in highereducation. Te movies and neohumanism are much more connected inthis period than scholars have noted because we are so accustomed todividing elite rom popular culture.

Pepe’s memory is the major source or constructing his biography.Memory is part o one’s subjectivity. It is clearly an extraction rom ex-perience. I am reerring here to conscious memory as an intellectual-ization and selection o experience. Such memory is as necessary or theconstitution and day-to-day continuity o the human being as it is subjectto revision, orgetting, amplification, embellishment, as well as adjust-

ment to any particular audience. Obviously, it is not about what exactlyhappened—neither the historian nor the subject can entirely re-createwhat was once experienced. But that does not negate memory’s value as ahistorical source. Every historical source, whether an archival documentor oral reminiscence, is an interpretation o what “really” happened andbecomes more so in the hands o the historian. My purpose in writingthis book is not to submit Pepe’s memory to discourse analysis, as DanielJames brilliantly did in his story o Doña María, the Peronist militant.

Rather, I explore his memory as a source or understanding his partic-ipation in historical processes and his negotiation o contradictory dis-courses he encountered in distinct educating sites. As he was so generousin sharing his experiences with me, I respect as well his silences and hisdesire not to move into print certain intimacies o his lie. Tey do notdetract rom the richness o his educational narrative.

His narrative is itsel an intertwining o socioeconomic process withlearned discourses or interpreting that process. Pepe tells the story oa poor boy brought in rom Oaxaca by his mother, a seamstress, to join his ather, a tailor, in a vecindad at Lerdo Street in Mexico City’sColonia Guerrero. Te poor boy was determined to superar (overcome)


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6 Introduction

his poverty, to develop his talent and skills—or, better said, his creativepotential, a sacralized idea and quest he absorbed rom Hollywood mov-ies, his primary school experience, and his education at La Esmeraldapainting school. His mother and ather helped him, as did particular

members o the extended amily, beneactors, riends, and teachers andthe distinguished painters and art critics he met through his experienceat La Esmeralda. Pepe embellished this narrative o upward mobility withstories o marvelous encounters with the movies and radio, with popularand classical music, with the mambo, danzón, lucha libre wrestlers, JamesDean, Chavela Vargas, and Celia Cruz, with sexually charged practical jokes played at amily gatherings, with discourses on hygiene, with some-times unbearable tension and exploding conflict between his parentsand within the extended amily, and with bitter experiences o betrayal,raud, and cruelty in the public world o work. As he tells his story o“moving up,” he weaves together residual, dominant, and emergent dis-courses. He appropriated messages and cultural goods which helped himto express opposition to certain values and conduct that he associatedwith his parents and a social environment he ound to be repressive andconstraining. He sought “reedom to be himsel,” a discourse o the lates and the s that was at once humanist and libidinous. In seekinghis unique creative path, he also longed to “communicate” openly and

reely, to express himsel affectively, sexually, and in painting, to find“tenderness” and to be “tender.”

As I was interested in exploring his encounter with educational sites,I used secondary materials (art, education, music, urban, sports histo-ries, essays on popular culture, biographies o his artist riends) and pri-mary sources (song lyrics and melodies, movies and theater productions,school textbooks, books and magazines, and newspaper reviews o hisexhibits and o the spectacles he saw). An avid collector, Pepe supplied

many photographs, books, catalogs, press clippings, postcards, and othermemorabilia that sparked more memories and more dialogue betweenus, enriching and sometimes reshaping the story. Sharing these materialswith him sometimes as much as sixty years afer he had first experiencedthem amplified and sharpened recall, although such recall was necessar-ily marked by subsequent events and perhaps by the narrative he himselwas constructing.

Filling out the story required lateral interviewing, that is, talks withsurviving members o Pepe’s amily, with riends and neighbors rom hischildhood, and with distinguished artists, intellectuals, and the widowso his mentors at La Esmeralda painting school in the tumultuous s.


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Introduction 7

Particularly critical or understanding his childhood were interviewswith Pepe’s brothers Jesús (Chucho) and Erén. Erén’s growing-up ex-perience was significantly different rom that o his older brothers. Bornin , he grew up at a time when both the amily and the urban society

had a bit more wealth and opportunity to share. He was the only one togo to secondary, preparatory school, and the university. Unlike Pepe,he was a direct participant rather than a sympathetic onlooker in thestudent rebellion o . By contrast, although born our years apart,Chucho (b. ) and Pepe (b. ) shared their childhood in Oaxaca,their migration to the city, and years o scarcity, struggle, and explorationin the metropolis. Pepe introduced Chucho to me as his “childhood pro-tector” who knew “more about the amily.” Indeed, Chucho’s narrative—earthy, unpretentious, apparently unscripted, ull o his own wounds andpleasures—proved an important complement to Pepe’s. As he did not plothis story as one o “moving up,” Chucho’s testimony served to illuminatethe sometimes sanitized character o Pepe’s. In the text, I register thedifference in opinion between the two brothers about events and person-alities when these discrepancies surged in the interviews.

We walked as well through the neighborhood. We spoke with resi-dents who remembered things Pepe had orgotten or never known. Atthe huge vecindad at Lerdo , razed afer the earthquake and now

rebuilt, we chatted with Elvia “La Boogie” Martínez Figueroa, who provided rich details about the dances Pepe had enjoyed there as a child andadolescent and about the many vendors who had sold rom their shops ortheir homes on Lerdo Street. We visited Manuel Buendía’s carpentry shophe had passed every day on his way to school and reminisced with his sonJuan, the current owner. We sat in the pews o the church o Santa Maríala Redonda Pepe had attended as a boy. We visited the Plaza Garibaldi,where amily members had enjoyed so much entertainment—not just the

still ubiquitous mariachi singers but the mambo o Dámaso Pérez Prado,the boleros o María Luisa Landín, the “exotic” dancing o ongolele, andthe political parodies o the comic El Palillo. As we sat at a table in theenampa bar, we remembered the stories about José Alredo Jiménez andChavela Vargas singing tragic ballads as they drank into the dawn. Welooked up to read a poem o composer Pepe Guizar inscribed in a wallmural. “We would see him walking to the Martínez de La orre market.We went to the studios across the Alameda to hear him sing. Teycalled him El Pintor Musical. We used to laugh because he wrote verymacho patriotic songs like Guadalajara! and Como México no hay dos! ,and he was very gay.”


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8 Introduction

I biography or lie history can elucidate processes at work in societythat are not so immediately perceived at the macro level, these can com-plicate, complement, or contradict prevailing narratives. When LuisGonzález y González published his now classic microhistory Pueblo en

Vilo in , his story o San José de Gracia broke the accepted narrativeo the Mexican Revolution. Te village o San José moved to rhythmsand rules distinct rom the dominant story o the prerevolutionary pe-riod as one o exploitation, land expropriation, material suffering, andreligious oppression. José Zúñiga’s story—while lacking the explanatorypower o an entire village’s history—also tells o lives removed rom theprevailing historical narrative o political repression, worker and cam-pesino resistance, sprawling poverty and state neglect that has cometo dominate our understanding o Mexican history between and. Even though Pepe’s experiences take place just blocks away romthe Buena Vista railroad yards where the period’s most significant laborstruggle unolded in – and although he lived near the Puente deNonoalco, the poverty belt (cinturón) made amous by Luis Buñuel’s filmLos olvidados and the prints o the aller de Gráfica Popular, his experi-ences register with neither. Pepe’s story should not and cannot bear theburden o a reinterpretation o Mexico City history. He could have toldother stories, I could have asked other questions, and thousands in his

age cohort have other memories.Yet the experiences he relates elucidate our processes which were to

some degree shared by a significant sector o youth coming o age in thes. Tese are ) a post–World War II mobilization or child welareand sel-development transnational in scope and in Mexico ed by po-litical stability, economic growth, and state investment; ) the flourish-ing o entertainment (particularly the mass media) in the city’s publicsphere that shaped the subjectivity o children as well as adults; ) the

domestication o violent masculinity related to social policy and polit-ical change, shifing economic, social, and commercial structures, andthe mass media; and ) the ormation o a critical public o youth in thes that catalyzed the emergence o a more democratic public sphereo political discussion, artistic expression, and entertainment afer .Tat increasingly democratic public sphere shaped and has been shapedby the opening o the political and social regimes and by movements omarkets and technologies. Current scholarly trends helped me to detectand flesh out these processes as I pursued the biography o a particularindividual. Tey in turn provided a conceptual context or interpret-ing Pepe’s story. While each has its own separate, discrete bibliography,


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Introduction 9

Pepe’s story threads them together and illuminates them in ways thatmacro approaches cannot. As my goal in narrating Pepe’s story is to reeit rom extensive analytical commentary, I here lay out my understandingo these processes.

