Technology in Postrevolutionary Mexico: From Cultural Rejection to National Promise

Introduction

By the turn of the 20th C., Mexico underwent one of its most radical political shifts-- liberating itself from the “benevolent” dictatorship of General Don Porfirio Diaz and the infamous era known as el Porfiriato, which imposed order, peace, and progress at all costs. The emancipation from a thirty-five year ruling was brought only after a ten-year bloody and tumultuous civil war. Before and during the Mexican Revolution, intellectuals and artists manifested a disdain of modern technologies perceived as symptomatic of a decadent society that had strayed away from the aesthetics and ideals of modernismo, the dominant artistic current of the 19th century which valued nature, classical antiquity, and desire to maintain the line between high art and low art. The Mexican Revolution, brought not only drastic political, economic, and social changes, it also opened up a new era that would embrace that which modernismo abhorred: technology. Followed by the civil war, a new revolution utilized technology as their main weapon and its soldiers would be artists and intellectuals during the mid-1920s to the 1930s. The “cultural revolution” established a different relationship with technology, from rejection to national promise. As seen in many of Diego Rivera’s murals, technology and democracy went hand in hand, and together they would liberate the subjugated and destitute from oppression and suffering. The new enthusiasm for technological artifacts sparked the imagination and artistic productions of the time, to envision a better future where all men and women, regardless of race or religion, would come together in peace and harmony and build a better world with the advantage of the most modern technological artifacts. And thus, technology not only began to change the way artistic productions were materialized, but most importantly, it became the main subject of this utopian vision. The technological madness which modernized Mexico at a dizzying speed brought hundreds of mechanical artifacts, but for Ruben Gallo, only the camera, typewriter, radio, cement, and stadiums epitomize “the mechanization of cultural production” (24).                           

The Camera, Typewriter and Radio in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Pictorial photographies dominated the photographic scene in Mexico during the 1920’s: a paradox similar to Rivera’s use of fresco paintings to celebrate modernity. The pictorial character was criticized by David Alfaro Siqueiros probably thinking of pictorial photographers such as Silva and Brehme. In 1923 two foreign photographers, Edward Weston and Tina Modotti (American and Italian), used the camera in a radical new way that initiated a “photographic revolution in Mexico” (32). Siqueiros pointed to the work of Weston and Modotti who rejected the use of pictorialism - “they create a TRUE PHOTOGRAPHIC BEAUTY” (44). On one hand, Modotti tried to produce “honest photographs” (45) documenting what represented modernity in Mexico and choosing to be more of a political activist while Weston made a conscious decision not to document technological scenes opting for more traditional landscapes.

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin examines the fundamental shifts in art and representation as a result of the technological advancements in mechanical reproduction. As opposed to other forms of reproduction throughout history, mechanical reproduction is distinct due to its independence from the original. The mechanisms of reproduction, such as the lens and the camera mechanics, can perceive what the human eye does not see and projects a level of objectivity. In addition, the copy transports the original outside of its context in terms of time and space. What is lost is the “aura” of the work of art, which is described as the “unique phenomenon of a distance.” The aura is essential to the idea of the work of art as simultaneously an object of cult value and of exhibition value. The reluctance of Mexican muralists, such as Riviera, to incorporate such technological reproduction techniques into their representations may be affiliated with this loss of aura. Murals, as opposed to other art forms, such as painting and sculpture, are inherently tied to its location in terms of place and context. Thus, mechanical reproduction may be perceived as a threat to the mural’s foundation as a medium of representation.

While the camera was an automated new technology able to capture captions and modern scenes, the typewriter became a mechanized procedure that would revolutionize writing in postrevolutionary Mexico. Three very different kinds of typewriters were in play: the Olivers, the Remingtons, and the Underwoods but ultimately they would serve almost the same function - to revolutionize writing. This did not happen initially though. The first mention of a typewriter (Oliver) in Mexican literature lacked function (Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela). Textual, visual and auditory signs were able to be reproduced mechanically by typewriters, cameras or phonographs but literature could no longer be a practice isolated from the technologization of these mediums. Mário de Andrade’s “mechanogenic writing” and photographer Tina Modotti  were able to understand the prediction of Trotsky that technology would become “an inspiration for artistic work” (114). La técnica (1928) by Modotti is able to capture this radical effect of mechanization through literature.

