ESSAYS

Gender, Sexuality, and Nation in the Art

of Mexican Social Movements
Edward J. McCaughan
! ., / O/:. ! .,.cc.
/./ , ./, / /. a/ a//
/,.
Bertolt Brecht
Art associated with social movements
helped to constitutenot simply reectMexicos dramatic social and
political change over the past century. National identity, notions of citizen-
ship, democracy, and justice, as well as dominant constructions of gender
and sexuality, have been shaped, in part, by the content, form, and institu-
tional context of activist art. Prime examples include the work produced
by turn-of-the-twentieth-century engraver Jos Guadalupe Posada, revolu-
tionary muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Jos Clemente
Orozco, and the dozens of (often anonymous) graphic artists of the 1968
student movement. Against the backdrop of such earlier movement art,
this essay examines the efforts of feminist, gay, and lesbian Mexican artists
since the 1980s to subvert hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, national
identity, and citizenship. In doing so, I also attempt to reveal the importance
of the often neglected or underestimated cultural dimensions of political
struggles.
Hegemony, Culture, and Social Movement Art
Artists and intellectuals played an important role, not always with the
outcomes they intended, in the construction of the state and culture that
Ne pant l a: Vi e ws f r o m So ut h 3.1
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
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would dominate twentieth-century Mexico. In describing the social forces
that came to power following the revolution (1910c. 1920), Antonio Gram-
scis (1989) concept of / // is more useful than / /, because it
better captures the complexity and heterogeneity of power and domination
that emerged. Even if the project of the then ascendant national industrial
bourgeoisie was hegemonic from the 1930s through the 1960s, that project
was always forced to conform to the interests of other social forces within
the ruling bloc, including those of the ofcial labor and peasant organiza-
tions. Any hegemonic project is always contested, always trying to secure
itself, always in process (Hall 1988, 7).
As formulated by Gramsci, the exercise of hegemony by the ruling
bloc implies that subaltern sectors have accepted (to a greater or lesser
degree) as common sense the meanings ascribed to social reality by the
hegemonic forces. A similar notion is found in regulation theory, which
posits that a socioeconomic system can only experience long-term stability
if it is materialized in the shape of norms, habits, laws and regulation
networks which ensure the unity of the process and which guarantee that
its agents conform more or less to the schema of reproduction in their
day-to-day behavior and struggles (Lipietz 1987, 14). Considered in that
light, cultureunderstood as the shared norms, habits, laws, and, above
all, the meanings attributed to social processesis at the center of political
struggle andsocial change. As summarizedinaninsightful essay by Evelina
Dagnino (1998, 43), this attribution of meanings takes place in a context
characterized by conict and power relations. In this sense, the struggle
over the meanings and who has the power to attribute them is not only a
political struggle in itself but is also inherent and constitutive of all politics.
Activist art, as Brecht insisted, is not intended to mirror reality but
to change it. Art is one of the means that social movements have used to
contest meanings attributed to everything from revolution, democracy, and
justice to the most intimate expressions of identity in daily life. The work of
artists such as Posada, Siqueiros, Rivera, and Orozco helped construct the
shared meanings and norms that underlay the hegemony of the historic bloc
which consolidated power after the Mexican Revolution. Likewise, the art
associated with oppositional Mexican social movements since the 1960s can
be understood as part of multiple counterhegemonic efforts by subaltern
social sectors to re-present and redene the meaning(s) of Mexican culture
and thus power.
Before and during the revolution against the thirty-ve-year Por-
rio Daz dictatorship, Posadas political cartoons challenged the power of
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
the oligarchy, not only in their elegantly executed critiques of the ancien
rgime and its foreign sponsors but also in their democratic form: sim-
ple, accessible, humorous lithographs reproduced in newspapers and on
broadsheets pasted on public walls. Posadas artwork fearlessly derided the
powerful and encouraged broader diffusion of art and information, as well
as participation in public debate. It thus helped to create a greater sense of
entitlement among broad sectors of the population and to redene politics
as an arena for the masses, a central tenet of the postrevolutionary populist
regime.
In a different form, the muralist movement continued this tradi-
tion, especially in the 1920s under the sponsorship of the new revolutionary
government. The muralists created monumental public art that placed the
popular classes and their struggles for national independence and social
justice at the center of Mexican history. The murals were also key to re-
presenting Mexico as a mestizo nation, proud of its indigenous past and
disgusted with the slavish imitation of all things French that had charac-
terized the Porrio Daz era.
A large part of the new regimes hegemony rested on its claims to
represent the people, to have opened the political system to the masses,
dispensed social justice, defended the nation against foreign aggressors,
and restored the nations pride in its Mexicanness. These were all ideas
articulated and popularized through the art of Posada and the muralists.
These same artists, however, also contributed to a darker side of the new
hegemony, a heterosexist, patriarchal machismo that constrained the pri-
vate and public life of women and men alike. Recent cultural histories
and culturally focused social science studies have analyzed how particular
representations of gender, sexuality, and/or ethnicity came to constitute the
central elements of . as it was broadly accepted.
1
The system
of political power that emerged out of the revolution was highlyand
consciouslygendered. Ilene OMalley (1986), for example, documents the
conscious effort, in the institutionalization of the postrevolutionary state, to
convert the heroes of the Mexican Revolution into politically indistinguish-
able macho rebels or benevolent patriarchs.
The muralists contributed to the mythmaking with their larger-
than-life portraits of Emiliano Zapata, often depicted with a smoldering,
virile sexuality, and Francisco Villa, the bad boy of the revolution. While the
male heroes were turned into world-famous icons, the women who lled
the murals remained largely anonymous, noble, and quietly enduring mes-
tizas or exotic Indian princesses. In Siqueiross ! .:/ (gure
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!. . D: // . Los revolucionarios ., `/
!.,. //: .,,
1), for example, several male heroes of the revolution are easily identied
among the armed insurgents, while unarmed, shawled women cling to
their men on the margins. It would be impossible to guess from this im-
age that thousands of women fought in the revolution, several serving as
ofcers.
The most important exception to the anonymous female in the
murals was the frequently portrayed Malinche, a multilingual Indian wom-
an who became Hernn Cortss interpreter and mistress, and thus the sym-
bolic mother of the mestizo nation. Malinche has also endured as the na-
tional symbol of betrayal, her story a Mexican version of the biblical lesson
of Eve: Beware smart women who act independently and seek knowledge.
To this day a traitor or sellout in Mexico is called a //.
The artwork of the early twentieth century also conveyed lasting
lessons in what constituted inappropriate male behavior. For example,
Posadas caricatures of the forty-one men arrested in 1901 at a private party
inMexico City (where many of themwere dressedas women) were a central
component of the extensive media coverage of the scandal, which would
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. . f. c/... O. ,///. El machete .. .
, .,./. .,., !.,. `. ^/ . . .,
ground public discourse about homosexuality in Mexico for decades to
come (Irwin 1999). One Posada broadsheet included a drawing of the men,
half of them in ball gowns, dancing together, and an accompanying ditty
about the pretty and coquettish . [faggots]. The identication
of male homosexuals as effeminate, sexually provocative, and objects of
derisive humor would stick, as seen in Orozcos 1924 cartoon from the
left-wing newspaper !/ /.. (gure 2).
Such imagery in murals, broadsheets, and cartoons combined with
the efforts of lmmakers, writers, criminologists, political leaders, and
others in the rst half of the century to associate Mexican culture, and thus
power, with the construct of heterosexist, phallocentric machismo. Given
Octavio Pazs stature as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century
and as a semiofcial intellectual of the Mexican state, the publication of his
famous 7/. !/,/ / /. (1961) helped to elevate such constructs to
the level of ofcial national discourse. Using highly sexualized language,
Pazs sociopsychological essays described what he understood to be the
essential characteristics of Mexican men and women. The Mexican man
never cracks, never opens himself up, never allows the outside worldto
penetrate his privacy (30). The passive homosexual Mexican male is thus
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regarded as an abject, degraded being (39). The inferiority of Mexican
women is constitutional and resides in their sex, their submissiveness,
which is a wound that never heals (ibid.). In the hegemonic culture as
summarized by Paz, the Mexican woman is also denied any agency, sexual
or otherwise. No penis, no power. As for the woman who does assert her
own will, she is the / ., hard and impious and independent like the
/ (ibid.). She is also dangerous, and, in Pazs sweeping analysis, all of
these national traits and behaviors stem from the social and psychological
trauma suffered by the Mexican people as a result of Malinches betrayal.