The Mobilization for Children

I detect rom Pepe’s story a broad didactic mobilization orchestrated bythe state and private institutions on behal o children’s welare and devel-opment. We uncover this agenda (sometimes tightly, sometimes looselyshared among dominant actors) by looking at a multiplicity o institu-tions and efforts—radio programming, the movies, schools, churches,clinics, health campaigns, and hospitals, toy manuacturers and vendors,producers o special oods and health enhancers (rom chocolate milk tocod liver oil), parks and playgrounds, museums, juvenile courts, sportsacilities and promotion, and subsidized housing. Even when social pol-icy ocused on workers, it gave special consideration to their children.New housing projects, like the Conjunto Miguel Alemán, created spacesor play and sports, and the Instituto de Seguro Social provided healthcare or all members’ children, legitimate and natural.

When Eve Kososky Sedgwick and Adam Frank examine images o

childhood in the transition rom nineteenth- to twentieth-century Brit-ish literature, they note the displacement o Dickens’s destitute, aban-doned children by Christopher Robin, the playul boy loved, cared or,watched over, and disciplined by his nanny and his mother. In Mexicanpopular culture, the child as Christopher Robin became visible and au-dible to millions o children with access to radio through the songs othe cricket Cri-Cri, broadcast every weekend rom over , “LaVoz de América Latina desde México.” It is not that the image o the

destitute, abandoned child disappeared in Mexico City rom discourse,the media, or the streets but rather that the loved child who delights inthe adventures o Cri-Cri’s animals (akin to Christopher Robin’s riendsWinnie the Pooh, igger, and Eeyore) came to occupy a central, instruc-tive position—a kind o discursive mandate, a rush o affect, and a claimto entitlement.

We may explain the mobilization or children in several ways. Apost–World War I ocus on child welare became evident in pan Amer-ican congresses, League o Nations meetings, and in the educational,health, and social policies o Mexico’s postrevolutionary governmentsrom . As Elena Jackson Albarran persuasively shows, the ederal


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10 Introduction

government’s drive or education, intensified by the church-state strug-gle, privileged the child as the product o the revolution. During WorldWar II and in its immediate afermath, the project linked to a reinvig-orated transnational campaign or children’s rights, articulated by the

United Nations.

With greater technical and financial capacity, the state (reerring to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional) afer could flesh out particular social and cultural programs to complement itsembrace o a Fordist model o industrialization. Tis model, embellishedin these years by theories o modernization and development (personalas well as social and economic), depended upon the nurturing o healthy,productive, disciplined workers and their consuming amilies. One canargue that the programs were insufficient and benefited only a portion othe population. But in Mexico City, with its concentration o public andprivate resources, critical beneficiaries o the mobilization came rombroad sectors o an urban society burgeoning with migrants and ani-mated by social peace and the promise o economic opportunity.

Most educators, including parents, sought to nurture the developmento a modern subject, clean, healthy, sel-disciplined, responsible in workand amily lie, and an enthusiastic participant in the nation’s march to-ward progress. However, the interinstitutional matrix o socialization en-couraged children to play, to imagine, and to take initiative. It prompted

them to cultivate their minds, hearts, senses, and bodies, to consume in-creasingly available market goods, to think critically, and to seek greateraffection and reedom. In other words, as Elias wrote, it allowed childrenand youth to ocus on themselves. How widespread this sensibility wasover a cross section o Mexico City youth in the s we do not yet know.Current evidence or it is in the protests o youth—mostly associatedwith postsecondary education—who rebelled against authoritarianism,convention, and violence and in avor o greater personal and political

reedom, governmental transparency, and social responsibility. Whiledissident youth ofen identified with previous struggles or collectiverights o groups privileged by the Mexican revolutionary process andpostrevolutionary state (organized workers, campesinos, teachers, andother government employees), rebel youth o the s spoke or thecommon good in deense o the rights o all citizens: they called or theopening o the autocratic system o the .

Several actors influenced Pepe’s participation in this mobilization. Ithe first was location in Mexico City’s center, where resources were many,location was not determinate, as we know rom Oscar Lewis’s study othe children o Jesús Sánchez, residents o the barrio o epito, adjacent


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Introduction 11

to the Colonia Guerrero. Lewis saw the Sánchez children as victims oan emotionally absent ather and a succession o erstwhile, inattentivestepmothers. In Lewis’s reading, the children drifed into a culture o violence and violation, o social and moral poverty, accessible to them in

epito. Critical or Pepe were his migrant parents’ enthusiasm and energyto struggle—in the midst o material scarcity and unsteady income—orsurvival and a better lie. o do so, they ofen utilized “traditional” meansor enabling “modernity”—as, or example, their extensive deploymento Oaxaca networks o amily and riends to access goods, work, workers,educational opportunities, and legal assistance. In a city with little publictrust, the protection and acility afforded by such networks cannot beoverestimated. Tey were committed, vigilant parents concerned withtheir children’s education and health. Tey also gave them reedom tomove in a city they did not regard as particularly dangerous. Tey camerom a provincial city that gave them tools or negotiating the metropolis.Te Zúñiga amily experience demonstrates the utility o reducing pov -erty to pathology, analyzing it exclusively in terms o monetary income,or homogenizing its social behavior across a particular physical space.One must consider the social, cultural, and affective capital with whichamilies (o many different sorts) and individuals work and with whichthey engage the messages and opportunities offered by dominant insti-

tutions and processes.

Entertainment in Mexico City’s Public Sphere

In the Zúñiga parents’ marshaling o “traditional” means to enable “mo-dernity,” none was as spectacularly important to Pepe as his ather’s en-thusiastic engagement o entertainment in Mexico City’s public sphere.Oaxaca’s public world o religious celebration, sacred and proane—the

processions with their giant puppets, wind bands, and ornately clothedsaints reverently carried on their pedestals, the churches’ sumptuous,gold-painted altars wrapped in clouds o incense and adorned with thick-ets o flowers in honor o the Virgin, the Christmas posadas with theirsolemn pilgrimage ollowed by “la hora romántica” o song, ponche, andchocolate—all o these hailed the senses o sight, hearing, and smell in se-ductive synchronization. I they engaged body and soul in devotion, theyhad always engaged them in more earthly pleasures as well—increasinglyin the twentieth century, in intimate romantic song and body-liberatingdance. Pepe’s mother, Lupe Delgado de Zúñiga, sang in church and at thehoras románticas. Afer sacred devotion and ritual masses, his ather, José


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12 Introduction

Zúñiga Sr., sponsored dances o the tango, the shimmy, and the Charles-ton, with music he had heard in the movies brought to lie by his musicianriends. In Mexico City, José Zúñiga Sr. practiced his aith in prayer athome and energetically embraced the public world o entertainment. Just

a short walk rom the apartment on Lerdo Street were radio station,dozens o movie theaters, the lucha libre arena, boxing and bull rings,nightclubs, and burlesque and musical theaters.

