>> Sara Duke: I'd like
to welcome all of you.
It is wonderful to
see a large turnout.
My name is Sara Duke and I
am the curator of popular
and applied graphic art in the
Prints and Photographs Division
of the Library of Congress.
Before we get started,
please humor me and tell me
from where you are
joining us today,
and whether you've ever used
the collections of the Library
of Congress, either
virtually or in person.
Please put your answers
into the chat.
Today's program is
sponsored by the Prints
and Photographs Division,
which has hosted the Swann
Fellowship program for 25 years.
It is my pleasure to
introduce the speaker today,
but before I do, I'd
like to say a few words
about the Swann Foundation.
The Swann Fellowship is
one of the few programs
in the United States dedicated
to funding graduate students
and post-grads in any field
in caricature and cartoon.
The Swann board encourages
research in a variety
of academic disciplines,
so as long as fellows
focus on the art form.
Swann fellows must spend at
least two weeks in residence
at the Library of Congress
consulting caricature
and cartoon collections,
and donate to the Library
of Congress one copy
of any publication
that arises from their research.
This event is being recorded
for future broadcast.
Neither the chat nor
the Q&A will be part
of the subsequent broadcast.
Please use the Q&A to post
questions to Dr. Romero.
The Swann board, when
awarding fellowships,
selectively invites individuals
to speak at the Library
and present their
work in progress.
We are very fortunate to
have Dr. Rosalia Romero
with us today.
Dr. Romero is an assistant
professor of art history
at Pomona College in
Claremont, California.
She earned her BA
from the University
of California-San Diego before
heading east to earn her MA
and PhD from Duke
University's Department
of Art History and
Visual Studies.
Her presentation today,
Anarchism, Revolutionary Art
and the US-Mexico Border
1910 to 1920 is based
on her PhD dissertation
as she examines the
role anarchism played
in the modernist
art movement during
and after the Mexican
Revolution.
My predecessor, Martha Kennedy,
who shepherded many fellows
through their research,
retired last year and turned
over the administration
of the program to me.
One of my delights earlier this
month was sharing the Goldstein
and Willner collections
with Dr. Romero.
I look forward to hearing
her work in progress,
and I know you do too.
Dr. Romero, I turn the
program over to you.
>> Rosalia Romero:
Thank you so much, Sara,
for your generous introduction.
Before I get started,
I'd like to take a moment
to thank the Swann Foundation
at the Library of Congress
for the opportunity to
research in the Prints
and Photographs Division,
and for organizing
this virtual forum.
I'd like to give a
special thanks to Sara Duke
for organizing my fellowship and
for sharing her expert knowledge
of the collection with me during
my two-week residency in DC.
It was an incredibly productive
and exciting research period.
I was awarded the Swann
Foundation Fellowship in summer
of 2020, and it really wasn't
until now that I was able
to travel to DC, but I
have to say that it was --
you know, because it was such
an exciting research period,
it was definitely
worth the wait.
I'd also like to thank the
Kluge Center at the Library
of Congress for welcoming
me into their community
of scholars during my fellowship
period, and a special note
of thanks to the staff at
the Rare Books Reading Room
for allowing me to consult
very valuable resources
in their anarchist collection,
as well as to the curators
at the Hispanic Reading Room.
I'm honored to speak to you all
today about my current research
on the art and visual culture
that was created by anarchists
in Mexico and the
US, and specifically,
art that represented the
US-Mexico border during the
Mexican Revolution
of 1910 to 1920.
This was art that envisioned the
border as a productive region
for the construction
of anarchist utopias.
In my talk, I will focus
primarily on the art
of the Mexican anarchist
group that was known
as the Partido Liberal Mexicano,
the Mexican Liberal
Party or PLM, for short.
This was an organization
that of Mexican exiles
that mostly resided in
Southern California.
It was founded by Ricardo
Flores Magon and his brother
and Enrique Flores Magon.
They actually founded
it in Mexico City,
and then they were exiled to
Los Angeles in the early 1900s,
but in the early 1900s,
they really fought
against the dictatorship
of Porfirio Diaz,
as well as US imperialism and
US interventions in Mexico.
And so from their
base in Los Angeles,
they staged numerous uprisings
on the US-Mexico border lands,
and they took over the cities
of Mexicali, and Tijuana,
where they attempted
to establish an
anarcho-communist utopia.