By mid-century, therefore, the hegemony of Mexicos postrevo-
lutionary regime was shored up by widely diffused, frequently repeated
cultural norms that linked the most intimate aspects of daily personal life
with sweeping historical narratives and civics lessons. A heterosexist, phal-
locentric, machista culture worked simultaneously to obfuscate the politics
of the revolution, to mystify the nature of the postrevolutionary regime,
to marginalize homosexuals, to restrain womens agency in both private
and public life, and, as OMalley (1986) suggests, to channel working-class
male anger into depoliticized, self-destructive behaviors such as alcoholism,
violence, and domestic abuse.
By the 1940s, the postrevolutionary regime had moved away from
radical populism and become fully institutionalized. Over the next few
decades, its institutions would become ever more rigid and its hegemony
would gradually weaken. Increasing authoritarianism, corporatist control
of worker and peasant organizations, and corruption, as well as unresolved
social demands for equality and justice, began to tarnish the regimes rev-
olutionary credentials. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, new oppositional
social movements of railroad workers, teachers, and doctors, among others,
began to challenge the hegemony of the regime, generally encountering
state repression.
On the artistic front, there were also signs of unrest. La Ruptura,
a movement by a new generation of artists born in the 1920s and 1930s,
rebelled against what its adherents saw as the stale rigidity of the Mexican
School, the institutional form of art in Mexico centered on the muralists
and other artists of their generation. Young artists like Jos Luis Cuevas,
who explained in an interview with me (Mexico City, 22 March 2001)
that he had been introduced to the Beats and the rst wave of the sexual
revolution in New York City, and Manuel Felgurez, who had studied in
Europe, beganto experiment withnewstyles, media, andthemes, including
more subjective explorations of sexuality and emotions. While their art was
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
not overtly political, their break with the ofcial art establishment was
politically signicant, and Cuevas and Felgurez lent their support to an
even younger generation of activist artists who joined the 1968 student
movement. That movement would strike the strongest blow yet against
the regimes hegemony.
A New Generation of Activist Artists: From the 1968 Student
Movement to the Grupos Movement
The 1968 student movement in Mexico City was a watershed event and
continues to be an important point of reference for social movements and
their loosely afliated artists. Indeed, a generation of artists inuenced by
the events of 1968 remains at the center of activist art. The 1968 movement
has been well documented over the years, from the classic oral history by
Elena Poniatowska (1992 [1971]) to the recent revisitation, using newly
released government documents, by Julio Scherer Garca and Carlos Mon-
sivis (1999). What began as a dispute very specic to the governance of
the public university system was transformed into a broad social movement
with a national agenda demanding social justice and the democratization
of Mexicos authoritarian regime. Though the movement, in its initial and
particular form, was smashed by the bloody massacre and massive arrests
of 2 October 1968, the movements legacy is difcult to overstate. It was a
catalyst for many of the far-reaching transformations that have occurred
in Mexican society in the decades since. Among these are greatly expanded
freedom of speech and of the press, the transition to a multiparty political
system, the emergence of a vast network of social movements throughout
the country, and the weakening of the long-ruling Party of the Institu-
tional Revolution (PRI)s claim to be the standard bearer and gatekeeper of
Mexican nationalism and national identity.
Fundamental elements of the student movements cultural poli-
tics are evident in its powerful posters and yers, which covered buildings,
walls, and buses throughout the summer of 1968. As described by par-
ticipants I interviewed, dozens of students from the two major national
art schools took over their institutions studios and began to produce y-
ers, posters, and banners for the movements daily needs. Recent graduates
collaborated with the movement, working in semiclandestine studios and
print shops to avoid government repression. Artists I interviewed, includ-
ing political cartoonist Rogelio Naranjo (Mexico City, 21 March 2001), de-
scribed how their participation in the movement turned them away from
careers as gallery artists and toward collective efforts at socially conscious
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art. They were occasionally aided by established artists such as Cuevas and
Felgurez, who helped create an ephemeral mural at the National Au-
tonomous University (UNAM) supporting the students. (The mural was
destroyed by shock troops, according to Cuevas.)
In a time of strict press censorship and repression, the student
movement artists also played a critical role in informing the public about
the movements demands and the governments repression. The artists or-
ganized into brigades to distribute their freshly printed yers and posters
throughout the city. In that sense, they were also taking democracy to the
streets and creating a new public consciousness about the need for freedom
of expression.
The art, by its nature ephemeral, was largely destroyed. However,
an important collection has been compiled in ! ./ !.. /
:. ./ (Grupo Mira 1988). The graphics of 1968 illustrate
both the movements powerful challenge to the symbolic underpinnings of
ofcial nationalist discourse and the limitations of the movements vision
with regard to the gendered and sexual subjectivities that would come to
the fore in subsequent movements.
At the time, the graphics were startling and groundbreaking in
their depiction of Mexican leaders and public ofcialsparticularly Pres-
ident Gustavo Daz Ordaz, the military, and policeas gorillas, brutes,
thugs, and thieves trampling on the Mexican constitution and violating the
human rights of the nations children. One graphic (gure 3), for example,
depicts Daz Ordaz as the eagle about to devour the snake in the familiar
symbol of the nations founding; but the eagles wings have become deadly
bayonets. At the same time, the students made relatively few references
to the nations great heroes; there is, for example, only one image of Zap-
ata among the hundreds collected by Grupo Mira (1988). Instead, we nd
various depictions of Che Guevara, a statement of the movements closer
identication with Latin American socialism than with Mexican cultural
nationalism. That association would leave the students vulnerable to gov-
ernment charges that they were unpatriotic. To some extent, the traditional
Mexican style of their graphics helped to undermine this claim.
Despite the newdirections taken by younger Mexican artists in the
1960s, student movement artists by and large recurred to forms and styles
of didactic political graphics associated with the Mexican School, such
as those of Posada, Siqueiros, and the Taller de Grca Popular (TGP, or
Popular Graphic Arts Workshop). Interviews with several of the artists who
participated in the 1968 movement suggest that this was more a pragmatic
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. , ,. ., ! /. . a/
:. /. . /.. !.,.
C, ` .,
decision than a conscious ideological or aesthetic statement. The urgency
of the moment demanded immediate response by the artists to the move-
ments ever-changing needs, and they thus fell back on the graphic art with
whichthey were most familiar. Occasionally they simply reproduceda TGP
graphic and added new text. Their choice of such a familiar visual style
and form also allowed the student artists to emphasize their Mexicanness
while exposing government leaders as the truly unpatriotic //.
While the 1968 movement broke important ground in recasting
the meaning of democracy, the Mexican state, and Mexican nationalism,
its representations of itself and of the protagonists of change remained
trapped in the traditional denitions of gender. This was true despite
the overwhelming presence of women in the movement and despite the
participation of budding gay and feminist intellectuals such as Carlos
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Monsivis and Elena Poniatowska. In the graphics compiled by Grupo
Mira, for example, there is only one image of a solitary, militant woman
protester. A small number of graphics incorporate one or two images of
women into crowd scenes, but the vast majority represent protesters and
victims of repression as male. The important exception to this is the use
of the suffering mother image in statements against repression; of course,
that image is fully consistent with the cultures dominant construction of
womanhood (see gure 4).
Despite the 1968 student movements focus on government re-
pression, it largely failed to recognize the associated repression of female
and gay sexuality. Nevertheless, the movements courageous assault on the
postrevolutionary regime did open space for a critique of ofcial nation-
alism that would continue to develop in the following decades. As Jean
Franco (1989, xxi) has noted, women, as feminist intellectuals, increasingly
took advantage of that space to tell their side of the story and to show
the articulation of patriarchy and nationalism. Indeed, the representation
of women and sexuality by social movementassociated art evolved grad-
ually throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but relating ofcial nationalism,
patriarchy, and heterosexism was not common in oppositional art until the
1990s.