Students o the public sphere in Mexico City in this period generallylook at its explicitly political dimension and define it as a space or ratio-nal discussion generated by the print media. In doing so, they ollow itsclassical theorist, Jürgen Habermas. Tey stress censorship in the printmedia. Although they may include street demonstrations as part o thepolitical public sphere, have begun to uncover more critical press opinionin the s and s, and point to a diversity o publics, they have notlooked at the nonprint mass media or entertainment as part o the publicsphere.

Habermas argued that in the bourgeois public sphere o the eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries, entertainment or what he calledcultural production and commodification (literature, art, theater, andmusic) orged—among bourgeois men—subjectivities appropriate torational participation in the public sphere’s political realm. Although

he did not elaborate, such ormation would reer to conduct, sentiment,sensibility, clothing, bodily habits, comportment, and the like. Seeingtwentieth-century developments as destructive o rational, independentpolitical debate, Habermas particularly singled out the mass media, anew stage o cultural commodification. Controlled by monopolies, cen-sored, and commercialized, the media reached a public broader thanthe bourgeoisie but served to privatize sentiment and reason in order topromote consumption and political quiescence. Te media, he argued,

created disdain or and apathy toward public institutions and politicallie.

His treatise, first published in , has much in common with otherpessimistic, totalizing academic critiques o those years. He understoodmodern capitalist society and its welare state as an interlocking net-work o corporate bureaucracies—the state, entrepreneurs, unions, po-litical parties, and the mass media—that allegedly made citizens’ rationalintervention difficult or impossible. Subsequently, scholars, includingHabermas, have pushed back against such theories o impenetrable struc-tures and narrow interpretations o the media. Indeed, in many places,television, radio, film, and the recording industry publicized the youth


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Introduction 13

protests o the s in ways that provoked widespread political debateand enabled discussion about, permeation o, and reaction against newdiscourses, behaviors, and rights.

Miriam Hansen and Jason Lovigilio, among others, have argued that

mass media technologies (principally photography, cinema, radio, andrecorded music) provoked sensorial, affective revolutions and enabledthe creation o new, inclusive communities—national, local, and trans-national. Te media ostered bonds o empathy and mutual recognitionthat razed barriers and ormed the basis or political and social discus-sion. Further, by making private lie public, they created or broadcastdiscourses, practices, and eelings or navigating processes o modern-ization—migration, urbanization, mobility, changing patterns and placeso work, amily lie, courting and romance, ashion, consumption, andgender roles. Most media rom the s into the s were censoredand didactic. Tey were so in pathological (consider Nazi Germany in thes and early s) or constructive ways, as I argue or Mexico. De-spite their didactic moralizing, they necessarily contained transgressivedimensions. As Pepe’s story illustrates, they presented immensely appeal-ing sinul characters (e.g., the beautiul prostitute with the heart o gold),impure sentiments and desires relished by thousands (e.g., Agustín Lara’smusic), and narratives that deliberately complicated and contradicted

dominant moral paradigms (e.g., rhumberas films).As many illuminating works on Mexico City have argued, the me-

dia mimicked existing conduct and eeling while opening to audiencesnew ways o behaving and viewing themselves and each other. In otherwords, rom the s into the s, the media participated in the cre-ation o publics and subjects and, indeed, a shared notion o the city theylived in. In many o his writings, Carlos Monsiváis, the extraordinaryanalyst o the city’s entertainment world, suggested the emergence o a

public that was vibrant, active, increasingly conscious o itsel and itsengagement with urban lie, yet politically disengaged and compatiblewith authoritarian rule. In this thesis, he might seem to have been inagreement with Habermas. Yet in the interest o his global argument, henecessarily overlooked the complexity o individual members o this pub-lic, as we shall see in the case o José Zúñiga Sr. and his wie, Lupe. Andclearly he was not writing about their son Pepe or other children whogrew up with this media only to rebel against the authoritarian regime.Pepe’s story shows how the mass media, its messages, and technologiessuggest the ormation o a more critical and demanding subjectivity anda new notion o rights—quite the opposite o what Habermas predicted


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14 Introduction

and more in tune with Elias’s notion o a qualitative space or personaldevelopment and communication in the immediate postwar period.

As detailed in chapter , José Zúñiga Sr. introduced his amily tomany sites o entertainment. For Pepe, the most un were the lucha libre

matches, but the most memorable ormative messages came rom the ra-dio, recorded and broadcast music, and the movies. His ather purchaseda Philco radio that played all day and into the night in the apartment thatserved both or amily lie and his workshop. Radio programming—soapoperas (radionovelas), advice programs, and romantic music—promotedaffectionately bonded and respectully ordered amilies, as well as nonviolent amorous intimacy within and outside o marriage. Children’sprogramming, particularly the songs o Cri-Cri, opened a world o an-tasy, humor, and musical pleasure to the Zúñiga boys. Cri-Cri celebratedthe old values o civisimo—work, respect, order, discipline, sel-control,and liberty—that their parents taught them but in a modern paradigmo productivity that insisted upon study and cleanliness but also affec-tion, imagination, initiative, aesthetic beauty, movement, and reedom.Cri-Cri echoed but turned the paradigm o the primary school intosomething more enchanting, rhythmic, and playul. Both promoted thenotion o a child’s right to care, love, health, personal development, andconsumption. While both Cri-Cri’s songs and primary school textbooks

encouraged a certain privatization o sentiment within the amily andamong riends, the primary school, like much radio programming andMexican Golden Age cinema, also sowed bonds o empathy among Mex-icans with the potential to mitigate discrimination, abuse, and violencein social relations. Because the songs o Cri-Cri and the school programswere messages Pepe shared with thousands o other children, I devotespace to examining their content in chapters and .

Tese children went to the movies. As detailed in chapter , José Zú-

ñiga Sr. introduced Pepe to film. From his ather, Pepe grasped and in-ternalized the Hollywood genre o success—the individual struggling tobreak out o poverty, conronting a world o change and challenge, notsimply to have a more comortable material lie but to “become some-one”—to develop one’s special “talent” or “gif.” Every Sunday at themovie matinee and without his ather, Pepe joined a critical public ochildren taking in, commenting upon, and judging with their eet, cries,sighs, whistles, sniffles, and singing seemingly endless films rom Mexico,Hollywood, Latin America, and Europe. Moviegoing was a distinctlyinternational and cosmopolitan experience. Movies were increasinglymade or children or or their viewing and spoke to them o their rights to


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Introduction 15

sel-expression, affection, and protection. We here meet such charactersas Flash Gordon, model o modern virility, deploying the most advancedspace technology to liberate the people o the planet Mongo rom thetyranny o the emperor Ming, and Snow White, the beautiul little girl

rescued by a band o kindly dwars rom her wicked stepmother anddelivered into the arms o a handsome prince. Te gender dichotomy omale agency and emale passivity was present but increasingly compli-cated. Snow White’s story moved little boys like Pepe. Pepe’s riends ElvaGarma and Elizabeth del Castillo loved Flash Gordon, Superman, cow-boy and war films. Elva recalls how she thought she could be Supermanand fly right off the street!

What each child sees in a film or hears in a song and learns rom it varies. Variation may have a lot to do with what adults allow them to see,what is available to be seen, what else is going on in their lives, and whatother educational experiences engage them. Pepe’s childhood ormationtook place in a variegated milieu o old and new educating sites. Oneimagines his milieu to have been a more heterogeneous mixture o theofficially proper and officially risqué than that o middle-class childrengrowing up on the city’s expanding residential south side. Pepe’s wascertainly an environment distinct in its urban openness and diversityrom the amily homes with gardens and gates depicted in primary school

textbooks.Every Sunday morning beore running off to the matinee, Pepe at-

tended mass at the church o Santa María la Redonda, constructed in. I his school and doctors’ offices were around the corner rom SantaMaría, the Momia nightclub aced the church. Across the street, the ma-riachi bands trumpeted and gay vendors sold tacos in Garibaldi Plaza,where the eatro Margot eatured Pérez Prado’s mambo, condemnedrom the pulpit by the priest at Santa María la Redonda. Near the church

as well were the carpas, the tent theaters ull o off-color humor and po-litical criticism, where the comedian Cantinflas got his start beore be-coming one o the biggest stars o Pepe’s childhood. Nearby too werethe prostitutes o the Calle Chueco. For Pepe and his cousin Nicolás,watching the prostitutes and the gay vendors was like going to the movies.But i these boys wished, they could climb to the roofop o their vecin-dad and watch a movie being filmed in the tenement next door. Morerequently Pepe and Nicolás crossed the Alameda Park to attend the liveradio broadcasts at studios, where they heard Pepe Guizar sing o México bravo, took in Agustín Lara’s latest bolero dedicated to a lady othe night, and heard the mystery show Nick Carter, Detective. On one


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16 Introduction

occasion, they saw Pedro Inante dressed up as a traffic cop to advertisehis latest film, .