And so in this talk, I'm going
to highlight two major
reasons why the archive
of Magonista art is important.
So first, it represents a very
rich collection of border art
in the early 20th
century, and specifically
in the first half
of the 20th century.
And second, it suggests that
art and artists were integral
to the Magonista struggle
during the Mexican Revolution,
so scholars have extensively
detailed the social
and the political history
of this anarchist movement,
but it's also important to
recognize their significance
to the history of print and
visual culture in Mexico
and the United States.
And so the research material
that I will discuss today is
drawn from archives in Mexico
and the US, as well as sources
that I recently consulted
at the Library of Congress.
So I want to begin by
presenting three major questions
that guide my research on border
art in the early 20th century.
The first is how do
we define border art
in art historical scholarship?
Now, border art has been
distinguished by two frameworks.
There's art of the border,
and art about the border.
So art of the border
represents the lived experiences
and rooted knowledge of artists
whose works are kind of based
on experiences that have
been marked by borders,
including geographic
and corporeal borders.
Now art about the border
is based on representations
that depict the geographic
features
and the built environment
of the borderlands.
And I just want to stress
that these are not mutually
exclusive frameworks.
Both can work simultaneously
to deconstruct and intervene
in the very notions of borders,
or even to reinscribe the
border line and the power
of the state to define it.
My second question is, when
does border art emerge?
Now typically, scholars argue
that border art history begins
in the 1960s with the
Chicano civil rights movement,
and through the 1980s
with the performances
of the border art workshop.
These kind of two movements
certainly established the field,
but did so in a way in which
the narrative is really focused
on contemporary art,
and so consequently,
they produce this narrative
that there is no
border art before 1960s,
and this notion is furthered
by hierarchies and relations
of power between cultural
capitals like Mexico City
and Los Angeles that
rendered art from the border
to the periphery of culture.
Now, the third question emerges
out of studies on the landscapes
that surround physical borders,
and how we might better
understand the relationship
between landscape
borders and art.
Border art reveals the
geopolitical dynamics
between the US and Mexico in the
first half of the 20th century,
and so as a result, I want to
ask what creative strategies
for reinscribing or
challenging the nature
of borders did artists
produce in the 1910s?
Anarchists artistic
production must be understood
through the discourse
of geopolitics,
or raise an analysis
that deconstructs the causal
relationships between politics
and geography, and so
my research aims to show
that the US-Mexico
border was a site
of both artistic experimentation
and radical theories of art
in the first half of the 20th
century, so before the kind
of dominant kind of notion
of border art is established,
because as early as
1910s, anarchists
and radical art collectives
were producing some
of the first border artworks
that would merge
political action
and radical Avant Gardism.
Now, the anarchist artists
and political revolutionaries
that I researched were active in
borderlands, in peripheral zones
and exile communities
in Mexico and the US.
They navigated a very
layered and complex geography
that was being visually
defined and shaped by fencing,
ever-increasing militarization,
surveillance technologies,
and natural waterways that were
coopted as border fortification.
So in my talk today, I will
respond to three questions,
to these three questions, by
examining radical cartoons
and political illustrations
by anarchist artists
that were created during
the Mexican Revolution,
and I will also offer possible
connections and comparisons
between Mexican anarchist
art and US visual culture.
But, you know, when the
Magonistas were active
in the borderlands, you know,
specifically Mexicali, Tijuana,
in 1911, their work was entering
and their activism was
entering a borderlands region
that had already long captivated
artists and photographers,
especially those who
served the interests
of an expanding US territory,
and so we see these specific
types of narratives at work
in photographs of
border monuments
in the late 19th century,
and in US photographs taken
during the border wars
of the Mexican Revolution.
So in the mid-19th century,
obelisk monuments were installed
at the border to
mark the boundary
between the two territories
as you see in this slide.
The International Boundary
Commission was created
to install the monuments
and mark the boundary line.
The US commissioners employed a
survey photographer named Daniel
Payne to record views
of each monument located
and erected by the US section.
