The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture, Revised and Expanded Edition

José Guadalupe Posada: A Profile

136 Since the turn of the century, political cartoons and murals in Mexico have been considered forms of street art. Still a highly cultivated medium, political cartoons were published from the 1850s on in prints and chapbooks that captured the imagination of the masses—rarely of the sophisticated, highly literate elite. Like journalistic accounts, they offered quick insight into contemporary affairs, and then they perished. In the decades before the Socialist revolution of 1910, millions were enlightened and entertained by José Guadalupe Posada’s lurid, eye-catching, marvelousengravings ,whichwereoftenaccompaniedbyjocularlyrics.Murals, on the other hand, were less ephemeral, more detailed and colorful. In the thirties, the busy passerby might see aspects of Mexico’s history painted from a Marxist point of view in murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. While Posada was incapable of seeing the pedagogic possibilities of muralism as a form of political activism, preferring to rely on the graphic arts to educate the populace, Rivera and his circle later acknowledged their debt to Posada’s hyperbolic illustrations, both in their art and in their writings, and by doing so created a bridge between the two forms of street art. But Posada, it seems to me, was more than just a populist artist. He invented the most fascinating freaks and grotesque monstrosities, and in that regard he is comparable to Goya, Rudolph von Ripper, Alfred Kubin, Sibylle Ruppert, and the creators of the fabulous beasts and demons of the medieval and Renaissance worlds. PosadawasbornonFebruary2,1852,atnumber47CalledeLosAngeles (laterCalledePosada)inthecityof AguascalientesincentralMexico.(Some encyclopediasgivehisyearofbirthas1851.)Thefourthofsix—somesources JOSÉ GUADALUPE POSADA A Profile JOSÉ GUADALUPE POSADA 137 say eight—children, of which only three survived, he was baptized in the Parroquia de la Asunción. Both of his parents were of Indian descent and illiterate. Germán Posada, his father, was a baker who owned a small shop; Petra Aguilar, his mother, was a housewife. Their oldest son, José María de la Concepción, died when still a child. The second, José Cirilo, born in 1839, became a schoolteacher. He taught José Guadalupe to read and write, until the latter and his younger brother Ciriaco were sent to a municipal school in the San Marcos neighborhood. Apparently, Posada enjoyed drawing even as a child, for he made humorous portraits of José Cirilo and his young pupils. Unfortunately, none of these early artistic experiments can be found. As an adolescent, Posada studied with Antonio Varela at the Municipal Academy of Drawing in Aguascalientes. By 1867 he began practicing the “trade of the painter,” and the following year he apprenticed in the lithography workshop of Trinidad Pedroza. Politically active, Pedroza supported the creation of a local government and spoke out against the ineffectiveness of city politicians—particularly the influential Colonel Jesús Gómez Portugal—and the economic and military intervention of France and the United States in Mexican affairs. In addition to lithography, Posada learned the basic printmaking techniques of engraving wood and metal. He also began producing lampoons and illustrations for magazines and books, selling some to Pedroza’s own independent newspaper, El Jicote. Many of them featured Colonel Portugal as their main target. Biographical information is scarce, so it is impossible to say precisely whenorhowPosada’spoliticalconsciencewasawakened.Some,likeOctavio Paz, Mexico’s foremost contemporary essayist and poet, claim that Posada’s ideologyhasactuallybeenmisunderstood.AccordingtoPaz,Posada’swork was not the prototype of el arte de protesta but simply a recording of what he saw. Since the artist was surrounded by the poor and uneducated, his subject matter just happened to look “progressive.” Paz, however, wrongly oversimplifies Posada’s artistic spirit. While it is true that political manifestos do not exist in his oeuvre—the tracts of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and scientific socialism not having reached him from Europe—he had a “socialist” weltanschauung and always expressed a strong social conscience. Even without a specific message, in image after image Posada clearly condemns injustice. And while he may not have subscribed to a particular philosophical or governmental remedy for the ills of his epoch, his lampoons nevertheless are testimony to the inequities and instabilities of his fragile country. Attimeshisstandregardingcertainpublicfiguresisambiguous.Hecould supportthepresidentandcondemnhisenemies,onlytoridiculetherulerlater. 138 JOSÉ GUADALUPE POSADA And, as mentioned, politics or political figures were by no means the focus of his lampooning. Folklore and “magical” happenings, subjects popular with everyone, provided ample grist for his cartoons. Regardless of his choice of subject, though, Posada was unmistakenly allied with the...