Like Andrade and Modotti, the radio also inspired the development of two new types of literature, “radiophonic,” which treats the radio like a subject, yet structure and language are to remain intact, and “radiogenic,” written for broadcasts, where style and structure are shaped by the possibilities and parameters of the radio. In Mexico, “radiophonic” literature inspired very interesting and avant-garde writings, such as Maples Arces’ “TSH,” Salvador Novos’ “Radio Lecture,” Appollinaire’s “Lettre-Ocean,” and Kyn Taniya’s “IU IIIUUU IU.” These texts share the evocation of the most salient features of the radio, cosmopolitanism, susceptibility to interference, and heterogeneity of radio programming. Mexican radiogenic literature came to perfectly exemplify what Italian F.T. Marinetti, the first poet to suggest that radio could function as a poetic model, called the “telegraphic style”: “a truncated form that of writing that does away with syntax in favor of speed” (165). The radio waves brought to Mexico not only two new forms of literature, but most importantly, they brought the whole world to a country striving for modernization and world visibility amongst developed and modern nations.             

Cement and Stadiums

The introduction of concrete building construction represents a significant cultural shift in Mexican Modernity. As cameras, typewriters, and the radio fundamentally altered the medium and content of visual, textual, and audio representation into mechanized forms, cement equally impacted the medium and content of architecture from a handcrafted trade into a mechanized process. Gallo references Kittler’s statement that “media determine our situation” to describe how the new concrete cityscape of buildings, roadways, and public projects introduced “completely different spatial logic” in which “citizens had to learn to exist in the new spaces of modernity.” The proliferation of concrete structures that pervaded Mexico City was perhaps the most visible of the technological artifacts in the 1920s. The new public buildings not only housed the newly reformed governmental organizations but visually communicated to the masses “the new ideology, at once nationalist, revolutionary, and modern.”

The use of concrete in public architecture presented new building construction capacities and, thus, new forms of architecture. While stadiums are not a new invention of the 20th century, Gallo argues that both its resurgence since the Olympic Games of 1896 in Athens and its new cultural and political function has established stadiums of the Modern era as a truly technological artifact. The stadiums following the Olympic Games of 1896 exhibited an exploration of avant-garde architectural designs and techniques, utilized the most contemporary technologies in building and construction, and aggregated large unprecedented masses of people around the spectacle. In the same way that the newspaper and radio disseminated content to the masses, the stadium was utilized as a medium for “mass events choreographed for a mass spectatorship.” Gallo associates the choreographed sequences of human movement with assembly line production where, when “seen from above by spectators in the stands, [they] form geometrical figures and even words.” He asserts that the human becomes an ornament, a single component within a larger communication machine, to feed the masses. The loss of individuality reflects the capitalist production of Modernity.

Following the revolution, José Vasconcelos, Minister of Education from 1921 to 1924, led the construction of the National Stadium built in Mexico City in 1924. As many other cities were constructing stadiums of unprecedented size and grandeur, Mexico constructed its own stadium as a symbol for Mexico’s postrevolutionary progress in both technology and educational reforms. The inaugural ceremony was used as a vehicle to communicate and reinforce these ideologies to the masses, including a global audience. However, the National Stadium had a short life due to issues with the building structure. The Jalapa Stadium built one year later by Heriberto Jara continues to stand today. One key difference between the two stadiums were their architectural ideologies. Vasconcelos’s National Stadium sought after a nostalgic utopia of the past emulating Roman and Greek architecture from antiquity. Jara’s stadium in Jalapa endeavored to form a new modern aesthetic representing a utopian future.

Tepito today: The Age of Commodity

Today Tepito is a “labyrinth of commodities” (228). A countless list of merchandise from technology gadgets to street food fill this open air market. The technological utopia of Mexico’s golden future that inspired artists and writers such as Vasconcelos in the first couple of decades of the 20th century no longer exists. For good or bad, the aesthetic revolution and its utopian vision proved more successful in the imaginary than in real life. The technological artifacts found in Tepito are ubiquitous and have long lost their symbolic meaning of progress. Poverty and political corruption prevail in Mexico turning technology into a “dystopia: a dysfunctional society haunted by many of same spectators of the postrevolutionary years” (234). The symbolic power of cameras, typewriters, radios, cement and stadiums were a source of inspiration for artists and intellectuals during the 20’s and 30’s, however Gallo concludes that “technology has ceased to spark the imagination not only of artist and writers but of ordinary people” (235).  

