Clara Porset and the Politics of Exile and Modern Design in 20th-Century Mexico

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Mexico City was a hub of ambitious experimentation in the use of modern architecture and design as well as left-wing and anti-imperialist exiles. Trained in art history, architecture, and design in Havana, New York, and Paris, in 1935 Cuban designer Clara Porset arrived in Mexico City as a political exile following her involvement in opposition strikes against Cuba’s Carlos Mendieta government. Remaining in Mexico until her death in 1981, during the 1940s and 1950s Porset established herself as a pioneer of and advocate for the development of a uniquely Mexican approach to modern design. Porset’s furniture designs combined elements of international modernist, Mexican revolutionary nationalist, and socialist realist aesthetics. In a practical sense, Porset worked primarily for relatively wealthy clients in new luxury housing developments or leisure venues who wished to communicate their nationalism and cultivation. Politically, Porset integrated into Mexico City’s Communist circles and worked on what would today would be termed cultural diplomacy for friendship societies for the USSR and the People’s Republic of China.

In this paper, I show how I am researching and writing the life and work Porset within a political context of transnational anti-imperialist and left-wing networks and a domestic Mexican state project of revolutionary nationalism. Using sources including personal correspondence, US government intelligence reports, and Porset’s articles and lectures on design, I have developed a methodology that combines biography, design, political and cultural history. I argue that tracing the experiences of Porset as a political exile and her successes and failures as a modern furniture designer provides a new and unusually clear window onto the intersections between changing transnational forces of cultural modernism, political exile, and revolutionary nationalism in Mexico from the 1930s through to the 1960s.