Volcanoes, Piñatas, and the Revolutionary Nationalist Aesthetic:
Mexican Child Artists as Inter-American Cultural Diplomats, 1930s 

Elena Jackson Albarrán
Miami University of Ohio 

Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, art education reformers set out to train the new generation of Mexicans to depict a national aesthetic, following a new pseudoscientific method steeped in archaeology, ethnography, and anthropology devised by Adolfo Best Maugard. The curriculum was put in place in 1921.  By the 1930s, Mexican children were well-versed in producing “authentic” Mexican art, and began to enjoy international acclaim for their honed technique and distinctly nationalist brand.  Children learned to assemble modernized motifs extracted from pre-Columbian architecture, landscape features like the smoldering volcano Popocatépetl, and local flora and fauna into their artistic production.  Their works were subsequently publicized nationally and abroad as part of a concerted program to forge a national visual vocabulary.  In particular, the government-run children’s art magazine Pulgarcito sponsored international exchanges of art in the spirit of bolstering the Mexican image abroad, while fostering fraternal cultural exchange among children.  Correspondents from the Junior Red Cross Journal traveled to Mexico to marvel at the works of child muralists, and young American readers at home began to imagine Mexico as painted by its children: colorful, primitive, and indigenous.  This, in turn, informed the visual cultural production about Mexico in popular U.S. cultural outlets for children, resulting in a monolithic representation of the country.  Meanwhile, the stylized piñatas, charros, and chinas poblanas that traveled across borders as cultural diplomatic agents masked the diversity, and often adversity, of the Mexican experience behind a spirited nationalist facade. In this paper, a close analysis of Mexican children’s artistic production will place it in the context of the revolutionary nationalist art curriculum, nascent Pan-American auspices, and the globalization of national aesthetics in the 1930s.