The art of Diego Rivera is inseparable from the revolution that Mexico experienced in the early twentieth century and the state that was built in its aftermath. The revolutionary process began in 1910, when Porfirio Díaz, who had ruled Mexico for thirty-four years, announced that there were going to be presidential elections.
Díaz had overseen the growth of an economy based on exports such as sugar, coffee, and tobacco, and new industries like oil and textiles, most of which were financed by foreign capital. Mexico’s rural population, Indian and mestizo, lived under the whip of the latifundistas, the landowning class, and the threat of violence from Díaz’s rural police, the rurales (as documented in John Kenneth Turner’s book Barbarous Mexico).
The social tensions were palpable, but the spark that lit the fuse for the revolution of 1910–17 was a politically moderate pamphlet by Francisco Madero, the son of a wealthy landowning family, advocating universal suffrage and a vote against Díaz. Madero’s demands were limited to political reform, and he was soon driven into exile. But his words echoed across a country riven with social conflict.
In the state of Morelos, with its highly profitable sugar plantations, peasant resistance under the leadership of Emiliano Zapata defended rural communities against the expansion of the huge estates. In the north, a sometime cattle thief called Pancho Villa led his own rebellion. Protests against Díaz spread until the dictator fled to Britain early in 1911.
In this vacuum of power, the old ruling class fought to control the remains of the Porfirian state in shifting alliances with the middle class. While each armed movement claimed the revolution for itself, it was the Zapatistas alone who were leading a mass revolutionary struggle.
Diego Rivera and his generation had rejected the conservative Eurocentrism of the art establishment and called for an art that reflected Mexico’s reality.
Mexico’s new constitution…
Auteur: Mike Gonzalez
