Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation by Mary Kay Vaughan (review)

In this informative and ingenious book, Mary Kay Vaughan employs personal biography to pry open the cultural experience of a youth cohort that grew up in Mexico City in the 1940s and ’50s. Her biographical subject is José “Pepe” Zúñiga (b. 1937), an artist of Oaxacan origin who rose out of the lower-class tenements (vecindades) of Colonia Guerrero to become an accomplished painter and eventually director of La Esmeralda art academy. Vaughan recounts Pepe’s early life — the book does not pretend to cover events beyond 1972, and mostly concerns the years of childhood and adolescence up to 1958, when Pepe entered art school — in order to explore the shared experience of a generation, which benefitted from the economic prosperity of the post-war period and developed a new and transformational form of subjectivity based on self-determination, libidinous freedom, tolerance, and tenderness.

The research draws on three main sources of information: first, extensive conversation between the author and her subject, who became in the process a close friend and confidant, and who is to a significant degree the book’s co-author — Vaughan calls Pepe her “ideal partner in the project” (2); second, interviews with Pepe’s family relatives, friends and neighbours, and with others from the cultural and artistic circles he inhabited — these contribute to the book’s original insight and lend the prose further freshness and verve; third, the author’s own considerable stores of knowledge about Mexican society, politics and culture, enhanced by additional research into the many cultural representations and processes discussed in the book.

As we follow the chronological account of Pepe’s “educational odyssey” (x), we learn about a myriad of cultural expressions and their role in shaping the consciousness of his generation. We are introduced to the mambo craze and its liberating effect on sexual mores, the influence of the beloved, singing cricket Cri-Cri from the children’s radio show on perceptions of family and self, and the ideals propagated through popular film, including classics from the golden age of Mexican cinema and imports from Hollywood and Europe. Vaughan dedicates several pages to the close study of primary school textbooks and the codes of behaviour they inculcated in young pupils. And attention is given to such residual ideologies as traditional Catholic religious practices and their continuing pull on a recently urbanized population. Perhaps most illuminating is the lengthy description of the conditions of life and cultural experience within the impoverished vecindades where Pepe spent his boyhood. Here we gain insight into the economic hardship and personal travails of the slum dwellers, of lives marked by violence and sexual domination, and also of the residents’ varied and enriching cultural activities, and of their stoicism and feistiness in the face of adversity.

The book’s brilliance and novelty rest chiefly on the probing of subjectivity in relation to the cultural practices that help form it and give it historical specificity. Vaughan proposes that in the decades of the 1940s and 50s mass media and popular entertainment exerted a liberating effect on subjectivity, by introducing alternative ideals and models of behaviour, and by enabling “the creation of new, inclusive communities” (13). Much of the book involves an exploration of this thesis as revealed through Pepe Zúñiga’s coming-of-age story.

Vaughan feels personal sympathy for Pepe and the experiences of his age-cohort. We learn in the book’s introduction that Pepe had asked her to write his biography, and we are told of the “sanitized” character of his testimony, of “his desire not to move into print certain intimacies of his life” (5), and of “painful experiences… he did not want to talk about” (230). It is perfectly understandable that, as Pepe’s friend, Vaughan wishes to protect him from invasive scrutiny, especially when this is immaterial to the cultural history she intends...