The driving issue for social movements in the 1970s was the PRIs
undemocratic, corporatist control of labor and peasant organizations. After
the governments brutal repression of the student movement, hundreds of
student activists immersed themselves in grassroots organizing in labor
unions and peasant communities throughout the country. Hundreds of
local mobilizations to build independent organizations or to democratize
existing organizations converged into a national movement in the second
half of the seventies, at times generating demonstrations of more than one
hundred thousand people in Mexico City.
Parallel to these class-based movements against corporatism, ac-
tivist artists attempted to undermine the states powerful inuence over
artists and other intellectuals and to reclaim an independent, critical space
for art at the service of the popular classes. Some fteen art collectives
, as they were commonly calledwere founded in the 1970s and came
together briey at the end of the decade in the Mexican Front of Cultural
Workers (see Liquois 1985; and Goldman 1994). The grupos movement
was very much an outgrowth of 1968. The majority of the grupos artists
were born between 1945 and 1955 and all were inuenced, directly or
indirectly, by the events of 1968. Former student movement artist Arnuo
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. , , ,. ., `. . ,
. ! // .///, !/ , ,. ,
/ , / / , /. //.
!.,. C, ` .,
Aquino later formed Grupo Mira (Liquois 1985). Another important 1968
antecedent of the grupos was the formation of the Saln Independiente, an
effort by rebellious Mexican artists to create an independent, alternative art
space and to protest the governments dictatorial cultural policies. Two of
the youngest members of the Saln, Felipe Ehrenberg and Ricardo Rocha,
went on to help found two other important grupos, Proceso Pentgono and
Grupo Suma.
In terms of content, Dominique Liquois (1985) identies three ar-
eas of activity, linked to three social problems, that characterize the grupos
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work: (1) the conditions of urban life in Mexico City, (2) the failures and
weaknesses of the education system, and (3) more broadly, the sociopolitical
situation in Mexico and Latin America, including the worsening economic
crisis, revolutionary struggles in Central America, and the military dictator-
ships of the Southern Cone. The grupos commitment to work collectively
rather than as individual artists was part of a broader effort on the Left
to build alternative institutions and new forms of nonindividualistic social
relations.
With regard to form, the grupos showed more interest in and
openness to artistic currents from outside the country than did earlier gen-
erations of activist artists. Happenings, performances, installations, and
various forms of conceptual art would constitute the new public art of
the grupos. As described by Shifra Goldman (1994, 13334), Suma, for
example,
was not willing to revert to the didactic art forms borrowed
from the Taller de Grca Popular (Popular Graphic Arts
Workshop) of the 1940s and 1950s that were deemed appro-
priate in 1968. They opted for a combination of conceptual art,
abstract expressionism (in vogue during the early 1960s), and
new graphic technology combined with found objects from
the popular urban environmentartifacts and images from
television, /:./ (photographic comic books), periodicals,
product advertisements, and other objects which formed the
visual code of the man [] in the street.
The grupos appropriation of international art trends rather than
ones more clearly identied as Mexican is revealing of the cultural politics of
the era, and the extent to which the recognized symbolic vocabulary of mex-
icanidad was associated with the PRIs hegemony. Efforts to democratize
politics and culture drew upon a representational inventory associated with
the worldwide family of social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In the immediate aftermath of the rupture represented by 1968, counter-
hegemonic representations seemed to demand a rejection of the nations
dominant symbols (in ways similar to the U.S. antiwar and anti-imperialist
movements rejection of the Stars and Stripes as an irredeemable symbol of
imperialism).
Images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, one of the most Mexican
of icons, appear in the work of two of the grupos, the Art and Ideology
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. C, ./ / //
., !.,. C `.. . / .,
Workshop (TAI) and Suma (see Garca Mrquez et al. 1977; and Liquois
1985). But the Virgin seems to serve mainly as a symbol of an oppressive,
exploitative system of class inequality. In one of the TAIs installations, for
example, a newspaper announcement of a Guadalupana pilgrimage appears
together with the elegant people of the society page and still shots from
popular Mexican lms. In another section of the same installation, the
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Virgin watches gracefully over a campesino who hangs dead over the
skeleton of another campesino; in the background are images of police and
army violence. In a Suma piece, the Virgins image is pasted onto a crum-
pledpiece of trash. Incontrast to more recent MexicanandChicana feminist
efforts to reappropriate the Virgin of Guadalupe as a symbol of womens
strength and spirituality (see, e.g., Nigro 1994; and Castillo 1996), in 1970s
movement art, she remained fairly unambiguously associated with oppres-
sion. As we shall see, such assumptions about the xed meaning of such
national symbols changed after the late 1980s, when a strong neonationalist
trend among oppositional movements encouraged an effort to reappropri-
ate the symbolic language of mexicanidad rather than simply reject it.
Though Sumas work includes more (and more varied) images of
women than did the graphics of 1968, the grupos images of poverty, home-
lessness, and oppression rely predominantly on male gures. Moreover,
there is relatively little attention given to the specically gendered aspects
of these social problems or to the patriarchal nature of Mexican culture.
One interesting though ambiguous exception in Sumas work is a shopping
bag that bears the burned imprint of an iron, out of which peers a womans
face (gure 5). The shopping bag and the iron are clearly symbols associated
with womens traditional domestic roles, burned into the fabric of society,
and the womans wistful expression may suggest her longing to escape.
Ambiguous and unrepresentative as it is, this piece reects a slowly emerg-
ing consciousness about the dominant sex-gender system among Mexican
social movements and their afliated artists.
Proceso Pentgonos work often focused on issues of militarism
and repression, a critique exemplied in the grupos twenty-ve-square-
meter installation !., which evoked the atmosphere of a police
station after an interrogation (gure 6). The piece alluded to the dictator-
ships in Latin America and the reality of U.S. imperialismand domination.
However, at a time when feminists and gays in the Southern Cone were
emphasizing the link between their military dictatorships and violence
against women and gays, Proceso Pentgonos work made no such con-
nection. My interviews with several participants in the grupos suggest to
me that the grupos were largely unwilling to tackle issues of gender and
sexuality, despite the active participation of feminist and gay artists in the
movement.
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. !. !. Pentgono ., !// !.,.
! .,
Feminist, Gay, and Lesbian Artists Emerge
Feminist and gay artists who participated in the grupos movement, such
as Maris Bustamante, Magali Lara, Mnica Mayer, and Oliverio Hinojosa,
spoke in interviews with me about the difculty of exploring issues of
sexism, gender, and sexuality within the grupos. With few exceptions, they
had to leave their grupos to form new womens groups or to work as
individuals before they could develop such themes. According to Mayer
(Mexico City, 21 March 2001), there was very little discussion about sex and
gender within the grupos and there was a process of pushing women out.
Lara (Mexico City, 3 April 2001) recalled what a liberation it was for her
when she began to work in an all-women context.
Rini Templeton was another feminist artist who participated in
the grupos movement, and, tellingly, she created the vast majority of her
voluminous work on her own, outside the context of the TAI collective.
Templeton cannot be considered typical of activist artists in Mexico dur-
ing these years in that she was not Mexican and her works attention to
women was unusual.
2
However, given its brilliance, sheer volume (thou-
sands of graphics designed to be easily reproduced with a photocopier),
and frequent utilization by literally hundreds of popular organizations and
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social movements throughout Mexico, Templetons work does represent an
important transitional moment in Mexicos movement-associated art from
the more class-based movements of the 1970s and 1980s to the newer
identity-based movements of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, in an interview
with me, the art critic and historian Raquel Tibol (Mexico City, 24 Decem-
ber 1998) characterized Templetons work as the culmination of Mexican
graphic art in the 1980s.
Templetons graphics were a signicant departure in terms of the
centrality of women in Mexican movement art, in part because of her own
feminist consciousness and in part because her work, unlike that of the
grupos, documented the rise of the new women-centered popular move-
ments of the 1980s. The governments imposition in the early 1980s of a
neoliberal structural adjustment program to resolve Mexicos debt crisis,
followed by the devastating 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, contributed
to a shift in the focus of social movement activity. Urban neighborhood
struggles over housing, land, public services, the cost of living, and demo-
cratic participation in local and national governance came to dominate the
social agenda. One of the more signicant aspects of this change was the
emergence of women as the critical base and leadership of many of the new
movements, often in collaboration with former 1968 activists, including a
new generation of feminists (see, e.g., essays in Foweraker and Craig 1990;
and in Rodrguez 1998).
