M A K I N G A R T PA N A M ER I CA N

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 Making Art
Panamerican
CULTUR AL POLICY AND THE COLD WAR

Claire F. Fox

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided
for the publication of this book from the University of Iowa.

An earlier version of the Introduction was published as “The Pan American Union Visual
Arts Section and the Hemispheric Circulation of Latin American Art during the Cold War,”
Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 83–106; reprinted with permission. An earlier version of
chapter 3 was published as “The Hemispheric Routes of ‘El Nuevo Arte Nuestro’: The Pan
American Union, Cultural Policy, and the Cold War,” in Hemispheric American Studies,
ed. Robert Levine and Caroline Levander (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2008), 223–48; reprinted with permission.

Excerpts from “La United Fruit Co.” by Pablo Neruda from his Canto general and its
translation by Jack Schmitt in chapter 2 are published with permission from Carmen
Balcells Literary Agency, Barcelona, and the University of California Press. Copyright
2013 Fundación Pablo Neruda.

Illustrations and archival sources from the Pan American Union are reproduced with
permission from the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce previously copyrighted
material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been made, we encourage
copyright holders to contact the publisher.

Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fox, Claire F.
Making Art Panamerican : Cultural Policy and the Cold War / Claire F. Fox.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7933-1 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-7934-8 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Art and state—America—History—20th century. 2. Pan American Union. Division
of Visual Arts. I. Title.
N8846.A45F69 2013
701'.03097—dc23
2012043824

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For D. and I.
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 CONTENTS

Abbreviations ix
Preface: The Long Twentieth-Century Quest for Panamerica xi

Introduction: The Pan American Union Visual Arts Programs

and Latin American Art 1
1 Art Enters the Union
The Transition from World War II to the Cold War 41
2 El Arte Que Progresa
Modernization, Modern Art, and Continental Consciousness 89
3 José Luis Cuevas, Panamerican Celebrity 129
4 The Last Party
HemisFair ’68 177
Afterword: The Afterlife of the Pan American Union
Visual Arts Programs 215

Acknowledgments 221
Notes 225
Index 317
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 A B B R E V I AT I O N S

AAA Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C.
AHB Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
BAV/BMAV Boletín de Artes Visuales/Boletín de Música y Artes
Visuales
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CRJ Concha Romero James
EMH Early Museum History
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
IACC Inter-American Cultural Council of the Organization of
American States
IDB Inter-American Development Bank
INBA Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of
Fine Arts), Mexico City
JGS José Gómez Sicre
JLC José Luis Cuevas
LJS/LJP/LJA Leslie Judd Switzer/Leslie Judd Portner/
Leslie Judd Ahlander
LK Lincoln Kirstein
x A B B R E V I AT I O N S

MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York

NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NAR Nelson A. Rockefeller
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College
Park, Maryland
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
OAS Organization of American States
OIAA Office of Inter-American Affairs
PAU Pan American Union, Washington, D.C.
PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional
Revolutionary Party), Mexico
RAC Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York
RdH René d’Harnoncourt
RF Rockefeller Foundation
SEATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
SEP Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretariat of Public
Education), Mexico City
SPU School of Panamerican Unrest (Escuela Panamericana
del Desasosiego)
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization
UT University of Texas at Austin
UTSA University of Texas at San Antonio
 PR EFACE

The Long Twentieth-Century

Quest for Panamerica

In spring 2006 the New York–based artist Pablo Helguera undertook

the “longest ground-covering public art project ever attempted” when
he embarked on a transhemispheric road trip as part of “an endurance
performance piece” known as the School of Panamerican Unrest (SPU;
Escuela Panamericana del Desasosiego).1 Over the course of five months,
Helguera logged thousands of miles on a repurposed electrician’s van,
christened La Panamericana, as he journeyed from Alaska to Tierra del
Fuego and met with artists, cultural workers, and community members
in nearly thirty host locations. At each stop on his itinerary, Helguera col-
laborated with local institutions to organize public events and roundtable
discussions on topics relevant to local audiences. In doing so he deployed
flexible, interactive scenarios that combined elements of performance,
education, and activism and bespoke Helguera’s own substantial career
experience as a museum educator.2 At a send-off event held at the Ameri-
cas Society in New York, Helguera explained that his reason for under-
taking the journey was to limn the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the
post-9/11 era and the manner in which this watershed troubled the trope
of the world as a global village that could be easily navigated through
air travel, the Internet, and mass media. By forging personal connections
across national borders, the SPU revived nineteenth-century concepts of
America as “a unified cultural region” in an effort to challenge the ten-
dency on the part of world leaders and prominent institutions to define
modernity as an economic process rather than a cultural one.3 To contest
the former tendency, the SPU project presented Helguera as the cultural
ambassador of a fictive supernation called Panamerica. In the manner of
those micronations that have claimed state sovereignty for abandoned
xii P R E FAC E

oil derricks, Internet websites, and living rooms through the meticulous,
if not eccentric, invention of constitutions, flags, coins, stamps, and pass-
ports, the SPU conjured hemispheric grandeur by availing itself of a mini-
malist and portable, yet evocative, institutional apparatus.
While the school’s intellectual rationale and iconography drew inspi-
ration from nineteenth-century Latin American nation-building move-
ments, the infrastructure that made Helguera’s journey possible, the Pan
American Highway, was a product of the cold war. Initially proposed
by the United States at the First Pan American Conference as a means
to link the Americas through trade and tourism, the first portion of the
route was completed in Mexico in 1950.4 It was the three temporalities
that coalesced in the SPU—post-9/11, cold war, and nineteenth century—
that piqued my interest in Helguera’s journey, for while he was on the
road I found myself similarly engaged in a research project that charted
efforts on the part of mid-twentieth-century artists and intellectuals to
introduce ideas associated with nineteenth-century Latin Americanism
into the realm of U.S.-based cultural diplomacy.
The SPU tour was a modest undertaking, funded through nonprofit
foundation grants and organized by a small, dedicated staff. In contrast,
the fanfare announcing the school’s presence in each host location in-
cluded opening and closing ceremonies that troped the performative ele-
ments of state receptions and sometimes even involved the participation
of diplomats and local officials. Upon the school’s arrival in a given host
location, Helguera and local collaborators erected a small-scale school-
house in a prominent public location, rang a bell to signal the com-
mencement of SPU events, played a Panamerican anthem composed by
Helguera, and displayed the school plaque and emblem, the latter depict-
ing a human eye framed within an antique bell, imagery evocative of sev-
eral hemispheric American independence movements.5 Each visit in turn
concluded with the public declaration of a sometimes serious, sometimes
comic Panamerican address, drafted by local collaborators with Helguera
acting as recording secretary.
I confess that upon learning of Helguera’s project, I did not know
whether to interpret it as parodic, nostalgic, utopian, or some combi-
nation of those modes. My confusion stemmed, I think, from trying to
reconcile the school’s deadpan delivery of cultural diplomacy à la mode
rétro, with its locus of enunciation in contemporary artistic and intellec-
tual networks that claim no institutional authority in the school’s various
host locations. The SPU rituals and emblems display intimate familiarity
with the visual culture and performance styles associated with the “age of
 P R E FAC E xiii

Pan Americanism” (1890–1940). The wistful nostalgia that I perceive in

the SPU anthem, bell, and schoolhouse (admittedly inherited on my part,
a hazard of archival research) must recall bygone celebrations of Pan
American Day for some hemispheric octogenarians, referring to a now
largely unobserved holiday proclaimed in 1930 in order to commemorate
the common histories of the American sister republics. Much in the spirit
of Pan American Day, the School of Panamerican Unrest performed insti-
tutionality at the same time that its very enactment sought to create local
institutional support for a greater American community. In this man-
ner, the SPU implicitly positioned itself against currents of institutional
critique in contemporary art worlds by asserting that when individuals
“embody” institutions they have the potential to “create transgressive
openings that allow for positive, gradual, and everyday social change.”6
Along his journey, Helguera stressed the community-building potential
of collaborative work by asking local participants to give voice to their
“unrest” (desasosiego), that is, to engage in self-reflection and comment
on their own social role and potential connections to other American
communities. Even as Helguera labored to promote a forward-looking
perspective on Panamerica, however, melancholia seemed to pervade his
quest for the “essence” of “the place where we live.”7 His meditations
on fragmentation or impending loss were perhaps most poignant at the
beginning and end of his trip, when he conducted personal interviews
with Marie Smith Jones in Alaska and Cristina Calderón in Tierra del
Fuego, each of whom was the last surviving speaker of her indigenous
language. Indigeneity thus provided the SPU with an ethical imperative,
and an overarching, telluric concept of place and ethnie, in the figures of
aging matriarchs who must be actively recognized and remembered by
contemporary citizens of the Americas.
On a quotidian level, unanticipated snafus did their part to thwart
Helguera’s movement, in spite of the years of careful logistical planning
that had gone into organizing the SPU tour. Difficult border crossings and
baroque customs regulations resulted in substantial delays, while bribes,
theft, and corruption depleted Helguera’s modest equipment and re-
sources. Ultimately, in order to complete his journey Helguera found him-
self obliged to abandon both the schoolhouse and his vehicle and to can-
cel scheduled appearances in several countries. Shortly after Helguera’s
journey concluded, large sectors of the United States would embrace a
revitalized civil rights–era discourse through the Obama campaign, echo-
ing the optimistic impulse of the SPU. However, during this same period
many Latin American countries witnessed a “pink tide” of elections that
xiv P R E FAC E

brought to power left-populist leaders who were often sharply critical of

the United States. Though Helguera assumed a low profile in SPU activi-
ties as a facilitator of discussion, his blog chronicles the repeated affronts
that he suffered from local artists and interlocutors who cast suspicion
on his foundation funding, his privileged status as a peripatetic artist, his
political motives, and even his van’s contribution to global warming.8 As
part of the travel writing in the project blog these moments of discord
make for more fascinating reading than do his harmonious encounters,
as they illuminate the vastly divergent local interpretations of basic SPU
keywords such as “Panamerican” and “public art.” In Chicago, where
Helguera had resided for some years, for example, no one showed up
to collaborate on the Panamerican address, and school staff found city
officials to be “bureaucratic, narrow-minded, and indifferent to the SPU
project.”9 Some artists and critics in Bogotá vocally boycotted Helguera’s
appearance and denounced the SPU on Colombian websites. In Caracas,
several participants amazingly sustained that Helguera was an emissary
of the North American Free Trade Agreement because of his advocacy of
a borderless continent, and of the anti-imperialist Venezuelan president
Hugo Chávez because of the inspiration he took from Simón Bolívar.
And in Santiago de Chile, after a particularly spirited debate about per-
formance art versus performativity, the composition of the Panamerican
address was preempted by a performance in which two people attempted
to walk around the gallery while balancing a heavy, bulky array of ob-
jects on a single wooden plank, until everything toppled. A despondent
Helguera posted to the blog as follows:
It seemed to me that, given the peculiar encounter of the dynamics
in Chile, the [performance] piece turned out to be the only possible
statement that could be done in terms of a Panamerican Address of
Santiago. The shelf and its random objects seemed like a metaphor of
Panamerica: an unstable place, full of arbitrary things, all on top of
each other, which pile up until they have no choice but to collapse.10

