Chapter 32: Society and Culture in the Postrevolutionary Period (PDF)

## Chapter 32: Society and Culture in the Postrevolutionary Period ### Daily Life in Countryside and City Between 1920 and 1940 the lives of average Mexicans changed more rapidly than they had in any previous 20 year period. The population decline of the decade of violence stopped, and with the gr...

## Chapter 32: Society and Culture in the Postrevolutionary Period ### Daily Life in Countryside and City Between 1920 and 1940 the lives of average Mexicans changed more rapidly than they had in any previous 20 year period. The population decline of the decade of violence stopped, and with the greater political stability of the 1920s and 1930s, the number of people began to climb rapidly. When Obregón came to office in 1920 the total population of the country was slightly over 14 million, but when Cárdenas turned over the presidency to his successor 20 years later the total had almost reached 20 million. Mexico was not yet an urban country although the percentage of population living in communities with fewer than 25 hundred people had slipped from about 70% in 1920 to some 65% in 1940. By then cultural anthropologists found fewer Indians who spoke a native tongue exclusively. The new ejidatario in rural Mexico, unlike his campesino forefather, was no longer bound to the hacienda. He could travel as freely as his pocketbook allowed. It was no longer necessary to purchase daily necessities in the tienda de raya, but if he did shop in the ejido store, he would likely find prices somewhat lower than those in the nearby community. The old mayordomos, of course, were gone, and in most cases ejido officials were elected by the ejidatarios themselves. Thousands of families who had fled their villages in search of security during the early revolution returned to find many things transformed. Hard-surface roads began to supplant bumpy dirt pathways, and buses rolled over them with more or less regularity. Bicycles began to push burros off the highways. Tractors challenged the ox-drawn plow. Gasoline engines, rather than mules or horses, turned the mills that ground the corn, and gasoline pumps drew the water from nearby streams. Electricity arrived even in some small towns. The anthropologist George M. Foster recorded some of the major changes in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, in the 1930s. ### The Revolutionary Aftermath The first major cultural impact of modern times occurred... in the spring of 1931. General Lázaro Cárdenas, then Governor of Michoacán, sent a Cultural Mission consisting of teachers who specialized in plastic arts, social work, music, home economics, physical education, and "small industries," and a nurse-midwife and an agricultural engineer. Most villagers were reluctant to cooperate, to help find living quarters, and to aid staff members and rural teachers... In spite of such difficulties, however, the Mission had a big effect. A number of the more progressive families agreed to whitewash their houses, to improve the appearance of the village, and the present plaza, then a barren wasteland with a few houses, was cleaned up, sidewalks were marked out, flowering jacaranda trees were planted, a fountain... was built... and place was cleared for a bandstand. At the end of the first month there was an open house exposition of arts, crafts, sports, and civic betterments, to which General Cárdenas came as guest of honor... Electricity was brought in from Pátzcuaro in 1938 and running water... was installed about the same time. In 1939 for the first time village children had ready access to the full six years of primary schooling. The rural school in the 1920s and 1930s became a focal point of village life. Economic and social activity centered on programs initiated by the rural teachers as the ministry of education tried to instill revolutionary nationalism. Schools challenged, although not always successfully, the domination of the church over cultural life. Regional responses to new impositions varied as they provoked both dialogue and conflict between communities and outsiders. Professional medical specialists gradually entered the countryside. Although some villagers regarded them with suspicion, the outsiders frequently exchanged knowledge with local healers and midwives. Life expectancy improved and the infant mortality rate dropped from 222 deaths per thousand in 1920 to 125 20 years later. But by no means did all of the essentials of the good life come to rural Mexico between 1920 and 1940. Poverty continued to be the single most pervasive characteristic of rural life. City life became more pleasant, at least for some, as the amenities of technology became increasingly commonplace. Mexico's first commercial radio station began transmission in 1923, and scores huddled around each neighbor lucky enough to own or have access to a receiver. Two years later the department of education established its own radio station and began beaming educational broadcasts to primary schools recently equipped with receivers. Radionovelas, broadcasts of sporting events, and constant streams of music helped relieve the tedium of daily life. The federal government initiated a new radio program in 1937 called La Hora Nacional, intended to integrate listeners into the national mainstream through programs on Mexican