Templeton created hundreds of graphics in support of these new
popular struggles. They were reproduced in the movements thousands of
yers, posters, newspapers, and journals. While some of her graphics depict
police or army violence, her images are less a critique of the dominant
system than an acknowledgment of and a reverence for the dignity of
the Mexican people. Unlike much of the work produced by the grupos,
Templetons art continued to be inuenced by the artists of the Mexican
Revolution; some of Diego Riveras woodcuts and book illustrations come
to mind. However, she gave her graphics an almost folk art quality
that made them appear to be produced by the very workers, students,
peasants, and women she depicted. In that regard, the authenticity of her
work has less to do with appropriating recognizable Mexican styles and
symbols than with their respectful and deceptively simple representations
of everyday men and women. She did not incorporate conceptual elements
of the contemporary international art scene, as did groups like the TAI and
Suma. Like them, however, she followedandusedformal andtechnological
innovations (particularly the photocopier, but also newpapers, plastics, inks,
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. ! 7.,/. /. ,/
!.,. `.. .,
and paints) that made mass reproduction and dissemination of her graphics
cheap and easy.
In terms of the gendered representation of Mexican society, Tem-
pleton lled her work with images of women as workers, mothers, ghters,
organizers, and leaders (see, e.g., gure 7). Almost every year she created a
special booklet of graphics and texts for International Womens Day: For
those who give voice to our silence, for those who ee hunger and death, for
those who rise up and raise up everything with them, for those who orga-
nize our hope, we sing: freedom! Unidas y unidos venceremos (Temple-
ton; quoted in Martnez 1987, 18789). Templetons graphics clearly depict
a Mexican society that is half female, and her representations of women are
quite diversean important departure from the male-dominated images
of other movement art. However, only a handful of her graphics depict
women as sexual beings (see, e.g., gure 8), and none deal with issues of
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!. ! 7.,/. /. ,/ !.,. `.. .,
rape, domestic violence, or the repression of gays and lesbians. As in most
other movement-associated art of the period, the important interconnec-
tions among gender, sexuality, sexual control, national identity, and the
construction and exercise of power remain largely unexplored and unrep-
resented. That would soon begin to change, as more artists and performers,
inuenced by the feminist and gay and lesbian movements yet closely asso-
ciated with broader oppositional forces, began to tackle these taboos.
Feminist, gay, and lesbian movements all emerged in Mexico in
the early 1970s, inuenced by the particular experience of the 1968 stu-
dent movement and the general experience of their counterpart move-
ments in Latin America, the United States, and Western Europe (see, e.g.,
Lamas 1998a; Mogrovejo 1999; Green and Asis 1993). Although the 1968
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student movement did not include gay or feminist demands, by challenging
the regimes censorship and repression it opened the door for the cultural
politics of the gay, lesbian, and feminist movements, which today operate
within a very different context. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the fem-
inist and gay movements increased their presence. Gay pride parades are
now a yearly event, attracting thousands of gays and supporters to the pub-
lic plazas of Mexico City and provincial capitals. The feminist movement
has built highly respected institutions, such as the journal D./. /.,
which has been published regularly since 1990. Along with the student,
worker, campesino, and urban popular movements I have already men-
tioned and the various political parties of the Mexican Left, the feminist,
gay, and lesbian movements contributed to a long, difcult, and still un-
nished process of democratization in Mexico. The left-wing oppositions
prevailing notions of democracy and citizenship evolved substantially from
1968 on, in part under the inuence of these movements.
The presence of the feminist movement certainly inuenced the
work of women artists from the grupos, gures such as Mnica Mayer,
Maris Bustamante, and Magali Lara, and helped to strengthen their re-
solve to address issues of gender and sexuality in their work. However, in
interviews with me these artists revealed that the feminist movement did
not always support their efforts as much as one might expect. According
to Mayer (Mexico City, 21 March 2001), within the Left [including the
grupos], it was considered bourgeois to discuss feminism, and within fem-
inism it was considered bourgeois to discuss art. Her observation would
seem conrmed by the fact that D./. /. has given scant attention
to the visual arts. Bustamante (Mexico City, 22 December 1998) described
her frustration at the lack of interest and fear of stigmatization that she
encountered when she tried to organize a large group of feminist women
artists.
In terms of a consistent, coherent organizational presence, the
record of the feminist, gay, and lesbian movements in the process of so-
cial and political change in Mexico is mixed at best. They have often been
shunned by political parties and other movements, and they have frequently
been at odds with one another, despite their shared concern with gen-
der inequality and sexual oppression (Lamas 1998a; and Mogrovejo 1999).
However, their broader inuence on Mexicos other progressive movements
and on political and popular culture has been signicant. Sonia Alvarez,
Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (1998, 19) argue that the impact
of social movements on the broad processes of democratization cannot
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be fully appreciated simply by examining changes in the formal political
arena; we must also take into account the proliferation of alternative so-
cial movement publicscongured . . . out of intra- and intermovement
political-communicative networks or webs. Such alternative publics or
spaces have been described as parallel discursive arenas where members
of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, so as
to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and
needs (Nancy Fraser, quoted in Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998, 19
20).
Over the course of thirty years, feminists, gays, and lesbians, in
their movements and as individual activists, have been instrumental in
challenging the conguration of power, national identity, and citizenship
in ways that recognize the centrality of gender, sexuality, and subjectiv-
ity. These counterhegemonic discourses have gradually begun to shape the
worldview of the broader progressive opposition in Mexico, since femi-
nist, gay, and lesbian activists are present in many other social movements,
popular organizations, and political parties and are an integral part of the
inuential webs of intellectuals and artists. This inuence is evident in
movement-associated art and performance at our turn of the century.
The work of the contemporary feminist, gay, and lesbian artists
that I nowwouldlike to describe is more diverse inits formandinstitutional
context than earlier movement art, reecting changes in the national and in-
ternational artistic and political conjuncture. Some favor performance and
installation; others are committed to more easily reproducible forms such
as photography and digital prints; still others have taken up painting anew.
Some continue to work collectively, while others prefer to produce their art
individually. Some are more intensely involved in political parties or orga-
nized movements than others, but all are deeply committed to the ongoing
processes of social and political change. Most move frequently, if not always
comfortably, between alternative institutional spaces and more mainstream
institutions like museums and commercial galleries, both because they now
can and because they see merit in taking their counterdiscourses into the
belly of the beast.
While the form and institutional context of their work vary, there
are important common themes. Three appear repeatedly in the work of
activist feminist and gay artists since the late 1980s: (1) the body, subjectivity,
andpower; (2) the ambiguity andduality of gender andsexuality; and(3) the
reappropriation of national symbols, myths, and forms of popular culture.
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The Body, Subjectivity, and Power
Shifra Goldman (1994) has noted a shift in the work of Mexican and
Chicana women artists from the more overtly activist and public issues
of the 1960s and 1970s to a more personal and subjective exploration in
the 1980s. Goldman also observes that one of feminisms inuences was to
sharpen these artists awareness of the association of emotional, subjective,
and existential issues with power. Feminism and what some refer to as
queer theory helped illuminate the body as strategic terrain on which
struggles over social power are waged; in Mexico as in the United States,
the AIDS epidemic reinforced these lessons in horric ways. These ideas
are at the core of the work by gay male as well as feminist artists and
performers in Mexico today.
A few group shows by feminist women artists, primarily exhib-
ited in alternative spaces, addressed female sexuality in the late 1970s and
early 1980s (Barbosa 2001). But one of the earliest to include works by
male and female (straight and gay) artists addressing themes of the body,
sexuality, desirelo ntimo, as the catalog described itwas a 1983 ex-
hibition organized by activist artists at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil.
