“Presencia de America Latina” (1964-1965), a 300-square-metre mural of painted in acrylics on stucco by Jorge González Camarena (1908-1980), located in the Casa del Arte of the University of Conceptión, Conceptión, Chile.
The conservative tendency to leave the public square and the realm of art—the mural—blank for someone else to paint on has done society no favours.
Political consciousness, representative institutions, nationhood—these are aesthetic realities, not merely geographically-determined utilitarian structures.
As such, Early Modern Spain congealed in Cervantes’ personification of this country and her ancestral origin in his Siege of Numancia.
Literary depictions of this kind often escape linear narrative as they long to capture a single image, a hieroglyph in which the forgers of an identity across the ages may meet, as when Cervantes brings Emperor Charles V and his son King Philip II into the sweep of a Pre-Roman legacy. In Virgil, this tendency is made concrete when the poet summarises the whole ideal of Roman history in the graven image on the Vulcan-forged shield of Aeneas, Rome’s Trojan founder.
We find the same desire to make the temporal spatial, to take the whole of a nation’s history and fit it into a single ‘day of judgement,’ so to speak, in the mural painting tradition, few of whose exemplars were as effective as the Mexican Jorge González Camarena.
His Constitucion de 1917, together with other works, glorifies Mexico, but he also tried his hand at depicting wider circles, from Latin America to the whole of humanity.
The latter occurs in Las Razas y Cultura, where he selects 14 women as representatives of every human ethnicity, placing a 15th and her golden embryo as a kind of future amalgam, reminding us of the artist’s countryman, Vasconcelos, who fantasised of a future ‘cosmic race,’—or, perhaps, the central mother and her child can be interpreted as presenting humanity’s present, archetypal unity.
As for Spanish-speaking America, we find her history summarised in Camarena’s Presencia de America Latina, a mural in Concepcion, Chile.
In front of it, the Meso-American feathered serpent adorns an actual staircase in the hall, as though the spiritual axis of America remained tied to pre-Columbine symbols, reinterpreted, perhaps, but not discarded.
The mural features a conquistador fighting an Aztec eagle-knight, while another armoured (and, crucially, faceless) Spaniard walks together with an indigenous woman: what Camarena called “the original couple”—parents to America’s Mestizo population.
The whole scene unfolds between two birds, the eagle on the Mexican flag on one end, and Chile’s national bird, the condor, on the other.
In between these, we find a multi-coloured psychedelia of faces, all eminently indigenous, as is the work’s humble centre-piece, a naked woman beneath a partially rendered Greco-Roman column.
In the end, the European legacy is integrated, as shown by the presence of its architecture, and the honouring of the “original couple,” but it seems that for Camarena—or in the visual language of his mural, at least—the future of a united Latin America, from the Mexican eagle to the Chilean condor, consists of resurgent indigenous identity, integrating, rather than being integrated into, European cultural forms.
Camarena’s ideological commitments aside, his Romantic coming to terms with the past, summarising of an identity, and effective communication of a vision for the future, is worth noting.
We live in a technocratic age in which policy decisions are most frequently presented as an absolute necessity to ward off coming catastrophes (terrorism, climate change, COVID-19 infection). What Ortega y Gasset called “the persuasive project of a life in common,” which he believed politics should consist of, is either lost in the bullying clamour of apocalyptic narratives or reduced to futuristic naivete quite unwilling to celebrate history.
Conservatives, for their part, have often been weary of reacting against the hegemony of deconstructivist ‘progress’ with anything other than anodyne, utilitarian economic arguments. In the West, some of this stems from an understandable scepticism towards political propaganda, albeit we are now subject to a crassly propagandistic cultural onslaught.
Indeed, leaving the public square and the realm of art—the mural—blank for someone else to paint on, has done us no favours.
Inspiration may be drawn from the Mexican muralist tradition in pursuing a renewed artistic project, including the aestheticization of history and depictions of wholesome visions for the future.