culture, folklore, art, and music. Popular music flourished on the radio, in dance halls like the Salón México, and in films with the rhythms and lyrics of mariachi and ranchera music; even Afro-Caribbean introductions like the danzón and the bolero became part of the canon of musical nationalism. Popular composer and lyricist Agustín Lara has been called the "minstrel of the national soul;" his boleros evoked forbidden sensual pleasures and emotional intimacy. Despite the misogynist lyrics, his romanticizing of male sexuality appealed to women of all classes in urban areas. ### The Revolution and the Movies Another revolution in popular culture occurred in film. By the mid-1930s the commercial cinema had begun to challenge the bullfight for preeminence in entertainment. Hollywood films dominated, but the Mexican film industry received support under Cárdenas to promote mexicanidad. The most interesting films relayed patriotic content depicting the glories of the revolution, like Ezequiel Carrasco's Viva México (1934) and Luis Lezama's El Cementerio de los Aguilas (1938). But the greatest commercial success was Fernando de Fuentes's musical Alla en el Rancho Grande (1936), starring Tito Guizar and Esther Fernández. The extraordinary box office profits of this film led to a cinematographic genre of folk films, soon to be dominated by two towering figures of popular culture, Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante. The melodramatic tropes of Golden Age cinema promoted an idealized Mexico and sought to draw mass spectators to share laughter and tears. ### The Motor Age in Mexico Without question, the internal combustion engine most changed the lifestyle of the urban areas. The motor car had arrived in Mexico shortly before the outbreak of hostilities in 1910, but, because of the tremendous dislocations of that first revolutionary decade, it did not begin to transform Mexican life until after 1920. By 1925, 53 thousand motor vehicles were digesting 35 million gallons of gasoline annually, 15 years later the number of vehicles had tripled and gasoline consumption had quadrupled. In the early 1920s the motor vehicle was still a prestige symbol, carrying a select few to and from their offices or their families on an occasional weekend outing. Later in the decade motor car racing became popular, and often left a toll of people killed or injured. But by the 1930s, with a tremendous increase in the number of trucks and buses, the internal combustion engine had transformed commercial life as well as disrupted staid social patterns. Automobiles, trucks, and buses required an expanded highway network; and Mexican engineers and day laborers completed several thousand miles of new, hard-surface roads. Road building acquainted Mexicans with places beyond the bounds of the patria chica, promoted tourism, revitalized local economies, and facilitated industrial development. ### The Growth of Mexico City The growth of Mexico City was nothing short of spectacular. The high national rate of population growth, coupled with an internal migration from rural to urban areas, gave Mexico City, with nearly 1.8 million people in 1940, an increase of more than a million in only two decades. The dramatic growth yielded its share of social problems as neither the job market nor the school system could absorb the tremendous influx. The medical infrastructure and public health initiatives were sorely tested as well, as syphilis reached epidemic proportions in the national metropolis in the 1920s and the government sought to control prostitution. Those fleeing to the capital in search of a better life often than not encountered disappointment. Rapid growth in other cities also caused difficulties for tens of thousands of recent arrivals. While Mexicans laughed with derision at the prohibition experiment in the United States, alcoholic consumption rose sufficiently in Mexico in the 1920s to cause alarm in the medical and scientific communities and to occasion anti-alcohol campaigns. Demographic growth gave rise to another, more salutary change. Revolutionary governments, particularly in the 1930s, began to shape Mexico City to reflect the new ideological landscape that was neither colonial nor Porfirian. A particular kind of Mexican modern style developed in the capital city that merged international Deco with an idealized vision of an indigenous rural past, both imagined through women's bodies-the hypermodern streamlined flapper or the voluptuous, exoticized native. The hybridity of Mexican Deco, in the way it could adapt or reshape the cultural past, undergirded its nationalistic character. Revolutionaries inherited the task of completing the Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes), begun in the Porfiriato to celebrate the centenary of Mexican independence, but not finished. Mexican architects complemented the imposing neoclassical exterior with a stunning Deco interior, and the building was inaugurated in 1934. Deco architecture dominated the 1920s development of the Condesa neighborhood and its centerpiece, the Parque México in central Mexico City, known today for its fresa (yuppie) nightlife and upscale apartments While the national theater and an upscale neighborhood were designed for elites, urban development projects also targeted the working classes, especially the many women who migrated to