While many children o Pepe’s age on Lerdo Street joined the lineswaiting to enter the studios and never missed a Sunday matinee,

they likely differed in the messages they took away and the experiencesthey had with child-development institutions. Tey were not likely tobe as steeped in such institutions as middle-class children living on thesouth side. Tey were or the most part o very humble background. Teirparents came rom the countryside, provincial cities, or generations ourban residence and worked at different things in distinct places—asindependent artisans, actory workers, low-level government employees,technicians in the entertainment industry, and practitioners o mil usos,a lower social category o work that implied both the absence o an oficio (learned skill) and impermanence and was ofen associated with men’sondness or the bottle and their wives’ need to cope with such ondness.In any case, as much as children bonded through play, mischie, sports,the movies, radio, or dance, new messages o child development togetherwith old ones encouraged them to distinguish among themselves: be-tween those who were clean and kempt and those who were slovenly,between those who wore store-bought clothes and those obliged to wearpants their mothers stitched, between those who got metal skates and

those who had to borrow them, between those who went regularly toschool and those who played hooky, between those teenage boys whopursued a skilled trade and those condemned to the work o mil usos,between children who continued on to secondary school and thosewho went to work afer completing primary school, between those withlight skin and those with darker skin, between girls ocused on gettingmarried and those who enjoyed or were coerced into more casual, ofencommercial sexual relations. For instance, on the block lived Lucha “La

Loca,” a beautiul, naive girl who reminded the children on Lerdo Streeto Silvana Mangano, whom they had seen in the Italian neorealist filmBitter Rice. “La Loca” loved gringos and particularly their dollars. Shesolicited in the Alameda Park. More than once, she walked into the clinico Dr. Luis Valiente Plascencia. Afer he delivered her baby, she walkedout without the inant. Whatever child-development messages she hadreceived, neither she nor her parents had likely taken them very seriously.


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Introduction 17

The Domestication of Violent Masculinity

Clearly then, the mobilization or child welare took place within a varie-gated milieu, and any single child’s exposure to it or parts o it dependedupon specific circumstances and experiences, as did the child’s internal-

ization o its messages. One o the particular trends within this mobiliza-tion that we detect through listening to Pepe’s story is the domesticationo violent masculinity, the sofening o masculine hardness, and the emi-nization o male sensibility. Tis I believe we can link to the Mexicanstudent movement o , or i the movement had a particular program,it was not to end the war in Vietnam, to realize a Cuban Revolution inMexico, or to transorm higher education. It was originally a movementagainst violence—state, police, and military violence against Mexican

citizens. What animated many o its participants and grew through theexperience was a joy in love. Novels, testimonials, memoirs, and theaterproductions expressed this sentiment significantly more than the plasticarts, where Pepe chose to express it. I do not discount private acts o vi-olence in personal relationships or public violence in the political protestso or the violence o armed groups that came out o convincedo Che Guevara’s notion o oco-based revolution. But in , Pepe joinedthrongs o young people who lined up and crowded the aisles to see the

student-produced play El cementerio de los automóviles, in which CheGuevara symbolized love. Che was perhaps the first revolutionary heroafer Christ to do so, and in the play Che is likened to Christ.

In three generations o Zúñiga men, we see a change in the armas que portan (the weapons they bear). Pepe’s grandather, José Zúñiga Heredia,born around , carried a knie, the arm o choice or men o the popu-lar sectors prior to the Mexican Revolution. He used it or shoemaking,one o his several trades. He also drew it to deend his honor. He had theproud reputation o having killed at least one man in his barrio in Oaxaca.

By no means did he invest his honor in deending the amily he created:he lef his wie and five children without support and went to Orizaba toorm another amily and engage in other amorous escapades. His son JoséZúñiga Pérez (b. ), Pepe’s ather, chose as his arm a pair o scissorswith which he made elegant suits or ashionable men and women in thecity o Mexico. Tese scissors and a silver thimble cherished by his sonshelped him to sustain his amily. His son Pepe took as his weapon a brushwith which he created paintings that expressed affectionate, tender, sex-

ual intimacy within a ramework o gender neutrality. As an adolescent,Chucho chose as his arms a pair o boxing gloves, because, like many, he


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18 Introduction

believed that organized sports disciplined masculine violence. Eventu-ally Chucho inherited his ather’s scissors and worked as a tailor. Teirbrother Erén took up a pencil and slide rule to work as an architect.

Although today Mexican society appears enveloped in violence stem-

ming rom the drug trade and its persecution by the state, the transitionin arms over three generations o Zúñiga men is no aberration. It was asocial project. We can identiy the processes that acilitated it. From thelate nineteenth century, Mexican psychologists, employers, military offi-cers, sociologists, novelists, hygienists, doctors, social workers, educators, journalists, Catholic activists, and sundry public intellectuals expressedconcern about what they viewed as a lower-class masculinity, prone tosocial, political, and amilial violence, irresponsibility, alcoholism, andsexually transmitted disease. I in the Porfiriato, criminologists viewedthis “condition” as a product o biological degeneracy and a sordid environment o poverty best isolated rom decent society, the postrevolu-tionary state ocused concerted social policy on reorm and integration,health and education. From the late s, when a good part o the worldwas entering an intense and devastating period o war, Mexico began aprolonged period o demilitarization, social peace, and economic growth.In , the abolished its military sector. Overt and violent socialconflict decreased. Such conflict had positioned organized workers or

considerable material improvement. Afer , possibilities or legal,protected employment grew, particularly in cities.

Te economic model o Fordism rested on amily ormation and themale worker’s garnering o a wage to support that amily. Mexico tookpart in .a broad trend o rising marriage rates in large Latin Americancountries with welare states. Criticism mounted against male domes-tic violence, long considered an acceptable practice. Adoption, as AnnBlum has shown, increasingly ocused on affective amily ormation

rather than the use o adopted children or labor.

Sociophysical con-ditions o daily lie improved or many in Mexico City so as to acilitateamily lie. Although the Zúñigas occupied a very small apartment in a vecindad, their access to running water, a toilet, drainage, a kitchen, andgarbage collection contrasted starkly with the almost complete absenceo services that made private lie difficult in the popular barrios duringthe Porfiriato. Tey benefited as well rom the rent control law passedby the government in .

Consumption, generally identified in the literature with women, en-gaged men as well and trended toward sentimental domestication andamily responsibility. It linked to personal presentation (lotions, soaps,


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Introduction 19

shampoos, clothing, hats, shoes) and to prestige (the purchase o a ra-dio, later a , still later a car—and o items used by their wives suchas a rerigerator or a stove). It linked particularly to entertainment. Al-though it suggested amily responsibility, it did not necessarily demand

fidelity. As Ageeth Sluis has argued, the new “modernist male subject,”shaped by the beauty, health, and entertainment industries, maintainedhis long-standing right to “step out.”