Indeed, as Helguera sowed the seeds of hemispheric unity on rocky soil,

he found himself immersed in a problematic that might have been famil-
iar to the great liberator Bolívar: the Americas have their own centers
and peripheries, they are often better acquainted with global metropoli
than they are with one another, and internecine competition and mutual
distrust is as common as regional solidarity among the citizens of greater
America, at least among its urban art worlds. Helguera’s meditations on
these and other dilemmas led him to confess to feeling a “semi-depression”
 P R E FAC E xv

toward the end of the journey, as he wondered whether Bolívar’s mori-

bund declaration that America is “an ungovernable region” was in fact
correct.11 His conceit recalls Doris Sommer’s prescient observation at the
outset of Helguera’s journey that the school was less about researching
Pan American unity than it was about constructing it.12
Here is where my own work intersects with Helguera’s bold experi-
ment in a way that does not affirm the cri de coeur “there is no American
there there,” but instead approaches the conundrum of an all-embracing
Panamericanism and resistant Latin Americanisms as movements that
have mutually produced and reinforced one another at particular moments
in recent history. Although the School of Panamerican Unrest claimed af-
filiation with intellectuals and patriots of the nineteenth century and early
twentieth who advanced the idea of greater America, such as Bolívar,
José Martí, and José Vasconcelos, the school departed significantly from
their perspectives in that it sutured the United States and Canada to the
countries of Latin America through an appeal to shared postcolonial and
transnational cultural formations. Bolívar, for his part, advocated for a
federative government comprised of former Spanish-American colonies,
but he was wary of the idea of a hemispheric union and felt that the
Protestant north was ultimately unassimilable to the Catholic south.13
Bolívar did extend an invitation to the United States in order to discuss
the outline of an American confederation eventually to be headquartered
in Panama, but as Anna Brickhouse has observed, the failure of the U.S.
delegates to attend the 1826 Panama Congress presaged an increasing
bifurcation in the United States between a vibrant transamerican literary
sphere and a comparatively isolationist, monolingual political one.14 It
was not until the late nineteenth-century Pan American Conferences that
the United States belatedly and opportunistically “accepted” Bolívar’s in-
vitation to dialogue, through what Sara Castro-Klarén calls the “violent
resemanticization of Bolívar’s concept” of American unity, now converted
into a “post-national, imperial gesture” of the United States.15
The school’s staging of familiar cultural diplomatic practices such as
roundtable discussion and intellectual exchange through travel reveal the
project’s more recent kinship with attempts on the part of U.S.–based
institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to redress
the political-cultural schism outlined by Brickhouse and Castro-Klarén.
The Pan American movement, which peaked from the late nineteenth
century to the early twentieth and again during World War II, stressed
the shared independence movements of the hemispheric American re-
publics at moments when the United States sought to harmonize trade
xvi P R E FAC E

and monetary policies throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Pan

American movement also significantly brought cultural initiatives into
the orbit of diplomacy through techniques that one might glibly describe
as “showing, not telling.” The first instance of U.S. cultural diplomacy, in
fact, was an ambitious journey, not unlike Helguera’s, in which the U.S.
government invited the Latin American delegates to the Pan American
Conferences to a six-week, six-thousand-mile goodwill railroad tour of
the United States in 1889, prior to the commencement of the first con-
ference.16 The itinerary was designed to showcase U.S. productivity in
industry and agriculture; however, the tour fell short of its intended ef-
fect, as the delegates complained of exhaustion and lack of access to a
translator.17 One outcome of the tour and subsequent cultural initiatives,
nevertheless, was that the U.S. government identified Latin American in-
tellectuals as “social leaders,” and consequently as ideal targets of cul-
tural diplomacy.18
The guiding assumption that dialogue and contact among intellectuals
lead to greater understanding and mutual respect among their respec-
tive societies informed a long-term investment in Latin American intel-
lectuals on the part of U.S. policymakers. During the years of the Good
Neighbor Policy in the 1930s and 1940s, this perspective stressed that
intellectuals were generally more respected in Latin American societies
than they were in the United States, and hence valuable to U.S. interests
as key shapers of public opinion. In the words of U.S. Secretary of State
Cordell Hull, “In the American Republics, the intellectual plays a part of
first importance in the national life. The poet, the scholar, and the teacher
are likely to be found not only in universities and cultural circles but in
places of diplomatic and political responsibility.”19 As the conclusion of
World War II threatened to terminate further funding for inter-American
cultural exchanges, Nelson A. Rockefeller’s wartime agency, the Office of
Inter-American Affairs, prepared an exhaustive memo cataloguing Latin
American humanists in government positions, an effort to convince U.S.
officials of the value of continued support for U.S.–Latin American cul-
tural diplomacy.20 Rockefeller need not have worried unduly; after World
War II, intellectuals were still attractive to U.S. policymakers, but Latin
American experiments were now being extended to a global level. In the
context of the postwar boom in modernization theory, the third-world
intellectual morphed into the forward-looking modernizing elite who
would lead the developmentalist charge in his native country. Further, in
the global struggle against communism, he became an indispensable link
in pulling neutral sectors of the world’s population toward the West.21
 P R E FAC E xvii

Given these long-standing patterns of intellectual recruitment on the

part of U.S. policymakers, the School of Panamerican Unrest foregrounds
the recent, and still relatively unstable, position of art and artists within
circuits of hemispheric cultural diplomacy. Their complicated entrée into
this arena lends the school its somewhat paradoxical basis in both civic
education and avant-garde aesthetics, in a Pan Americanism inclusive of
North and South America and a Latin American intellectual tradition
that is deeply suspicious of appeals to hemispheric unity. As latecomers
to cultural diplomacy, as well as to intellectual sectors conceived along
“republic of letters” models, artists only began to appear as social lead-
ers on the radar of U.S. policymakers during the Good Neighbor Policy
years of the 1930s and 1940s.22 Thanks to the institutionalization of the
Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) with its robust state-sponsored public
art programs, Mexican art achieved broad popularity in the United States
and other American countries during the 1920s and 1930s. Through their
extensive travel and international affiliations, “los tres grandes,” the three
great muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro
Siqueiros, influenced artists in diverse contexts, from Canada to Brazil,
Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Argentina (Figure 1). Even
Jackson Pollock, whose abstract expressionist paintings were sometimes
characterized by cold war critics as antithetical to the muralists’ social re-
alism, acknowledged his profound debt to Siqueiros and Orozco in terms
of his own painterly formation. Well before the rise of the New York
school of abstract expressionism, Mexican muralism and other Latin
American avant-garde movements raised the possibility of “American
art” as a hemispheric phenomenon.23
As influential U.S. policymakers and connoisseurs like Rockefeller also
looked to Mexico in the 1930s, the techniques of U.S. cultural diplomacy
themselves became imbued with a latent Mexicanism, especially those
pertaining to the visual arts. Bathed in the aura of twentieth-century
revolution and modernist aesthetics, the introduction of Latin American
artists to cultural diplomacy during the Good Neighbor Policy years was
politicized to a greater degree than that of other intellectuals, owing to
established United States–Mexico cultural exchanges. Among Helguera’s
intellectual inspirations for the School of Panamerican Unrest, the debt to
José Vasconcelos is particularly significant, for the architect of Mexico’s
postrevolutionary public arts programs is the only one among the trio
of inspirational figures cited by Helguera (the other two being Martí
and Bolívar) who was himself a cultural policymaker in the service of a
state. Throughout Helguera’s journey, the legacy of early twentieth-century
xviii P R E FAC E

Figure 1. The Mexican delegation to the American Artists’ Congress in New York;
photo taken at the Delphic Studios before paintings by José Clemente Orozco.
Pictured left to right are Rufino Tamayo, Alma Reed (owner of the Delphic Studios
gallery), David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Roberto Berdecio, and
Angélica Arenal. The Congress was held at the New School for Social Research
on February 15–16, 1936. As a Popular Front initiative of the Communist Party,
the Congress convened delegations of artists from Peru, Cuba, Mexico, and the
United States to organize in opposition to the war and fascism. The Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, California (960094). Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

United States–Mexico cultural exchanges seemed to precede him, and

local publics regarded him alternately as a U.S. artist or a Mexican one.
In spite of the fact that Helguera described his conversations with Mexico
City artists to be like “herding cats” and the conductor of Mérida’s mu-
nicipal orchestra complained that the SPU anthem was “very bad music,”
the school was relatively well received at its five stops in Helguera’s native
country.24 In El Salvador, the Mexican embassy even hosted a reception
for the school, readily grasping the project’s “protocolary dimension” and
perhaps recognizing in its linkage of art to diplomacy something compa-
rable to the model pioneered by the postrevolutionary Mexican state.25
The School of Panamerican Unrest is thus not only concerned with
independence-era movements but is also an oblique reflection by an art-
ist and educator about the relatively recent incorporation of art into the
realm of hemispheric American cultural diplomacy, an initiative inspired
by Mexican state policy and later taken up by U.S.-based institutions
and international organizations. A compelling feature of the school is its
 P R E FAC E xix

expressed desire to forge bonds of solidarity on terms other than those

enabled by the market, and it aims to do so through its invention of the
institutional trappings of a vital, participatory public sector—a gesture
that implicitly draws attention to the erosion of state-sponsored and pub-
lic cultural institutions under neoliberalism. That the post-9/11 era would
prompt Helguera to return to previous cultural diplomatic configurations
comes as little surprise, since the World War II era in the Americas pro-
vides a set of templates that have been newly rejuvenated by contempo-
rary U.S. policymakers in the interest of promoting liberalism in other
regions. But Helguera’s school complicates the U.S. orientation of such
projects by tracing further precedents for cultural diplomacy in the pro-
gressive internationalist orientation of the Mexican intelligentsia in the
years immediately following the revolution.
In addition to summoning these historical dimensions of cultural ex-
change, the SPU’s engagement with the performative aspects of art and
diplomacy also dramatizes the tacit pact between institutions and people
that is basic to contemporary theories of cultural citizenship. The very
project title plays upon the notion of a “school” as a pattern of aesthetic
transmission across time and space, and the concept of school as a public
institution where civic values are instilled in the young. Both types of
school share a common investment in mimesis as a form of pedagogy, in
that they create shared values through modeling behavior and encourag-
ing repetitive exercises. Yet a third inflection emerges from the juxtapo-
sition of schools of art and education, and that is the school as a “pro-
tected” space, where practice and rehearsal, or draft and sketch, become
endowed with potentially transgressive possibilities, precisely because they
are contextualized as mere practice toward some future-oriented, exter-
nal, real-world endeavor. In this respect, the contemporary hemispheric
performance scene is particularly rich in its staging of social experiments
like Helguera’s under the rubric of art, as in the case of the Cuban art-
ist Tania Bruguera, whose performance at the Havana Biennial, Tatlin’s
Whisper  #6 (Havana Version) (2009), invited speakers to come up to
a podium to speak freely for one minute, effectively creating a public
sphere within an arts institution that calls into question the “theatrical-
ity” of similar spectacles taking place in other social arenas. As in the
case of Bruguera’s performance, it would be a disservice to characterize
Helguera’s school as simply reacting to deficiencies in the political or
economic sectors. The performance itself is a generative undertaking and
testament to the advantageous incommensurability of the avant-garde
with those worlds to which it refers.
xx P R E FAC E

Between Latin American intellectuals and U.S. circuits of cultural di-

plomacy there is a little-examined institutional meeting ground, which is
the topic of the present study. Rather than fix an arbitrary point of origin
for the narrative that follows, I will begin my story with an anecdote, an
obscure reference that I came across in a Pan American Union admin-
istrative report describing an exhibition of Mexican open-air painting
organized by the union’s Division of Intellectual Cooperation in 1931 for
travel to New York and other venues.26 From that moment on the cusp of
the Good Neighbor Policy, and throughout the cold war, several genera-
tions of Latin American arts administrators at the Pan American Union
insisted, like Helguera, that culture was central to the theorization of
modernity, that a greater American culture did exist, and that art should
circulate freely throughout the hemisphere. A central tension informing
their work, however, was that they drew on long-standing traditions of
intellectualism associated with anti-imperialist Latin Americanism from
within a Pan American institutional location. Since artists have been some-
what idiosyncratically incorporated into circuits of hemispheric cultural
diplomacy, they are perhaps well positioned to address the conflicted col-
lective memory of Pan Americanism and its continual, agonistic staging
of hemispheric unity and fragmentation. Looking back on his journey,
Helguera surmised that “Panamerica is a place of false starts and un-
finished stories.” The open-endedness of his summary statement under-
scores the persistent, utopian impulse to “find a new beginning” by re-
visiting neglected icons of the past.27
2 INTRODUCTION

palaces,” or incubators for “the International Mind,” where, it was hoped,

diplomats of diverse nations would fraternize and achieve a mutual under-
standing that would in turn be conducive toward maintaining world
peace.2 In this case, the incubator was an elegant Beaux-Arts building,
designed by Paul Cret and Albert Kelsey, with a flock of live parrots and
tropical plants installed in the central patio to make Latin American dip-
lomats feel “at home” (Plate 1 and Figure 2).3
The more ethereal strategy for cultivating “the International Mind,”
however, was the shared consumption of high culture. Cognac and piano
concertos were not mere perquisites of the diplomatic service; rather, they
were like water to fish, invisible yet essential, for culture was the very me-
dium through which diplomacy was supposed to occur. Foreign policy-
makers understood politics to be the cause of war, and culture as the
antidote to realpolitik and brute force. Hence, they maintained, cultural
diplomacy should necessarily be “disinterested,” meaning free from the
interference of political lines or exigencies.4 As one veteran of the Pan
American Conferences put it, “A recital by a pianist or violinist, an exhi-