the capital after the war. Markets served as spaces of independence where women could sell their wares, bargain for the best price, and contribute to the vitality of the city. The traditional outdoor markets which represented an idealized indigenous past could be reborn in permanent indoor markets, subject to sanitary regulations. In 1934, for example, the Abelardo Rodríguez Market opened its doors. Built within the exterior walls of a convent near the Zócalo, the functional Deco interior housed a theater, day-care center, and a school for the children of the many women who worked there. Murals on interior walls, depicting a peaceful countryside, assured patrons of the benefits won by the revolutionaries. To this day, the market is a bustling space of commerce in the busy Centro Histórico, surrounded by an informal economy that persists despite the many attempts to quash it. ### Women in the New Mexico Aspects of life were changing for Mexican women as we now know from recent rich scholarship on women and gender relations in the period from 1920 to 1940. The revolution did not bring radical transformations for women, but it did accelerate a process begun earlier by economic modernization in opening up more social spaces for them outside the home. The revolution could be said to have modernized patriarchy as it redefined gender roles under a paternalistic umbrella. For men, this meant reining in a masculinity based on violence to create a self-disciplined, hard-working "revolutionary" man. For women, it opened up more jobs in education and social services in roles that conformed to the idealized feminine state of motherhood with its implied self-denial and nurturing instincts. These mostly urban middle-class women could teach children and poor mothers how to become modern citizens. When women's public aspirations went further than participating in the areas of education and moral reform-for example, when they tried to assert equality in the workplace, justice in wages or rents, or the right to vote the revolutionary state was not so accommodating. For the most part, union bosses were able to keep women in the least skilled factory jobs, ejidatarios were male, and politicians worked to the women in the state. Images of the "new" woman (primarily white and middle-class) in newspapers, advertising, and film promoted domesticity, marriage, and motherhood. More negative stereotypes presented women (especially poor indígenas) as abused and victimized-in need of education and moral reform. The "chica moderna," with bobbed hair, ready-to-wear dress, and stiletto shoes, was still a controversial figure who threatened gender norms. Workplaces were still construed as fraught with sexual danger. ### Immigration and a Changing Identity Nonetheless, more and more women entered the worlds of business, education, government service, and medicine. Between 1920 and 1924 only 223 Mexican women received university degrees; ten years later the figure had doubled. By 1930 women participated more actively in civic work than at any previous time, and hundreds of thousands had successfully rebelled against family-arranged marriages. In some areas, women became powerful voices in labor organizing. This was the case of female coffee sorters in Córdoba, Veracruz, where women successfully balanced activism with work and family life to advocate for their rights. Often, in order to gain traction, activist women couched their quest for citizenship in the discourse of motherhood and family. This strategy along with the revolutionary paternalism of men, including President Cárdenas, helped women get the right to vote in a number of Mexican states, but full female suffrage would have to wait until the 1950s. While Mexicans were struggling to establish anew identity. Immigration from the Middle East and Asia challenged the limits of the ideal of mestizaje and questioned the definition of what it meant to be Mexican. In the nineteenth century, Arab immigrants began to arrive during the Porfiriato and came in increasingly numbers as the Ottoman empire fell. Initially using Mexico as a stopover on the way to the United States, eventually Mexico became a destination of choice for many Middle East immigrants who styled themselves as Lebanese, rather than use the terms Turks or Arabs that acquired racist overtones in the Mexican context. Overall the community thrived, establishing Arab-language schools, publications, and organizations; today the Mexican-Lebanese Cultural Institute estimates that there are eight hundred thousand Mexicans of Middle Eastern descent. As time went on, their children identified as Mexican, but their influence is still felt in Mexico today with figures like Salma Hayek and Carlos Slim who proudly proclaim their Middle Eastern heritage. More importantly, the taco al pastor, meat marinated in a spicy red sauce served with pineapple, onion, and cilantro, is an adaptation of schwarma brought to Mexico City in the 1930s. The history of Chinese and Japanese migration to Mexico dates to the colonial period, as many crossed the Pacific with the Manila galleons, some against their will. In the nineteenth century, a new kind of immigration began with large numbers of Chinese who came as laborers. They constituted a significant part of the labor force that built many of the railroads running north to connect Mexico to