As noted, or men as well as women, radio programs stressed senti-ments o love, affection, and responsibility, and, in advice programs, ra-tional resolution o disputes. School textbooks dropped their presentationo destitute children rescued by charitable rich men or representationso those diligently cared or by ather and mother, who never resortedto physical punishment. Children were to learn nonviolent, affectionateparenting in their care o pets. Formally, the school banned corporalpunishment. Even i Mexican film entertained with violent criminals,cowboys, and revolutionaries, the premier icons—Jorge Negrete and Pe-dro Inante—captured a masculinity in transition rom the s intothe s. Jorge Negrete personified authoritarian, aristocratic maleprivilege and bravado. He was a charming conquistador; not a amilyman but rather an elegant, singing Hispanic horseman ensconced in thedisappeared world o the hacienda. Pedro Inante was an ordinary guy,

a muscle-bound worker and athlete. For all the rural roles he played, hewas quintessentially urban. He seduced many women, but he loved themtenderly and showed special care and affection toward children. He was,or all his occasional outbursts o temper, a sof, vulnerable romantic anda good dad. José Zúñiga Sr. loved Negrete and thought Inante a punk.Pepe liked Pedro Inante and learned all his songs.

In the s and early s, Oscar Lewis articulated new trends inpsychology and personality development in his ocus on Jesús Sánchez’s

emotional abuse o his children. Octavio Paz, in Laberinto de la soledad (), psychologized the Mexican man as enclosed in deep insecurity,prone to uncontrollable drunken eruptions o violence, and not matureenough to embrace a universal humanism. Psychologist Erich Fromm,who made his home in Cuernavaca, confirmed a patriarchal paradigmin his Art of Loving , published in : the mother owed unconditionallove, while the ather was to guide the child into the ways o the world.However, he called or a more emotionally open and mature masculin-ity. Tese intellectuals gave voice to an ongoing, multiaceted, moraland social project.

Te same critique came through in the films Pepe Zúñiga watched


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20 Introduction

as an adolescent in the s while he trained and worked as a radiotechnician. Te Hollywood bildungsroman shifed rom the rags-to-riches stories that had animated Jose Zúñiga Sr. to youths caught up inaffective turbulence, struggling to express their inner eelings and sense

o justice, pitted against male adults and athers who were closed, cold,corrupt, ofen violent, and emotionally clueless. Te characters playedby James Dean in Rebel without a Cause and East of Eden, by MarlonBrando in On the Waterfront , and by John Kerr in ea and Sympathy resolved their conflicts in tender—i precarious and fleeting—solidaritywith deeply sympathetic women and sometimes with one another. In-deed, ternura (tenderness), the word Gustavo Sainz chooses or the emo-tional awakening and subduing o his wild delinquent hero CompadreLobo, seems an emerging sentiment among Mexico City youth romthe late s.

enderness could move in many directions—companionate marriageor partnerships, spontaneous love affairs, homosexual intimacy, platonicriendships, literary or artistic creativity. enderness does not necessarilyspell the end o patriarchy: most o its expression stayed within this ramewell into the s. Rather, tenderness speaks to a certain eminization omale sensibility which punctuates Pepe’s story. By linking tenderness toemale sensibility, I do not wish to essentialize emininity but rather call

attention to the images, symbols, and discourses o the time that playedwith the Enlightenment dichotomy between male rationality and emalesentiment. From the late nineteenth century and particularly rom theinitial years o postrevolutionary government, the elite preoccupationwith violent and dissolute masculinity had its counterpart in assigningresponsibility and affective care to the mother. Whether we are listen-ing to a song rom Cri-Cri, watching Sara García in Cuando los niños sevan or Bambi’s mother in the movies, or beholding in a Mexican mural

or official sculpture the essential mother—ull-bodied, nursing a baby,protecting her children, washing clothes, making tortillas—the spectatorlearns that the mother was the source o care and tenderness toward nowcherished children, a tenderness intended to permeate male as well asemale children.

Te ideal twentieth-century Mexican mother was more than tender.She was also responsible or her amily’s well-being and her children’shealth, education, discipline, and uture, duties assigned to her by andshared with a somewhat “eminized” state (consider its nurturing, cur-ing, and educating dimensions). In this endeavor, she assumed some taskshistorically assigned to men. Although such active motherhood has deep


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Introduction 21

historical roots in Mexico, mid-twentieth-century discourse and practicereified and amplified it. A social type emerged in popular culture in theseyears. La Borola, heroine o the Familia Burrón comic series; La Bartola,o Chava Flores’s song; and La Patita, o Gabilondo Soler’s Cri-Cri were

all energetic promoters and protectors o their amilies and, in the caseo La Bartola and La Patita, were hampered by irresponsible husbands.As noted in chapters and , Pepe’s mother, Lupe Zúñiga, was ero-

ciously responsible. It was she who struggled in the public world o com-merce to make ends meet. It was she who stitched the children’s clothes,made good meals out o little, ound the children doctors, dentists, andbarbers, and ed them nasty cod liver oil. She assumed responsibility ortheir ormal education and job training. Supremely responsible, she wasnot very tender. Her violent streak will immediately strike the reader. Herchildren accepted it as part o her service in deense o their education,her amily, and hersel, or in Pepe’s opinion, his ather and his ather’semale relatives abused her.

Pepe was more critical o his ather’s violence. Pepe’s ather was the di-rect source and object o the boy’s love. It was José Zúñiga Sr. who taughtPepe how to see the movies. Although he had only three years o ormalschooling, José Zúñiga Sr. was a connoisseur o cinema, a maestro andstudent o exquisite sensibility and perception. Particularly because he

had grown up with silent film, he understood the camera’s affective de-ployment to highlight the aesthetic or athletic plasticity, the emotion,the subtle sexuality o the human body and ace. It was his perceptiono cinema that inormed his impressive, seductive sel-presentation andhis son’s artistic sensibility. Cinema, treated by U.S. film studies scholarsas the genre o emale sentiment, ormed and affected both Pepe and hisather. And in moments o deep despondence outside o cinema, it wasofen Pepe’s ather who consoled him.

But his ather could also be hard and distant, occasionally abusiveand violent toward his wie and children, financially and morally irre-sponsible, and passive in the ace o the aggression his mother and sis-ters showed toward Lupe. He also insisted in a traditional manner thathis son ollow him into the tailor’s trade, a position Pepe rejected withhis mother’s support. Multiple messages appropriated rom school, themovies, radio programs, and daily lie inormed the son’s critique o hisather. In it, Pepe identified with his mother and with the abused womenand children he had seen in the movies. Against what he perceived to benegative elements in his ather’s character, he rebelled as a teenager anda young man—identiying, as did many o his riends, with the iconic


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22 Introduction

James Dean, the misunderstood, emotionally deprived adolescent rebelin search o love, recognition, and his own voice.

From a Critical Public of Youth to a More Democratic Public Sphere

Shortly afer he embraced James Dean and purchased readily availableDean paraphernalia—a red sweater and a red vest (he could not affordthe jacket)—Pepe signed up or an evening class in drawing at the Esmer-alda painting school on San Fernando Street in the Colonia Guerrero.It was the mission o his teacher, the painter Benito Messeguer, to en-courage the artist in each o his students—mostly young men o modestbackground who worked in the day. He had them read the biographieso amous painters who had painstakingly struggled to discover and ex-press their inner soul. In recent years, Pepe had drawn the portraits oJames Dean and Marlon Brando, o Elizabeth aylor and Grace Kelly.Now in night class, Messeguer took note o his portrait o the Esmeraldamodel imoteo. In its expressive power, Messeguer told him, the paint-ing reminded him o José Clemente Orozco, about whom Pepe Zúñigaknew very little.