Now the photographs, such
as these that you see
on the screen, were compiled
into a set of four albums
at the conclusion of the survey,
and these works served as one
of the primary visual
tools, evidence really,
of the establishment
of the boundary line
between the two countries
that was defined
by the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Now photographs later kind
of taken during the border war
would document notable battles,
people, and places
that shaped US
and Mexican conflict during
the Mexican Revolution.
They reflect US military
presence and interest
in the borderlands
between 1910 and 1918.
Now these images document the
weaponry, leaders, and soldiers,
and how they navigated
through various American
and Mexican border
cities and interacted
with their citizens during this
period, but also interacted
and navigated border landscapes.
Now, the United States
Army deployed soldiers
to border towns to
protect American people
and their property.
Their presence was also
there to ensure that fighting
between Mexican armed groups
remained on the Mexican side
of the border, and so these
photographs reveal the role
of the US in defining
the geographic limits
of the Mexican Revolution,
but also reinforcing US power
on the border and
beyond it into Mexico.
So some photographs
show how US generals
and soldiers were active
in the Mexican countryside,
supplying aid and forces
to revolutionary groups.
Now these kinds of photographic
representations serve
to reinforce the power
of the US government.
They are part of
a longer tradition
of visual representations of
US westward expansion tied
to the ideas of manifest
destiny,
but also the violent conquest
of land in North America.
They represent the
documentary impulse
of US government
photographers and media,
which often sensationalized
the border wars
of the Mexican Revolution, and
they often omitted any signs
of life and activity and
culture at the border,
which depicted the Borderlands
region as barren landscapes or,
you know, major sites of,
you know, kind of conflict.
And so I want to argue
that by contrast,
the Magonistas created art
that denounced US imperialism
and military presence
on the borderlands.
Their cartoons and illustrations
represented the land
and landscape, but claimed
it for the Mexican people,
including indigenous
groups like the Yaki.
Unlike the interests supporting
the US government and military,
Magonista, artists portrayed
an alternative future
for the borderlands
that would be based
on anarcho-communist principles.
These images show how
the Magonistas sought
to link their cause to
other socialist movements
around the world,
especially in the US,
Europe, and South America.
And the Magonistas used
art to excite their readers
and present them an image
of what could be possible
at the border after an anarchist
victory of the revolution.
Now, when the Mexican
Revolution began in 1910,
the Magonistas became one
of the several armed groups
that were vying for
control of the country.
In an effort to realize
their ideals,
the PLM instigated
strikes and uprisings
on the US-Mexico border
between 1906 and 1911.
Their struggle was
against the Mexican state,
and foreign US industrialists,
and they staged revolts
in the cities of Cananea, El
Paso, Tijuana, and Mexicali.
Now, the more well-known
of these uprisings is the
Magonista Rebellion of 1911,
in which a small army of PLM
Mexican and US soldiers took
over the border cities
of Mexicali and Tijuana
to create an anarcho-communist
commune in northern Mexico.
They held the cities
for a period
of four months before
being defeated
by federal military forces.
They outlined their aim
in the official PLM
newspaper called Regeneracion,
and on the left, you know, you
will see an article that called
for the repossession
of the land in order
to implement the three
great anarchist ideals,
bread, land, and liberty.
And in the photographs
to your right,
you can see PLM soldiers
standing under the PLM flag
that is emblazoned
with the rallying cry
of tierra y libertad, right?
-- land and liberty.
Now, while historians have
used photographic documentation
to reconstruct the
events of the rebellion,
my research is concerned
with how the PLM visualized
their movement at the border
through art, because art
and artists were central
to their vision for
Magonista revolution,
and they used visual
art forms to communicate
with their readers
across the US and Mexico,
and even as far as
South America.
The PLM used their newspaper
that was called Regeneracion,
regeneration, to fuel
these small rebellions
by communicating and
circulating PLM ideology
through different
literary, also visual, forms,
including manifestos, political
writings, and artworks,
and so they commissioned
artworks in primarily
in media print and drawing from
an international set of artists,
including the Catalan
artist, Fermin Sagrista,
the Italian anarchist, Ludovico
Caminita who's based in the US,
the Mexican painter from
Zacatecas, Nicolas Reveles,
as well as the PLM leader
Enrique Flores Magon.
Now, I call this group of
artists the Regeneracion group,
because they worked closely
with the newspaper to create
and circulate didactic
illustrations and cartoons
that were aligned to
the Magonista cause.