The show, which included the work of artists such as Maris Bustamante,
Mnica Mayer, Magali Lara, and Oliverio Hinojosa, is a good example of
the transition these artists were trying to make from the more traditionally
dened political art of the grupos to an exploration of sexual politics. This
exploration has taken them in many different directions. Mayer (2001), for
example, focused on curating more group shows by women artists and
on documenting feminist art. Bustamante concentrated on large installa-
tion pieces that incorporated performance, with humor and satire at their
core. Lara (2000) is currently creating huge tapestries inspired by abstract
expressionism, evoking various dimensions of female sexuality and desire.
Oliverio Hinojosas 199899 one-man show at Mexico Citys Mu-
seo Nacional de la Estampa (National Print Museum), entitled The Body
as Language, is a good example of these artists new focus. Hinojosa (b.
1953), a gay painter and printmaker, was a founding member of Grupo
Suma in the 1970s. His artistic exploration of themes centered on the body
began after Sumas dissolution, in part because his straight male comrades
were uncomfortable with these issues. Hinojosas show in 1998, his last
major exhibition before his death in 2001, consisted of eighty-six pieces
(drawings, digitalized prints, paintings, and mixed media), each of which
featured some element of the male body (see, e.g., gure 9).
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!. , O/:. ! Robar pasiones .,, `. . ,/,,/
!.,. ! .,,,
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Unlike Hinojosas work with Grupo Suma in the 1970s, this show
is not overtly political; it does not expose poverty and exploitation; it does
not attack the PRI. Hinojosas late work does, however, jar the dominant
discursive order that sustains the prevailing systems of power, in part be-
cause it challenges the neat distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity,
emotion and reason. In the shows catalog (Hinojosa 1999, 11), Elizabeth
Romero writes: To the maxim, c . (I think therefore I exist),
we should add: I feel therefore I am, to be able to grasp Oliverio Hinojosas
work, whose foremost theme has been the human body. The realmof every
sensation, every emotion, every passion; it is also in the body, where reason,
intelligence, and creativity dwell.
Hinojosas show reminds us that all social processes ultimately
begin and end in our esh-and-blood bodies, however much those who
struggle to maintain their power rely on cold abstractions (whether le-
gal, scientic, religious, or economic) to justify the brutalization of human
beings. Hinojosas show is subversive in another sense: it confronts the
Mexican public, whose dominant culture is ercely, proudly heterosexist
and /, with the homoerotic beauty of the male nude, in this case
the artists lover. In a challenge to the hegemonic constructs of masculinity
once described by Octavio Paz, the repetition of Hinojosas images on wall
after wall, room after room, seems an effort to normalize the naked male
body (whether active or passive) and the notion of men as capable of
expressing the full range of human emotions. Some critics argue that its
move fromthe streets (Sumas preferred venue in the 1970s) to the museum
signals the depoliticization of work by artists like Hinojosa. Perhaps, but
I would suggest that the showing of Hinojosas art at the National Print
Museum in fact illustrates how wide social movement artists have forced
open the doors of ofcial institutions.
The artists own body is the subject matter in most of Nahum
Zenils paintings, whether he appears as Jesus and all twelve disciples or as
various circus sideshow freaks. Zenil (b. 1947), another gay man and one
of Mexicos most celebrated contemporary painters, is not a political activist
in the traditional sense. However, he has used his celebrity and inuence
to help create alternative venues for feminist, gay, and lesbian artists, and
he is a strong supporter of these movements. Zenils work recalls Frida
Kahlos famous self-portraits, in which autobiography serves to illuminate
sociopsychological aspects of patriarchal power. His 1999 one-man show,
!/ ./ (Zenil 1999), requires us to enter the circus through
Zenils clown-painted mouth (in a piece called !. !.) and exit
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through his anus (in one titled ! !..), underscoring the centrality
of the esh-blood-and-feces body to all social phenomena.
Maris Bustamante (b. 1950) was one of the fewartists fromthe gru-
pos movement to take on the issues of sexuality and power. In an interview
with me (Mexico City, 1 April 2001), she described her 1981 ! /a,
which included a striptease in which she could remove even body parts,
including a penis lled with drink and a vagina stuffed with popcicles that
were offered to the audience. In 1982 Bustamante and Lara did a perfor-
mance about how the erotic codes of Mexican culture are male codes. That
same year she developed a performance piece called c/../..', in
which she wore a penis on her nose while she criticized Freuds theory of
penis envy (gure 10).
In1994 Bustamante createdthe performance-installation .
/., one in a series of Nafta Performances at the 1994 Mexican Per-
forming Arts Festival of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museumin Chicago
(Bustamante 2000). In it, Bustamante interacted with a ve-meter-high,
foam rubber human heart, talking to it about love and its contradictions
and paradoxes. At one point she removed a chair and whip from inside one
of the hearts openings and began to insult the heart. The organ responded
by showering the audience with little hearts that ew from its interior like
shooting stars, thus drawing the public into what might have remained
a private dispute. When two white doves emerged from inside the heart,
Bustamante made up with it and the performance ended. To reconcile with
ones own heart (and body), to overcome the assumed boundaries of the pri-
vate/public, and to acknowledge the potential force of generosity even in the
face of insults and brutalityare these perhaps elements of an alternative
to the logic of patriarchal power?
The Ambiguity and Duality of Gender and Sexuality
Marta Lamas, the editor of D./. /. and one of Mexicos most
prominent feminist intellectuals, insists on the importance of breaking
down the rigid, heterosexist constructions of gender and sexuality that
have long dominated Mexican culture. After identifying at least a dozen
existing sex-gender identities, Lamas (1998b, 37) asks what purpose it serves
to offer such a list, and proceeds to answer: Theoretically it serves to legit-
imate symbolically and juridically a broader spectrum of lifestyles, based
on these new emergent identities. This legitimization is indispensable in
the face of the sexism and homophobia that, by establishing rigid norms
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. .c ` !. a. /
/ /. ,./. Caliente-caliente!
.,. !/,/ /, !/. !/.
., / ` !.
about what women should be and what forms of sexuality are acceptable,
generate oppression, exclusion, and discrimination.
Whats more, she continues, recognizing the variety of possible
sex-gender identities allows us to consider another question: What have
we all lost, in terms of our full potential as human beings, by having been
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forced to conform to the narrow and rigid expectations of our culture?
Politically, Lamas (1998b, 4748) argues, in order to effectively deconstruct
such cultural notions, a discursive and communicative strategy must be
developed that will denaturalize the ideological conceptions that have
been imposed upon women and men.
The work of feminist, lesbian, and gay visual artists contributes
to such an effort. Yolanda Andrade (b. 1950), an internationally renowned
photographer, helps denaturalize the ideological conceptions of gender
by documenting the great variety of sex-gender identities that exist in Mex-
ico City. Monsivis (1988, 1415) has described her photographs as scenes
of visual marginality, of social marginality (that which, it is hoped, does
not exist; that which, it is believed, exists only to offend), [and] of aesthetic
marginality. Andrade has a simpler description of her work: I take por-
traits of spontaneous actors of the street, characters full of imagination
(Licona 1996). The photographer has undertaken the long-term project of
creating a visual diary of Mexico City, with my comments about politics,
womanhood, machismo, religion, traditions, sexual mores, social attitudes,
the imagination of the common person, high art, and popular culture
(Andrade n.d.).
Among the exquisite photos included in Andrades Mexico City
series are several that speak to the variety of gender performances in this
ancient city at the turn of the millennium. `./ . // captures a
lovely young person (probably male in biological terms) naked except for
bikini briefs and a bunch of grapes, striking a glamorous pose for a crush
of photographers in what appears to be the middle of a gay protest march.
The columns of a public monument rise dramatically in the background,
providing the perfect set for this strikingly self-condent model. ! ./
./ . `. shows what appears to be a vibrant young woman hanging
out the window of a passing van (her biological sex is impossible to
determine with certainty here). She wears a beauty pageant winners sash
across her chest, but her obvious athleticism, her aerobics-class attire, and
her anything but demure gesture to the public confound that image.
