Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico's Revolution

By Mónica M. Salas Landa

An examination of the failures of the Mexican Revolution through the visual and material records.

The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) introduced a series of state-led initiatives promising modernity, progress, national grandeur, and stability; state surveyors assessed land for agrarian reform, engineers used nationalized oil for industrialization, archaeologists reconstructed pre-Hispanic monuments for tourism, and anthropologists studied and photographed Indigenous populations to achieve their acculturation. Far from accomplishing their stated goals, however, these initiatives concealed violence, and permitted land invasions, forced displacement, environmental damage, loss of democratic freedom, and mass killings. Mónica M. Salas Landa uses the history of northern Veracruz to demonstrate how these state-led efforts reshaped the region's social and material landscapes, affecting what was and is visible. Relying on archival sources and ethnography, she uncovers a visual order of ongoing significance that was established through postrevolutionary projects and that perpetuates inequality based on imperceptibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781477328736

Book preview

VISUALIDADES: STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN VISUAL HISTORY

Jessica Stites Mor and Ernesto Capello, series editors

Also in the series

Caitlin Frances Bruce, Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico

VISIBLE RUINS

The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico’s Revolution

MÓNICA SALAS LANDA

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press

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First edition, 2024

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Salas Landa, Mónica M., author.

Title: Visible ruins : the politics of perception and the legacies of Mexico’s revolution / Mónica Salas Landa.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Series: Visualidades: studies in Latin American visual history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023043896 (print) | LCCN 2023043897 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2871-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2872-9 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2873-6 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mural painting and decoration—Political aspects—Mexico. | National characteristics, Mexican, in art—Political aspects—Mexico. | Nationalism and art—Mexico—Veracruz-Llave (State)—History—20th century. | Nation-building—Mexico—History—20th century. | Ruins, Modern—Political aspects—Mexico—Veracruz-Llave (State) | Mexico—History—Revolution, 1910–1920—Art and the revolution. | Mexico—History—Revolution, 1910–1920—Influence. | Mexico—Politics and government—History—20th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Latin America / Mexico

Classification: LCC NX650.M52 S25 2024 (print) | LCC NX650.M52 (ebook) | DDC 709.72/0904—dc23/eng/20231212

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043896

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043897

doi:10.7560/328712

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Governing through Perception

CHAPTER 1: Documents: The Aesthetics of Agrarian Reform

CHAPTER 2: Infrastructures: The Aesthetics of Economic Nationalism

CHAPTER 3: Pre-Hispanic Remains: The Aesthetics of Monumental Reconstruction

CHAPTER 4: Photographs: The Aesthetics of Indigenismo

EPILOGUE: Reconfiguring Dissent

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP

MAP 0.1. Lowlands of Northern Veracruz.

FIGURES

FIGURE 0.1A–B. Desde las primitivas labores agrícolas prehispánicas hasta el actual desarrollo petrolero; Pablo O’Higgins: Voz de lucha y arte.

FIGURE 1.1. J.M. Montoya, Plano del camino de Tlapacoyan a Jicaltepec.

FIGURE 2.1. President Lázaro Cárdenas visits Poza Rica.

FIGURE 2.2. Oil workers posing in front of a gas plant, circa 1945.

FIGURE 2.3. México Progresa.

FIGURE 2.4. Widows receiving fondos de defunción.

FIGURE 2.5. PEMEX Travel Club, 1959.

FIGURE 2.6. Spherical tanks.

FIGURE 2.7. PEMEX stamp, 1958.

FIGURE 2.8. Díaz Ordaz and others visit PEMEX.

FIGURE 2.9. The President visited infrastructure developments in Poza Rica.

FIGURE 2.10. Oil monuments in Poza Rica.

FIGURE 2.11. The goal is zero incidents.

FIGURE 2.12. Oil infrastructures in Poza Rica.

FIGURE 3.1. The clearing of great mounds of their cover of natural vegetation (desmonte).

FIGURE 3.2. The pyramid’s condition before restoration work.

FIGURE 3.3. Dismantling the niches.