markets in the United States. In the northern borderlands, many Chinese immigrants settled, despite vociferous and sometimes violent racism directed toward them by Mexicans. Mexicali, which to this day boasts a large Chinese-Mexican population, attracted agricultural workers and merchants who became an important part of building the agricultural base of the region. Most Chinese immigrants in the early twentieth century were male; they sought to settle permanently and many married Mexican spouses despite a law that stripped these women of their Mexican citizenship. While the law was generally ignored, there were instances when the state acted and expelled families; recent research has looked at the Mexican-Chinese communities who resided in Hong Kong and Macau until they were repatriated to Mexico in 1960. Early Japanese immigrants went to Chiapas to work on coffee plantations; most settled in the borderlands and became part of what it means to be Mexican in northwest Mexico and the US southwest. Sushi Saga in Tucson, Arizona is owned by a Japanese-Mexican family that migrated from Sonora. The menu boasts traditional Japanese sushi and Mexican tacos with fusion rolls named after cities in Sonora. ### Cultural Nationalism in the Arts Mexican culture during the period 1920-40 came to the service of the revolution. The artistic, literary, and scholarly communities, with an abiding faith in the new thrust of Mexican life, supported revolutionary ideals by contributing their unique talents to awakening consciousness in the new social order. The aim was to fashion a national citizen and promote national solidarity among diverse sectors of the Mexican population. The process is nowhere better illustrated than in the cultural achievements of Mexico's most famous painters. The restlessness of Mexico's artistic community had been apparent during the late Porfiriato and the first revolutionary decade, but Mexican art came into its own and won world acclaim after 1920. Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos commissioned leading artists to fill the walls of public buildings with didactic murals, and Mexico's artistic renaissance combined European training and indigenous motifs in the service of the revolution. Art was no longer directed to the privileged few who could afford to buy a canvas; it was for the public. If Mexico was not yet able to provide a classroom and a seat for every child in the country, some measure of popular education could be provided by a muralist movement carried out on a scale grander than any the world had yet known. ### The Muralists Coordinating his efforts with the artists' union, the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, Vasconcelos instructed the artist simply to paint Mexican subjects. To be sure, youthful enthusiasm carried some astray; but giants such as Jean Charlot, Rufino Tamayo, Juan O'Gorman, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Fernando Leal, and Roberto Montenegro emerged in the process as well. In particular, two muralists began to dominate the movement. That they are highlighted in these pages is not to diminish the magnitude of outstanding works by the numerous talented artists and architects of the period. As John Lear illustrates, many other artists' collectives flourished as they interacted with labor organizations to place the proletariat at the center of their work. They played a fundamental role in creating a new national identity that blended influences of nationalism and internationalism. During the 1920s and 1930s, Diego Rivera (1885-1957) became the most renowned artist in the western hemisphere and one of the most imposing artists of the twentieth century. A man of boundless talent and energy, he used the Indian as his basic motif. Rivera's realistic murals did not invite freedom of interpretation as he depicted humanistic messages for the illiterate masses on the walls of the Agricultural School in Chapingo, the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca, the National Preparatory School, the Department of Education, and the National Palace in Mexico City. The Spaniard during the colonial period and his criollo offspring during the nineteenth century had enslaved the Indian and had kept him in abject poverty. It was now time to integrate the Indian into the mainstream of society just as Rivera was incorporating him into the mainstream of his murals. Although Rivera emphasized content over form, he was without rival in technique. His symmetry was near perfect, but his genius emerged even more clearly in his use of line and color. He invariably depicted Indians in soft, gentle lines, with earthen red and brown tones, while the oppressors, white foreigners and white Mexicans, were portrayed in sharp lines and harsh colors. Rivera's greatest masterpiece was composed at the Agricultural School in Chapingo. With aesthetic originality and flamboyance, Rivera spelled out his appreciation of the new revolutionary ideology. Not only did his frescoes display the virtues of land redistribution, but they offered lessons of sociopolitical reality. On one wall he portrayed bad government-the campesinos betrayed by false politicians, fat capitalists, and mercenary priests. But the opposite wall was one of revolutionary hope-a scene of agricultural cultivation, a rich harvest, and a liberated peasantry. Nude female