! .. [The fteen-year-old girl; the fteenth birthday
marking a girls symbolic transition to womanhood in Mexico] is dressed
in the traditional coming-of-age bridal gownall white chiffon and em-
broidery, the off-the-shoulders neckline gracefully framing prominent col-
larbones. Her hands, covered in long black gloves, delicately clasp a white
bouquet, as more white owers cascade down one side of her thick black
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
hair, which has been cut in a short Dorothy Hammel bob. But the face
handsome Indian nose and strong jawlinedisrupts the otherwise typ-
ically feminine image. In !/ /. two lovers, one masked and one musta-
chioed, their broomstick horse rearing up, pause for a kiss in the middle
of a crowded street. Two women? Probably, but any combination here
would be a reasonable guess. What matters is that it doesnt matterthey
are simply two lovers creating a tender, private, intimate space amid the
tumultuous multitudes of the city. Finally, !.//.. . reveals two ladies
of the night in broad daylight. One looks directly into the camera, cocky,
self-assured, with her tight, short white sheath revealing soft, round breasts
and hips. A woman? Not likely, but in Mexico, where gender and sexuality
traditionally have been dened by howthe penis is used (not by its presence
or absence), that probably doesnt matter much to many of her straight
clients.
Nahum Zenil also challenges the arbitrary assignation of sex and
gender as a f. . . (gure 11). This 1998 triptych includes a painting
of the groin area of a naked spread-eagled body with a black oval and a
strip of Velcro where the genitals would be. On the other two panels hang
images of the missing genitalia, a penis on one and a vagina on the other;
they each have a Velcro strip on the back, allowing the viewer to play the
game of gods by changing the sex of the body at will.
In another playful take on gender assignation, a man was im-
pregnated by two feminists in a 1987 televised performance by Polvo de
Gallina Negra (Black Hens Powder), a performance group organized by
Maris Bustamante and Mnica Mayer that was active from 1987 to 1991.
Bustamante (2000, 23637) describedtheir mother for a day performance:
Since both Mnica and myself were really pregnant, we had
toyed with the idea that the methods used by the group were
really scientic. In order to address the issue of motherhood, we
neededto be really pregnant, something we were able to accom-
plish within a period of four months in 1987, with the support
and solidarity of our husbands. We decided to choose a very
high-prole media personality, so we approached Guillermo
Ochoa, a journalist who is very well known for his news broad-
casts on Televisa. . . . He agreed to be part of the action and to
put on an apron with a fake pregnancy tummy underneath for
about twenty minutes, not only for national broadcast, but in-
ternational as well (about 200 million viewers). Ochoa became
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!. .. ^/ Z./ Juego de dioses .,, `.
. ,,/ !.,. Z./ .,,,
the rst Mexican man ever to become pregnant by the only
Mexican feminist art group. The phone lines were jammed
with calls, many of them against the event, which they consid-
ered to be disrespectful of motherhood. Since then, Mnica and
I have shared the feeling that we were able to take a stab at one
of the strongest archetypes in our culture. At the very least, we
were able to leave a scratch.
Jesusa Rodrguez, who is probably the most inuential lesbian
artist in Mexico today, recently took on another archetype of Mexicos
patriarchal culture: marriage. Rodrguez (b. 1955) is a playwright, actor,
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
director, and cabaret-theater owner who constantly toys with the ambiguity
and duality of gender and sexuality in her plays (see Costantino 2000;
and Franco 1994). The importance of theater as an expression of social
movement is beyond the scope of this essay; sufce it to say that Rodrguezs
contribution extends well beyond the world of theater, and that she has
collaborated with visual artists such as Magali Lara since their days at the
Academia Nacional de San Carlos in the 1970s.
In February 2001, as part of the gay and lesbian movements Valen-
tines Day efforts to draw attention to the issue of gay marriage, Rodrguez
and her partner, singer-songwriter Liliana Felipe, held a very public wed-
ding ceremony. The text of their vows and photographs of their wedding
by Lourdes Almeida were subsequently published as a cover story in the
cultural magazine !. As in Rodrguezs theater, the meanings conveyed
by the wedding photos (e.g., gure 12) are multidimensional and cannot
be reduced to a simple slogan. In the photo spread, Rodrguez and Felipe
staged a send-up of traditional wedding ceremonies (complete with over-
the-top romantic bridal gowns), made a statement about the arbitrariness
of heterosexual marriages, insisted on the importance of love and commit-
ment, and poked fun at norms of femininity, all while sharing their love
for one another and their hope for the future.
In different ways, each of these artists insists that the meanings
ascribed to the most fundamental aspects of human experiencebirth,
sex, motherhood, marriageare ambiguous and arbitrary, culturally con-
structed rather than genetically programmed, divinely ordered, or scien-
tically reasoned. Their work undermines a cornerstone of secular and
religious power: the ability to x the meanings attributed to basic social
processes and social identities.
Reappropriating National Symbols, Myths, and Forms
of Popular Culture
As I have already discussed, artists of the 1968 student movement used a
form of didactic political graphics made popular during the Mexican Rev-
olution and the subsequent period of regime institutionalization. Yet they
rarely invoked national symbols or heroes (with the occasional exception
of Zapata) to stake a claim as the true defenders of the revolution. To
the extent that the graphics of 1968 utilized national symbols, they tended
to represent the government as the enemy. The artwork of groups like
Suma and the TAI relied even less on art forms associated with Mexican
culture and represented icons like the Virgin of Guadalupe as irredeemable
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!. .. !. / !/ !./,. f.
!.. !./, .cc. !/,/ /, !.
/. !///. Exis `/ .cc.
symbols of oppression. They also tended to associate popular culture with
the mind-numbing mass culture of capitalism.
Since the late 1980s, however, Mexicos oppositional cultural pol-
itics have been marked by a struggle to reappropriate enduring national
symbols, myths, and forms of popular culture. An important turning point
inthe process of political change was the 1988 presidential election, inwhich
a broad coalition of opposition parties and social movements supported the
candidacy of progressive nationalist Cuauhtmoc Crdenas. Though the
PRIs candidate, Carlos Salinas, claimed to have won a majority of the
votes, many people believed massive fraud denied Crdenas victory. The
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
following year, a new left-wing opposition party, the Party of the Demo-
cratic Revolution (PRD), was formed, and it has subsequently competed
effectively for ofce at the local, state, and national level. Perhaps more
important than the shifting balance of power in the electoral terrain was
the fact that the broad left-wing opposition that is loosely associated with
the PRD began to seriously challenge the PRIs ability to x the meaning
of the Mexican nation.
The accelerated process of globalization, including the adoption
of the North American Free Trade Agreement, combined with such shifts
in national politics to bring nationalism to the fore once again. Even in the
commercial art world, a wave of neo-Mexicanist art inundated the global
market. In this context, struggles to redene the meaning of mexicanidad
and nationalism and to reappropriate national symbols (e.g., the Mexican
ag, heroes such as nineteenth-century liberal Benito Jurez and revolu-
tionary leader Emiliano Zapata, cultural gures like seventeenth-century
writer Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz and artist Frida Kahlo, and religions icons
like the Virgin of Guadalupe) have become central to the oppositions cul-
tural politics. Feminist and gay artists are deeply involved in these efforts.
This represents a departure from an earlier tendency of social movements
and their artists to cede that struggle to the PRI by implicitly accepting as
xed the meaning of the nations symbolic language.
Efforts to redeem central elements of the national culture and
to establish the progressive oppositions credentials as genuinely Mexican,
while simultaneously exposing the oppressive, patriarchal, heterosexist, and
racist aspects of Mexican nationalism, require great sophistication. The
most straightforward strategy in this regard has been simply to present
important gures fromMexicanhistory as onthe side of the people andtheir
social movements, rather thanas symbols of state power. After Cuauhtmoc
Crdenas won the rst election ever held for mayor of Mexico City in
1997, one of the new city governments many cultural initiatives was to
commission Maris Bustamante to create dozens of life-size foam rubber
sculptures representing important gures from the citys past. Among the
gures, which were installed throughout the city, were Sor Juana Ins
de la Cruz and Frida Kahlo, both of whom have become icons of the
contemporary feminist and gay and lesbian movements. Blurring the lines
between theater, performance, and visual arts, Jesusa Rodrguez and activist
actress Ofelia Medina have costumed themselves as Sor Juana and Frida to
participate in rallies, street demonstrations, or movement fundraisers.