FIGURE 3.4. Artificial stones.

FIGURE 3.5. Reconstructing the niches.

FIGURE 3.6. Monumental reconstruction.

FIGURE 3.7. The pyramid today.

FIGURE 3.8. Proyecto Nichos.

FIGURE 3.9. Julio 17 de 1959.

FIGURE 3.10. Ruins.

FIGURE 3.11. Beginning of the sendero.

FIGURE 4.1. Women weaving.

FIGURE 4.2. Wedding of Marcela Méndez and Florencio Santes.

FIGURE 4.3. Bride and groom.

FIGURE 4.4. Papantecas dressed in Totonac costume, circa 1934.

FIGURE 4.5. Volador dance.

FIGURE 4.6. Participants of the Mesa Redonda visit the archaeological site of Tajín in 1951.

FIGURE 4.7. Tajín voladores, 12 of 36.

FIGURE 4.8. Tajín voladores, 26 of 36.

FIGURE 4.9. Poster of Cumbre Tajín featuring voladores and the pyramid of Tajín.

FIGURE 4.10. Negrito dance.

FIGURE 4.11. Kelly in the field.

FIGURE 4.12A. Sones (music) by Agapito Pérez.

FIGURE 4.12B. Sketches by Agapito Pérez.

FIGURE 4.13. Vanilla, 1947.

FIGURE 5.1. Buscando nos encontramos todxs.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book benefited from the support, insight, and collaboration of many people. First, I would like to thank my interlocutors in the lowlands of northern Veracruz for generously sharing with me their knowledge, memories, and expectations for the future. For this and for the numerous friendships that I gained while working on this project, I am deeply grateful. Thanks especially go to Salomón Bazbaz, Gregorio Bernabé Hernández (1940–2017), Benjamin Blaisot, whose photographs are featured both on the cover and within this book. I am equally grateful to Ana Elba Alfani Cazarin, Victor García, Sergio Natan González, Don Narciso Hernández (1961–2019), Alejandra Jiménez, Miguel J. León, Roberto Pérez, Ramón Rosas, Jesús Trejo, Adolfo Vergara, and all members of the cooperative Lankasipi. In Poza Rica, I was fortunate to have met Eugenia and Chave Salazar in the early days of my fieldwork, and they became cherished friends who went out of their way to help me. Doña Micaela Juárez Danini welcomed me in her home in Papantla, and I want to thank her for her warmth and generosity. I also extend my thanks to everyone at the Centro de las Artes Indígenas (CAI) and at the Zona Arqueológica El Tajín for opening their doors to me.

My archival work in Mexico at the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz, the Museo Nacional de Antropología (ANMA), the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas, the Archivo Técnico del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ATINAH), and the Hemeroteca Nacional would not have been possible without assistance from archivists and staff. I am grateful for their generous support over the years. Thanks are especially due to the staff at the Archivo General de Veracruz, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, or INAH), and the Mapoteca Manuel Orozco y Berra for granting me permission to reproduce a number of images in this book. In the United States, I received helpful assistance from archivists and staff at the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution and at the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University. I want to thank you for all that you did for me: finding materials, digitizing them, and granting me permission to reproduce them.

Visible Ruins began as a doctoral dissertation at Cornell University and developed through intellectual engagement with mentors in both the anthropology and history departments. Marina Welker’s work on corporate forms and extractive industries resonated strongly with what I encountered in the field. I am extremely grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from her and for her friendship and advice. I also want to thank Ray Craib for his invaluable teachings, encouragement, and support over the years. His graduate seminars on Latin American history as well as his work on cartographic routines and the forging of the modern Mexican state have deeply influenced my own work. Adam Smith’s interest in the material world was key in shaping the methodology of my research, as well as the theoretical lens that informs this book. I want to thank him for encouraging me to cultivate an archaeological sensibility and to take seriously our sensory experiences and the materiality of our political lives. At Cornell, I was also fortunate to participate in the 2014 Summer Institute on Contested Global Landscapes coordinated by Sara Pritchard, Steven Wolf, and Wendy Wolford. I want to thank them and the rest of the participants, especially Bikrum Gill and Kara Schlichting, for all of the wonderful conversations and feedback that helped me develop this project.

