In Excess: Sergei Eisentein's Mexico - Cineclub

assigned a special civilizing mission to education as a means of universal
spiritual transcendence, with the didactic role performed by the state
(and Vasconcelos as its representative). But, as Olivier Debroise notes in
his Figuras en el Tropico, while the art of the muralists was governed by a
very strong antibourgeois impulse both in art and ideology, an impulse
shared by Vasconcelos to the extent that he identifi ed “bourgeois” with
the Porfi rian emphasis on French academism, this new emphasis on the
indigenous was rapidly assimilated and vulgarized in everyday lowermiddle-class
culture—proof that this construction did, in fact, resonate
with the collective needs of the society. Thus in 1921 the newspaper El
Universal organized its fi rst pageant of indigenous beauty in response to
the new canons from above. The winner was La India Bonita (The Pretty
Indian) Bibiana Bribiesca, of a Mixtec origin from the state of Puebla, who
did not speak a word of Spanish but who was received by the secretaries
of state during tea time, with photographs published in El Universal to
prove it. 8
So we see that the legitimization of the cultural platform of the Mexican
Revolution was dependent on the glorification and mythologizing
of the pre-Hispanic past and on fi guring indigenes as noble savages to
be civilized. Another key ideologue of the movement, anthropologist
Manuel Gamio, continued this emphasis on the indigenous, but within a
somewhat different intellectual and cultural framework.
Vasconcelos, who was primarily a believer in the classical European
tradition and “educating the indio,” presented a vision of a syncretic nation,
where the tradition of the humanism, education, and rationalism
of Western enlightenment merged with quasimystical (symbolist) premodern
culture. This synthesis of European humanism (with elements
of classicism) and the intuitivist premodern soul was to result in the formation
of a “cosmic race, which, supported by the arts and education as
the main instruments of the state ideology, would culminate in absolute
unity, subsuming all particulars: unity will be consummated there by the
triumph of fecund love and the improvement of all the human races.” 9
This unity, as we shall see, is not entirely unlike the organic unity and
evolutionary approach to anthropology elaborated in Eisenstein’s later
writings. Vasconcelos’s vision of the world was shared in particular by
Roberto Montenegro and Adolfo Best Maugard, as well as by Diego
Rivera, at least in the early stages of his artistic work in Mexico.
Unlike Vasconcelos, whose ideology derived from a background
steeped in European classicism and humanism, with elements of fi n-desiècle
mysticism, Manuel Gamio (who was Boas’s student in New York)
belong to a new generation, one we can associate more directly with
eisenstein’s ¡que viva méxico! : 25