Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism, and Nation Building under Lázaro Cárdenas by Jennifer Jolly (review)

Art historian Jennifer Jolly’s new book takes the reader on a fascinating journey into art and tourism in Pátzcuaro, with a focus on the period from 1928 to 1940, when Lázaro Cárdenas served as governor of the state of Michoacán and then president of Mexico. This richly illustrated book focuses on public art programs, ranging from murals and sculpture to parades and magazines, to consider how Cárdenas personally promoted domestic tourism in pursuit of a dual agenda: 1) to transform Pátzcuaro into a “microcosm” of the nation, and 2) to enshrine this region as central to the cultural history of the nation (1–3).

Jolly argues that Cárdenas used various artistic programs to promote domestic cultural tourism. She convincingly demonstrates that through the promotion of such tourism, the state and its allies “constructed a logic for circulating people and resources around the nation’s territory; it materialized and put on public display many intangible elements of national identity, including history, culture, and the landscape; and it offered the emerging middle and organized working classes secular, ritualized leisure-time activities that would allow them to engage with these signs of nationhood, both individually and collectively” (6–7).

As various sectors of society directly consumed, reproduced, assimilated, and even reinterpreted nationalist ideologies, they did so, according to Jolly, in a manner that linked art and tourism into a unified “technology of nation building.” (4) The role of middle- and upper-class artists and intellectuals within this scheme was to design monuments, paint murals, publish historical accounts, create museums, and serve as city boosters. The masses, meantime, engaged in regional tourism directly through their own travel, or indirectly by learning about Mexico’s regions in school or by reading magazines. President Cárdenas, she shows, encouraged the press to follow his carefully choreographed travel around the country in work and in leisure. As tourist-in-chief, he modeled for the public a particular way of imagining the nation. In doing so, he intentionally granted the Pátzcuaro region a central place within this imagined nation, and cast local myths and histories as continuous with, or even as replacements for, national myths and histories. The local indigenous chief Tanganxuan, for example, became a local version of, and at times even a replacement for, Cuauhtémoc, as a symbol of indigenous resistance against imperialism.

Jolly makes a compelling case for the importance of regional arts and domestic cultural tourism in 1930s Mexico. But, like any study, hers has some weaknesses. In contrast to recent work on Mexican art history by Mary Coffey or Adriana Zavala, Jolly shies away from historical and artistic debate. The result is a study that is creative and compelling, but does not break as much new ground as it could have. Of larger concern is the emphasis on Cárdenas as puppet master. One wonders whether the president really took such a doggedly detailed interest in every facet of artistic production as the book suggests. This overemphasis on Cárdenas seems a missed opportunity to explore how contested many issues were, even within the ranks of cardenismo.

Finally, while the book expertly builds upon the literature related to art and to nation-building, including my own publications, it overlooks key studies of 1930s regional tourism, such as Emily Wakild’s 2011 award-winning study of park tourism and Lisa Pinley Covert’s 2017 study of San Miguel de Allende. As a result, Jolly’s book passes up the opportunity to compare tourism in Pátzcuaro to tourism in other parts of the country during the same era.

Despite these minor shortcomings, Jolly’s book draws on deep knowledge of the art historical and historical literature of Mexico, especially of Michoacán and Pátzcuaro. It recognizes well-known artists such as Diego Rivera, while...