Since my leaving Cornell, many colleagues and institutions supported me in bringing this book to fruition. A postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center in 2015–2016 provided time and an intellectual community to begin working on the book manuscript. I am thankful to Homi Bhabha and Steven Biel for giving me the opportunity to join the center, and to the staff members for making sure we had everything we needed. For their engagement with my work during the time of our fellowship, I thank Konstanze Baron, Matthew Baxter, Nils Bock, Zain Lakhani, Mira Rai Waits, and especially Trais Pearson, who has remained a source of advice, encouragement, and intellectual exchange. Kirsten Weld and Ann Laura Stoler, two scholars whose works have deeply influenced my own, likewise shared insightful comments and ideas with me during this time, and I want to thank them both for that. Xenia Cherkaev, Rishad Choudhury, Hayden Kantor, Roanne Kantor, Casey Lurtz, Trais Pearson, Will Thomson, and Carlos Yescas not only warmly welcomed me to Boston but also created an intellectual community that made my time in Cambridge memorable.

At Lafayette College, I have benefited from the support and friendship of my colleagues in the Anthropology and Sociology Department. Rebecca Kissane, Rui Jie Peng, Howard Schneiderman, David Shulman, and Carlos Tavares have offered advice and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Bill Bissell, Caroline Lee, Andrea Smith, and Neha Vora for reading versions of this manuscript, providing feedback, and for their overall support as I finished this project. I also want to thank my friends and colleagues Robert Blunt, Rachel Goshgarian, Hafsa Kanjwal, Charlotte Nunes, Daniel Quirós, Olga Rodríguez Ulloa, Lijuan Xu, and Jeremy Zallen for their support, encouragement, and camaraderie, as well as John Clark for his map-making help. Ayat Husseini, Lauren Phillips-Jackson, Becca Scott, Nina Weissback, and the students in the course on Latin American ethnography, I want to thank you, too, for the space we built together in the classroom, where we discussed many of the ideas I present here.

This work benefited significantly from discussions in a number of research groups, workshops, coloquios, and conferences across disciplines, areas of academic focus, and geographical regions. My thanks go to the members of the Oil Cultures of the Middle East and Latin America (OCMELA) research group for their enthusiastic reception of my work and for their generous feedback. For helping me sharpen the arguments that this book puts forward, I also want to thank the organizers, discussants, and participants of the Aesthetics of Latin American Technology Working Group in 2022–2023; the Latin American Visual Histories Workshop in 2022; the seminar on indigeneity sponsored by the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University and the Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades (CEIICH) at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2022; the colloquium of the Society of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology in 2021; the Comparative Americas Conference at the University of Rochester in 2019; the coloquio Ciencias del Estado/Estado de las Ciencias at CEIICH-UNAM in 2019; the Andre W. Mellon Seminar on Violence and Non-violence at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University in 2018, the seminario permanente Antropología, Poder y Ruralidades at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas at UNAM in 2017; and the Taller de Etnografía of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Colegio de México in 2016.