Pepe continued working as a radio technician, taking night classes un-til the milieu completely absorbed him and he entered the degree-granting

day program. Trough the Esmeralda, Pepe joined and participated in anew critical public o youth in Mexico City, a diverse group mostly con-centrated in postsecondary education that began to take shape at the endo the s. We now know a great deal about this movement. We gener-ally learn about one o its several dimensions—in politics, art, literatureand poetry, music, theater, or hippy-inspired counterculture. In differentdegrees, these overlapped in the lives o participants. Te movement isusually defined as middle class. Te term is vague and underestimates the

presence o hundreds who had joined the middle class in these years oeconomic growth or gained access to it through higher education. It ex-cludes participants rom the popular sectors—among them, the militantstudents o the vocational schools and many rock musicians. Overall,this public was predominantly male with a significant, growing emalepresence that raised gender questions at the level o practice and everydaylie but not yet at the level o politics, theory, or analytical reflection. Reaching back to the late s and spilling into the s, the new pub-lic included minigenerations. Pepe belonged to the early wave raised onradio and the movies. Tose just a ew years younger had watched moretelevision. Pepe was out o school and struggling to establish his career


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Introduction 23

as a painter when students took to the streets in . Many o the youthwho undertook radical activity in politics and the arts in the s werebarely in preparatory school in .

Further, the movement was not sui generis. Its critique developed in

dialogue with extensive consumption o national and transnational cul-tural goods and inormation and with more seasoned adult mentors. Itlikely would not have reached the drama and political impact it achievedhad it not been ed by a very public quarrel within the ruling , asex-president Lázaro Cárdenas ormed the Movimiento de LiberaciónNacional in support o the Cuban Revolution and the party’s powerulconservative action recoiled. Te tension ed the communicative andpolitical opening, its effervescence, and its repression.

What does Pepe Zúñiga’s experience tell us about this critical publicinormation? His story, related in chapters , , and , tells less about thepolitical actions o and more about a prior period o neohuman-ism—a transnationally shared humanism that permeated the classrooms,workshops, corridors, campuses, theaters, and galleries associated withthe vastly expanded sphere o higher education in Mexico City—par-ticularly the art schools and the national university. It was a critical hu-manism, ull o existential angst in a world threatened by nuclear war,perplexed by capitalist materialism and growing technocratization (much

as Habermas presented it in ). It was a humanism equally disillu-sioned by Stalinism in the socialist world and alarmed by colonial violencebeing perpetrated against people o color in search o their liberation. Itwas ull o sociopolitical criticism, whether it was to subvert the stulti-ying censorship o entertainment imposed by Uruchurtu, the mayor oMexico City, to marvel at the Cuban Revolution as a new possibility orthe redemption o the oppressed, to ault the Mexican government orrevolutionary promises unulfilled, or to insist on pushing the limits o

press censorship. It was rebellious—in painting, José Luis Cuevas, JuanSoriano, Mathias Goeritz, Lilia Carillo, and Manuel Felguérez rom theearly s led the Ruptura, declaring war against the Mexican school osocial realist painting. Pepe’s teachers at La Esmeralda, a redoubt o theMexican school, encouraged individual expression as did new theater andliterary movements. In psychic matters, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s eatroPánico staged shattering therapy sessions in schools and caés to engageyoung spectators in what they did not want to see or the sake o their ownliberation rom society’s constraints and distortions. It was spiritual—moved by Bach’s masses, the new vernacular Misa Criolla rom Argentinaand Missa Luba rom the Congo, and Paolini’s film Te Gospel according


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24 Introduction

to St. Matthew. Te music o the Beatles captured its libidinal exuberance,its exhilarating embrace o reedom and experimentation and sense ogenerational uniqueness, or the Beatles were a totally new sound.

It was a cosmopolitan world, as Carlos Monsiváis eloquently described

it. For Monsiváis, its epicenter was the new campus o the National Uni- versity on the ar south side o the city. In the s the university hadheld out in avor o reedom o thought against pressure rom the gov-ernment and the labor leader Vicente Lombardo oledano to submit toa singular social-political agenda. In the s that independence boreruit. Te new campus, with its modernist architecture and wide openspaces, became a place or critical thought, international exchange, and vanguards o all sorts. It was a site rom which came the new word (mag-azines like La Revista de la Universidad de Mexico); new sounds (stereosound recordings o classical music and jazz broadcast over Radio Uni- versidad); new visions (art exhibits, cine clubs, and experimental the-ater). We explore these through Pepe’s experience in the city’s center,where theaters debuted the works o young playwrights and directorsHector Azar, Juan Ibañez, and Julio Castillo with stunningly expressivestudent actors and haunting scenography. Pepe took in the new cinema—Fellini, Pasolini, Bergman—at downtown movie houses or the cine clubo the Instituto Politécnico Nacional closer to his neighborhood. He was

certainly not alone here. Te major art schools, La Esmeralda and theAcademia de San Carlos, were located in the center, and here the youngpainters, sculptors, and graphic artists wove an intoxicating milieu ocreativity, questioning, and revelry.

As much as it was a moment o cosmopolitan awakening, it was alsoan experience o learning more about Mexico. Exposés o Mexican pov -erty, injustice, and official corruption prolierated. In Carlos Fuentespublished Te Death of Artemio Cruz , reinterpreting the Mexican Rev-

olution not as a movement o liberation accomplished by a benevolentstate but through the lie o an excessively corrupt official who enrichedhimsel at the expense o society. In Fondo de Cultura Económicapublished the Spanish edition o Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sanchez . Hisshockingly detailed exposure o urban poverty in the barrio o epitoelicited enormous public response and sold out immediately. In , proessor Pablo González Casanova published his iconic critiqueDemocracy in Mexico. Rodolo Stavenhagen’s key essays on sociology andunderdevelopment appeared in El Día in June . Fernando Benítezbegan to publish his culturally affirmative and politically denunciatoryseries Los indios de México. In Benítez, always a daring journalist,


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Introduction 25

brought his México en la Cultura, the repressed cultural supplement othe newspaper Novedades, to Siempre! , the decade’s most enduring mag-azine o plural political and cultural opinion. In , in the afermatho protests against the U.S.-backed invasion o Cuba, the government

permitted the publication o the more radical magazine Política. It enjoyed an avid readership until it shut down in , in part because thegovernment paper monopoly would not supply it.

Journalist and art historian Antonio Rodríguez published articles inSiempre! detailing the disastrous results o agrarian reorm in the hen-equen industry in Yucatán. Introduced to Pepe by Benito Messeguer,Rodríguez became a mentor. He gave Pepe his articles and his booksand secured him exhibiting opportunities. Rodríguez was one o severaldistinguished figures connecting Pepe to a broader world o art, history,and politics and one o many older proessors, artists, and intellectualsdelighted to share their politics, art, literature, and music with open andeager youth. ogether they constituted the new critical public. In theeffervescence o the period, hierarchies held and dissolved at the sametime in a creative exuberance that prooundly marked the subjectivityo youth. Pepe, in particular, ound in this communicative network opeers and mentors a trust and confidence that had ofen eluded him inthe world o work. In this network, he learned new languages, altering his

sense o sel and his possibilities.Long ashamed o his dark Oaxacan skin and enamored o modern ur-

ban ways, Pepe learned the value o pre-Colombian civilization (aestheticand grand) and contemporary indigenous culture (artistic, culturally“authentic,” unjustly neglected) through the high modernist languageo his mentors and teachers—Antonio Rodríguez, Benito Messeguer,sculptor Francisco Zúñiga, and painter Raul Anguiano. In he joinedAnguiano’s team, one o many made up o scores o young artists led

by established painters and sculptors executing murals, walls, maps,and archaeological replicas or the new Museum o Anthropology. Forall, it was a proound learning experience creating a new dimension osel-identity, linking their youthul energy and search or artistic reedomwith an overwhelming diversity o Mesoamerican aesthetic expressionabout which they had known little or nothing. Intellectuals have treatedthe museum’s construction and design critically—in part, because staterepression o the protests came on the heels o its opening in and made it vulnerable to scathing critiques o cultural expropriation andpopular manipulation. But or the young artists who worked to bring itto lie, the many artists and scholars who would use it as a source or their


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26 Introduction

work, and thousands upon thousands o its visitors, it was much morethan the monument o an authoritarian state.