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A more challenging approach has been to problematize and hu-
manize national icons and yet still acknowledge their importance. Moving
from her theater mode to the visual arts, Jesusa Rodrguez (1999) took on
ve national myths, playing each of them herself, in a photo essay for the
cultural journal !.!.. They included Sor Juana (shown with a com-
puter, which is appropriate given her once dangerous interest in science
and technology), Mexicos most popular lm star, the macho but fallible
(Ramrez Berg 1992, 133) Pedro Infante, and former President Carlos Sali-
nas, who has become a symbol of neoliberalism and corruption. Unlike the
Frida Kahlo with whom weve become so familiar through photographs
and self-portraits, Rodrguezs Frida is unaware of her observer and smiles
broadly at her ceramic pre-Hispanic dog, revealing rotten teeth (gure
13). Rodrguez is not afraid to tarnish this feminist icons image by subtly
suggesting her vanity (no wonder Kahlo never smiled in her photos and
self-portraitsshe had bad teeth!). In the nal image of Rodrguezs photo
essay, she and her artistic-business-romantic partner, Liliana Felipe, pose
as two pre-Hispanic gurines, with the goal of subverting our proven
reverential capacity. In each of the images, according to the brief intro-
ductory text, Rodrguez shows the face of a mexicanidad in crisis, beset
by bureaucracy, political demagoguery, the stereotypes of machismo, and
decadent ////.
Maris Bustamante (gure 14) has used two common symbols of
mexicanidad, the taco and the nopal, to play with what she described in
our interview (Mexico City, 22 December 1998) as the phallocentric (not
simply patriarchal) nature of Mexican culture. In !.. ./ (1979), one
of her early social performance pieces, as she calls them, she addressed
a variety of issues related to Mexican cultural identity. A huge, vertical
image of a taco, accompanied by the slogan, Dare to commit an erotic act:
Eat a taco, made explicit the phallic nature of the nations most famous
dish ( are often rolled in Mexico) and recognized the erotic in daily
life. The performance also dealt with the commercialization of Mexican
culture, as Bustamante went through the bureaucratic steps of applying for
a patent for this ancient food. Like her mother for a day performance, it
was broadcast on Guillermo Ochoas popular television show.
At the center of Bustamantes 1995 ^,/ installation was an in-
atable twenty-ve-meter-high nopal cactus, a central element in the sym-
bol of the founding of Tenochtitln (now Mexico City), and thus of the
Mexican nation, by the Aztecs. And, like the taco, the nopal is a common
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. . f. !.. ! !// 5 mitos
nacionales segn Jesusa Rodrguez !/,/ /,
C/./ :. !///. ViceVersa ,
!.. .,,,
food. Bustamante turned the opening of the installation (at the Museo Uni-
versitario del Chopo in Mexico City) into a performance piece by inating
the sculpture before the spectators, thus causing the cactus to grow to its
full length and girth before their dazzled eyes.
Gay male artists have also used national symbols, including the
Mexican ag, to play with the homoerotic elements of national culture. For
the past several years, the Museo Universitario del Chopo has been the site
of an exhibition of gay and lesbian art. It has attracted established artists like
Nahum Zenil as well as lesser-known and new artists. The 1999 exhibition
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!. ., ` !. /. a./. /
.ccc !/,/ /, !. /. .,
/ ` !.
included several striking representations of homoeroticism in the national
culture. ! ,., a mixed media assemblage by Carlos Jaurena, in-
cluded two erect penises intertwined with a tricolor ribbon (Mexicos red,
white, and green). They oat above a typical Mexican rural landscape with
a little town, including a cantina, in the background. A globe is suspended
over the genitals and above that the words somos bien machos. Jaurena,
who has been active in AIDS education efforts, alludes in this piece to the
well-known but unspoken bisexuality of many Mexican men who carry
on long-term sexual relations with their compadres while married and
continuing to father children (see, e.g., Wilson 1995; Almaguer 1991; and
Bufngton 1997). The globe suggests, perhaps, the fact that homosexuality
exists throughout the world.
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. . /: /. Allonsanfn .,,, O/
: ! / , /./ .//
`. :. !/ c/, `. c, .,,,
!/,/ /, !a f `c/
Also included in the 1999 gay and lesbian show at El Chopo was
Salvador Salazars oil portrait of a nude (and very buff) Subcomandante
Marcos (gure 15), the best-known leader of the Zapatista indigenous
movement in Chiapas. The typically ski-masked Marcos holds a machine
gun aloft with his right hand and a huge Mexican ag in his left. The im-
age reminds us, among other things, of how Zapata and Villa were largely
depoliticized and transformed into virile, macho rebels in ofcial postrev-
olutionary myths (OMalley 1986) and in popular lm portraits (Ramrez
Berg 1992). At the same time, the image gratefully acknowledges Mar-
coss departure from the homophobia typical of leftist insurgencies: he won
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over the hearts of many gays and lesbians with this widely quoted state-
ment:
Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, Asian in
Europe, Chicano in San Isidro, Anarchist in Spain, Palestinian
in Israel, Indigenous in the streets of San Cristbal [the list goes
on]. . . . In sum, Marcos is a human being, any human being,
in this world. Marcos is all the minorities who are untolerated,
oppressed, resisting, exploding, saying Enough. All the mi-
norities at the moment they begin to speak and the majorities
at the moment they fall silent and put up with it. All the un-
tolerated people searching for a word, their word, which will
return the majority to the eternally fragmented, us. (Marcos
1995, 21415)
Zenil (1999) also incorporated many symbols of the national cul-
ture, both secular and religious, into his c self-portraits. In one, which
evokes the .//, Mexicos popular religious art form, he appears as San
Miguelito. Saint Michael the Archangel is a complex symbol for gay men,
not unlike Marcos. On the one hand, he was the leader of Gods army
and the patron saint of soldiers, paratroopers, police ofcers, and security
forces. As such, he potentially represents religious and state repression of
homosexuals. On the other hand, Saint Michael is also the patron saint of
artists, bakers, haberdashers, millinersprofessions more compatible with
the sensibilities of many gay men. And he is the patron saint of sick and
dying people, of ambulance drivers, paramedics, and medical technicians
gures of no small importance for the gay community in the era of AIDS.
In portraying himself as Saint Michael, Zenil perhaps suggests that he, like
most gay men and, indeed, like the national culture in general, embodies
all of these contradictory impulses: to oppress and to protect, to destroy and
to create, to kill and to torture and to heal.
In another Zenil self-portrait, he appears on a lottery card as La
Rosa. The rose is card number forty-one in the popular childrens game of
/., and forty-one has been a symbol of male homosexuality in Mexico
since the 1901 scandal (mentioned earlier in the discussion of Posadas
work), in which police arrested forty-one men, some of themcross-dressers,
at a private party in Mexico City. In ! !, Zenil seems to remind us that
homosexual identities emerge early in life, as natural as children at play,
and as much a part of the national culture as lotera.
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
In O/ /. (gure 16) the Mexican ag stands erect,
planted rmly in the anus of a naked, bent over Zenil. Is the artist the
victim of painful rape by his homophobic culture or a willing participant
in the pleasurable sex associated with Mexican mens complex experience
of hidden, macho bisexuality? The artists face is inscrutable (as in all his
self-portraits), revealing nothing except, perhaps, gay mens ambivalence
about what Bustamante called the phallocentric nature of Mexican society.
In any event, the image speaks to the fundamental connection between
national identity and constructions of gender and sexuality.
The link between national identity and sexuality is also articulated
in Oliverio Hinojosas homoerotic Sacrice, Cinnabar, and Jade series
(1999). In an interviewwith me (Mexico City, 23 December 1998), Hinojosa
explained that the work was inspired by a tomb at Palenque, a major
pre-Hispanic Mayan site whose symbols, images, and forms have been
incorporated into modern representations of mexicanidad.