I also received helpful comments and feedback at the meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2022; the XVI Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México in 2022; the American Association of Geographers in 2022; the Society for the History of Technology in 2021; the Latin American Studies Association in 2018; the American Association of Environmental Historians in 2017 and 2018; the American Anthropological Association in 2016 and 2017; and the American Ethnological Society in 2015. Special thanks go to Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda, Miruna Achim, Andrea Ballestero, Mattin Biglari, Chris Boyer, Ronda Brulotte, Christina Bueno, Eduardo Cadava, Ernesto Capello, Amy Cox Hall, Dafne Cruz Porchini, Alexander Dawson, Julio Díaz, Shane Dillingham, Ángeles Donoso Macaya, Jennifer Eaglin, Ryan Edwards, José Luis Escalona Victoria, Alex Fattal, Joseph P. Feldman, Nelida Fuccaro, Vivette García Deister, Rocio Gomez, Columba González Duarte, Gastón Gordillo, Kyle Harvey, Mark Healy, Kregg Hetherington, Laura Hindelang, Sam Holley-Kline, Aaron Kappeler, Richard Kernaghan, Moisés Kopper, Pablo Landa, Alejandra Leal Martínez, Paul Liffman, Paula López Caballero, Haydeé López Hernández, Isaiah Lorado Wilner, Casey Lurtz, Fiona McDonald, Heather McLean, Kathleen M. Millar, Vicente Moctezuma Mendoza, Diana Montaño, Johannes Neurath, Yovanna Pineda, Sebastián Ramírez, Daniel Reichman, François G. Richard, Sonia Robles, María Esperanza Rojo Jiménez, Susana Romero Sánchez, Karin Rosemblatt, Sandra Rozental, Robert Samet, Clare A. Sammells, Iván Sandoval, David Seitz, Nitzan Shoshan, Manuel Silva-Ferrer, Sanaz Sohrabi, Jessica Stites Mor, Will Thomson, Camilo Trumper, Paola Velasco Santos, Germán Vergara, Mathew Vitz, Adam Warren, Kirsten Weld, Mikael Wolfe, Lesley Wolff, Tony Wood, Carlos Yescas, Gabriela Zamorano, and Katie Zien.

I am especially grateful to Luis Herrán Ávila, Paula López Caballero, Trais Pearson, Iván Sandoval, and Sandra Rozental, who have engaged with my work over the years. They read and reread portions of the manuscript, provided invaluable feedback, and supported me with their friendship. Christina Bueno, Amy Cox Hall, and Jessica Stites, whose work I have long admired, warrant special thanks: their generous reading of this manuscript, incisive comments, and critical suggestions helped me improve the final version of this book—any remaining flaws and shortcomings, of course, are my own. I also want to express my thanks to Kerry Webb at University of Texas Press for embracing this project with such enthusiasm, to Bruce Bethell, Victoria Davis, Sandra Spicher, Christina Vargas, and Lisa Williams for their expert assistance, and to the editors of the series Visualidades, Jessica Stites and Ernesto Capello, for taking on this project.

The research, writing, and publication of this book were possible thanks to the financial support of several institutions. I am profoundly grateful to the Department of Anthropology, the Latin American Studies Program, and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University for funding my research in Mexico from 2009 to 2014; to the Smithsonian Department of Anthropology and the National Science Foundation for allowing me to conduct museum research thanks to a SIMA Fellowship in 2010; to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant in 2012–2013; to Harvard University for a research fellowship in 2015–2016; and to Lafayette College for awarding me the Catherine R. Scott Research Fellowship in addition to numerous faculty research and publication grants between 2017 and 2022.

This book has a personal origin and is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Heriberto Landa Hernández, Julia Olivares Alba, Cirilo Salas Huesca, and Mercedes Torres Marín. Each of them lived revolutionary twentieth-century lives while experiencing the transformations that this book examines. Despite all odds, they gave my parents the opportunity to live more comfortable lives. I am thankful for the world they made possible for all of us.

It is to my sister, parents, and partner that my most profound thanks go. Their love and support made it possible for me to complete this project. My sister, Tania Salas Landa, not only encouraged me to pursue doctoral work but has kept me laughing and focused. My parents, Irma Landa Olivares and José Luis Salas Torres, taught me invaluable lessons about Mexican history as they shared with me so many anecdotes and experiences of growing up in the 1950s, of the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, and of the series of economic crises that followed. Their political and environmental activism, their dedication to careers at state institutions, and the family histories and documents they have shared with me were likewise formative in my appreciation and commitment to studying the legacies of Mexico’s dead revolution. I also want to express my gratitude for the carefully chosen book collection they assembled as I was growing up in Xalapa and for giving me the opportunity to explore it and nurture my interest in it. I don’t think I have ever thanked them for that gift. I can now see how much that book collection has shaped me. And finally, thank you, Tim Haupt. Nobody has seen this book develop as closely as you have. Thank you for engaging with its ideas, for helping me hone many of the book’s insights, for your careful reading of different versions, and for helping me be a better writer. This book is yours as much as it is mine.