Many of the artists were PLM
members, or held positions
of leadership within the group,
while others were supporters
of the PLM that were aligned
to other international
anarchist movements.
These artists were
craftsmen, illustrators,
not all academically
trained fine painters.
Many were self-taught or trained
through socialist
correspondence art schools
that were based in the US.
Now typically, their
work was printed in black
and white newspaper print,
but we do have some examples
of color lithographs.
Now, among the aims of my work
is to dispel a popular notion
that the Magonistas were only
political revolutionaries
and anarchist philosophers.
These anarchists were
also aesthetic thinkers
that created a large
body of artworks,
but also cultivated a theory
of revolutionary art before
that idea became popularized
in the 1920s in connection
with the Mexican mural movement
during the post-revolutionary
period in Mexico.
Now Ricardo Flores Magon
developed a theory of art based
on the work of artists in
the Regeneracion group.
In written correspondence,
as well as in writings
in Regeneracion, he
supported art as a way
of awakening the working
class to their oppression,
and inciting workers to act
against their oppressors,
so I want to focus specifically
on one source that's located
at the Library of Congress's
Rare Books Reading Room you see
here pictured on your screen.
This is a letter by Ricardo
Flores Magon to Ellen White --
it was the pseudonym
for Lilly Sarnoff --
that he wrote in November
of 1920 from his prison cell
in Leavenworth penitentiary.
Here he is making a
statement against an art
for art's sake position,
which he calls nonsense.
He also states that he feels
a great personal admiration
for art and values its
integrity, and that it hurts him
to see it degraded by
those people who, quote,
having not the power of making
others feel what they feel,
nor of making think what
they think, end quote.
So while Magon pointed to his
intimate and personal experience
of art, he also believed
that art could be used
to fuel the collective
imagination of a group of people
and assist in forming a common
vision for the anarchist ideal.
Now, the artists aligned with
the Magonista cause is one
who can make others
feel what they feel,
think what they think.
They can fill others with
the revolutionary ideal
and incite them to action,
and we see Ricardo Flores
Magon's theory of art put
into practice by
Regeneracion artists.
So as a case study, let's look
at the work of Fermin Sagrista,
who was a Catalan anarchist
artist based in Barcelona.
He is a relatively
obscure artist,
and few biographical details
are known about his life.
He frequently contributed
works to anarchist newspapers
across Europe and the Americas.
His work is representative of
the commitment to figurative
and legible print
styles, as well as the use
of text-based imageries
and captions
that guide viewer
interpretation of the artwork.
This particular artwork
is constructing an image
of the downfall of global arms
manufacturers that he labels
as Schneider and Krupp, because
you see their buildings oozing
with oil while workers
on strike are marching
out of their factories.
Now towards the front, a
large group of workers appear
to welcome a smaller group of
military and police officers
from across the world, who
are ostensibly now enlightened
to the fact that they too,
are international
proletarian comrades.
There are also two
central figures
in the foreground, both female.
The highest figure
is a woman standing
on a platform holding the
black flag of anarchism
and a torch symbolizing liberty.
This speaks to Magon's
premise of art in service
of the awakening of the working
class to their oppression
and eliciting a response
to action, in this case,
direct action and a
strike by workers.
The inclusion of Sagrista's work
in Regeneracion in a 1914 issue
of the newspaper that
you see on the left,
demonstrates how anarchists
viewed art as essential
to politics, but also to the --
of the urgency to
articulate ideology
in non-literary forms
accessible to a wide audience.
The PLM believed that
direct action and rebellion,
such as an armed rebellion or
a worker strike at a factory,
could make workers
conscious of their oppression,
inspire revolt, and ignite
collective action in service
of the anarchist cause.
This same belief in inspiring
an awakening of free thought,
was also the driving force for
the promotion and inclusion
of images of revolutionary
victory
that would span across
the globe.
Now, this article was
printed in The Anarchist Press
in Los Angeles, in Regeneracion.
It would circulate to
Mexico, and it was exchanged
between the Americas and Europe,
as the image on the right shows.
So the image on the right
was printed as a postcard for
or Le Reveil, which was an
anarchist newspaper based
in Geneva, Switzerland.