Te young painters at the Museo de Antropología created there a spacelinked to others (caés, theaters, galleries, pánicos, private studios, and

their proessors’ homes and apartments) to oster critical dialogue andcultural experimentation. Tis new extended space constructed itsel in varying degrees against society and against the state, in part because itscritique led it into opposition and in part because the government andsome sectors o society reacted against it. As Pepe remembers, studentswere badly seen and likely to be picked up by the police on any pretext.At the unconventional ashions (long hair and beards or men, miniskirtsor women, peasant garb and sandals) and behavior (new dances, mari- juana smoking, new romantic activity, insolence toward authority), thegovernment, the press, ellow citizens, and many parents recoiled. Aferall, they had provided these children with every advantage to becomehealthy, productive, compliant adults. Pepe’s ather could not figure outwhy he wanted to become an artist, associated as that proession was withirresponsibility, poverty, drunkenness, and homosexuality. Pepe couldresist his ather’s opposition because his own critical public affirmed hischoice. State anxiety produced police raids and repression that in turnueled youth’s defiance, experimentation, and solidarity.

But the understandable critique o state repression tended to mini-mize the degree to which the government had made the rebellion possiblethrough its social and cultural policies and its own internal conflicts. Ithad constructed the expanded educational system that was virtually tui-tion ree. Between and , enrollments at and the InstitutoPolitécnico Nacional had quadrupled, rom , students to ,. Its unds had built or reurbished the theaters where young directorsand actors staged experimental works or other students admitted at dis-

count rates. It had subsidized the publication o new literature. In itsart galleries and competitions, Pepe Zúñiga and his riends—boys andsome girls rom modest backgrounds with no social, political, or culturalconnections except those orged with their proessors—got their first op-portunities to exhibit.

Youth also expressed a certain disdain toward capitalism, technology,and markets. Pepe read and took to heart the treatise o Herbert Read,Cartas a un joven pintor , in which the English critic defined the artist as asolitary genius struggling to find “a new land,” discovering new symbolsto express his emotions, and “widening the space o coherent conscious-ness in a world in which the majority o our civilization [are] alienated


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Introduction 27

beings, slaves o the machine, robots in a demolished land, deprived othe joy o creation.” Pepe’s proessors, who held teaching jobs in publicinstitutions and public works contracts, suggested to their students thatto produce art or commercial purposes was contaminating and cor-

rupt. Tey seemed not to consider their own dependence on a state theycriticized as corrupt. Further, perhaps because young people in highereducation and their mentors made a distinction between high-brow andlow-brow consumption, they seemed reluctant to recognize how muchthey participated in material consumption—particularly in the explodingmarket or transnationally shared cultural goods in the orm o books,magazines, music, and film developed through new market-based com-munications technologies—stereo and sound, the record, the tran-sistor radio, the paperback book, the television, and the jet plane. Alongwith youth, an expanded middle and upper class enlarged the market orcultural goods and helped to explain the new art galleries and exhibitingopportunities that opened or Pepe and his riends. In act, in the s,state largesse, new prosperity, and prolierating markets pegged to innovative and deepening sensorial technologies catalyzed the social move-ments that challenged political, social, and aesthetic authority.

As this book treats the education o a young painter, its narrative endsin with Pepe’s departure or Paris on a French government scholar-

ship. Yet the major argument o this biography, that o a reedom-seekingsubjectivity animating Pepe and the youth movement o the s, re-mains abstract unless we examine its impact on the subsequent period.Te student protests o and the broader critical public o the sspoke or the common good (not a special corporate group within soci-ety) and demanded a undamental change in authoritarian, repressive,corrupt politics at the level o the state, society, and private lie. Tey didnot immediately nor did they ully achieve these goals. Nonetheless, they

catalyzed the expansion, liberalization, and diversification o political,social, and cultural opinion in the public sphere that worked in tandemwith the opening o the political system and social relations afer .Not ully liberated rom the behaviors and conventions they decried, therebels o the s nonetheless contributed to a transormation that hasnecessarily engaged subsequent generations and a much broader MexicoCity public. Propelling it have been major events: the collapse o the Ford-ist import-substitution development model in and the introductiono neoliberal economics and politics; the earthquake o , which dev-astated the central city; the epidemic o the s and s; the vic-tory o the Partido Revolucionario Democrático over the in Federal


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28 Introduction

District elections in ; and the deeat o the at the national levelin . From the s ull-blown globalization and a communicationsrevolution, similar to but very different rom the revolutions o the s,have urther transormed the public sphere.

In effect, the classically Habermasian bourgeois public sphere con-ducive to critical exchange and rational debate that has come to operatein Mexico City owes much to the s movement. It is a ar more inclu-sive, democratic, and diverse sphere than that described by Habermasor the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It includes the mass mediaand ironically grew out o the media Habermas so deplored in ortheir alleged privatization o sentiment and curtailment o interest inpublic lie and politics. Further, the public sphere opened with permis-sion, guidance, and unding rom the state whose rule it critiquedand undermined. oday, the vigorous state-society dialogue sustainedin Mexico City’s public sphere translates into citizen participation andpolicy that capitalizes upon globalization’s positive dimensions and helpsto mitigate some o its harsher aspects. I it is a city o greater economicinequality, it is one o diverse publics, conscious o their right to speak,object, and propose.

In the final chapter o the book, we explore Pepe Zúñiga’s maturepainting, that o his riends, and his age cohort as part o Mexico City’s

public sphere in the s and s. We explore how art has reflectedand contributed to changing social relations, state-society relations, andthe recognition o basic individual rights within a state o law. We do sowith particular ocus on Pepe’s representations o the body as the reposi-tory or affection, sexuality, rational reflection, and solidarity. We look athis paintings, their content and composition, their reception, and theirplace o exhibition to understand how intimate subjectivity has linked tochanges in the public sphere and politics in Mexico City.


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Notes

Introduction: Portrait of a Young Painter

. Elias, “errorism in the German Federal Republic,” –. Emerging schol-

arship on the global s stays close to Elias’s narrative particularly or the

United States and Western Europe. See, or example, Marwick, Te Sixties, and

Suri, “Te Rise and Fall,” –. . For literature, see, among others, Agustín, La tumba; Pacheco, Las batallas

en el desierto; Sainz, El compadre lobo. For testimonials and biography, Pon-

iatowska, La noche de latelolco; aibo, ’; on music, Zolov, Refried Elvis;

Agustín, La contracultura en México; Rubli, Estremécete y rueda; Blanco

Labra, Rockstalgia; Monsiváis, “De marzo de ,” –; on the arts, De-broise, ed., La era de la discrepancia; Goldman, Pintura mexicana contempo-

ranea en tiempos de cambio; Hijar Serrano, ed., Frentes, coaliciones y talleres;

McCaughan, Art and Social Movements; ibol, Confrontaciones; on gender,

Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices, and Frazier and Cohen, “Mexico ’,” –; or a

powerul historical reflection, Hiriart, “ ‘La revuelta antiautoritaria,’ ” –; onestive street democracy, Guevara Niebla, La democracia en la calle; Jardón,

El fuego de la esperanza; Soldatenko, “Mexico ’,” –. See also Zolov, “Ex-

panding Our Conceptual Horizons,” –; Monsiváis, El . More directly

relevant to the ormal politics o the movement are González de Alba, Los

años y los días; Revueltas, México ; Ramírez, El movimiento estudiantil de México; Pensado, Rebel Mexico.

. Nasaw, “Introduction,” .

. Merleau-Ponty, Te Structure of Behavior , .

. Spiegel, “Comment on a Crooked Line,” . . For a recent in-depth philosophical exploration o the term, see Ferguson,

Modernity and Subjectivity ; or a more accessible explanation, see Roper, “Slip-ping out o View,” –.


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242 Notes to Introduction

. See de Certeau, Practice. . Kessler Harris, “Why Biography?,” –.

. On memory and oral history, most helpul are Grele, “Oral History as Evi-

dence,” –; Portelli, Death of Luigi rastulli.

. James, Doña María’s Story .