INTRODUCTION

GOVERNING THROUGH PERCEPTION

The consensus that governs us is a machine of power insofar as it is a machine of vision.

JACQUES RANCIÈRE, CHRONICLES OF CONSENSUAL TIMES

THE AESTHETICS OF THE REVOLUTION

In the summer of 1958, American-born artist Pablo O’Higgins (1904–1983) learned that his mural project for Mexico’s most important oil-producing center, the city of Poza Rica, in the state of Veracruz, had been selected as the winner of a national competition.¹ By this time, O’Higgins had already made a name for himself in Mexico’s art scene. In 1924, after leaving the Academy of Arts in San Diego, he moved to Mexico City. Like many other artists, he was drawn by the mural renaissance unfolding in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and by the commitment to popular struggle, social justice, and radical politics that animated this form of public art.² Upon arrival in Mexico, O’Higgins began his career assisting Diego Rivera (1886–1957) in the completion of his now-iconic murals at the Ministry of Public Education (1923–1928) and at the National School of Agriculture (1924–1927).³ By the 1930s, however, O’Higgins’s own posters, prints, and illustrations—the output of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (The People’s Print Workshop)—were already widely disseminated.⁴ All the while his didactic mural compositions began to be publicly admired as they decorated schools, markets, and union headquarters throughout the country, from Mexico City to Morelia.⁵

During the following decade, as Mexican muralism received unparalleled state support, O’Higgins continued to work on several mural commissions. By midcentury, the monumental works on public walls that O’Higgins and others produced were already considered a venerated national art form.⁶ Murals, as Mary Coffey argues, were integrated into a burgeoning governmental infrastructure of public museums, in addition to banks, hospitals, federal housing projects, schools, and ministry buildings.⁷ This boom, which the self-promoting state and its ruling and authoritarian party, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), encouraged, reached a high point in 1958: the year that O’Higgins began working in the lowlands of northern Veracruz.⁸

Desde las primitivas labores agrícolas prehispánicas hasta el actual desarrollo industrial petrolero (From the Primitive Pre-Hispanic Agricultural Work to the Current Oil Development), the title of O’Higgins’s mural for Poza Rica, celebrates almost two decades of dramatic state-led industrialization and modernization in the oil city. On the left of his sketch, the viewer sees the profile of a rural cultivator who, machete in hand, traverses a field of pre-Hispanic ruins. This ruinous landscape, intended to signify historical depth, is, however, not completely inert: out of a collapsed and partially unearthed stone sculpture, a lively speech scroll emerges, suggesting an indigenous presence in the region but one that eventually dissipates once it is absorbed by overgrown vegetation from which a pair of strong hands emerges. Both hands carry modern tools with which an industrial landscape is built. In the final scene, an economic and cultural transformation appears to have been achieved: the rural dweller ceding way to the industrial worker, whose figure is almost eclipsed by the city’s imposing and perfectly aligned oil infrastructure.⁹

In tune with the optimism that the revolutionary regime promoted during a period of economic bonanza, the so-called Mexican Miracle (1940s–1970s), it is unsurprising that O’Higgins proposed to represent Poza Rica’s emblematic oil derricks, storage tanks, and pipelines as the end point of a long path leading to the technical, improved, and prosperous industrial present.¹⁰ But it was not only this imagery or even O’Higgins’s stature as a recognized figure of Mexican modernism that led the city to choose his design. A determining factor was his innovative combination of materials and technique: instead of painting the facade of Poza Rica’s city hall directly, O’Higgins proposed to hand-paint, fire, and assemble thousands of ceramic tiles to ensure the mural’s durability in spite of the heat and humidity that characterize this region of tierra caliente.¹¹ Seen from afar, however, the mural’s constitutive fragments would become indistinguishable, giving viewers a reassuring perception of wholeness and integrity despite the principle of fragmentation that guided the mural’s construction.

