Citizenship Expressed through Art: The Case of the Mexican Children's Magazine Pulgarcito, 1925–33

The decades following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) were marked by an intensive state-sponsored program of establishing revolutionary nationalist programs throughout the country.  Government officials dedicated a substantial portion of the budget to both art and education as means of quickly and thoroughly constructing a nationalist aesthetic based on social realist techniques that valorized the “new” proletarian, mestizo citizenry.  The children’s art magazine Pulgarcito, a free magazine published through an agency of the Department of Public Education, appeared at first glance to be one of the most successful ways of quickly disseminating visual tropes that contributed the cultural nationalist aesthetic; state-sponsored pedagogues and artists carefully edited the magazine’s entirely child-produced content.  Yet a closer examination of the content and context in which this magazine briefly enjoyed publication reveals that children across the country did not always conform to the top-down construction of Mexican citizenship.  Their submissions to the magazines, and in some cases their glaring omissions, speak to the cultural and social diversity that still characterized the future citizenry, despite aggressive state attempts to create a monolithic national identity.