Figure 2. The Pan American Union, Washington, D.C., 1943. Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection (LC-USW36–740). Photo-
graph by John Collier.
 INTRODUCTION 3

bition of the works of a great painter or sculptor may create, for the time,
a sense of common human feeling transcending the sharp controversies
of foreign offices.”5 To encourage an environment suitable for diplomacy,
the PAU and other international organizations dedicated entire branches
to culture, which in the early twentieth century encompassed a broad
interdisciplinary field including education, libraries and publishing, the
arts, humanities, and sciences.
Following World War II, the Pan American Union underwent a dra-
matic transformation when in 1948 it became the General Secretariat, or
headquarters, of the Organization of American States (OAS), a regional
cold war pact undergirded by two powerful hemispheric security treaties.
The first OAS secretary general, the Colombian journalist and politician
Alberto Lleras Camargo (1948–1954), supported cultural programs at
the PAU in the interest of “Latin Americanizing” the institution’s work
culture.6 Through art exhibitions, concerts, lectures, and publications, he
sought to convey the image of the PAU as a training ground for aspir-
ing Latin American diplomats and international civil servants, and to
dispense with the institution’s image as tweedy and paternalistic under
the leadership of its former director general, the U.S. political scientist
Leo S. Rowe (1920–1946).7 In these efforts, a rather modest office at
the Pan American Union known as the Visual Arts Section emerged to
hold a singular position among U.S.-based arts institutions.8 During the
two decades after the war, the PAU Visual Arts Section became a major
player in the burgeoning hemispheric arts scene, the scope of its activities
surpassing the other cultural initiatives of the OAS. At a time when U.S.
foreign policy and aid were primarily concerned with ensuring stability
in war-torn Europe and Asia, and the fledgling OAS was already declared
to be in crisis, the PAU Visual Arts Section assertively proclaimed Latin
America’s entrée into the postwar international community as it forged
connections between a growing base of middle-class art consumers, on
the one hand, and concepts of supranational citizenship and political and
economic liberalism, on the other.9 The PAU Visual Arts Section burgeoned
under the leadership of a strong administrator, the curator and critic José
Gómez Sicre (Cuba, 1916–1989), who became its chief in 1946 and over-
saw its programs for the next three and a half decades (Figure 3).10
Over the course of his career at the PAU, Gómez Sicre maintained a
rigorous schedule of rotating exhibitions at the union; served as an ad
hoc art dealer; acted as consultant, judge, and tastemaker for numerous
Latin American arts events throughout the Americas and Europe; and
boosted the international reputation of many artists. He conceived of the
4 INTRODUCTION

Figure 3. José Gómez Sicre (right) and Joan Miró (Spain, 1893–1983). Nettie Lee
Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University
of Texas at Austin. Copyright 2013 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photograph by Manuel de Agustin.

Western Hemisphere as an art circuit, framing the PAU arts programs

through multinational corporate patronage and Latin Americanist dis-
courses explicitly tied to concepts of universalism, developmentalism, and
rebellious, youthful aesthetics. As an advocate of free trade in the arts,
 INTRODUCTION 5

Gómez Sicre based his transnational curatorial projects on the principle

of commodity exchange and circulation, and he viewed art through the
lens of comparative advantage rather than national patrimony. In this
respect, he anticipates the contemporary figure that George Yúdice has
described as the neoliberal arts administrator.11 Yet, at the same time,
Gómez Sicre was committed to the establishment of self-sustaining arts
cultures in Latin America, and he regarded U.S. arts institutions not so
much a terminus for Latin American art as an export processing zone
where aspiring artists had critical and monetary value added to their
work before having it reexported to Latin America. The tension between
the hemispheric and Latin American registers of Gómez Sicre’s adminis-
trative activities serves as my point of departure for this study.
For many young Latin American artists, a show at the PAU’s small
gallery was a career turning point that enabled them to bypass restrictive
or nonexistent national arts institutions and gain access to a broad inter-
national network of galleries, museums, and publics. Among the well-
known twentieth-century artists who had their first solo show abroad at
the union are Fernando Botero (Colombia, b. 1932), Alejandro Obregón
(Colombia, 1920–1992), Raquel Forner (Argentina, 1902–1988), Manabu
Mabe (Japan–Brazil, 1924–1997), José Luis Cuevas (Mexico, b. 1934),
and Fernando de Szyszlo (Peru, b. 1925).12 Fundamental to the Visual Arts
Section’s activities was an optimistic, even triumphalist, view of the hemi-
sphere as an egalitarian network of postwar “international art centers”
that emerged to displace Paris as art capital of the Western world during
the postwar period. One of Gómez Sicre’s most famous declarations con-
jured the image of a new hemispheric circuit that radiated outward from
American metropolises to encompass other global cities, including Tokyo,
Sydney, and Stockholm:
The young American artist knows that international art centers are
being born in his own continent and now has as obligatory reception
points New York and Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Lima, Mexico
City and São Paulo, Caracas and Washington. . . . Paris has stopped
being “the center” in order to become “one more center.”13

The beholder of this expansive panorama is the “young American artist,”

a recurring protagonist of Gómez Sicre’s art criticism, who liberates him-
self from national arts institutions where stale, official tendencies such
as indigenism and muralism still flourish. The young artist breaks the
“vicious cycle” that goes from the academy to foreign grant to national
salon prize and finally to professorship (“academia-beca al exterior-salón
6 INTRODUCTION

nacional-premio-profesorado”) in order to make a cosmopolitan pil-

grim’s journey through the hemisphere’s capitals, culminating in a visit to
Washington, D.C.—this last stop being the sly insertion of Gómez Sicre.14
Gómez Sicre’s ambitious geography promised not only renewed cul-
tural and intellectual exchange between the countries of Latin America
and Europe following the privations of World War II, but also, for the
first time, the possibility of cultural parity with them. Through promot-
ing a continental consciousness, Latin America would exchange paro-
chial and fractious nationalisms for a progressive and outward-looking
regionalism that did not dispense with the national altogether but instead
featured it as one tier on a progressive scale of affective spatial and com-
munal registers linking American metropolises to the rest of the world.
Gómez Sicre’s circuit of “reception points” celebrates the efflorescence
of contemporary art that was occurring in many large Latin American
cities during the postwar period, but the utopian tenor of his declaration
tellingly also avoids mention of hemispheric inequalities that became pro-
nounced during the same period—namely, New York’s rise to prominence
in the art world amid the newly proclaimed global cultural, political, and
economic hegemony of the United States at the dawn of the cold war. Just
a few blocks away from the White House, the PAU Visual Arts Section
was a stronghold of culturalist Latin Americanism that flouted the will to
U.S. global supremacy expressed in Henry Luce’s phrase “the American
century.”15
The apparent contradiction between Gómez Sicre’s defiant Latin
Americanism and his Pan American institutional context was neither a
personal idiosyncrasy nor an invention of the cold war; rather, it had
long twentieth-century antecedents in liberal internationalism as well as
in practices of U.S. cultural diplomacy, which became fascinated with
wooing a particular incarnation of the Latin American intellectual just as
the United States was entering a phase of aggressive expansionism on the
eve of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. The current of Latin
Americanism that flourished at the PAU during the pre–World War  II
period that Ricardo D. Salvatore calls the “age of Pan Americanism”
(1890–1940) was closely related to the growth of Latin American area
studies as an academic discipline in the United States. For Salvatore, proj-
ects such as the PAU’s Columbus Memorial Library, founded as a reposi-
tory of all of the books of the Americas, served as a power-knowledge
nexus, comparable to orientalism, which facilitated the growth of the
U.S. commercial empire in Latin America.16 Gómez Sicre’s curatorial
projects drew on this U.S.-centered conceptual and material database of
 INTRODUCTION 7

Latin Americanism; however, they also introduced ideas pertaining to a

distinctly Latin America–centered tradition of latinoamericanismo (Latin
Americanism) associated with prominent fin de siècle literary intellec-
tuals such as José Enrique Rodó (Uruguay, 1872–1917), Rubén Darío
(Nicaragua, 1867–1917), and José Martí (Cuba, 1853–1895). Among
this generation, Martí personally witnessed the rise of Pan Americanism
in the United States, having attended the Pan American Conferences while
working as a foreign correspondent and acting as New York consul for
several Latin American governments during his long period of exile from
Cuba.17 Coming to maturity in the shadow of the War of 1898, these
writers were critical of emerging U.S. imperialism, and at the same time
they sought to renovate Spanish-American literary language by liberat-
ing it from its long-standing adherence to peninsular Spanish lexical and
generic forms.
The Latin American generation of 1898 inaugurated the literary move-
ment known as modernismo (distinct from its English-language cognate),
which promoted the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere as a counterweight
to the dehumanizing modernity that it perceived to be emanating from
the United States. Julio Ramos sketches the animating ideas of the mod-
ernistas through a series of powerful binarisms in which “Latin America
[is] a repository for ‘aesthetic,’ ‘human,’ and ‘spiritual’ values opposed to
North American capitalist and technological modernity. We/they forms
the matrix of an emerging nationalistic subject: it constitutes an antitheti-
cal configuration that introduces the opposition between Anglo-Saxon and
the Latin race.”18
In spite of their different affiliations, several factors combined to bring
early twentieth-century U.S.-based area studies and modernista conceptu-
alizations of U.S.–Latin American relations together in the Pan American
Union in the first half of the twentieth century. During the years of the
Good Neighbor Policy (ca. 1933–1945), as in the late nineteenth century,
the United States once again pursued commercial and cultural relation-
ships with the countries of Latin America, this time in order to curb Axis
influence on the continent and to secure valuable primary materials given
wartime restrictions on transatlantic trade.19 In an effort to combat the
negative stereotypes of the United States that circulated abroad, the U.S.
State Department organized ambitious cultural exchange programs tar-
geted at Latin American intellectuals and social leaders, including jour-
nalists, creative writers, artists, musicians, professors, and politicians.
This period saw a massive influx of Latin American intellectuals to U.S.-
based institutions and agencies, often on short-term grants, internships,
8 INTRODUCTION

and fellowships, and often in subordinate roles to their U.S. counterparts

for whom they served as translators, mediators, and “sounding boards”
for proposals. In spite of this unequal labor dynamic, Latin Americans
exerted influence over the shape of hemispheric American policies and
programs, particularly in the cultural field. Many of the intellectuals who
first visited the United States in the early 1940s on State Department travel
grants later turned up at the PAU in some capacity in the years following
World War II, including two of the institution’s early postwar directors
of cultural affairs, Jorge Basadre (Peru, 1947–1950) and Erico Veríssimo
(Brazil, 1953–1957).20 Even the Cuban patriot José Martí, who had
strongly denounced the late nineteenth-century Pan American Confer-
ences, was posthumously recruited for the cause of Pan Americanism, in
part through the frequent citation of his writings by the poet, diplomat,
and educator Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889–1957), who was a 1945
Nobel laureate and the grande dame of the PAU during the “age of Pan
Americanism.”21 As cultural workers and diplomats started accompany-
ing their own books to the PAU’s Columbus Memorial Library en masse
during the 1930s and 1940s, the yawning gap between Jose Martí’s
“Nuestra América” (Our America) and the Pan American movement that
he so vehemently opposed became a bit narrower.
In addition to intellectuals and their books, the Good Neighbor Policy
also brought art, artists, critics, and curators from Latin America to the
United States. During this period, hemispheric cultural diplomacy privi-
leged visual art as an object of exchange, often capitalizing on the popular-
ity of postrevolutionary Mexican art in the United States and its influence
on New Deal public arts projects. As Anna Indych-López has observed,
U.S. viewing publics and critics during the Good Neighbor years gradu-
ally shifted their interpretative frame for viewing contemporary Mexican
art from one stressing folkloric and exotic qualities to one stressing leftist
politics.22 One outcome of the binational artistic exchanges is that U.S.
viewing publics came to associate Mexican art with the whole of Latin
American artistic production.
The particular configuration of hemispheric aesthetic and political
movements during the decades of the 1930s and 1940s shaped the projects
of the PAU Visual Arts Section for decades to come. In spite of the epi-
graph attributing the invention of Latin American art to Gómez Sicre that
opens this introduction, it was really his predecessor, Concha Romero
James (Mexico, 1900–1987), who got the process of continental canon
formation underway at the PAU during the Good Neighbor years. She ac-
complished this largely through her efforts to bring art into the rubric of
 INTRODUCTION 9