While all these artists seek to unx the meanings of the na-
tions symbolic order, they also attempt to make their counterhegemonic
discourse accessible by utilizing familiar forms of popular culture, both
contemporary and traditional. Bustamante, for example, has relied on tele-
vision to extend her works audience beyond the connes of museums and
galleries, and her representations of hearts and nopales are familiar from
Mexican folk art traditions. Hinojosa, whose late style feels more removed
from traditional Mexican artistic expressions, revealed in our interview
that he views his work as a logical extension of Mexicos long history of
printmaking: from lithographs and woodcuts, to silk screens and stencils,
to todays digital technology. Zenil presents his challenging images within
the familiar, family entertainment context of a circus; in 7. (1999),
he appears as a familiar puppet show character, evoking the great Mexican
comic Mario Moreno (Cantinas). Jesusa Rodrguez, in an interviewwith
me (Mexico City, 7 August 1999), described her work as a combination of
several popular culture genres, including cabaret, opera, and vaudeville.
Por un mundo en que quepan muchos mundos
The thirty-year trajectory of oppositional art and performance that I have
analyzed here suggests the increasing inuence of the feminist, gay, and
lesbian movements on cultural politics in Mexico. There has been a signif-
icant increase in the attention given by movement-associated art to issues
of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity, as well as a tendency to represent
national identity in ever more heterogeneous and critical terms. As social
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!. . ^/ Z./ Oh Santa bandera
(a Enrique Guzmn) .,, `. . ,,/
!.,. Z./ .,,,
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
!. . !. !///. Soy totalmente de hierro .,,,.ccc .,.
Curare . f/,D../. .,,, , /. / `/
.cc. Z, //, !/,/ /, !a f `c/
movements have evolved and reformulated their strategies in response to
the changing national and international context, oppositional artists have
both reected these changes and contributed to the articulation of new al-
ternative discourses. The meanings of womanhood, manhood, sexuality,
and mexicanidad are being reconstituted as part of broader struggles for
progressive social change.
Evidence of these changes could be seen in many of the ban-
ners and mobile murals painted by artists for the rallies welcoming the
commanders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) to
the Mexico City area in March 2001. Alongside the ubiquitous images of
Marcos, there were many images of strong indigenous women, as well
as creative new symbols of a multicultural, multiethnic Mexico. The in-
uence of feminist and gay movements seemed clear in these images and
in the many rainbow ags ying at the EZLN rallies. The slogan Por
un mundo en que quepan muchos mundos [For a world in which many
worlds t] was often repeated at the rallies, and it was illustrated in a va-
riety of ways, including by the gay-identied rainbow. And when Marcos
addressed the more than one hundred thousand people gathered in the cap-
itals main plaza, his speech was broadly inclusive: in a purposefully slow
litany, he carefully named the dozens of social groups and sectors gathered
there: cabdrivers, housewives, street vendors, professionals, gays, lesbians,
transsexuals, doctors, carpenters, garbage collectors.
One banner at the EZLN rally in Xochimilco appeared to take
a cue from feminist performance artist Lorena Wolffer (see gure 17). In
2000, the twenty-nine-year-old Wolffer staged a series of what she called
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espectaculares (spectaculars) in Mexico City that parodied the advertising
campaign of an upscale department store, the Palacio de Hierro. The stores
ad campaign slogan is Soy totalmente Palacio [Im totally Palace], and
its snob appeal is directed at upper-middle-class, light-skinned women.
Wolffers parodies used the slogan Soy totalmente de hierro [Im totally
of iron]. One of the restaged ads featured a photo of a young woman
surroundedby leering menonthe subway andthe statement, The problem
is you think my body belongs to you. Im totally of iron. Another showed
the woman holding handcuffs and asserting, One phrase separates the
girl from the woman: I decide. Im totally of iron. The banner at the
EZLN rally featured the face of an indigenous woman and the phrase,
Soy totalmente de maz. Dignidad [Im totally of corn. Dignity.]. Corn
is symbolic of the nations original inhabitants, and multicolored corn has
become a symbol for the Zapatista vision of a multicultural Mexico.
The inuence of feminist, lesbian, and gay artists clearly extends
far beyond their particular communities and/or movements, as these exam-
ples from the Zapatista rallies suggest. Moreover, the artists discussed here
are all incorporated into extensive interpersonal, institutional, and move-
ment networks. The work of Andrade, Bustamante, Hinojosa, and Ze-
nil has been shown in major national and international spaces, as well
as in more alternative, movement-associated spaces. Bustamante collabo-
rated with Jos Luis Cuevas, perhaps Mexicos best-known living artist, in
the erotic room of the Cuevas museum in Mexico City; she worked with
Cuauhtmoc Crdenass city government on an ambitious public art and
history project; she lends her talents to groups such as Amnesty Interna-
tional; and she is actively involved in Mexicos popular wrestling world,
whose heroes are known for being socially conscious. Bustamante also has
collaborated frequently with Jesusa Rodrguez, and they are both active
supporters of the PRD.
Rodrguezs theater and cabaret (La Capilla and El Hbito) consti-
tute an important institutional space for oppositional movements, as well as
for socially relevant entertainment, and her collaborations are extensive. She
and Liliana Felipe wrote the music and lyrics for a politically savvy and
artistically exquisite CD (. .:./:) recorded by activist singer/diva
Eugenia Len. Rodrguez, lmstar Ofelia Medina (! ^/.. :),
and celebrated novelist Laura Esquivel (!/. !. / c//.) conspired
in a bold act of street theater to protest the armys assault on indigenous
communities in Chiapas in 1999. Dressed as Mayan women, they began
to grind corn and make tortillas in the middle of an avenue in one of
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Art of Mexican Social Movements
Mexico Citys wealthy neighborhoods, until other actors dressed as soldiers
attacked the women and hauled them off. Trafc was tied up for hours as
confused and horried residents witnessed the reenactment of a common
scenario that they are usually able to ignore. With a grant from the Rocke-
feller Foundation, Rodrguez has also built a theater school for children in
one of Mexico Citys poorest neighborhoods.
The breadth of these artists networks testies to both the potential
inuence of their work on the broader culture and to the doors they have
been able to pry opendoors once closed tight to ball-busting feminists,
uppity dykes, and . . Their cultural politics are helping
to redene collective identities, opening space for ways of being Mexican
that are not restricted to traitorous Malinches, quietly enduring Guadalu-
pes, and Super Machos. Through their relations with progressive social
movements, they are contributing to the reconstitution of social power in
Mexico. They are helping to create a world in which many worlds t,
effectively transforming a once hegemonic national culture that excluded,
marginalized, repressed, and constrained.
Notes
Much of my discussion is based on interviews with artists and activists in Mexicos
social movements. These interviews were conducted in Mexico City during
research trips between December 1998 and August 2001.
Research for this article was made possible by generous nancial
support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science
Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the
Research and Grants Committee of Loyola University New Orleans.
1. Recent studies vary widely in their methodologies, time frame, and particular subject
matter, though most are interested in cultural aspects of the construction of
political and social power in Mexico. Jean Franco (1989) offers a sweeping his-
torical view of how Mexicos master national narrative, highly gendered, did
not include real women. Natividad Gutirrez (1999) argues that state forma-
tioninMexico reliedonpervasive nationalist myths that downplayedseparate
ethnic identities. Marjorie Becker (1995) describes how the Lzaro Crdenas
administration in the 1930s had to come to terms with the campesinos cul-
ture, particularly its Catholicism. Michael Nelson Miller (1998) focuses on the
1940s, when the Avila Camacho administration helped shape mexicanidad by
funding radio, lm, art, and architecture. Jeanne Gillespie (1998, 19) explores
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how the / ,//the image of a dark-haired, dark-eyed young Mex-
ican woman dancing the jarabe tapato (Mexican Hat Dance) and wearing
a white embroidered blouse, a full green skirt adorned with ribbons, and a
red rebozo (shawl)became a national archetype for Mexican women and
an icon for economic interests. Finally, and signicantly, some scholars (e.g.,
Vaughan 1997; and Rubin 1997) have begun to highlight how national iden-
tity and power were always constructed in the context of counterhegemonic
efforts by grassroots communities and movements.
2. Rini Templeton was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1935. She spent the early 1960s
in Cuba, where she participated in the revolutions literacy campaign, among
other activities. During the late 1960s and early 1970s she lived in New
Mexico, where she worked closely with the Chicano movement. She moved
to Mexico City in 1974 and lived there until her death in 1986. During these
years she participated in the TAI, the Mexican Cultural Workers Front, and
the graphics group of the journal ! (Martnez 1987, 2049).
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