Modernity and Mobility: Exclusion and Extraction

Elites, Exclusion and the Modern Ideal

Both Schivelbusch and Benjamin discuss Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris. In The Arcades Project (1927-1940), a polyphonic montage of historical voices, Walter Benjamin illuminates the controversy that never ceased to exist about urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891). Critical voices underline how the urban planner destroyed many historical buildings in order to rip his linear, grand avenues through Paris; thereby erecting an abundance of monuments wrapped in a fake neoclassic cover; turning Paris into “the true Babylon, the true arena of intellectual battle, the true temple where evil has its cult and its priesthood; and I am sure that the breath of the archangel of shadows passes over you eternally, like the winds over the infinity of the seas" (142). Haussmann himself would agree that he indeed brought a fresh breeze into the congested, smelly Paris. While several voices critique Haussmann for supporting social injustice in order to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie, and for turning into Paris into a cosmopolitan Moloch full of bastard architecture in which no one feels home anymore, Benjamin places a “plea for Haussmann” (148) by Fritz Stahl at the end of his chapter about the ‘Haussmannization’. Stahl argues that Haussmann has completed the work of Louis XIV, that he made Paris complete — even due to the fact that he had to sacrifice a lot of beauty. Stahl (and Benjamin too?) admits that Haussmann’s work was the work of a fanatic, but a task of this scope could only have been fulfilled by a fanatic.

As Tenorio-Trillo reports, the Mexican centennial represented an attempt to follow Haussmannian and modernist ideals. Leading up to the 1910 centennial of Mexico’s 1810 declaration of independence, elite-driven fervor over ‘modernity’ and the making of Mexico City into a world-class, cosmopolitan capital (as envisioned by elites) drove heavy-handed attempts at top-down change. Responding to the ideal of capitalist consumption, attempts were made to reduce contentment with simple things and create demand for elaborate, disposable goods. In the modern city, it conditions must be set “so that para vivir tenga que trabajar” (17). Modern hygienic ideals translated into racist eradication of brown and indigenous bodies from the public square, or their commutation into camouflaged spaces. In its physicality, the "modern" city was supposed to reflect its history — following Haussmann, official histories were inscribed into streets, buildings, and ubiquitous monuments. The seeming finality of elite triumph came, ironically, via the revolution which attempted to overthrow the elites. The success of the revolutionaries transformed them into the new elites. Eleven years after the first centennial, in 1921, the revolutionaries threw their own centennial of the end of the war of independence in 1821. Although “what 1921 celebrated was not 1821, but the assumed triumph over what the 1910 celebration meant” (38), the new regime almost immediately echoed the old regime, driven by modernist-extractivist ideals and toasting their success “with champagne and with glasses and plates from the Hapsburg emperor” (39).

In echoes of the cosmopolitan centennial ideals chronicled by Tenorio-Trillo, Merodio explores the metropolization of Mexico City as an elite space within Mexico. Merodio argues that modern technological innovation changed the territorial mapping of political, administrative institutions in Mexico. The geographic centrality of the Distrito Federal within the country coupled with capitalist-extractivist-accumulatory ideology drove its metropolization.

The Urban Condition

In his seminal essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1902) Georg Simmel stages the spectacle of the growing modern metropolis as a threat to the psychological stability of the human being confronting it. "The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life" (130). Thereby he reads the technological and scientific progress of humanity as a two sided sword that on the one hand liberated humanity from historical bonds within the state, religion, morals, and also in economics, but on the other hand forces the individual to specialize his professional skills in order to stay valuable for the market and thus to becomes dependent on the skills of others, because specialization does not allow the subsistence of the individual. This again is a threat to the individual personality: “"Here in buildings and educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technology, in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwhelming fullness of crystallized and impersonalized spirit that the personality […] cannot maintain itself under its impact” (134). In order not to drown (atrophy) in the stream of masses within the metropolis, he has to exaggerate his individuality (hypertrophy) to maintain his ‘personal core’. The blasé attitude is born.

As an equal incision into the human psyche (and life) Wolfgang Schivelbusch assigns to the spread of the railway in the 19^th century, as he argues in his work The Railway Journey (1977). For him the railway infrastructure equals an annihilation of space and time that made the world shrink. The process of shrinking is accompanied by an oppositional process, the growth of the metropolis into (almost) infinite size, by incorporating the whole nation into its framework of infrastructure. Those changes lead to a general rootlessness, e.g. local products lose their aura of naturalness, since the new mobility provided by the rail tracks makes products that were originally only available in a certain region now to have everywhere easily. Further on he argues, as much as the railroad has increased speed and capacity of travelling, the new architectural materials of glass and iron have increased the capacity of buildings. His close analysis of the train station stages it as a space that brings together two totally different worlds: the space of the metropolis and the space of the journey, which with urban development became equally noisy. The reason for that noise is the ideal of circulation that he sees as the fundamental principle of modernity. Everything that circulated, esp. traffic, was seen as vital; everything that did not was seen as archaic and diseased. "The notion that communication, exchange, motion bring to humanity enlightenment and progress, and that isolation and disconnection are the obstacles to be overcome on this course, is as old as the modern age” (197).