. Margadant, Te New Biography , . . González y González, Pueblo en vilo. . It has been and still is such a prevailing view that to single out particular

works may be superfluous, but it may be worth citing classical analyses such as

Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow of Revolution, and Hellman, Mexico

in Crisis.

. Te Mexican Instituto de Seguro Social was ounded in as a tripartiteorganization o government, employers, and workers to provide health care,

pensions, and other social services to principally unionized workers.

. Christopher Robin is a contemporary o Cri-Cri. He first appeared in the poem

“Vespers,” published in by Vanity Fair magazine beore his big debut inthe book When We Were Very Young , written by his ather A. A. Milne and

published in by Methuen. See Sedgwick and Frank, ouching Feeling ,–.

. Te classical study o childhood in Mexico City in this period that captures

the multiple experiences o the well-cared-or and precociously stimulated

middle-class child is a novel, Pacheco’s Las batallas en el desierto, that in

was made into a movie, Mariana, Mariana, adapted by Vicente Leñero anddirected by Alberto Isaac. I am not alone in pursuing the idea o a mobilization

or children in Mexico in this period. See, in particular, the excellent studies

o Jackson Albarran, “Children o the Revolution,” and Ford, “Children o theMexican Miracle.” Research on Mexican children is prolierating with five

important books, Alcubierre Moya, Ciudadanos del future; Blum, Domestic Economies; Del Castillo roncoso, Conceptos, imágenes y representaciones;Sosenski Correa, Niños en acción; Sanders, Gender and Welfare in México;

collections such as Alcubierre Moya and Carreño, Los niños villistas; Sánchez

Calleja and Salazar Anaya, eds., Los niños; Agostoni, ed., Curar, sanar, y edu-

car ; and articles by these authors and Galván, “Un encuentro con los niños,”

–; Gudiño Cejudo, “Estado beneactor,” –; Sosenski Correa, “Elniño consumidor,” –; Stern, “Responsible Mothers and Normal Chil-

dren,” –; Vaughan, “Mexican Revolution,” –.

. On the transnational campaign or children’s rights in Latin America, see Guy,

“Politics o Pan American Cooperation,” –, Jackson Albarran, “Chil-

dren o the Revolution.”

. Jackson Albarran, “Children o the Revolution.” . Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico.

. Lewis, Te Children of Sánchez .

. Claudio Lomnitz discusses the twentieth-century Mexican public sphere in

terms o press censorship in “Ritual, rumor, y corrupción,” –. Pablo Pic-

cato has done a rich, innovative analysis o the public sphere as press expressionin the second hal o the nineteenth century (Te yranny of Opinion). For new

work on the twentieth century, see introduction and essays in Sacristán and


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Notes to Introduction 243

Piccato, eds., Actores, espacios, y debates, particularly Piccato, “Honor y opiniónpública,” –, Leidenberg, “Habermas en el Zócalo,” –, and Davis, “El

rumbo de la esera pública,” –. In his current work on crime journalism

(“Murders o Nota roja”), Pablo Piccato argues that while censors monitored

the political news, crime reporting encouraged reader engagement and com-

mentary and permitted a critique o the corrupt police and judicial systems. . Habermas, Structural ransformation, –, –; or critical essays, see

Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere.

. Habermas, Structural ransformation, –.

. E.g., Mills, Te Power Elite; Marcuse, One Dimensional Man; the classic work

o Habermas’s colleagues o the Frankurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer,Dialectic of Enlightenment . Scholarly and artistic disdain or the mass mediawas general in this period and part o a modernist distinction between high-

and lowbrow culture. Consider Adorno and Horkheimer, “Te Culture Indus-

try,” –; Read, Cartas a un joven pintor ; Riesman, Glazer, and Denney,

Te Lonely Crowd ; Goodman, Growing Up Absurd ; MacDonald, “Masscult andMidcult,” –; or Fellini’s La dolce vita. It is not surprising that Oscar Lewis

entirely ignored the impact o movies and the radio on the Sánchez children,although he notes they were avid ans. Nor does Norbert Elías give the media

their ull due in the ormation o s rebels.

. In his reflective essay on Te Structural ransformation, Habermas acknowl-

edges the seminal work o Stuart Hall, Encoding and Decoding, in influencing

his reassessment o the media. See Habermas, “Further Reflections,” –. . On the sensorial revolution, see particularly Hansen as she draws on Wal-

ter Benjamin in “Fallen Women, Rising Stars” and “Benjamin and Cinema,”

–. On community creation and sensorial revolution, see Lovigilio, Ra-dio’s Intimate Public.

. Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars,” –.

. On the ormative role o cinema, radio, music, and comic books in Mexico,see, among others, Granados Chaparro, ; Loaeza and Granados Chap-

arro, Mi novia, la tristeza; Monsiváis, “Instituciones,” –, “Agustín Lara,”

–, “South o the Border,” –, and Pedro Infante, –; Rubenstein,

Bad Language and “Teaters o Masculinity,” –. On radio listening ex-

periences, see essays in ierra Adentro, “Días de radio,” and Robles, “ShapingMexico Lindo.” On cinema, see also Sosenski, “Diversiones malsanas,” –;

on gender roles, behavior, and anxieties in cinema, see uñón, Mujeres de

luz ; Hershfield, Mexican Cinema/Mexican Women, and Imagining the Chica

Moderna; de la Mora, Cinemachismo. On live theater and the negotiation o

old and new gender behavior in the s, see Eineigel, “Distinction, Culture,

and Politics,” –. . On the imagined city, see uñon, La ciudad actriz , and Lara Chávez, Una

ciudad inventada por el cine.

. Interviews with Elva Garma, Elizabeth del Castillo Velasco González.

. abbreviates ¡A toda maquina! In the film, Pedro Inante and Luis

Aguilar play members o the Squadron o ransit Police in the Federal District. . See, among others, Poniatowska, La noche de latelolco; Agustín, La tumba;

Sainz, El compadre lobo, aibo, ’.


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244 Notes to Introduction

. Piccato, City of Suspects, –. . Classic primary sources are Guerrero, El Génesis del crimen; Roumagnac, Los

criminales en México; Ramos, El Perfil del hombre. Key secondary sources are

Bliss, “Te Science o Redemption,” –, and “Health o the Nation,” –;

Buffington, Criminal and Citizen; French, A Peaceful and Working People ;

Piccato, City of Suspects; Gustason, “ ‘He Loves the Litt le Ones’ ”; Rath, Mythsof Demilitarization; Stern, “Responsible Mothers and Normal Children,” –; Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, –, –, –, and “Te

Modernization o Patriarchy,” –.

. Te Porfirian approach is well examined in Buffington, Criminal and Citizen,

and Piccato, City of Suspects, and the revolutionary shif well explained by

Bliss, “Te Science o Redemption,” esp. , –, –, . . On the increasing ability o Mexican working-class men to support their

amilies through gainul employment between and , see Tompson,

“Households,” .

. Malanich, “Non-Normative Families.” She bases her argument on Arraros,“Concubinage in Latin America,” –, and Terborn, Between Sex andPower . She also notes that the trend reversed afer . In Mexico marriagerates rose rom per , inhabitants in to . in to . in

(Quilodran, Un siglo de matrimonio en México, ).

. On male domestic violence as socially perceived and legally handled in the

Porfiriato into the s, see Piccato, City of Suspects, –. See also Buff-

ington, “oward a Modern Sacrificial Economy,” –. On protest against itin the press, see Gustason, “ ‘He Loves the Litt le Ones,’ ” –; and in public

education, Vaughan, Cultural Politics, .

. Blum, Domestic Economies, and “Breaking and Making Families,” –. . On Porfirian conditions, see Piccato, City of Suspects, –. Te Porfirian

poor ofen attended to their personal needs over series o spaces ranging rom

etid tenements, pulquerías, public baths, the streets, and brothels. On thelong-enduring role o the pulquería as a site o multiple transactions (drink-

ing, eating, f

Documents

18. Portrait-of-a-Young-Painter-by-Mary-Kay-Vaughan.pdf