Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture

Conclusion

301 F A Conclusion The studies in this book demonstrate that cosmopolitanism in Mexico was closely linked to colonization. International learning and belief structures and communication networks established in the colonial period were saturated with indigenous forms of knowledge and expression. These resulted in cultural products that united international with vernacular traditions. This implies that after colonization international culture ceased to be merely imported but became part and parcel of Mexican subjectivity. Colonization also created a system of values where European culture protected under the mantle of universality occupied a dominant position. Because in that value system the local in its particularity was opposed to the universal , peoples and works from conquered regions acquired subaltern status. In Mexico this value system was adopted and simultaneously resisted; beginning in the colonial period, this dynamic also structured the relations of the independent Mexican state with indigenous peoples and with international culture . This vacillation drove the artists and intellectuals in this study, from the colonial period onward, toward the achievement of two goals: to demonstrate equality with the developed nations and to assert the uniqueness and value of local culture. Demonstrating equality involved not only imitation, as is frequently believed, but deployment of international models, often in unique or extravagant forms. While Sigüenza y Góngora’s Teatro de virtudes políticas demonstrated his mastery of European sources, it also inserted models from Mexican antiquity into the traditional cannon of European virtues. Boari’s Palace of Fine Arts, by contrast, attempted to compete with the architecture of European nations by employing neoclassical and modernizing visual languages sparsely inflected with regional accents. I have discussed how scientific discourses and new technologies became part of international modernity in the late eighteenth century and entered into the making of Mexican identity and visual culture. The Pavilion of Mexico and the National Theater illustrated the imbrications of the past with the present by 302 ■ Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture incorporating the classical language of architecture, technological expertise, and references to local antiquity. Chapters 1 and 7 have shown that from the colonial period onward references to Mexican antiquity, especially the Aztec Empire, represented the local. Even this move was colored by colonial dynamics: the Europeans previously had adopted Greek and Roman antiquity as both local heritages and universal languages. The Mexicans’ focus on the indigenous past was a matter of both local and later nationalistic pride as well as an instrument of contestation to challenge the supremacy of the only past that until then had been vested with universal value. I have argued that the seemingly contradictory desires for integration in the global and affirmation of the local need not be read as signs of confusion or the inability of artists and intellectuals to dominate international languages but can be seen as characteristics of cosmopolitanism. If cosmopolitanism entails participation in international culture, then the multiplicity implied in the term “international” needs to be taken seriously. The affirmation of cultural specificities would be a given aspect of the process of cosmopolitanization. It would be possible to see that the visual languages and discourses that we regard as universal are also the products of specific locales. What distinguishes the universal from the local often is related not only to extension but also to economic and political might. Consequently cosmopolitanism is a complex of relations that change according to the vicissitudes of power. In its proximity to power, cosmopolitanism often is affiliated with violence. My studies found violence of various kinds related to cosmopolitanism. The violence of colonial conquest saturated and transformed the later structuring of social groups within Mexico. I have argued that the same values that drove the racial classification as represented in casta painting affected the evaluation of the Mexican Baroque and eclecticism in architecture. Chapters 2 and 4 also have addressed the violence directed toward indigenous peoples both during the colonial period and under independent regimes. To Mexican elites under the lingering influence of colonial power, the indigenes were an unassimilable aspect of the local that could only be integrated into national and international culture when dead or Europeanized. All the studies here have addressed the less visible but pernicious effects of epistemic violence in the a priori evaluation of intellectual and cultural products of subaltern peoples as derivative or confused works that invariably fell below the standards set in the traditional imperial centers. Although few intellectuals today directly judge works in this manner, that form of evaluation had tremendous impact on the history of...