Carlos Perona Calvete is a writer for The European Conservative. He has a background in International Relations and Organizational Behavior, has worked in the field of European project management, and is the author of Meta-Politics: City of God, cities of men (Angelico Press, 2023), in which he explores the metaphysics of political representation.
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Claiming the Walls: Thoughts on Mexican Muralism
“Presencia de America Latina” (1964-1965), a 300-square-metre mural of painted in acrylics on stucco by Jorge González Camarena (1908-1980), located in the Casa del Arte of the University of Conceptión, Conceptión, Chile.
Political consciousness, representative institutions, nationhood—these are aesthetic realities, not merely geographically-determined utilitarian structures.
As such, Early Modern Spain congealed in Cervantes’ personification of this country and her ancestral origin in his Siege of Numancia.
Literary depictions of this kind often escape linear narrative as they long to capture a single image, a hieroglyph in which the forgers of an identity across the ages may meet, as when Cervantes brings Emperor Charles V and his son King Philip II into the sweep of a Pre-Roman legacy. In Virgil, this tendency is made concrete when the poet summarises the whole ideal of Roman history in the graven image on the Vulcan-forged shield of Aeneas, Rome’s Trojan founder.
We find the same desire to make the temporal spatial, to take the whole of a nation’s history and fit it into a single ‘day of judgement,’ so to speak, in the mural painting tradition, few of whose exemplars were as effective as the Mexican Jorge González Camarena.
His Constitucion de 1917, together with other works, glorifies Mexico, but he also tried his hand at depicting wider circles, from Latin America to the whole of humanity.
The latter occurs in Las Razas y Cultura, where he selects 14 women as representatives of every human ethnicity, placing a 15th and her golden embryo as a kind of future amalgam, reminding us of the artist’s countryman, Vasconcelos, who fantasised of a future ‘cosmic race,’—or, perhaps, the central mother and her child can be interpreted as presenting humanity’s present, archetypal unity.
As for Spanish-speaking America, we find her history summarised in Camarena’s Presencia de America Latina, a mural in Concepcion, Chile.
In front of it, the Meso-American feathered serpent adorns an actual staircase in the hall, as though the spiritual axis of America remained tied to pre-Columbine symbols, reinterpreted, perhaps, but not discarded.
The mural features a conquistador fighting an Aztec eagle-knight, while another armoured (and, crucially, faceless) Spaniard walks together with an indigenous woman: what Camarena called “the original couple”—parents to America’s Mestizo population.
The whole scene unfolds between two birds, the eagle on the Mexican flag on one end, and Chile’s national bird, the condor, on the other.
In between these, we find a multi-coloured psychedelia of faces, all eminently indigenous, as is the work’s humble centre-piece, a naked woman beneath a partially rendered Greco-Roman column.
In the end, the European legacy is integrated, as shown by the presence of its architecture, and the honouring of the “original couple,” but it seems that for Camarena—or in the visual language of his mural, at least—the future of a united Latin America, from the Mexican eagle to the Chilean condor, consists of resurgent indigenous identity, integrating, rather than being integrated into, European cultural forms.
Camarena’s ideological commitments aside, his Romantic coming to terms with the past, summarising of an identity, and effective communication of a vision for the future, is worth noting.
We live in a technocratic age in which policy decisions are most frequently presented as an absolute necessity to ward off coming catastrophes (terrorism, climate change, COVID-19 infection). What Ortega y Gasset called “the persuasive project of a life in common,” which he believed politics should consist of, is either lost in the bullying clamour of apocalyptic narratives or reduced to futuristic naivete quite unwilling to celebrate history.
Conservatives, for their part, have often been weary of reacting against the hegemony of deconstructivist ‘progress’ with anything other than anodyne, utilitarian economic arguments. In the West, some of this stems from an understandable scepticism towards political propaganda, albeit we are now subject to a crassly propagandistic cultural onslaught.
Indeed, leaving the public square and the realm of art—the mural—blank for someone else to paint on, has done us no favours.
Inspiration may be drawn from the Mexican muralist tradition in pursuing a renewed artistic project, including the aestheticization of history and depictions of wholesome visions for the future.
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