Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas's Legacy as a Nation Builder through His Art Patronage in Michoacan’s Lake District

FAIN: FB-56865-13

Jennifer Ann Jolly
Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY 14850-7000)

Lázaro Cárdenas is lauded as Mexico's most influential 20th century president, however his artistic legacy remains obscure, arguably because its most ambitious efforts focused outside Mexico City. My book-in-progress, Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, examines Cárdenas' extensive patronage in and around Pátzcuaro and pairs it with a history of images of this region to consider how the area figures historically in the post-revolutionary re-imagining of Mexico. Here, art participated in Mexico's national integration project both as part of the State's secular public education and culture programs, and as a facet of tourism development. The latter matched economic development with the promotion of touristic ways of seeing, perceived as a means of promoting nationalism and diplomacy. I demonstrate that the regional performs a central role in imagining the modern nation, and argue that one of Cárdenas' artistic legacies is the development of regionalism in Mexican art.

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Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism and Nation Building Under Lázaro Cárdenas (Book)
Title: Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico: Art, Tourism and Nation Building Under Lázaro Cárdenas
Author: Jennifer Jolly
Abstract: In the 1930s, the artistic and cultural patronage of celebrated Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas transformed a small Michoacán city, Pátzcuaro, into a popular center for national tourism. Cárdenas commissioned public monuments and archeological excavations; supported new schools, libraries, and a public theater; developed tourism sites and infrastructure, including the Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares; and hired artists to paint murals celebrating regional history, traditions, and culture. The creation of Pátzcuaro was formative for Mexico; not only did it provide an early model for regional economic and cultural development, but it also helped establish some of Mexico’s most enduring national myths, rituals, and institutions. In Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, Jennifer Jolly argues that Pátzcuaro became a microcosm of cultural power during the 1930s and that we find the foundations of modern Mexico in its creation. Her extensive historical and archival research reveals how Cárdenas and the artists and intellectuals who worked with him used cultural patronage as a guise for radical modernization in the region. Jolly demonstrates that the Pátzcuaro project helped define a new modern body politic for Mexico, in which the population was asked to emulate Cárdenas by touring the country and seeing and embracing its land, history, and people. Ultimately, by offering Mexicans a means to identify and engage with power and privilege, the creation of Pátzcuaro placed art and tourism at the center of Mexico’s postrevolutionary nation building project.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/creating-patzcuaro-creating-mexico-art-tourism-and-nation-building-under-lazaro-cardenas/oclc/1056934349&referer=brief_results
Secondary URL: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/jolly-creating-patzcuaro-creating-mexico
Secondary URL Description: Publisher page
Access Model: Published Book, university press
Publisher: University of Texas
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4773-142
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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