But the PLM version highlights
significant adaptations
for the PLM reader, which
included the integration
of the Tierra y, which is a
-- on the on the black flag --
which is a reference
to the PLM rallying cry
of tierra y libertad,
or land and liberty.
The title in the postcard print,
si vis pacem, if you want peace,
is omitted and replaced with the
addition of a didactic caption
at the bottom, which orients
the image towards a narrative
of movement for revolution
in Mexico.
And so this example, this
case study, really speaks
to how reprinting
and translating were
central practices
for establishing a solidarity
among Regeneracion's imagined
transborder readership.
This visual form of solidarity
reveals two historical phenomena
that deserve our attention.
The first is the
transnational power
of images during the Mexican
Revolution, and second,
the existence of an
interconnected network
of anarchist movements in
which artists contributed.
Now, the US-Mexico border is
-- was a very prominent subject
of Magonista art, and I've
identified three image types
that the PLM produced to
articulate the physical
and imagined border
environment as the setting
for their movement
for liberation,
so that of revolutionary
symbols, landscapes of conflict,
and utopian illustrations.
These types of PLM
artworks were created
with regional aesthetic
styles and audiences in mind.
They were created within
the broader context
of global revolutions,
and cross-border conflicts
in the early 20th century, most
notably the First World War
and the US militarization
of the border
after Villa's Columbus
raid in 1916.
I draw connections between
cartoons and drawings
in Regeneracion and works that
circulated in the US and Europe
to show how PLM art was
engaging with broader networks
of radical leftist and
anarchist art, which served
as a source base for
Magonista imagery.
Artworks in Regeneracion
allow us
to see how Magonistas
figure the US-Mexico border
and their anarchist
insurrections in the borderlands
as part of revolutionary
moments, both in past
and present that spanned
into the US and Europe.
So the first is the activation
of revolutionary symbols.
This image type utilized
imagery sourced from libertarian
and socialist art, including
symbols of the anarchist dawn
or rising sun, broken shackles,
black and red flags, and nude
or costumed women as
embodiments of revolution.
It has a foundation in
imagery that we might associate
with classical Western
tradition,
and that was also prevalent
in anarchist art from France
in the kind of turn of the
century, and art produced
by the US press during
the First World War.
One notable figure in
this visual culture is
that of the female figure
in long Grecian robes,
who holds out revolutionary
symbols.
So olive branches
and broken shackles,
and her styling evoke similar
representations of Marianne,
which was the symbol of liberty
for the French Revolution.
So she is a herald
for revolution.
So on the right, you see
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen's
The Liberator that was created
for the anarchist journal
Les Temps Nouveaux in 1903.
Steinlen's work is a lithograph
that depicts the
triumphant moment
in which a revolutionary
figure liberates the masses
from the servitude and
cult of a golden calf,
a Biblical reference to the
devotion of false idols.
She holds up a torch that
illuminates the scene
and brings the huddled
masses to their feet,
and so please forgive the shine,
the glare on the top
of the right image.
Unfortunately, the glare
covers up the torch
that is precisely the symbol
that I want to highlight.
And on the left, you see
the Swedish-born American
caricaturist, Oscar
Edward Cesare,
who is summoning the image of
Columbia, the female embodiment
of the Americas, that's
also wearing a flowy toga
and star-studded Frisian cap.
She holds up an olive branch
and palm leaf, symbols of peace
and victory, and a sword
and hand are extending
into the center of the drawing,
overlapping the palm leaf
and activating a
metaphor for the US's role
in dictating the
peace terms in Europe
after the First World War.
Now these works evoke imagery
of the French Revolution,
but also of the Western
frontier myth,
in which women were
the guiding spirits
for white colonial settlers.
Women have been portrayed as
both the revolutionary figures
and guiding lights that
reveal the potential
of the future society
based on imagery
of the French Revolution,
liberal republicanism,
and classical mythology.
Regeneracion artists
adopted this similar imagery.
These symbols helped connect
the PLM border movement
to international solidarity
networks across the Americas
and Europe, I think as is best
represented in the center image
at bottom with the two
continents converging.
These symbols were also meant
to visually communicate
anarcho-communist ideology
to PLM supporters, and so
here we have some examples
of different types
of representations
of anarchist revolutionaries and
their triumph, which signaled
by the raised flag that reads
"tierra y" that are reminiscent
of the works in the
previous slide.