figures, and his own pregnant wife, represented the bounty of a productive earth. Just in case the humanist agrarian message might be lost, he painted over the main stairway of the building, "Here it is taught to exploit the land, not man." ### José Clemente Orozco Only slightly less famous than Rivera, but no less a genius, was José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949). As the violent decade passed, Orozco abandoned his career as a biting political caricaturist for mural art. Less a realist than Rivera, Orozco could be more forceful, expressive, and passionate. He was willing to experiment with new techniques as well as themes. His brutal and distorted Christs, grotesque depictions of God, and nude Madonnas pilloried all religious piety and brought forth a storm of protest. While angry crowds mutilated some of his frescoes, Vasconcelos did not interfere with Orozco's freedom of expression although the secretary was becoming increasingly anti-Marxist, even pro- fascist. Orozco's scenes of violence during the revolution bring to mind Francisco Goya's Horrors of War, and he might well have had the Spanish master in mind when he conceived them. Orozco had his tender moments too. During the 1920s, when he could see the first hesitant steps of social progress, some of his murals portray hope. His famous fresco Cortés and Malinche shows two nude and carnal figures sitting over the figure of the old, prostrate Mexico and represents the process of mestizaje, the biological and spiritual origin of the Mexican people. But in the 1930s, even as the pace of social reform began to accelerate, Orozco became increasingly disillusioned with the progress being made. After spending several years in the United States, he went back to his native Jalisco, and in the Instituto Cabañas in Guadalajara he decided to return to the theme of the conquest. The new Cortés he portrayed was a powerful, violent conqueror in full armor and with sword in hand. The only hope held out is that the spirit whispering in Cortés's ear might convince him to use his power and technology for good rather than for evil. ### Frida Kahlo Also nationalistic, but less public, in her painting was Frida Kahlo (1907-54). Her marriage at the age of twenty to Diego Rivera gave her access to the intellectual avant-garde, but she easily earned recognition on her own as a painter who drew on the tradition of Mexican religious folk art to self-referentially portray human suffering. Her struggle to understand national identity in post-revolutionary Mexico and her battle to overcome debilitating physical impairments are stunningly depicted in the bloody and fragmented bodies of her subjects and her self-portraits. Kahlo also encouraged her students to represent everyday life by painting objects of popular folk art. The ways in which her own production embraced mestizaje and rejected traditional conceptions of gender (and especially of the self-abnegating Virgin Mary) became more fully appreciated in the late 20th century, both in Mexico and abroad. ### Martín Luis Guzmán The painters were not alone in transforming a national art into a nationalistic one. The literary community contributed as well with its novels of the revolution. Two of the best came from the pen of Martín Luis Guzmán (1887-1976), who published El águila y la serpiente (translated as The Eagle and the Serpent) in 1928 and La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Leader) the following year. The first constitutes a novelized personal memoir of the young Guzmán, who left the comfortable life of a university student to join the revolution and found himself a Villista. Captivated by Villa's personality, yet always afraid of his violence, Guzmán sketched the Centaur of the North most vividly in his discussion of revolutionary justice. This man wouldn't exist if his pistol didn't exist... It isn't merely an instrument of action with him; it's a fundamental part of his being, the axis of his work and his amusement, the constant expression of his most intimate self, his soul given outward form. Between the fleshy curve of his index finger and the rigid curve of the trigger there exists the relation that comes from the contact of one being with another. When he fires, it isn't the pistol that shoots, it's the man himself. Out of his very heart comes the ball as it leaves the sinister barrel. The man and the pistol are the same thing. Villa did not turn out to be the ideal man Guzmán had hoped for. The intellectual simply could not communicate with the people's hero and ultimately took his leave. Guzmán never abandoned his revolutionary faith, but he began to wonder whether the goals could be attained without all the violence. Guzmán's disenchantment with the politics of the revolution became even more evident in La sombra del caudillo, a novel inspired by the presidential election of 1928, which saw opposition candidates Francisco Serrano and Arnulfo Gómez both dead by election day. Mexico's most powerful novel decrying dictatorship, La sombra del caudillo is written with truculence and righteous indignation. But even here Guzmán does not give up on revolution. To the contrary, he directed passionate condemnation against Calles for having betrayed the ideals of the movement. ### Nellie Campobello In a less cynical vein, Nellie Campobello (1900-1986) used short narrative