the Pan American Union’s cultural activities and systematize its archives
in the field. That Romero James’s perspectives favored mass education,
feminism, and the Mexican school of art was no doubt a source of ir-
ritation for Gómez Sicre, whose own projects implicitly opposed these
values. Nevertheless, it was Romero James who forged the structure that
subsequently conferred Gómez Sicre’s distinction as the “inventor of
Latin American art.” Although Gómez Sicre strongly opposed Mexican
muralism and sought to make hemispheric publics aware of diverse art
from many Latin American countries, postrevolutionary Mexican cul-
tural policy still provided a template for his projects, which cast visual
artists as public intellectuals and used art as a means to foster regional
identity. The category of Latin American art may be an invention, but as
I argue in this study, it is less the intellectual property of a single vision-
ary than a concatenation of diverse institutional projects that eventually
found an impresario at the PAU during the postwar period in the contra-
dictory and multilayered Gómez Sicre.
For Good Neighbor cultural policymakers, the circulation of art
on a hemispheric level also brought with it the tantalizing prospect of
an emerging inter-American art market. Julio Ramos observes that the
late nineteenth-century modernistas regarded beauty as a compensation
for “the destabilizing . . . flux of money and an ‘empty’ life of reigning
‘materialism’ ”—values that the movement broadly associated with the
United States. But during the Good Neighbor years, at least in the al-
chemical gaze of U.S. policymakers, the leveling power of the market
could draw even the most resistant currents of latinoamericanismo into
the orbit of Pan Americanism. By taking the modernistas’ claims to cul-
tural superiority at their word, U.S. policymakers identified the aesthetic
as Latin America’s comparative advantage in accordance with liberal
theories of economic development. Consider, for example, this statement
by Daniel Catton Rich, director of fine arts of the Art Institute of Chicago,
presented in 1943 before an audience of philanthropic foundation admin-
istrators and foreign policy specialists, in which he reports on his recent
fact-finding trip to Central and South America:
Latin American countries, frankly sensitive and full of inferiority
feeling, not only to the United States but to their own neighbors, have
stoutly insisted on cultural superiority. Their insecurity in the face of
our technical supremacy is often over-compensated for by extravagant
claims that the United States is the Caliban and Latin-America the
Ariel of the spirit of the Western Hemisphere.
We would do well to recognize this defense mechanism by not
10 INTRODUCTION

pushing our culture down their throats. Neither should we admit that
we are uncultured. Rather it seems to me that the United States should
adopt a dignified and self-possessed attitude of this kind: Surely, we
have culture. It is growing, advancing, spreading. Whatever you find
useful in our civilization is yours for the asking—and readily avail-
able to all. You have an historic past which long antedates ours and
contains many things of interest and value. Let us absorb what we can
of that.
A reciprocal “culture” understanding would not insist on trading
experiences of the Old North Church for La Compañía of Quito. If
you are keen to learn our techniques and we are keen to know your
artistic heritage why not settle it along those lines. After all we have
more bathtubs than we need and you have more Cuzco paintings than
you need.23

What Rich terms a “reciprocal ‘culture’ understanding” eagerly antici-

pates new acquisitions of art for U.S. museums and the corresponding
modernization of Latin American societies through U.S. exports and
technology (the reference to plumbing as a barometer of development
would become a cliché by the 1960s). Rich’s reference to characters from
Shakespeare’s The Tempest responds to José Enrique Rodó’s canonical
modernista essay “Ariel” (1900) in which Latin American intellectuals
are cast as Ariels in contrast to base and instrumentalist U.S. Calibans.24
Through exchange value and vulgar psychoanalysis, Rich reconciles
Ariel to Adam Smith while at the same time reaffirming modernismo’s
North–South axis of cultural difference. Instead of reciting platitudes
about shared political systems—the independence wars and “sister repub-
lics” that provided a bread-and-butter rationale for the Western Hemi-
sphere concept during the “age of Pan Americanism”—Rich establishes
a basis for productive inter-American relations in cultural difference and
uneven development.
Julio Ramos has noted that Latin Americanism has tended to assert
itself at historical moments marked by a “compression of hemispheric
space” and intensified circulation of capital. “Might it not be said,” Ramos
muses, “that Latin-Americanism . . . is a field of investigation into the
precarious balance among the cultural formations of international capital
and vernacular cultures?”25 Throughout the long twentieth century, intel-
lectuals have borne witness to this “precarious balance” around monu-
ments of the American sublime, from Machu Picchu to Niagara Falls
and the Panama Canal. Reader, be warned: this study ventures into more
prosaic terrain, such as filing cabinets, organizational charts, and policy
 INTRODUCTION 11

documents, as it investigates the “compression of hemispheric space”

that made it possible for Rich’s remarks, cited above, to find a long-
term institutional basis of support, and for art to become integrated into
cold war hemispheric cultural policy programs launched by U.S.-based
institutions.
As World War II came to an end and the cold war gathered momentum,
the compatibility between Pan Americanism and Latin Americanism that
had been asserted at the PAU during the Good Neighbor years underwent
increasing challenges from the Communist left. While PAU cultural work-
ers claimed nineteenth-century Latin American statesmen-intellectuals,
such as Bolívar, Bello, and Martí, as foundational figures for the Pan
American movement, the Soviet Latin Americanist Anatolii Nikolaevich
Glinkin in his study El latinoamericanismo contra el panamericanismo:
Desde Simón Bolívar hasta nuestros días (Latin Americanism Against Pan
Americanism: From Simón Bolívar to the Present) cautioned that the
Pan and Latin prefixes were fundamentally antithetical to one another.26
The contested affiliations of Latin America speak to the growing sensitiv-
ity on the part of the superpowers toward third-world allegiances within
the emerging bipolar order. As Odd Arne Westad has argued, “The most
important aspects of the cold war were neither military nor strategic,
nor Europe-centered, but connected to political and social development
in the Third World,” for this was where each empire stood to gain the
most in terms of tipping the balance of power, and where third-world
peoples also stood to gain the most in terms of decolonizing their socie-
ties.27 But, as the West and the Soviet bloc struggled over the loyalty
of Latin Americans, they also encountered the sedimented histories of
long-standing movements for independence, decolonization, and self-
determination that had invoked latinoamericanista rhetoric and imagery
prior to the cold war. For this reason, I do not characterize the postwar
PAU as a U.S. front organization or a liberal cargo cult that descended
upon Latin America, but rather as a site of heterogeneity and collabora-
tion among intellectuals and diplomats of vastly different backgrounds
and perspectives, loosely, and sometimes tensely, convened under the ban-
ner of liberal internationalism.
Even within the Organization of American States, the PAU Department
of Cultural Affairs (home to the Visual Arts Section) was somewhat
anomalous, characterized by one union insider as “a purely Latin Ameri-
can sphere” within the larger, hemispheric organizational structure.28 Of
course, it was strategically advantageous, from the perspective of OAS
architects, to designate, or permit, the Organization’s cultural branches
12 INTRODUCTION

to project the image of a truly Latin America–dominant system of gov-

ernance during the cold war, while the balance of power remained more
opaque in the Organization’s other branches. In this sense, the PAU Visual
Arts Section did important work for Pan Americanism and for U.S. for-
eign policy, in that it capitalized on an Arielista disdain for U.S. philis-
tinism, proffering a culturalist, continental version of “Nuestra América”
that implicitly targeted Latin American nationalisms as obstacles to
hemispheric unity.29 The visual arts programs stressed “modernity be-
fore modernization,” as they detached cultural autonomy from political
and economic demands and offered a model of international community
that preempted other potentially threatening (to U.S. and Latin American
elites) forms of internationalism based on class, race, or other factors.
Liberal internationalism shared significant philosophical concerns with
the currents of Latin Americanism that circulated in the PAU after World
War II as well, such as the perception of intellectuals as leaders of the
masses, the investment in a disinterested cultural sphere, and the charac-
terization of the aesthetic as a peaceful refuge in times of crisis or war.30
But the Latin Americanism that flourished in the postwar PAU cultural
branches also endowed them with a degree of relative autonomy that at
times broached critique of the larger Organization and certainly assumed
a life of its own once their projects entered the world. As Mary Louise
Pratt has argued, metropolitan narratives of modernity rarely envision
the transformations that they will undergo in the course of their own dif-
fusion.31 In tracing the routes of PAU projects in the visual arts, my study
avoids a top-down or diffusionist approach to cultural policy, focused
on goals and outcomes, in favor of a multilateral one that examines the
interplay among institutions, social actors, and the interpretation and
circulation of art in a broad transnational context. The projects under-
taken by José Gómez Sicre in the dynamic and innovative years of his
early career at the PAU, from roughly 1946 to 1968, offer numerous
examples in support of Pratt’s claim. During these two postwar decades,
Gómez Sicre dedicated himself to defining the contours of “el nuevo arte
nuestro” (our new art) in relation to postwar political and economic re-
alities and in pointed opposition to social realism, which had enjoyed a
broad hemispheric reception before and during the war.32 Gómez Sicre’s
office was active in debates about art and society in many Latin American
cities, and his projects thrived in an institutional culture of personalism,
in which he improvised cultural policy, sometimes inconsistently, as he
maneuvered through overlapping corporate, diplomatic, intellectual, and
governmental circles, rather than operating in compliance with top-down
mission statements.33
 INTRODUCTION 13

The energy that the PAU arts programs display during these decades
may be inversely related to U.S. policymakers’ interest in them, for Gómez
Sicre’s early career at the PAU falls roughly in the interregnum between
two ambitious U.S. development initiatives for Latin America: the anti-
fascist Good Neighbor Policy (ca. 1933–1945) and the anticommunist
Alliance for Progress (ca. 1961–1973).34 These were the early years of the
cold war, marked by the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the National Security
Council Report 68 of 1950, and the CIA-organized coup in Guatemala in
1954. But, in terms of U.S. foreign policy, this was a period of relative ne-
glect for Latin American affairs as such in favor of a global and beachhead
approach to containment. The PAU Visual Arts Section was one of the
few U.S.-based offices that carried on the type of inter-American cultural
exchange that had thrived during the first half of the twentieth century in
larger U.S. institutions. It was a sort of placeholder for such projects until
the Cuban Revolution of 1959 once again pushed hemispheric matters to
the fore of U.S. foreign policy concerns. The Visual Arts Section was also
ahead of its time in experimenting with linkages between modernization
theory and visual art that would later receive wide coverage during the
arts-friendly Kennedy era. As administrator of the Alliance for Progress, a
large-scale U.S.-initiated development program intended to compete with
the Cuban Revolution for the hearts and minds of Latin Americans, the
OAS played a major role in inter-American affairs during the early 1960s;
however, the twilight years of the Alliance for Progress also marked the
decline of the Visual Arts Section’s expansive phase as the OAS ushered in
a new, decentralized approach to cultural policy and the PAU visual arts
programs underwent numerous challenges, both internal and external to
the OAS.
Like the office he directed, Gómez Sicre’s own intellectual formation
spans the pre– and post–World War II years. If there is a particular mo-
ment that seems to define his long career at the PAU, it is the window from
1940 to 1945, spent mostly in Cuba, during which he developed impor-
tant international contacts and ideas about modern art that informed sub-
sequent curatorial projects. During this period he traveled to Mexico, the
Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Argentina, and Haiti in order to study
art and mount exhibitions; he experienced momentous encounters with
the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) di-
rector Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros;
he audited courses in art history and criticism with Erwin Panofsky at
New York University and Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University while
helping to mount a MoMA exhibition; and in Havana he interacted with
prominent intellectuals and gained administrative experience working
14 INTRODUCTION