Now the center image is
of the centerfold
propaganda poster created
by Fermin Sagrista, the
Catalan anarchist that was based
in Barcelona in 1913, and it
was featured for the January 1,
1913 issue of Regeneracion.
At center, you see three
female muses on horseback
that are riding over the
globe, and each hoist flags
that read land and liberty, the
ideal way for the revolution,
while holding symbolic objects
of liberation, broken shackles,
a torch, and an olive branch
that evoke the iconography
of the revolution.
And they're fashioned
in different styles.
One wears a flowy Grecian
dress with a sombrero.
One has a corset and feathered
headdress, and last a nude.
The frame includes portraits
of prominent PLM leaders
and key figures
in the international anarchist
movement, and it's also embedded
with symbols of the tools of
the revolutionary intellectual,
which include torches, banners,
a feather pen and an inkwell.
This use of local and global
symbols was both a way
of signifying a solidarity
with the international social
revolution and communicating
to a wide audience the narrative
of an anarchist victory
that would be unique to Mexico,
but that would also
indicate a triumph towards an
international revolution.
Now I term the second image
type as landscapes of conflict,
because the armed fight
for anarchist liberation
on the US-Mexico border
was a central visual idiom
for the editors of Regeneracion.
The PLM featured artworks that
satirized geopolitical tensions
and political upheavals
during the Mexican Revolution.
Through caricature and
political cartoons,
they parodied their opponents,
subverted authoritarian power,
and attacked US imperialism.
These narratives depicted the
often violent means, battles,
revolts and strikes at the
border, that would lead
to the utopian end, which
I will speak a little bit
about in the next coming slides.
They'll also offer depictions
of early border fortification
systems, including rivers
and major waterways as you
see in the two drawings
on the right, that
future parallel lines
with the words Rio Grande
separating Mexico and the US.
So the drawing by the Italian
artist Ludovico Carminita
on the far right, depicts
the Rio Grande as the divider
between the US and Mexico.
The Statue of Liberty
in the distance reinforces
national values
at the dividing line, while
the Mexican side is abundant
with cacti.
This setting is the
background for the exploitation
of the worker, and the
scene reveals a campesino
or a Mexican rural worker
that's at the bottom,
shackled to a volunteer
chain that reads "peonage",
while crouching under
the weight of a priest,
a military officer,
and a capitalist.
These figures are representative
of the clergy, the military,
and capitalism, and each are
plucking money from the tree,
and it's the lushness of this
foreign plant in the context
of the desert landscape that's
underscoring an argument
that the system of oppression
has been imported possibly
from the US north.
Now the cartoon at the center
shows US capitalists dressed
in military garb raiding
Mexico from the border.
You have the financier
and banker JP Morgan
that's leading this pack,
and his feet are submerged in
the waters of the Rio Grande,
and Morgan is proclaiming,
"To arms, comrades,
on behalf of our investments,"
with the US dollar sign
serving as their flag.
This work underscores
the symbolic power
of the US-Mexico
border landscape
in the radical anarchist
imaginary
and for anti-US imperialist
ideologies.
It also speaks to the power
of reprinting and translation.
So this particular cartoon was
originally kind of produced
for The Daily Tribune of
Los Angeles, but the editors
at Regeneracion included a
didactic caption in Spanish
at the bottom, and then
also a new Spanish title
for the cartoon.
Now, the artist Luis Diaz
Jr. created the illustration
that you see on the left,
which portrayed a
specific border locale
and the enforcement of the
border through acts of violence.
You see a pack of
black wolves surrounded
by dismembered human body parts
that are strewn across a desert,
a very desolate desert
landscape.
There's one human figure at
the center that is crying
out while the wolfpack
ravages his body,
and the word Texas is written
on the bodies of the wolves.
So here, the border is embodied
by savage man-eating animals
who feed off the vulnerable
communities of border-dwellers
and Mexican-Americans,
and so this artwork speaks
to the targeted violence
perpetrated against Mexicans
and immigrants on the
border by Texas Rangers,
and this interpretation
is reinforced
by an accompanying article
in in the newspaper.