portraits in Cartucho (1931) to portray the violence of the revolution but at the same time to honor the people who sacrificed their lives for it. Cartucho is especially significant because it is the only testimonial depiction by a woman to have been published in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. In this work and in Las manos de mamá (1937), translated as My Mother's Hands, Campobello also highlights the changes provoked by the revolution for women and Indigenous peoples in the Mexican north of Pancho Villa. ### Gregorio López y Fuentes The Indianist novel of the revolution reached its apex in 1935 with Gregorio López y Fuentes's El Indio. Without naming a single character or place, López y Fuentes is able to portray the Indian, not as the noble savage, but as a man beset with social problems that society can help to overcome. The plot is not intricate as the author was more interested in atmosphere. He admirably succeeded not only in illustrating the wide chasm between Indian and white society but also in making intelligible the deepest suspicions of whites harbored in the Indian community. López y Fuentes received Mexico's first National Prize for Literature for this perceptive model. ### Carlos Chávez The cultural nationalism focusing on the Indian was carried into the arena of music by Carlos Chávez (1899-1978). After studying in Europe and the United States, in his late twenties Chávez returned to Mexico to become director of the National Conservatory of Music and to begin a brilliant career as a conductor, pianist, musical scholar, and composer. His Sinfonía India (1935) and Xochipili-Macuilxochitl (1940) were scored for pre-Columbian instruments, but realizing that not all performing orchestras would be able to acquire such esoteric accouterments as strings of deer hooves, he made provision for modern substitutes. But both rhythmically and melodically the compositions were inspired by Mexico's indigenous heritage, as well as other vernacular music and dance. Chávez was fully integrated into overall efforts to promote cultural nationalism; he affiliated the conservatory with the Ministry of Public Education and collaborated on many projects with other intellectuals, artists, and academics, even some of whom, like Aaron Copland, he met in the United States and lured to visit Mexico. He sponsored Silvestre Revueltas as the conductor of the conservatory orchestra, and encouraged his research into vernacular music. Revueltas composed orchestral music and film scores, including the suite for the film Redes (1936), on which he collaborated with American photographer Paul Strand. A movie of social realism, the film focuses on the battles of a poor Veracruz fishing community with big business and corrupt bosses. The magnificent score beautifully evokes the aura of realism and inspires empathy for the downtrodden villagers. The message of social injustice is startlingly rendered. ### Cultural Nationalism and the Anthropologists Also keenly interested in issues of social justice were the anthropologists who studied indigenous communities. They aspired to cultural nationalism but in a way that diverged from Vasconcelos' ideas about assimilation. Vasconcelos was interested in accumulating a record of cultural diversity as part of the nation's patrimony but not in preserving discrete Indian cultures and values. With the publication in 1922 of Manuel Gamio's highly important three-volume La población del valle de Teotihuacán, Mexican archaeologists, ethnologists, and social anthropologists began to take a new look not only at antiquities but at contemporary Indian problems as well. Rejecting theories of racial inferiority and the anti-Indian posture of many nineteenth-century intellectuals, they set out to depict the glories of the Indian past, to restore Indian arts and crafts, and in general to revitalize contemporary Indian cultures. Their efforts to valorize indigenous cultures (known as indigenismo) were greatly facilitated in 1936 when the government established the Departamento Autónomo de Asuntos Indigenas and three years later the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. No great historical work emerged from the period in the proliferation of biographies to venerate or disparage the many revolutionary leaders. Porfirio Díaz, of course was demonized. ### The Revolution and the Legacy of Cultural Nationalism Despite the mediocre record of Mexican historians from 1920 to 1940, the country's overall cultural production was remarkable during those two decades. The revolutionary state supported the movement for cultural nationalism through the patronage of popular arts, mural painting, music, radio, and film; by renaming streets and other places for revolutionary heroes and events; and through educational programs that tried to assimilate Indigenous peoples and secularize local cultures. The degree to which these wide-ranging efforts succeeded in fomenting nation building and shared popular memories varied, but they did contribute to the formulation of one powerful and dynamic vision of Mexican national identity. This revolutionary identity had not obliterated forms of Catholic nationalism, but it captured the Mexican spirit and yielded a sense of national confidence and pride for many. The artistic outpouring of the 1920s and 1930s was unequaled in Latin America.