in progressive cultural institutions. The institutional connections forged

during the World War II years are crucial to understanding the cold war
activities of the Visual Arts Section. In terms of Gómez Sicre’s own in-
stitutional trajectory, the state-private network described by scholars as
a paradigmatic configuration of the cultural cold war in the West was
actually forged during the hot war.35 The cold war security mission of the
OAS brought undeniable changes to the work culture and organizational
structure of the PAU, but as we have seen, the union’s cultural programs
were shaped by a somewhat more distant set of historical circumstances
in which cultural exchange was closely tied to trade liberalization and ex-
panding markets. As the Visual Arts Section entered the postwar period,
a current of Talcott Parsonsesque professionalism joined the Visual Arts
Section’s long-standing orientation toward Latin American humanism,
and new geographical, historical, and intellectual vectors were brought to
bear on its ongoing consolidation of Latin American art as a field.
With a few notable exceptions, scholars have avoided sustained con-
sideration of the PAU arts programs.36 Broadly speaking, the early cold
war is a desert in terms of U.S.–Latin American cultural diplomacy, and
one critic has likened the PAU to a “ghetto” for Latin American art, in
contrast to the high visibility it enjoyed at large U.S. institutions during
the Good Neighbor years.37 This assessment is accurate, but it overlooks
the PAU arts programs’ significant interventions in the postwar art scenes
of many Latin American cities, where, arguably, they had greater impact
than they did in the United States. Gómez Sicre has also been character-
ized as an imitator of trends in the New York art world, and a palpable
homophobia still marks some references to his stable of young male art-
ists.38 But the main reason, I believe, for the critical avoidance of the PAU
programs is ideological, a legacy of the Cuban Revolution’s polarizing
impact on American intellectual sectors. Since its inception, critics have
regarded the inter-American system as a vehicle of U.S. empire, and the
OAS anticommunist response to the Cuban Revolution only intensified
this perception. In the assessment of one contemporary Cuban scholar,
Gómez Sicre is the Organization’s “superagente del imperialismo y man-
ager manipulador del arte latinoamericana” (superagent of imperialism
and manipulating manager of Latin American art).39 When asked late in
life if he was a CIA agent, Gómez Sicre responded “No,” but added pro-
vocatively, “No negaré que hice el papel que me tocó actuar durante la
guerra fría. Sobre todo en torno a Cuba” (I won’t deny that I played the
part assigned to me, especially regarding Cuba).40 Following the Cuban
Revolution, Gómez Sicre did do his part to counter the aesthetic programs
 INTRODUCTION 15

of the revolution and maintain a Cuban presence at the PAU through ex-
hibitions featuring Cuban artists in exile. I contend, however, that Gómez
Sicre’s most active interventions in Latin American art worlds, and his
ongoing legacy for the study of contemporary Latin American art, do
not stem from his pronounced anti-Castrismo after the revolution but
rather from his modernizing experiments in Latin Americanism during
the 1940s and 1950s.
The cordon sanitaire around the PAU means that one of its most sig-
nificant contributions to Latin American art has gone largely unexam-
ined, namely its role in advancing the category of Latin American art
as a coherent object of study, a premise that has been widely adopted
across the political spectrum and that continues to inform contemporary
practices of collecting, curatorship, and criticism. In this study, I aim to
distinguish the specific modernist trajectories in which the PAU was in-
volved from Gómez Sicre’s universalist claims about contemporary Latin
American art, and I do so in the hope that it will also draw attention
to those aesthetic currents that have been ignored or suppressed by his
curatorial emphases.41 At the same time, I argue that the Pan American
Union arts programs are germane to the study of contemporary Latin
American art. Gómez Sicre’s substantial intellectual formation in the
Cuban vanguardia (avant-garde) and other modernist movements com-
plicates characterizations of him as a mere tool of U.S. interests. Like-
wise, the artists whom he supported were never exclusively branded by
the PAU but rather were active in multiple institutional and intellectual
arenas, and at times their PAU affiliation contrasted markedly with their
profiles in other contexts. Finally, as noted above, the discourse of Latin
American art that coalesced at the PAU during the early cold war had
intellectual roots not only in prewar U.S. institutions and policies but
also in aesthetic modernisms forged in and across diverse American lo-
cations, and often in broad affiliation with leftist movements. Gómez
Sicre stands as a monolith of “the age of curators,” curators whose lega-
cies are now undergoing substantial revision. Just as recent studies of
postwar art in the United States have sought to disentangle the figure of
MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. from histories of modernist painting,
and to distinguish abstract expressionism’s contexts of production from
its deployment as cold war propaganda, a generation of scholars is now
revisiting the institutional-intellectual networks that fueled postwar Latin
American art worlds through nuanced studies that examine interactions
among urban, national, and international social actors.42
José Gómez Sicre’s early intellectual formation did not augur his
16 INTRODUCTION

contemporary epitaph as a “Cold Warrior” for the arts.43 In the 1940s,

his political perspectives were more progressive than those of many of his
contemporaries who went on to become revolutionary intellectuals. Born
in Matanzas, Cuba, to a secular middle-class family, members of which
were prominent in Cuba’s War for Independence from Spain, Gómez
Sicre became a diplomatic law scholar by training and a bohemian art
critic by avocation. He gravitated toward avant-garde movements that
had been developing among Cuban intellectuals since the 1920s, in par-
ticular Afrocubanismo, which was inspired by nascent projects in Cuban
anthropology and a critical appropriation of European primitivism in
the arts. The movement valorized the African presence in Cuban culture
as a means of articulating a Cuban national identity in contrast to the
values identified with Spanish and U.S. colonialism.44 Through his work
as a gallerist, critic, and curator in Havana, Gómez Sicre promoted the
eclectic art produced by painters and sculptors of his generation, known
as the vanguardia. In Gómez Sicre’s opinion, fusing the iconoclastic, anti-
bourgeois stance of the school of Paris with Afrocuban elements—in
other words, forging a cultural front out of that which was proscribed
in official arenas—was an effective strategy to combat the conservative
academicism favored by the Cuban state.
Gómez Sicre arrived in Washington, D.C., in December 1945 as an
admirer of Neruda and Picasso and a protégé of MoMA’s Alfred H. Barr,
Jr. Under surveillance for his political and sexual orientation during the
Red Scare and the Lavender Scare, he somehow managed to survive the
purges to emerge a cold warrior. Even in this phase of his career, his
commitments remained idiosyncratic with respect to the prevailing policy
climate. While he retained a nostalgic and unyielding loyalty to several
Communist friends and idols of his youth, he debuted a vitriolic anti-
Castrismo after the revolution, and upon Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS
in 1962 he and a handful of other Cuban cultural workers became de
facto representatives of their nation at the PAU.45 In other respects, how-
ever, Gómez Sicre’s curatorial projects asserted Latin American autonomy,
intra-Latin American solidarity, and North–South parity. Consistent with
his utopian vision of a decentralized art world, Gómez Sicre projected
egalitarian geopolitical relations through exhibition practices that recog-
nized the multilingual Caribbean at a time when paradigms of U.S.-based
area studies tended to regard it as a region separate from Latin America.
Further, he dedicated exhibitions to Puerto Rican art, even though the
OAS did not recognize Puerto Rico as an independent nation, and he
demonstrated an interest in postwar Canadian art long before Canada
became an OAS member state in 1990.46
 INTRODUCTION 17

The rebellious overturning of old models, central to Gómez Sicre’s

curatorial project, pervaded hemispheric art worlds during the late 1940s
and 1950s.47 In Latin American countries, the postwar years were a pe-
riod of intense activity for the foundation of institutions dedicated to
contemporary art in large cities, as well as for national projects broadly
linking modernization to visual art, mass education, and mass culture.
The São Paulo Bienal, founded in 1951 on the model of the Venice Bienal,
became the premier art event in the hemisphere, and the professionaliza-
tion of art criticism, curatorship, and arts education led to greater cover-
age of art and visual culture in magazines, newspapers, public events,
radio programs, and even television shows targeted at middle-class pub-
lics.48 It is important to underscore that as art connoisseurship became
disseminated through mass media outlets, contemporary Latin American
art became integral to the image repertoire of postwar modernity for
viewing publics, a repertoire that also included interior design, architec-
ture, graphic art, cinema, photography, performance, and fashion.
For his part, Gómez Sicre took special interest in stimulating the art
scenes of the countries of Central America and the northern Andes, for
which he curated national selections at the São Paulo Bienal in addition
to his own PAU pavilion. He established spheres of influence in these re-
gions, I believe, in order to work around his formidable curatorial compe-
tition in the contemporary field from other countries, figures such as Jorge
Romero Brest in Buenos Aires and Mário Pedrosa in São Paolo, and also
because in the former regions he could avail himself of prewar corporate
and foundation connections, such as the Rockefeller family’s Standard
Oil Company affiliates. Dethroning the “picturesque impressionism” that
flourished in the small art academies of these regions was a mere opening
salvo, for Gómez Sicre’s most protracted battle was aimed at toppling
the venerable reputation of Mexican muralism and movements inspired
by it, such as Peruvian and Ecuadorian indigenist painting.49 To this end,
he launched campaigns in nations that were strongholds of social real-
ism, thanks to the protection of state-supported arts institutions. In these
sensitive arenas where painting and nationalism were deeply imbricated,
Gómez Sicre intervened more discreetly than he did in other countries
where he assumed a high public profile, such as Venezuela and Colombia;
instead, he exerted influence through a personal network of sympathetic
critics, gallerists, and curators, but his primary allies were the young art-
ists themselves.
Gómez Sicre’s animus toward muralism stemmed from personal experi-
ences in Cuba, where in 1943 he had sustained a polemic with the renowned
Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Though their interactions were
18 INTRODUCTION

cordial, Siqueiros’s didactic Stalinism and overweening personality of-

fended Gómez Sicre, and the encounter galvanized Gómez Sicre’s subse-
quent negative perceptions of social realist art and national-populist of-
ficialism, tout court. Though Mexican muralism and Cuban vanguardia
painting had been nourished by many of the same modernist movements,
such as cubism and surrealism, and Gómez Sicre’s own aesthetic forma-
tion had been forged at the nexus of Mexican and Caribbean modernist
movements, the Siqueiros encounter, coupled with an acute sensitivity
toward placing Cuban art in the international art market, pushed Gómez
Sicre toward championing the eclectic sensibilities of the Cuban vanguar-
dia in contradistinction to the comparatively renowned Mexican school.
Gómez Sicre thus arrived at the PAU with an aversion to committed art
and social realism that was rooted in his own national context but that
nonetheless converged significantly with critical trends in the U.S. art
world during the formative period that Serge Guilbaut has described as
the “silent interval,” from 1946–1951, when critical discourses about ab-
straction and modern art became consolidated in the United States.50
As Guilbaut and other scholars have noted, by the end of the “silent
interval,” U.S. policymakers had begun to deploy abstract expressionist
painting as a weapon of the cold war in U.S.-produced propaganda for
export in order to convey notions of free expression, individualism, and
sanctioned dissidence.51
In contrast to his U.S. counterparts, Gómez Sicre did not embrace ab-
stract expressionism, and his relation to new aesthetic currents in Latin
America was inevitably complicated by the sheer territorial expanse and
myriad particularities of the art worlds in which he participated. As Jean
Franco has observed, the postwar “flight from commitment” that has been
chronicled substantially from a U.S. perspective played out differently in
Latin American countries; in the latter contexts, the cold war unleashed a
wave of diverse aesthetic experimentation and intense polemics, in which
the Communist left was an active and visible presence.52 During the cold
war, Gómez Sicre employed the antitotalitarian and antiauthoritarian
language of protest from his early intellectual formation to encourage
young artists to rebel against dogmatic or staid institutional aesthetics.
He was not single-handedly responsible for social realism’s loss of criti-
cal cachet in the postwar years. He was, however, well poised to benefit
from the crisis of social realism that was unleashed by the impact of the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and revelations about Stalinism at
the Twentieth Party Congress, which led to a process of de-Stalinization
on the left and marked a turning point in the shift from “old” to “new”
 INTRODUCTION 19