According to established interpretations of Mexican muralismo, O’Higgins’s mural for Poza Rica can be best understood as a technique of governance: as an effective instrument to diffuse the ideology of revolutionary nationalism to the public.¹² In line with this interpretation, both the placement of the mural (in Poza Rica’s city hall) and its unmistakably teleological narrative (which is confirmed by the mural’s title) work together to represent the revolutionary regime not only as a generous patron of artistic production but also as a guarantor of progress and industrial development. It is by displaying this set of nationalist ideas and ideals that O’Higgins’s mural, and muralism more broadly, appears to have contributed to the consolidation of Mexico’s postrevolutionary state.

FIGURE 0.1 A–B. Pablo O’ Higgins, Desde las primitivas labores agrícolas prehispánicas hasta el actual desarrollo petrolero, 1958. Sketch, detail. Pencil and charcoal on millimeter paper, 80 × 519 cm. Pablo O’Higgins: Voz de lucha y arte. Mexico City: Antigüo Colegio de San Ildefonso and Palacio de Minería in association with the Fundación Cultural María y Pablo O’Higgins, 2005. Exhibition catalog.

However, this interpretation of O’Higgins’s mural, which takes it as a mere manifestation of the postrevolutionary state’s ideology, overlooks the artist’s distinctive work process: not only his embrace of fragmentation but also his reliance on existing local landscapes, which he captured in his sketches during his exploratory road trips to the areas he intended to depict in his mural work.¹³ If his field sketching is recognized, the successive and progressive character attributed to his Poza Rica mural can be put into question, opening in turn the possibility for an alternative reading of it. Hence, drawing on O’Higgins’s work process, I suggest that rather than archetypes of historical stages, one supplanting the other, O’Higgins’s mural composition portrays contemporaneous scenes. And what these scenes showcase is not just statist imaginings but actual details of how the project of the Revolution, those exemplary policies that had granted the revolutionary regime a significant degree of legitimacy and predominance in national political life, visibly transformed the basins of the Nautla, Tecolutla, and Cazones Rivers.¹⁴ O’Higgins’s mural, in other words, gives us an indication of how the project of the Revolution reordered the social and material landscapes of the region and in doing so conditioned what was and is possible to see. A brief review of these policies can help envision the extent of the changes that O’Higgins witnessed in the region and then captured in his mural sketch.

At the outset the project of the Revolution meant agrarian reform, as the inclusion of the figure of the rural cultivator in O’Higgins’s mural suggests. In the years prior to the revolution, by the end of the Porfiriato (1876–1911), the fertile lowlands of northern Veracruz were almost entirely the property of immigrant merchant capitalists. However, following the new Agrarian Law of 1915, the lands became subject to expropriation.¹⁵ During the armed phase of the revolution, peasant rebels made reversing the liberal model of private landholding one of their key demands. Thus, the revolutionary agrarian reform allowed campesinos to hold land collectively in the form of ejidos, inalienable concessions of land granted by the state. During the waning years of armed conflict (1915–1920) and the early years of state reconstruction (1920–1930s), state-led efforts to implement ejidos in the region advanced with a significant degree of success.

By midcentury, however, ejidos were less visible. The transfer of tillable and grazable land to peasants had slowed down due to the state’s support for cattle ranching, which tended to favor larger and privately owned estates, on the one hand, and a renewed interest in promoting economic growth on coastal land, on the other. Despite the increased visibility of small private estates at the time O’Higgins worked on his mural project, land surveyors, aligned with the agrarian reform movement, continued to traverse the region. They evaluated the nature of landholdings and produced a vast amount of paperwork, because various groups of dispossessed campesinos continued to request ejido land through legal channels.¹⁶

But state surveyors and dispossessed campesinos were not the only ones crisscrossing the rural landscape at the time of O’Higgins’s visit. Oil workers and engineers of the state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), did too. As a result of the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938, as well as Mexico’s subsequent enthusiastic adoption of the development strategy known as import substitution industrialization (ISI), Poza Rica became the heart of the Mexican oil industry during the 1950s. Once a remote oil field employing less than two hundred workers, by 1951 Poza Rica began to grow as an industrial center with approximately thirty-five thousand residents. Its unending infrastructure developments dotted the city’s landscapes and gave it the industrial appearance that O’Higgins captured in the mural’s final scene.¹⁷

