Painter José Zuñiga: Creative Consumption, Modern Subjectivity, and Youth Rebellion in 1960s Mexico City

While the study of an individual life does not lend itself to generalization, it may reveal socio-cultural processes only dimly perceived in macro-analysis.  Undertaken to gain insight into the subjective formation of Mexico City youth who rebelled against social convention and political authoritarianism in the 1960s, my biography of painter José Zuñiga (b. 1937) uncovers four such processes: l) a transnational campaign for children’s rights and welfare invigorated and managed by the state and private sector in post-World War II Mexico; 2) a vigorous public sphere of entertainment, animated by radio, film, and sports spectacles, national and transnational in production with much of it directed toward children and youth; 3) a domestication of violent machismo linked to the latter processes and 4) a neohumanist critique of social and political submission pervasive in higher education in the early 1960s that stressed the individual’s “discovery” of his/her “unique” creativity.    Following Michel de Certeau’s understanding of the subject as the creative appropriator of the text he/she reads, sees, or hears, of the goods he/she wears or uses, in this paper I discuss Pepe Zuñiga’s creative consumption of cultural and material goods accessed through these processes as he constructed a subjectivity that sought freedom from corporatist/authoritarian forms of socio-political organization and from heterosexual normativity.  I will discuss the methodological challenges of placing the plot-line of the story he narrates into a larger historical context; of disentangling his experience of consumption from his memories of it and from our conversations about the meaning of the consuming act;  and of turning a life history of a painter who is respected but not of celebrity status into a book that will be of interest not only to professional historians  but to a broader public, particularly a Mexican public whose memories I seek to provoke.