left political movements in many locations around the world during the
late 1950s and the 1960s.53
Unlike other U.S.-based cultural diplomacy programs of the cold war
that were concerned with exporting positive images of the “American
way of life,” Gómez Sicre dedicated himself to seeking cognates for lib-
eral ideals, such as “freedom” and “progress,” in places where modernist
movements had been well underway since the early twentieth century. He
did not create movements ex nihilo but rather identified and championed
minoritarian intellectual and aesthetic currents and alternate art histori-
cal genealogies to hegemonic nationalist ones. In the closely linked art
worlds of Mexico and Peru, for example, he valorized an alternative aes-
thetic tradition that elevated artists who had challenged the parameters
social realism during the prewar period, such as Rufino Tamayo (Mexico,
1899–1991) and Carlos Mérida (Guatemala, 1891–1984). Steeped in the
pan-Caribbean modernist movements that developed in relation to exis-
tentialism, ethnography, and archaeology, Gómez Sicre’s predilection for
the poetic and nonmimetic loosely paralleled projects that were being
forged in small journals with ties to the international surrealist movement,
such as El hijo pródigo (Mexico, 1943–1946) and Las moradas (Lima,
1947–1949). These journals raised the question of an “American art” in
a manner similar to the muralists, while also incorporating cosmopolitan
internationalist perspectives fueled by the arrival of European émigrés in
the Americas, new research on Afro-Caribbean and pre-Columbian cul-
tures, and antifascist solidarity movements around the Spanish Civil War
and World War II.54 Not only did surrealism provide Gómez Sicre with
a parallel, and sometimes overlapping, leftist hemispheric art network
to the one created in the wake of the Mexican muralists’ travels, the
movement’s interest in the social unconscious (as opposed to the fascina-
tion with technology upheld by other modernist movements) also helped
him to conceptualize an alternative, abstract aesthetic tradition in the
Americas. Gómez Sicre’s perspective on modernism and modernity did
not dispense with vernacular and traditional forms; rather, he legitimated
his promotion of abstract and experimental aesthetics by emphasizing
that pre-Columbian artists were in fact the first abstractionists and by
characterizing social realism as a Eurocentric deviation from the autono-
mous development of Latin American art. While European primitivists
looked to non-Western cultures for inspiration, Gómez Sicre, in contrast,
urged Latin American artists to seek it in their own societies.
As his tenure at the PAU lengthened, Gómez Sicre ultimately endorsed
in the traditional media a rather catholic selection of modernist idioms,
20 INTRODUCTION

including lyrical and hard-edge abstraction, expressive figuration, kinetic

art, and op art. Many of the artists whom he supported began to work
prodigiously during an exuberant interval spanning the end of World
War II and the immediate postwar years, from roughly 1944 to 1948,
a period that scholars of the cold war in Latin America refer to as the
“democratic spring.”55 During this brief window, not only were cultural
ties reestablished with Europe but many countries witnessed an end to
dictatorship, the implementation of social welfare programs, increased
political participation on the part of working-class and popular sec-
tors, and the adoption of import substitution industrialization models
of development.56 Initially, the United States supported these movements
(several of these measures were in fact endorsed at the Bretton Woods
conference), but with no Marshall Plan for Latin America in the offing,
U.S. and Latin American elites ultimately pushed toward establishing a
“proper investment climate” in order to attract foreign capital. A pe-
riod of violent repression of progressive movements ensued, and by the
end of the 1940s import substitution industrialization quickly morphed
into developmentalism.57 Guatemala, which enjoyed the longest “spring”
of all, underwent perhaps the most brutal return to winter through a
CIA-organized coup in 1954.58 It is difficult to characterize the new art
emerging from these nascent social democratic movements through the
critical prism that Guilbaut refers to as the “politically apolitical”—in
these contexts, the abstractionist turn was often precisely a flight into,
rather than away from, political engagement, even if artists saw their
work quickly recruited for state- or corporate-led modernization proj-
ects.59 Nevertheless, in emphasizing quality and form over ethics and con-
text Gómez Sicre insisted on a separation between art and politics, thus
approximating the position of prominent U.S. critics such as Clement
Greenberg and Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Gómez Sicre’s trajectory from progressive social democrat and commu-
nist fellow traveler to cold war liberal intrigues me. His political profile in
the early 1940s was eclectic yet committed; he associated with antifascist
intellectuals, and he maintained contact with avant-garde Communist
friends and colleagues even into the late 1940s, while his own cultural
politics inclined toward a Trotskyist endorsement of experimentation and
autonomy for the arts.60 My interest in revisiting Gómez Sicre’s early
formation is not to replace his cold war profile with a Popular Frontist
one, but rather to gain insight as to how his transformation from one era
to the next occurred in relation to U.S.-based institutions, and how his
personal career path might in turn illuminate the generational impact of
 INTRODUCTION 21

the cold war on Latin American intellectual and cultural sectors. In this,
I am inspired by a new wave of historiography about the cultural cold
war in the Americas that rejects the portrayal of Latin America, and the
third world more broadly, as the passive terrain over which two empires
clashed, and instead explores ways in which the cold war provided com-
municative forms and a means for local actors, including native anti-
communists like Gómez Sicre, to forge strategic alliances with the super-
powers.61 When one abandons the symmetry and simplicity of the bipolar
world order in order to introduce third-world perspectives, however, the
narrative inevitably becomes more complex.
Both during and after World War II, many Latin American intellectuals
of Gómez Sicre’s generation entered liberal international organizations or
the diplomatic service—rarely in exalted positions like Pablo Neruda and
Octavio Paz, both of whom held ambassadorships—but in relatively low-
level and often short-term administrative positions. These were taken out
of financial necessity or to escape unfavorable political climates while
unfinished manuscripts or canvases languished at home. This generation’s
movements atomized and attenuated the aesthetic and political affinity
groups that had formed in Latin American and European capitals prior to
and during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, but they also turned
the cultural branches of postwar international organizations into signifi-
cant transfer points of modernist aesthetics, with overlapping queer and
political coteries, much in the way that Communism, exile, and travel had
served to foster transnational aesthetic movements in previous decades.62
By the early 1950s the FBI and the U.S. Department of State were busy
enforcing loyalty oaths and implementing screening procedures to detect
suspected communists and homosexuals at the PAU. Gómez Sicre’s later
invective against the Cuban Revolution was perhaps predictable given his
wartime polemic with Siqueiros, but I feel that it was actually in the con-
text of the the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare during the early 1950s
that Gómez Sicre underwent his most dramatic transformation, as he
retreated from his earlier advocacy of state-supported cultural programs
and political and economic self-determination for Latin American coun-
tries and replaced these ideals with cultural projects tied to multinational
corporate development as a mechanism for spurring the cultural sectors
of Latin American societies and for challenging the monopoly on the
public sphere asserted by some nationalist cultural programs.
Gómez Sicre’s gambit for the placement of young Latin American art-
ists in the United States and Europe mined the vocabulary of popular-
ized existentialism to emphasize their courageous transcendence of the
22 INTRODUCTION

familiar opposition between modernity and tradition. To cite one of his

preferred terms of critical praise, their work was “exportable”—in other
words, distinctive enough to appear original abroad, yet at the same time
qualified to participate in the grand Anglo-European conversation about
postwar modernism.63 In their native countries, in contrast, the artists
whom Gómez Sicre supported were not the isolated or alienated visionar-
ies that he made them out to be. They were instead active in generational
debates about national identity and history and affiliated with other art-
ists and intellectuals and institutions, both locally and internationally.
Gómez Sicre’s relationship to his preferred artists repeatedly under-
scores the admonition to “be careful for what you wish for,” for rebel-
lious youth does rebel—and it matures. Youth was a powerful social force
in the 1960s, and Gómez Sicre was not always able to anticipate the
chain of affiliations unleashed by his support of young artists.64 When the
twenty-one-year-old Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas held his first exhibi-
tion at the PAU in 1954, for example, Gómez Sicre could not foresee that
his protégé would eventually reconcile with his erstwhile nemesis, the
aging muralist Siqueiros. Nor would he have expected that Cuevas would
become perhaps the most commercial exponent of a boom in drawing
and graphic art during the 1960s that was broadly associated with the
rise of the Latin American left. He could not imagine that the Peruvian
artist Fernando de Szyszlo would create a suite of lithographs in honor
of Che Guevara, nor that Szyszlo and another protégé, Alejandro Otero
of Venezuela, would go on to exhibit their work in Cuba (Figure 4). Nor,
finally, could he know that his sometime collaborator, Marta Traba, per-
haps the greatest art critic to emerge from the Latin American left during
the 1960s, would be contracted to write a history of Latin American art
based on the permanent collection that Gómez Sicre himself had assidu-
ously assembled for the PAU Museum of Modern Art of Latin America
(Figure 5).65
These examples are cautionary reminders against ascribing inherent
and univocal meanings to works of visual art. Whereas the social real-
ism that Gómez Sicre opposed often elicited a range of narratives about
national history or identity, the experimental and abstract art that Gómez
Sicre promoted invited an even greater proliferation of competing inter-
pretations about the work’s significance.66 Likewise, these examples dem-
onstrate how easily the Latin Americanism that served as the cultural arm
of the OAS could become antagonistic toward its own hemispheric sup-
port system. The capaciousness of visual art to signify differently across
time and space sometimes resulted in unusual or unpredictable alliances,
ones that diverged significantly from Gómez Sicre’s personal agenda and
 INTRODUCTION 23

Figure 4. José Gómez Sicre (center) with José Luis Cuevas (front, right) and
Fernando de Szyszlo (front, left). Also pictured standing are Mexican artist Alberto
Gironella; Washington, D.C., curator Annemare Henle Pope; and Cuban artist
José Y. Bermúdez. From El avance criollo (Havana), 26 September 1959. Photo-
graph courtesy Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio Paz,” Museo José
Luis Cuevas. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP,
Mexico City. Reproduced with permission of Fernando de Szyszlo.

broader OAS initiatives. In spite of this—or rather, I would argue, be-

cause of it—the PAU visual arts programs are one of the OAS’s most suc-
cessful endeavors of the postwar period, as judged by the Organization’s
own liberal, multilateral principles. This is the case even though they
are largely ignored in histories of the OAS, which downplay the role of
culture altogether.67 The fact that the arts programs functioned through
friendships, personal connections, and informal institutional networks
gave them a flexibility that was lacking in the cumbersome diplomatic
structures of the juridical and political branches of the OAS, which
were often impeded by those very problems, such as interventions and
coups, which the inter-American governmental system was supposed to
24 INTRODUCTION

Figure 5. José Gómez Sicre (center), Marta Traba (left), and fellow judges deliber-
ate at the 1964 Industrias Kaiser Argentina (IKA) Bienal, Córdoba, Argentina. The
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (970074).

prevent.68 In this study, however, I am less keen to gauge the efficiency

of the PAU visual arts programs than I am to explore their vagaries. By
taking “theory, history, and politics” as my point of departure, I follow
the model of cultural policy studies elaborated by scholars such as Tony
Bennett, Toby Miller, and George Yúdice, which stresses policy’s poten-
tially transformative, as well as its normative aspects.69 Because the PAU
arts programs operated within a complex field, they provide a vantage
onto the cultural cold war that incorporates diverse, ground-level per-
spectives and offers insight into the relationships between policy and the
social and intellectual environment of specific locations.