Technical and urban infrastructures, however, were not the only construction projects underway in the lowlands of northern Veracruz. Beginning in 1929 experts in the excavation and conservation of pre-Hispanic monuments set to work on the restoration of the main pyramid of Tajín, a fragile and jungle-covered structure located fifteen kilometers south of the oil city of Poza Rica and clearly represented in O’Higgins’s mural. These conservation efforts were part of a long-standing nationalist effort to reconstruct the pre-Hispanic past and forge with it a set of cultural values and an official version of history. This attempt to celebrate an abstract notion of indigenous people and culture located securely in the past, was an important component of state-led indigenismo, or the infusion of selected aspects of Mexico’s indigenous cultures into a nationalist cultural project.¹⁸ Yet by 1958, after thirty years of relentless archaeological intervention and despite PEMEX’s provisional technical and financial support, the pyramid of Tajín was far from being completed. Multiple cuadrillas of local men under the direction of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, or INAH) continued to re-create, out of fragments, the monumentality that the postrevolutionary state necessitated not only to communicate a sense of national stability, historical precedent, and grandeur but also to foster economic development through tourism in the region.

It was in this context that the Totonac-speaking population living in the shadow of the pyramid started to become more visible, too, as O’Higgins’s inclusion of a speech scroll in his mural illustrates. Postrevolutionary indigenismo, after all, was concerned not only with the preservation of the pre-Hispanic past but also with the acculturation and incorporation of the living indigenous population into the national mainstream.¹⁹ In 1947 this assimilationist aim had led a group of anthropologists from the National School of Anthropology and History (Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, or ENAH) and the Smithsonian Institution to settle in the Totonac-speaking community of Tajín for eight months of ethnographic fieldwork. As the project’s photographs began circulating outside the field, they began to provide scientific and material evidence of the alterity of the local population. By the late 1950s, when O’Higgins visited the area, a selection of cultural manifestations was further exposed and commercialized through an emerging cultural tourism industry, which was based not only on the monumentality of the pre-Hispanic past but also on images of folkloric authenticity.²⁰

Against the backdrop of these significant transformations, we can recognize how the implementation of postrevolutionary agrarian reform, economic nationalism, and indigenismo made certain qualities, forms, and features in the area visible, from large grazing areas to spectacular oil infrastructures and from the monumentality of a pre-Hispanic pyramid to the alterity of the local indigenous population. These were qualities, forms, and features that the PRI regime favored and deemed worthy of perception and that O’Higgins’s public art reproduced and helped naturalize. But given that the process of reshaping a visual field involves interventions that lead not just to new modes of appearance but also to new modes of occlusion, attending to what was excluded from the visual configuration that O’Higgins represented acquires particular relevance. What lay beyond the elements that caught O’Higgins’s perceptive attention? What or whom was he unable to see? What are the political effects of such concealment?²¹

If we account for O’Higgins’s perceptual choices and omissions, we can then see that From the Primitive Pre-Hispanic Agricultural Work to the Current Oil Development lays bare something more than the nationalist aesthetics or the aesthetic statism of the postwar period (i.e., the normative ways in which government officials used mural art by midcentury to disseminate nationalist ideologies). It lays bare, too, the aesthetic dimension of governance.²² This aesthetic dimension, following Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the term, refers neither to the state’s use of art nor to the state’s role in shaping art’s theories or principles.²³ Rather, it refers to the state’s more encompassing authority to envision and then fabricate a common world of perceiving through the creation of borders between the visible and the invisible.²⁴ A product of concrete micropolitical strategies that divide what is visible from what is not, a visual order (which Nicholas Mirzoeff calls visuality) sustains a fundamental inequality based on imperceptibility.²⁵ It follows that for Rancière, as well as Mirzoeff, the essence of politics resides in those acts of dissensus or counter-visuality that challenge, interrupt, or confront a governing aesthetic configuration, by rendering visible what has been excluded from the perceptual field.²⁶