Now Regeneracion
images and those created
by US artists similarly deployed
cultural symbols like Uncle Sam,
campesino revolutionaries,
and capitol buildings
to denote divisions between
Mexico and the United States.
Cartoon commentaries on the
Mexican Revolution created
for the US press often included
caricatures of Mexican types
and stereotypes to reinforce
difference between US
and Mexican territories.
So from right to left
again, we see Carey Orr's
"The Mexican Salute",
which depicts the shadow
of a campesino in a
wide-brimmed sombrero hat,
poking fun at Uncle Sam, who's
climbing over the border fence
in retaliation of the act.
The Capitol building
in the distance acts
as a prominent symbol of USA
power, while the signposts serve
as further delineators
of the space.
Here, the border is demarcated
by the tall wood fencing,
but reinforced by Uncle Sam and
his weapon, which is a symbol
that reads fleet of military
weaponry that will be brought
into the borderlands to capture
the subversive campesino.
Now Oscar Edward Cesare's
"All is Quiet Tonight Along
the Rio Grande" uses the river
as the symbol of the border, and
on either sides of the river,
soldiers are pointing
weapons at the other.
And the weaponry is identical,
but the sides are distinguished
from each other by
the style of hats.
So one is the American
style fedora,
the other the Mexican sombrero.
And the moon is looking down
at the scene disapprovingly
as if it is the source of
the quiet battleness night
and perhaps insinuating
an anti-conflict message.
And last, William
Garre's [phonetic]
"To the Victory Belongs" shows
Mexican revolutionary leaders
Zapata and Carranza
that are fighting
to conquer over Pancho Villa.
The two leaders have
Villa pinned down
and draw their knives to
kill him, but at the top
of the mountain stands
a thin and weak wolf
with the word famine
written on its body.
Now the cartoon implies
that the victor
of the conflict will
inherit a serious social
and economic issue of massive
hunger and lack of food supplies
in Mexico, but the
mountain ridge
and its curve downwards imply an
oncoming famine that will move
from north to south
indicating the borderlands
as the source of the famine.
In all three works,
walls, mountain ridges,
rivers represent the division of
land and territory as thin lines
in a cartoon with these
cultural symbols used to denote
and define either side's
national territory.
Now the third category
of imagery are utopian
illustrations.
These works helped viewers
conceptualize a PLM victory
over the Mexican Revolution,
as outlined in plans
for land distribution and
individual freedom written
by Ricardo Flores Magon, but
here it's projected onto scenes
of pastoral paradises.
Now, scholars have long
defined utopia as, quote,
an ideal society in an imaginary
country, really pointing
to the Greek etymology of the
word that means "no place",
but for the Magonistas, the
promise of Utopia was tied
to a specific place and time,
and it took shape in the context
of the social and
geographic landscape
of revolutionary
Mexico, and specifically,
that of its border regions.
So the ink drawing that you see
on the right side, was received
by the PLM editors
in Los Angeles
as a postcard print in 1912.
Although the original postcard
has not been located or found
in the archives, the image
that the artist created is
this one here, that I'm showing
to you all as a reprint from
the New York-based anarchist
cultural newspaper
called Brazo y Cerebro.
The work was created by Fermin
Sagrista who was imprisoned
in Barcelona and stated in a
letter to Regeneracion editors,
that while being confined
to his cell, he was inspired
by the revolutionary actions
of the PLM at the border,
and he created this work to
emblematize the movement.
So in the pages of Regeneracion,
Magon would describe this work
to his readers in an
article, and he described it
as the vision of a
paraiso de ventura, right?
-- this kind of grand paradise.
You know, he would describe
the scene in which a nude man,
woman, and children admire
this grand spectacle,
following the fall of
authoritarianism and capitalism.
And in the horizon,
the sun is inscribed
with the French words
terrain libre, free land,
signifying the new society.
A beautiful woman represents the
embodiment of the revolution,
holding again broken shackles,
revolutionary symbols, right?
-- of the freedom from
servitude, with one hand,
and with the other,
she's presenting
to the disinherited the land
they are now free to cultivate.
And I think in a move that
localized anarchism in relation
to Mexico, the Catalan Sagrista
connected this idealized future
by including an indigenous
figure, which Magon interprets
as representative of
the Mexican people.