Symbols and Identity

Guajardo and Riguzzi follow a modernist, (neo)liberal perspective in presenting the history of railroads in Mexico. The railroads brought modern infrastructure and the rigors of clocked time, without serving most towns. Yet despite their limited geographic coverage, they became a symbol of a public service and a connector of Mexicanness. They were used by revolutionaries in the war and by nationalists after the revolution to further their ideals of Mexicanness. With the neoliberal turn, the unions lost power, layoffs ensued and the railroads were privatized, much, it would seem, to the delight of Guajardo and Riguzzi. The decline of the importance of the railroads in providing public service, supporting working-class jobs, advancing modern progress and as a part of Mexican modern identity has erased their symbology. Yet the salience of the train symbol survives, perhaps, in the Metro of the Distrito Federal.

In a literary-oriented approach to Mexico City as a (hardly) describable city, Villoro also suggests to view the infrastructures, and in particular the metro, as a key to decipher the complexity inherent to modern cities. The author writes: “no place defines such a city as appropriately as the metro” (128), and identifies this infrastructure, intertwined with presence of “Lions”, as central to modernity of the city. These two strong, connected symbols, the metro and “the Lions” (“Hic Sunt Leones”), both represent the unknown (and in the same time the connection of present times to a buried past), the margins, and modernity. The Metro is also a 'symbolic' way to compensate the failure of revolutions, both in Stalin's USSR and in DF (Metro and Revolution happen almost in the same time) as an expression of the 'national greatness'. Finally, an interesting notion of social justice is highlighted by the sentence: “two axes of Mexican life intersect underground : a rhetorical recuperation of the past and a functional racism” (131).

Freeman recounts the story of "Los hijos de la Ford"—the “sons” of the Ford corporation, i.e., its cars. Freeman’s audacity (or else naïveté)—in referring to pollution-machines currently driving both local health crises and global ecological destruction, that kill one million people annually in crashes and that have created arbitrary and devastating social, political and economic inequality, as personified, sympathetic “sons”—is a direct reflection of the extent to which these machines have become a symbol of something other than themselves, and a part of our collective affective identity. As Freeman explains, when cars first appeared in Mexico, nearly all citizens detested them because they were dangerous, loud, and stinky. While some wealthy elites enjoyed driving the early death-machines, others hated cars because they contributed to disorder, in contravention of modern ideals. In contrast to the success of elite domination in other instances, it was only once Fords became cheaply available and purchased by working people that they became accepted in the city. Yet the disorder and unhygienic pollution they apported were not their only contradictions to the modern project: the Mexican modern ideal required the country to reach to its indigenous, rural roots, while the auto represented urban American technology and logic. This conflict was later resolved through the cognitively dissonant process of the auto becoming idolized as a way for citydwellers to explore rural areas and observe peasants and Indians people like so many animals in a zoo. Eventually, the rationality behind this entire set of auto-oriented phenomena became clear, as the government and big business embraced and promoted the car in keeping with globalized modernity and (neo)liberal extraction and accumulation.

Tlatelolco 1968: The Movement behind the massacre

José Revueltas states that Tlatelolco “will never end because others will continue writing it”. The Tlatelolco being written, however, might be different from the Tlatelolco that began 47 years ago, and how can we know exactly what happened that year?  The “Tlatelolco” we know today, (either followed by ‘1968’ or by itself) has become a symbol of the massacre that took place on October 2 of 1968, as students were protesting government oppression. As Steinberg notes, rather than the memory of the Student Movement that challenged the Mexican government in 1968, was has prevailed is the memory of one single event: the massacre. The legacy of Tlatelolco is problematic mainly because it is represented symptomatically, an unknown grief hoping to be redeemed in order to earn its place in history. October 2, 1968 is “a moment of unrealized possibility”. If students had not feared for their lives at later events, what could have come of the movement?