By placing aesthetics and perception at the center of this book’s conceptual framework, I build on two dominant perspectives that have guided the study of the relation between vision and power in Latin America. Drawing on an important body of work attentive to the workings of colonial and modern ways of seeing, scholars have analyzed practices in illustration, cartography, photography, architecture, and writing as a way to examine how rule over humans and the environment has been asserted through vision.²⁷ Equally influential have been decolonial theorizations, which have led scholars to privilege instead those submerged and opaque perspectives and views that exist outside of hegemonic visual regimes.²⁸

In this book I seek not only to bring these perspectives into closer conversation but also to foreground a more complex, nuanced, and ambivalent set of everyday practices that have configured and reconfigured a governing field of vision. I will try to show how what is visible and what is not are the result of distinct political operations that are often carried out jointly and simultaneously to promote and hinder state control in various spaces. In doing so, visibility is presented not as an immutable condition or a fixed state effect but as the result of practice, and therefore as something vulnerable and contingent.²⁹ Attending, then, to the politics of perception—that is, to the configuration and reconfiguration of governing modes of visibility—can help us uncover how unequal aesthetic orders are established, are disrupted, and also, as this book will make clear, persist, even after the governing regimes that institute them succumb.

In the following pages, I look at how these political processes unfolded in the lowlands of northern Veracruz. As shown, this region was of strategic importance for state and national postrevolutionary administrations due to its coastal land, rich oil deposits, archaeological remnants, and indigenous population. Specifically, this book examines the aesthetic dimension of postrevolutionary state-making by revisiting historically and ethnographically the landscapes that O’Higgins observed and represented in his 1958 mural for the oil city of Poza Rica. The history of how the visual order that O’Higgins captured was brought about, maintained, and contested over periods of radical reform during the 1920s and 1930s, of state consolidation during the 1940s and 1960s, and up until the 1970s, when the facade of economic prosperity and political stability belonging to the midcentury economic bonanza began to dissipate, is one story this book tells.

The second story reveals how this visual configuration endured even after Mexico’s institutionalized revolution came to an end, that is, after major changes in the economic and political systems during the late twentieth century led first to the replacement of the state-led development model with neoliberal reform (1980s and 1990s) and then to the PRI’s electoral defeat to the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN) in 2000, a defeat that put an end to the PRI’s seven decades of continuous rule.³⁰ Even the return to power of the ghost of the PRI in 2013 was not enough to revive the project of the Revolution. Yet, despite its downfall and collapse, the workings of the dominant (even if contested) visual order that the project of the Revolution established would continue to affect those living among the many ruins it left behind.³¹

REVOLUTIONARY RUINS

That the PRI had returned without its revolutionary principles, social welfare provisioning, and redistributive reforms was made clear by President Enrique Peña Nieto during the celebration of the ninety-eighth anniversary of the Agrarian Law of 1915. The event took place in the port city of Veracruz on January 6, 2013, only days after Peña Nieto initiated his presidential term.³² I am here to commemorate an important date for Mexican campesinos, Peña Nieto pronounced before hundreds of national representatives of one of the corporatist pillars of the PRI, the National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesina, or CNC), as well as before a selected group of politically aligned governors and the leader of his party. Cheered by the applause of the audience, he proceeded to retell a brief summary of Mexico’s official revolutionary history. It was here, in Veracruz, where Venustiano Carranza, first chief of the Constitutionalist Army, promulgated the decree that mandated the restitution of land to those villages and pueblos that had claimed them from time immemorial. It was by addressing the main source of rural discontent, and thus one of the main causes of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Peña Nieto added, that the Agrarian Law of 1915 established a new development model, which reversed the negative impact of the oligarchic regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), the liberal laws it endorsed, and the large haciendas it supported.

Yet, after briefly acknowledging the law’s historical importance and former transformative potential, Peña Nieto moved quickly to