Now Sagrista's depiction
leans heavily on stereotype
of tribal garb and
indigeneities in Mexico
and the broader Americas.
It's a generic representation
of American Indians,
rather than one
that distinguishes the
unique characteristics
of any particular group,
but Magon would claim
that the indigenous figure
represents both an adventurer
and a guardian of the New
World, which the artist
and Magon would both identify
as a Mexico at the bottom
of the frame, so Mexica.
The central image illustrates an
anarcho-communist utopia based
on the agrarian ideal and
exemplifies the ideal society
that the Magonistas envisioned
for the border region.
The campesino is
plowing the field
and creating orderly seed beds.
The Magonistas envision
the proletariat
in small self-governed
communities
where the cultivation
of agriculture would
be the primary source
of wealth and sustenance.
And the artist depicts the
idealized rural environment
and its decentered
communal pattern of labor
that reinforced the PLM plan
to liberate land in Mexico
from foreign ownership and
redistribute it to the people,
and I think that this raises
two very fascinating aspects
of this artwork in relation
to Magonista visual culture.
So first is that
Sagrista's image
and Magon's interpretation do
more than just depict utopia
in an unidentifiable
or imaginary place.
This image makes
a visual argument
that anarchism could thrive in
Mexico's borderlands by pointing
to indigenous collectivization
and the promised future
of agrarian reform.
And second, while
Magonista prints reveal
that a critical awareness of the
violence that marked the border,
as we saw in earlier
images, representations
of the borderlands as a possible
utopia counter that narrative.
And it's this type of imagery
that has a historical base
in anarchist visual
culture in Europe,
so we can locate two possible
influential sources in the album
of original prints of the French
anarchist editor Jean Grave's
Les Temps Nouveaux.
Now, Grave commissioned Avant
Garde artists and illustrators
to create works of social art,
which needed to be didactic
and accessible to the working
classes, which is an aim
that resonates with
Magon's own theory of art.
Now among the album's
works were those
by the Impressionist artists,
[inaudible] and Paul Signac,
who envisioned a worker's
paradise on the edges
of the sign and workers in
harmony with the anarchist dawn.
Now, you know, in both artworks,
the working class is enlightened
by the glow from the
rising anarchist sun.
[inaudible] inscribe the
word "justice" on the sun,
so the principle of
justice evokes the harmony
that would be derived from
the fair and equal treatment
of all people of all
ages, genders and classes.
And the rising sun is an icon
that connects the PLM's
anarcho-communist visual culture
to that of European
anarchist movement.
This was a symbol that
could connect PLM anarchists
to the global social revolution,
and so while these
two cases reveal
that in European
anarchist art, it was cities
that were the sites
for major awakenings
of the working class, right?
-- but also the urban
worker, right?
-- who would profit from the
rising of the anarchist dawn
in Mexico, the rural was
the site of revolution
and a model for utopia.
Sagrista's vision of
an anarchist paradise
that was prominently featured
in the US anarchist press made
possible the idea of rural
and agricultural spaces as sites
of potential anarchist utopias.
So in closing, I just want
to reiterate that the art
and visual culture of
the Magonistas invites us
to restructure borders
in our history.
This visual culture is depicting
a future anarchist Utopia
on the US-Mexico
borderlands, and it was printed
in Los Angeles in English and
Spanish, and aimed at readers
on both sides of the
border, and beyond.
Magonista art contained more
than just mere visual
representations
of the insurrection
at the border.
It also set the stage
for revolutionary art
of the borderlands, and it
transformed the US-Mexico border
into a stage for revolutionary
art of the borderlands,
you know, but also it
transformed the border
into a subject of
artistic experimentation
and projected utopian
futures onto the region.
Their imaginings of
border spaces runs counter
to more familiar
narratives of modernity,
in which urban centers were the
locus of innovation in the arts.
And I think indeed, there
are interesting continuities
and parallels with
today's world.
So many of the themes, such as
violence and land cultivation
on the border, are still
familiar to us today,
and so my research is seeks
to uncover these continuities
between past and present
of the borderlands.
So this concludes my talk.
I want to thank you
all very much
for taking the time to listen.
It was also an absolute
pleasure to research
in the wonderful
collection of the Prints
and Photographs department
of the Library of Congress.