Trotsky in Mexico: Artists United, Artists Divided, 1930–40

In August 1935 Mexico City’s newspapers splashed front-page headlines revealing the shocking news of a “scandalous” debate that took place between the “communists” David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Yet this “battle of the century,” as labeled by journalists, represented only the latest chapter in the on-going dispute between Rivera and Siqueiros. Their disagreements emerged wholeheartedly not long before Rivera’s expulsion from Mexico’s Communist Party (PCM) in 1929, even though just a few years earlier Rivera and Siqueiros shared similar artistic and political viewpoints. Ideological comrades during the early 1920s, the young artists and prominent members of the PCM played key roles in the creation of El Machete, the official journal of the PCM. However, by the mid-1930s, deep political and creative differences between those who backed Stalin (led by Siqueiros) and those who sided with the Russian exile, Leon Trotsky (headed by Rivera), fractured Mexico’s artistic community and the artists grew apart. At this point, Siqueiros sharply criticized Rivera on political and artistic fronts, including Rivera’s cooperation with the government. But even worse, according to Siqueiros, was Rivera’s narrow focus on “Indianism” as a “Picasso in Aztecland.” Although Siqueiros argued for the retrieval of Mexico’s indigenous cultural inheritance, he contended that artists should avoid the depiction of an exotic “Indian” past in their work. Addressing this point, and referencing early Maya and Aztec artists, Siqueiros wrote: “we adopt their synthetic energy, without reaching, naturally to the lamentable archeological reconstructions (Indianism, Primitivism, Americanism).” This paper considers the ongoing debates between Rivera and Siqueiros to analyze the multiple meanings of race, ethnicity, and nationalism within a Mexican post-revolutionary identity. This presentation argues that the radical artists and government officials utilized culture as a medium to negotiate larger issues whose general relevance fell well beyond art’s more traditional influence.