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When a group of Mexican film directors such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro made a big splash in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, their work was characterized as the second “Golden Age” of Mexican cinema, the first occurring in the 1930s and 1940s, represented by Alejandro Galindo and Emilio “El Indio” Fernández (Mora 1989). Both historical moments produced films labeled as quintessentially “Mexican” in content but also, less directly, in style and format, meaning the employment of images directed at a general, popular, public. Since the 1920s, Mexican art has been identified as, and expected to be, produced in media that are widely available to such a public, rather than in those associated with the privileged spaces of galleries and museums. Like film, the art forms treated in this chapter have that quality of the “popular,” of being made by and for a deliberately nonelite sensibility, aspiring to a large audience and searching for a social as well as an aesthetic base of acceptance.

Thus, this chapter considers images as densely constructed arguments that take highly polemical positions in the great debates of the day. As Robin Greeley claims for the mural painters, “they deployed a leftist realism that stressed the fundamental importance of popular agency to the functioning of the nation … when the need for public debate about the form of that … national identity was greatest” (Anreus et al. 2012, pp. 1–2). The issues of style, subject matter, visuality, and the ideology of the aesthetic form a platform from which to seek correspondences in the social realities of the day, casting that imagery as an agent of great consequence in its period.

The entire concept of “its period,” however, is vexing in itself, as it sprouts tentacles that can trap us entirely within the framework of periodization. The notion of art “of” and/or “after” the Mexican Revolution can limit the sorts of questions we can ask of our material, perhaps more so than of other art historical topics, that we might ignore many relevant issues of, for example, manufacture or internal facture or psychology of the images. The Mexican Revolution as an enclosing and self‐enclosing phenomenon hovers so heavily over us that we need to worry quite seriously about its limiting powers and about its suffocating “essentialism.” We need to conduct interventions against its hegemony.

Two statements by the art critic Roberto de la Selva in 1936 are quite telling in this respect. The first concerns the mural painters Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, that “they are makers of the Revolution. They have given…the Revolution corporeal form” (Selva 1936a), and the second, “An intelligent historian could begin by saying ‘The Mexican Revolution is justified by…’ and continue by pointing out mural after mural by Diego” (Selva 1936b). The collective sense of these statements is that the murals actually gave “form” to the revolution and that they have also “justified” it. My suggestion here is that the murals are given extraordinary power to define what the revolution had become by this time, but that they seem to define nothing else about painting or about Mexico. This sort of incestuous intellectual and historical consciousness is something to consider in our scholarship.

Since the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Mexico has been a country of paradox and enigma. With the election of Álvaro Obregón as president in 1920 relative social peace settled in and encouraged the government to apply the principles of the Constitution of 1917, which in some ways represented a progressive and enlightened form of government. The paradox appears when we realize that the actual policies of the revolutionary government were very close to those of Porfirio Díaz, the dictator overthrown by Francisco Madero and his followers in the first uprising. The daily life of most Mexicans was not changed by the revolution, nor were the upper classes removed from power. It seemed to many observers then and scholars of today that the revolutionary leaders, people like Madero and Obregón, were not interested in truly changing the social and political makeup of their country as much as they were in gaining and holding tremendous power and wealth for a new minority of elite, upper‐class Mexicans. In other words, to the nonelite Mexicans, the revolution was more façade than reality, and in order for the government to convince the general population that it was truly a revolutionary government, full of progressive ideas and programs that would improve quality of life for all citizens, it planned a program of propaganda to sell its message.

The government of Obregón produced such a program in order to give the Mexican people the impression that the nation would make progress toward democratization and modernization. The government office most capable of mounting such a campaign was the Ministry of Public Education, with its access to a large audience by means of the public schools. José Vasconcelos, the minister of public education, was given the crucial assignment of spreading the word of the benevolence of the regime. Vasconcelos first envisioned a massive project to teach all Mexicans to read and ordered translations of the great works of Western literature to be made available far and wide. It quickly became clear that the largely rural Mexican population was not ready for or interested in such a sudden and intense immersion in readings from mostly foreign sources.

Vasconcelos then devised a plan to employ visual images as part of his program. Very large paintings on the walls of buildings would be available to all who would visit government offices and schools. Large, publicly visible paintings would be more effective than the printed word in bringing the propagandistic messages of the Mexican government to its citizens, in this period of nation (read “regime”) building and identity formation on a massive social scale. Vasconcelos invited painters, architects, sculptors, and other visual artists to participate in his programs. The mural painters became part of a highly politicized context in which art operated during an extended period after 1920.

The three media considered in this chapter – mural paintings, prints, and photography – all played important roles in picturing Mexican life in its social, political, and more subjective and internal aspects. The aspiration to be socially involved and relevant is what ultimately links these media, otherwise so distinct in terms of scale and technology. That they superseded other art produced during this charged period, such as easel painting or sculpture, in the sheer attention of the public and critical eye says much about their assignment and acceptance to carry so much of the weight of social meaning. That we study and understand so much of what Mexico was like through these charged images confers on them a very special role.