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The Politician
- University of Wisconsin Press
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h The Politician In 1859, sixty years before politician José Vasconcelos first referred to Isthmus society as matriarchal, French traveler and historian Brasseur de Bourbourg set the stage with his description of the marketplace in Tehuantepec. Not only did he discover the market dominated exclusively by women, but he found them to be the least reserved in America: “[They] chattered, laughed, conversed, screamed, and argued with an incredible animation. They openly made fun of their men, who they provoked in Spanish and Zapotec with a shamelessness hardly equaled by the green-grocers of Paris.” Later in the same visit, Bourbourg came across a twenty-two-year-old Tehuana selling coconut candy and playing pool with soldiers in a barracks outside Tehuantepec. Her name was Juana Cata Romero, and Bourbourg found her so beautiful that he compares her to Isis and Cleopatra. “Some claimed she was a sorceress . . . and the Indians respected her as queen.” Given the women’s lack of respect for their men and the regal devotion toward Juana Cata Romero, it is not hard to imagine that outsiders might go away with the impression that something unusual was going on, and that they might label this role reversal as matriarchal. This leap of logic is even easier to imagine when you consider that the context for Bourbourg’s observations was male-dominated Mexico of 140 years ago. José Vasconcelos was born in February 1882 in the city of Oaxaca, not three hundred miles from the Isthmus. As was the case with many Mexican men, the bond formed at an early age with his mother was far more profound than that with his father. “My mother’s deep voice gave direction to my thoughts, determined my impulses. One might say that I was bound to her by an invisible, psychological umbilical cord which 18 endured many years after the breaking of the physical bond.” His mother took charge of his early education, reading and discussing the classics from her private library. Vasconcelos began his formal studies in Eagle Pass, Texas, and graduated from Mexico’s La Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia with a degree in law. In 1908, not long after he graduated , Vasconcelos made his first trip to the Isthmus on a political campaign where he crossed paths with the mature Juana Cata Romero at the peak of her political power. Though he is reticent about their meeting, she must have held his attention, because he described her glowingly as the local political boss of that “species of indigenous matriarchy.” Oblique as the reference to matriarchy might be, it marked a beginning: The pro-matriarchs had raised their flag. In 1922, when Vasconcelos began his term as minister of public education , he took it upon himself to find a new source of inspiration for Mexican artists. For too long, they had looked to Europe. Vasconcelos wanted an indigenous wellspring that would stimulate Mexican artists to create a purer form of national art. After repeated visits to Tehuantepec and Juchitán, he was convinced that he had found this wellspring in the people and culture of the Isthmus. He described the region as a kind of earthly paradise where “no yearning of the flesh went unsatisfied.” And, at the center of this paradise, were the women of the Isthmus: “Dressed in red and yellow with white headdresses, slim shoulders and waists, wide hips, firm breasts and black eyes, those women possess something of sensual India, but without the religious overtones.” One of the artists who listened to what Vasconcelos had to say on this topic was the young Diego Rivera, who had recently returned from Europe and was busy painting one of his first murals, La Creación. Because the mural bore clear influences from European schools of art, Vasconcelos urged Rivera to look toward Mexico’s indigenous cultures for inspiration. More specifically, he suggested Rivera visit the Isthmus, and he sponsored Rivera’s first trip there in 1922. In Tehuantepec, Rivera sketched Isthmus women, dances, and landscapes. He also began an oil portrait of an Isthmus woman naked from the waist up who was washing in the Tehuantepec River, which he titled The Bather of Tehuantepec . Art critics consider the work the turning point in Rivera’s search for a style free of European influence. Vasconcelos’s plan had worked. The Politician 19 h [44.192.75.131] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:19 GMT) Jean Charlot, an American muralist who knew Rivera and...