Art in the Service of Creating Hemispheric Citizens

This study takes up the topics and methods of contemporary scholarship

on cultural policy and cultural citizenship in order to illuminate activities
of the PAU Visual Arts Section that relate to the postwar shift in critical
 INTRODUCTION 25

values from realism to abstraction in hemispheric art worlds, the ad-

vancement of Latin American art as a continental project, and the rela-
tion between art and economic development.70 Toby Miller and George
Yúdice identify the historical role of cultural policy as one of mediating
between the anthropological and aesthetic registers of a given society
in the interests of creating a common taste formation, one conducive to
the harmonious functioning of a liberal public sphere. With its basis in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European nation formation, cultural
policy is concerned with creating citizens who share common moral,
ethical, and cultural values, through the selection and dissemination of
paradigmatic cultural models. In this process, scholars, curators, and
educators occupy an important pedagogical role in relation to the larger
population.71 Cultural policy’s self-justification depends on the “ethical
incompleteness” of its constituencies; that is, individuals’ inability ever to
merge completely with the imago of a greater social body, and the contin-
ual appearance of culturally deficient populations on the horizon, just be-
yond the reach of current policy initiatives.72 Cultural policy thrives in in-
stitutions, where funding and aesthetics meet; in the field of international
relations, this meeting ground often involves complex interactions among
representatives of states. When linked to diplomacy, cultural policy thus
coordinates not just the anthropological and aesthetic concepts of culture
described by Miller and Yúdice but also the relatively narrow domain of
statecraft and the broad field of transnational cultural relations.73 As the
historian Frank A. Ninkovich has observed, close scrutiny of the cultural
policy of a given international organization often leads one to confront
the organization’s “culture of policy,” and this, in turn, provides insight
into the circulation of power within and through the institution. But, he
goes on to caution, the part-whole relation between cultural diplomacy
and statecraft is not mimetic or microcosmic. It is instead comparable to
a “metaphor” or a “trope”—that is, like art itself cultural policy offers a
mediated or condensed perspective on broad historical processes.74
Cultural policy emerged during the European Enlightenment as an im-
portant technique of what Michel Foucault calls biopower, that is, the
lifegiving activities of the state that are concerned with the protection
and reproduction of citizens.75 One outcome of the eighteenth-century
shift toward state-longevity was an emergent discourse of European in-
ternational community that had the goal of maintaining peace among
nation-states and preempting any single nation from becoming an empire
within the region. European regional identity was fostered through a cul-
ture of international reciprocity, common juridical standards, diplomatic
26 INTRODUCTION

protocols, the protection of mercantilism and trade, and shared rules of

military engagement. Meanwhile, European nations projected their impe-
rial and expansionist aspirations outward through colonialism.
The intellectual foundations of cultural policy at the Pan American
Union derive from the mid-nineteenth-century Latin American engage-
ment with European Enlightenment thinkers, especially Immanuel Kant.76
The PAU’s narrative of its own origins draws substantially on the ideas
of early to mid-nineteenth-century liberal statesmen-humanists. These
were the nation-building letrados, or lettered intellectuals, of the post-
independence era who elected civilization over barbarism, most notable of
whom was the constitutional lawyer, grammarian, educator, and diplomat
Andrés Bello (Venezuela, 1781–1865).77 Bello articulated an American
variation on Kantian universalism that expressed faith in intellectual in-
quiry and rationalism, but eschewed wholesale adoption of European tra-
ditions by stressing that Americans must forge their own knowledge and
history based on autochthonous realities.78 The translation of European
Enlightenment values to American contexts was deeply fraught, however.
In contrast to European strategies for maintaining peace within the re-
gion while competing for markets and territory in Africa, Asia, and the
Americas, the Western Hemispheric nineteenth century was characterized
by U.S. expansion and interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The mutations of Pan American liberalism reveal themselves symptom-
atically in the diverging political and economic discourses of the “sister
republics” and “uneven development,” observed previously in regard to
Daniel Catton Rich’s statement about the emerging U.S. market for Latin
American art.
The founding documents of the Organization of American States
endow culture with a particular gravitas as an instrument for preparing
the very ground for liberal values to take root in the American republics.
The same Pan American conference that gave birth to the OAS in 1948
also produced the first postwar human rights document, the American
Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which described the need
for moral training as a precondition of functional legal and political sys-
tems: “Duties of a juridical nature presuppose others of a moral nature
which support them in principle and constitute their basis.”79 Early OAS
policy documents are fascinating for the manner in which they relegate
to the Organization’s major cultural organ, the Inter-American Cultural
Council, those problems that could not be resolved through the knowl-
edge and methods of the Organization’s political and juridical branches.
Culture was, consequently, a grab bag of impossible charges, ranging
 INTRODUCTION 27

from addressing “the Indian problem” to enforcing the Rights and Duties
of Man, achieving mass literacy, and effecting scientific and technological
harmonization in the hemisphere.80 In other words, its job was to gaze
into the breach between liberal ideals and postcolonial realities, and con-
sequently its projects, realized and unrealized, continually refracted the
epistemological lacunae of the Organization’s other, supposedly discrete,
domains. Cultural policy at the OAS effectively dwelled in the interstices
between de jure and de facto liberalism.81
Like the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organiza-
tion (UNESCO), the OAS was supposed to adopt a cultural charter that
complemented those of its juridical and political branches, but ratifica-
tion of the cultural charter was continually impeded by bureaucratic and
political problems. In the absence of a comprehensive and coordinated
cultural program on the part of the OAS, the PAU Visual Arts Section,
charged merely with bringing the art of America to the attention of the
wider Washington, D.C., community, gathered force in the postwar years
under Gómez Sicre’s leadership. In spite of his avowed aesthetic formal-
ism, Gómez Sicre’s institutional location pushed him to become an ad
hoc economic and political theorist as he wrestled with the conundrum
of reconciling his dream of Latin American cultural autonomy and avant-
garde ideals to corporate patronage and schmoozed the OAS diplomatic
corps in order to sell art. His brash editorials that appeared in the Visual
Arts Section publication Boletín de Artes Visuales (Bulletin of Visual Arts)
blithely trespassed the boundaries of his own administrative domain,
as did the art that he exhibited at the union. From José Luis Cuevas’s
provocative drawings of Mexico City’s lumpenproletariat to Fernando
de Szyszlo’s series of lithographs in honor of the Peruvian avant-garde
Marxist poet César Vallejo, Gómez Sicre’s antibourgeois sensibility con-
tinually drew into the institution visual reminders of those worlds where
the liberal-democratic was nonnormative.
With just two decades separating the birth of Gómez Sicre in 1916
from the death of José Martí in an early battle of the Cuban War for
Independence in 1895, Gómez Sicre shared more in common with his
exiled compatriot than he did with mid-nineteenth-century letrados like
Bello.82 The nationalist aspirations that Ramos identifies as an essential
aspect of latinoamericanista discourse went unfulfilled in the case of Cuba
and Puerto Rico, which became quasi-colonial territories of the United
States following the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. Gómez Sicre
came to maturity under the shadow of U.S. domination; he turned eigh-
teen in 1934, the year that the Platt Amendment was repealed.83 Martí’s
28 INTRODUCTION

historical moment, poised between the waning Spanish and emerging U.S.
empires, feels painfully fresh in Gómez Sicre’s own youthful attacks on
the colonial servility of Cuban academic painting and his equally ve-
hement disdain for the vulgarity and coldness of North Americans and
their business culture.84 In spite of their radically different orientations
toward Pan Americanism, Gómez Sicre seems to have internalized many
of Martí’s postures in exile, including his self-fashioning as a cultural
translator before North and South American publics.85 But perhaps
Gómez Sicre’s greatest twist on Martí’s legacy was the way in which he
reconceived Martí’s ideas about the compensatory role of the aesthetic.
For Martí and his generation, as noted previously, the aesthetic was a
refuge from the alienation of urban life and industrialization, as exempli-
fied in Martí’s fin de siècle crónicas (chronicles) about New York City.86
For Gómez Sicre, in contrast, “quality art” laid claim to full enfranchise-
ment for Latin Americans in the international community, and it signaled
the imminent harmonization of the political, economic, social, and cul-
tural spheres in Latin American societies. For Gómez Sicre, as for Martí,
the aesthetic stood in opposition to a lack, but in contrast to the latter,
Gómez Sicre asserted superior Latin American cultural achievement as a
strategy for claiming other kinds of rights.
It might be said that Gómez Sicre intuited cultural citizenship well
before this concept became widespread in social and cultural theory dur-
ing the past two decades. “Cultural citizenship” refers to performative
or activist strategies that groups undertake in order to gain visibility and
make demands for other forms of citizenship. William Flores and Rina
Benmayor in their introduction to Latino Cultural Citizenship offer the
following definition: “Cultural citizenship can be thought of as a broad
range of activities of everyday life through which Latinos and other
groups claim space in society and eventually claim rights.”87 Since their
volume appeared in 1997, scholarship on the topic has proliferated to
encompass a broad range of practices and contexts on the part of con-
stituencies marked by racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, physical, linguistic,
or religious difference. For Miller and Yúdice, cultural citizenship de-
scribes attempts to redress the invisibility of groups under the prevailing
definition of citizens as sovereign individuals in liberal-democratic states.
According to them, “Cultural citizenship concerns the maintenance and
development of cultural lineage via education, custom, language, and
religion and the acknowledgment of difference in and by mainstream
cultures.”88 According to this perspective, practices of cultural citizenship
may also include institutionalized activities that occur beyond or along-
side those fostered by the state.
 INTRODUCTION 29

Both of these definitions resonate with the PAU Visual Arts Section’s
“invention of Latin American art” as a means of interpellating national
subjects as “Latin Americans” and making them “visible” as citizens of a
region in order to gain recognition in and access to international arenas.89
Gómez Sicre’s strategies for asserting cultural citizenship actually oper-
ated on several fronts: first, within the art world he sought entrée for
Latin American art and artists in the museum-gallery nexus of Anglo-
European modernism, which in the postwar era defined itself as the uni-
versal aesthetic. This assertion of cultural citizenship was an appeal for
access to a presumed even greater form of cultural citizenship. Second,
he recast the interwar role of aesthetic vanguards in relation to economic
development. For Gómez Sicre aesthetic quality foreshadowed a dawn-
ing era of plenitude, marked by political enfranchisement and a prosper-
ity that would soon take effect in Latin American societies. And finally,
Gómez Sicre recognized that corporations were assuming some of the
administrative aspects of citizenship where state administration of such
functions, or a liberal state itself, was absent or deficient. As early as the
mid-1960s, his office used the phrase “corporate citizenship” in press
releases to praise corporate patrons of the arts and culture, well before
the term entered U.S. business parlance in the 1980s.90 Paradoxically,
corporate citizenship initiatives became widespread under neoliberalism,
as corporations assumed some responsibility for social services that states
had eliminated precisely in order to make themselves more attractive to
foreign investors.91 Gómez Sicre likely recognized the advent of corporate
cultural citizenship much earlier than his U.S. and European counter-
parts, because in his personal experience of “the national” in Cuba under
the Machado and Batista regimes, and among other U.S.-supported dic-
tatorships under which he carried out arts projects (including Argentina,
Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay,
Uruguay, and Venezuela), the liberal state was never a given; meanwhile,
corporate multinationals had a long history of involvement in Latin
America and with the Pan American movement.
David Luis-Brown recently advanced the concept of “hemispheric citi-
zenship” to describe the transamerican solidarity movements that devel-
oped in the wake of the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. Luis-
Brown demonstrates that empire produced a positive and unanticipated
outcome in successive waves of oppositional intellectuals such as José
Martí and W. E. B. Du Bois, who perceived common bases of oppres-
sion experienced by third-world peoples and U.S. minorities and who la-
bored to extend anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles across national
borders.92 As in the case of Luis-Brown’s subjects, Gómez Sicre’s ideas
30 INTRODUCTION

about transnational community also have intellectual roots in the 1898

watershed, but in contrast to the former group, Gómez Sicre’s aspirations
for claiming citizenship were trained “upward” toward Latin American
parity with powerful geopolitical actors rather than “downward” toward
securing equality or autonomy for the region’s disenfranchised groups.
Gómez Sicre advocated a form of transnational affective community en-
abled by the privatization of the cultural sector, which he perceived to
be a necessary catalyst for spurring economic growth in Latin American
societies, as well as a useful counterbalance to the monopolistic practices
of state-run cultural institutions.
Gómez Sicre’s assertion of cultural citizenship in and for Latin America
remained problematically unfulfilled in relation to concurrent processes
of political and economic liberalization. The Alliance for Progress ini-
tiative was perhaps his career’s greatest case of “be careful what you
wish for,” for the development that Gómez Sicre had wished for in the
1950s ultimately held only a token place for the arts and humanities in
the 1960s, and even less for a visionary avant-garde. Even the U.S. gov-
ernment’s cultivation of Latin American intellectuals was revised during
this period to prioritize scientists and social scientists over artists and
humanists. The decline of the PAU visual arts programs in the face of ac-
tually existing developmentalism indicates the shortcomings of conceiv-
ing cultural citizenship as a supplementary or anticipatory strategy for
claiming liberal citizenship rights. Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic retrenchment,
reorientation toward Washington, D.C., and growing cynicism during the
late 1960s suggest that he perceived the former realpolitik of “modernity
before modernization” as preferable after all to relegating the arts and
humanities to second-class status in the field of international relations.
The fact that the PAU Visual Arts Section was concerned with mod-
ernization and cultural policy aligned it with the “soft” end of the U.S.
foreign policy spectrum during the cold war; this approach stressed
open markets, assimilation to the West, and uplift of third-world peoples
through education, taste, and training.93 Rather than regard the PAU’s
approach to cultural policy as fundamentally opposed to more hawkish
U.S. policy perspectives that favored containment or rollback, however,
I am inclined to view these two sides of liberalism as interrelated tech-
niques that have historically bound first-world liberal states to the third
world, and which have precedents in colonialism.94 In this, I concur with
theorists such as Achille Mbembe, who have extended the framework of
Foucault’s biopolitics to elaborate a theory of necropolitics that describes
those governmentalities exercised in contexts where the liberal democ-
 INTRODUCTION 31