Poniatowska attempts to recover that Movement that has been buried under “Tlatelolco” by presenting the origins of what led to the massacre of October 2nd. The Student Movement of 1968 is not an isolated fight, among the students marching were the struggles of other movements that were silenced in order to keep the postcard perfect city that Mexico had promised for the Olympic games. A decade later, Poniatowska contemplates the silence that was restored after the massacre; the social struggle has been buried under american hotels and restaurant chains, it has been silenced by Mexico’s modernity, another postcard perfect city. Will the youth dare to recover the lost voice? Or has political assimilation and bribery annihilated the movement?

Tlatelolco, the place of memory, still stands. The Plaza de las Tres Culturas shows the historical overlays of events: the Aztec empire and their defeat, the Conquest victory and their effort to erase the past of their newly acquired territory, and the modern Mexico with its multifamily housing complexes that served as refuge to students on October 2nd of 1968. The blood has been washed away, attempts have been made at erasure, but the footprints of these pasts still exists. Octavio Paz references the space in his poem as he reflects on the massacre, his discontent with the urban landscape and the current modern state. He describes himself as Mixcoac, suggesting he is a native, who is “walking back, back to what [he] left or to what left [him].”  His memories of his homeland become part of his present view of the Mexico City, which becomes more bitter and removed as he ventures deeper into the confines of the city. It is the past of this Plaza, of the city itself, that seems to have direct implication to the present that has demanded the students. It is after all, the “Plaza of the Sacrificed”.

Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History states that historicism empathizes with the victor, “ whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day”. Has “Tlatelolco 1968” fallen behind this idea of historicism? Has the victor remained victorious as Tlatelolco continues to be written? Has the memory of the massacre erased what 1968 was, what it could’ve been?

Fictions of Conquest, Water and the Environmental Imagination

The Narrative of Conquest

In attempting to understad the course of events leading up to Tenochtitlan’s destruction and it's being rebuilt as Mexico City, it would seem prudent to look at the available narratives of those who had participated in the event, or had “been there.” Cortes’ letters and the anonymous account written in Nahuatl by an anonymous author of neighboring Tlatelolco provide some evidence in accounting for how the city’s destruction happened – it goes without saying that these are both highly subjective accounts. In the case of Cortes, it is quite clear that who his audience is and who he is trying to please (namely, King Charles III).

Hayden White reminds us that “when it comes to the task of storytelling, whether in historical or in literary writing, the traditional techniques of narration become unusable” – if narratives are not sufficient as tools for remembering an event, what are? One approach might be to understand these narratives as “fictions” and how can these fictions help us understand the themes of colonialism from Cortes’ time that persist to the present? Might environmental fictions be understood as the de facto truths associated with the environment (water, infrastructure, nature) and their technologies available at a specific period in time?

Ivonne del Valle describes how the Spanish were only able to construct the fiction of sovereignty through violence, yet were unable to master in such short space of time the intricacies of water management, she notes “each flood must have reminded the colonial authorities of their uncomfortable position as masters of a place they could not manage” (p.217) illustrating the paradox of power over a people, but not necessarily the knowledge to control its setting (the newly founded Mexico City).

The Evolution of Cities Infrastructure

What does the contemporary map tell us about Mexico City? Felipe Correa’s Mexico City: Between Geometry and Geography reveals the most extensive geometric imposition of human rationality on the landscape: infrastructure. These transportation infrastructures are illustrated on the micro, neighborhood, city, and regional scales. The many networks are interconnected. And those networks—especially juxtaposed to the Cortes’ narrative of conquest—appear at first glance to be a refreshingly objective or straightforward explanation of how the city has developed. Here, instead of narrative as text, Correa creates infrastructural images of stacked diagrams and renderings. However, the neutrality is itself a graphic narrative of the dominant city morphology. Instead of mapping the informal or the lost, the memory or the imaginary—creating thickness of all sorts—the map articulates its own formalized specificities. The map is itself a fiction generator.

Water and the Idea of Progress

The idea of progress is intimately entangled with water issues in Mexico City. In Joel Simon’s “The Sinking City,” Simon reveals how, due to water extraction from underground aquifers, the city has steadily been sinking over past decades – in some places as much as a foot a year! In his article, he traverses the theme of progress, industrialization, and both economic growth and environmental degradation. As a reader, we transition away from being at the bird’s-eye-view with Correa, we are now on the ground with Simon, literally following the infrastructural pipes out of the city and back to their sources. He travels the city for clues and builds a case about the terrible impact of population growth on air and water quality, which he contrasts against the backdrop of local pride in a modernizing Mexico. The apparent subjectivity of his account – feigning scientific accuracy amid patronizing claims against local cultural norms begs one to question; is the current model of environmentalism a neocolonial paradigm?