racy is nonnormative or where competing sovereignties exist alongside

weak states, with the dire consequence that entire human populations
are deemed disposable.95 “What is the relationship between politics and
death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency?”
Mbembe asks. His response makes the similarities between cold war
cultural diplomacy and colonialism’s civilizing mission manifest, as the
pacifist, “disinterested” ideals of cultural diplomacy appear uncannily
bellicose when they play out on the ground: “In modern philosophical
thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony rep-
resents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise
of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where ‘peace’ is more
likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end.’ ”96
In truth, it would be erroneous to speak of U.S. hegemony in the hemi-
sphere during the cold war, if by that one refers to nonviolent domina-
tion, for in Latin America, Gramsci’s “war of maneuver” and “war of
position” were coterminous processes.97 In undertaking a study of art
worlds during this period, like other scholars of the cultural cold war in
the Americas, I am interested in learning how elite and vernacular cul-
tural forms provide a means of understanding the way in which, in the
words of Gilbert Joseph, “symbolic systems, media, and state-private net-
works” produced a “politicization and internationalization of everyday
life” in Latin America during the period.98 This “politicization of every-
day life” pervades the art historical archive, from critical debates about
realism versus abstraction to the casual references to shattered glass and
tear gas scattered throughout the logistical planning correspondence for
the Third Bienal Americana de Arte, a major hemispheric art event held
in Córdoba, Argentina, in 1966.99
Janus-faced liberalism, with its trade-and-aid and military interven-
tionist sides, is a recurring pattern of twentieth-century U.S. policy toward
Latin America, with the exception of the Good Neighbor years when
the United States adhered to noninterventionist principles. In fact, the
most intense waves of liberal internationalism in the United States (e.g.,
the Wilson and Kennedy eras) have coincided with the greatest surges
in interventions and occupations in Latin America.100 The Kennedy ad-
ministration was the apotheosis of both hard and soft liberalism: by the
decade of the 1960s, according to the historian John Coatsworth, U.S. in-
terventions in Latin American countries were taking place on an average
of one every thirteen months, and the body count continued to rise well
into the Reagan-Bush era forays in Central America and the Caribbean.
As Coatsworth grimly notes, “Between 1960 and 1990, the number of
32 INTRODUCTION

political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of non-violent politi-

cal dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded that of the Soviet Union
and its East European satellites.”101 This is not a dubious claim to Latin
American exceptionalism; it is evidence in support of an argument that
has been advanced in slightly different terms by other scholars, such as
Greg Grandin, who observes that the long twentieth-century history of
U.S. policy in Latin America has provided a laboratory of techniques
and guiding metaphors that have subsequently been deployed in other
areas of the world, most recently in the context of the U.S. occupation of
Iraq.102 Aspects of U.S.–Latin American relations during World War II,
such as intellectual exchange and recruitment, clearly served as a dress
rehearsal for cold war cultural policies, and the period itself is rife with
Latin American analogues for major geopolitical topoi: to name a few, the
OAS and NATO, Arbenz and Mossadegh, the Panama and Suez Canals,
and Cuba and North Vietnam.103
The OAS was, for the most part, an ineffectual multilateral organiza-
tion during this deeply conflicted period of U.S.–Latin American rela-
tions. Gordon Connell-Smith describes the fundamental inequalities of
the inter-American system of governance as giving rise to a “form of
coexistence . . . not only between a rich, powerful state and twenty small,
weak ones sharing the same continent, but between different social sys-
tems and much else besides.”104 Given the uneven power dynamic within
the Organization of American States, the United States exerted dispropor-
tionate influence over Latin American countries. As one postwar observer
of the OAS remarked, “The inter-American conferences have often had
all the earmarks of a Latin American alliance against the United States,”
although “the United States has generally been able to use its influence
with enough governments to prevent the ‘alliance’ from including all or
even a majority of Latin American states.”105 As the 1960s came to an
end, the OAS was seemingly powerless to stem or intervene in the wave
of dictatorships that gripped the Southern Cone countries in the 1960s
and 1970s and the Central American civil wars that erupted in the 1970s
and 1980s. The historian Daniela Spenser concludes that Latin America
emerged from the cold war in the late 1980s more impoverished and less
democratic than it was when it entered the period.106
As an ascendant cultural form and an integral part of the urban media
environment during the cold war, contemporary art is a promising re-
search area for cold war studies of the Americas; however, in comparison
to literature, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. There are,
to be sure, many parallels between the Latin American art boom and its
 INTRODUCTION 33

literary counterpart.107 The Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, who fig-
ures prominently in this study, collaborated with Boom author Carlos
Fuentes, and Gómez Sicre’s own personal friendship with the Cuban
writer Alejo Carpentier dated from the 1940s.108 Both the art and literary
booms generally shared an orientation in urban, cosmopolitan intellec-
tual sectors; both opposed the conventions of nineteenth-century real-
ism and academicism in favor of modernist aesthetic experimentation. In
addition, both advanced the idea of a Latin American regional cultural
identity in international arenas, while also addressing their work to mass
audiences in Latin America and abroad. The literary Boom has attracted
interest on the part of cold war scholars, in part because, like art, its af-
filiations were contested and ambiguous in the bipolar struggle, as texts
and authors were claimed by the left and the right in different locations
and historical moments. Deborah Cohn, for example, in her study of the
International PEN Club annual conference held in New York in 1966
observes that although the conference was steeped in an ambiance of cold
war liberalism, for the Boom authors in attendance the event nevertheless
served to galvanize their sense of generational and regional camaraderie
and left-inflected Latin Americanism.109 This process resembles the insti-
tutional interplay between Latin Americanism and Pan Americanism in
the PAU cultural branches.
But there are also significant differences between the cold war liter-
ary and art worlds. If the success of authors such as Carlos Fuentes,
Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, José Donoso,
and Mario Vargas Llosa marked the belated acknowledgment of Latin
American literary modernism on the part of European and U.S. publish-
ing markets in the late 1960s, one might say that the circulation of Latin
American modern art and architecture in international arenas during the
1940s and 1950s provided a visual-aesthetic primer for the Boom authors’
subsequent literary celebrity.110 Unlike contemporary Latin American lit-
erary history, which could be, as Julio Ramos has quipped, “created out
of the informal gatherings of writers in the lobby of the [Hotel] Havana
Libre,” Gómez Sicre was relatively correct in his assertion that visual
art’s “reception points” developed along more decentralized lines, before
and after the Cuban Revolution converted the island nation into a flash-
point of the cold war in the Americas.111 In reviving the “republic of
letters” model, the Cuban Revolution supported literature through its
major cultural institution, La Casa de las Américas, the publisher of an
eponymous journal that competed for the loyalty of American intellectu-
als against its competitor Mundo Nuevo, a literary magazine published in
34 INTRODUCTION

Paris, and for a time covertly funded by a CIA front organization. Ramos
observes that the intellectual protagonism of Casa de las Américas liter-
ary director Roberto Fernández Retamar may in fact be the last gasp of
the nineteenth-century letrado.112 While Gómez Sicre’s emphasis on cos-
mopolitanism and Latin Americanism approximated the perspectives of
Mundo Nuevo editor Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the art that Gómez Sicre
supported in the 1950s was not channeled institutionally around two
competing organs or loci of power; in addition to circulating abroad, it
was strongly associated with diverse movements based in particular Latin
American urban centers.113
To conclude, the questions I am posing in this study revolve around
the tension between the normative and transformative capacities of cul-
tural policy described by Miller and Yúdice: Are the programs of the PAU
Visual Arts Section another publicity wing of U.S.-based foreign policy,
or are they a small countercurrent that resists that logic through the mul-
tilateralism and potential for critical appropriation inherent in their very
structure? My intuition has been to cast Gómez Sicre as a sort of Balzac to
my Lukács, albeit on the modernist end of the spectrum, in that he was by
no means a radical, yet his institutional location as an arts administrator
obliged him to think about relations among culture, economics, politics,
and foreign policy in such a way that his work highlighted the funda-
mental contradiction of hemispheric solidarity under conditions of gross
inequality, a contradiction that I as a critic am foregrounding to a greater
extent than Gómez Sicre himself ever did. My analyses suggest that the
transformative aspects of cultural policy rest precisely in that which they
cannot visualize—that is, the unforeseeable and contingent interfaces that
arise among artists and publics convened through institutions. In the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century, latinoamericanista binaries and center-
periphery distinctions cease to hold much explanatory power in the Pan
American Union’s cultural branches, but the activities of the Visual Arts
Section reframe the question of hemispheric differences as those between
de jure and de facto liberalism, and between liberalism and other govern-
mentalities. The analytical categories that emerge from these distinctions,
in turn, elucidate the conflicted, enigmatic leaps encapsulated in the post-
war PAU Visual Arts Section’s programs, from 1898 to the “democratic
spring” and from cold war liberalism to contemporary neoliberalism.

Overview of Chapters

This study traces the Visual Arts Section through several distinct historical
periods. The first extends roughly from 1945 to 1948, when the Mexican
 INTRODUCTION 35

cultural administrator Concha Romero James incorporated visual art

into the PAU cultural programs during the era of the Good Neighbor
Policy, a gesture in turn inspired by the New Deal encounter with post-
revolutionary Mexican cultural policy. The second extends from 1948
through 1959, as José Gómez Sicre established a program of rotating ex-
hibitions at the PAU and cultivated an inter-American arts network draw-
ing on the participation and support of young artists, sympathetic critics,
and new arts institutions in many Latin American cities. The third phase
coincides with the Alliance for Progress, from roughly 1960 to 1968,
when the Argentine art critic and administrator Rafael Squirru arrived
in Washington, D.C., to assume the position of director of cultural af-
fairs for the PAU. As U.S.-led modernization initiatives for Latin America
launched in the 1960s cast visual art and other media as a barometer of
economic and political development, the Latin Americanist agenda that
Gómez Sicre had promoted since the late 1940s began to lose coherence.
The greatest methodological challenge that I have confronted in work-
ing on this project has been how to handle the figure of Gómez Sicre—
that is, I have struggled to avoid conflating his “vision” with the institu-
tion and reading his career through the prism of intellectual biography,
even though he is a compelling presence in this story. In truth, even as a
character in a scholarly monograph, Gómez Sicre resists the conventions
of realism. I demur from constructing an interiority for him that might
provide satisfying but ultimately hypothetical resolutions to the numer-
ous contradictions that emerge through his archival trace, in particular
the psychological dimensions of the changes that he underwent between
Havana and Washington, D.C. Like those scholars of the cultural cold
war who have abandoned the fetishism of the covert and the quest for
first causes in order to explore the struggle that was hiding in the light,
I dwell on Gómez Sicre’s manifest contradictions rather than speculate
about his ulterior motives. And so, here he appears as an anti-Stalinist fel-
low traveler; a homophobic homosexual; an exile without a generation;
and a Latin American Latino.114
Known for his physical presence and devastating bons mots, his sen-
sibilidad viril (virile sensibility), and his ojo (critical eye), the exist-
ing interviews of Gómez Sicre suggest a man who was alternately witty
and sardonic, verbally dexterous and impulsive.115 Unfortunately, his
critical writings do not complement these qualities by demonstrating
sustained attention to particular concepts or methods. Even the bold
editorials published in his Boletín de Artes Visuales, on which I rely to
adumbrate the evolution of his critical perspectives, tend to be telegraphic
and undertheorized, as though written quickly in response to particular
36 INTRODUCTION

dilemmas.116 If I do find a recurring motif in the writerly Gómez Sicre,

it is his mobilization of contextually specific avatars, as in the case of
his campy, ghost-written diatribes for José Luis Cuevas. The metaphor
of ventriloquism—the displaced voice—seems somehow appropriate to
describe this subject marked by self-censorship, as well as linguistic, gen-
erational, and geographical dislocations. In order to emphasize Gómez
Sicre as both a product and an agent of his institutional and historical
context, I maintain a contrapuntal analysis at the narratological and the
geographical levels by interweaving episodes of institutional and personal
history with interpretative explorations of artists’ careers, exhibitions,
and works of art that illustrate the ways in which projects of the PAU
Visual Arts Section assumed a life of their own once they entered the
world.
Chapter 1 establishes two key scenes that figure in this narrative:
the PAU office that José Gómez Sicre encountered when he arrived in
Washington, D.C., in December 1945, and the Havana that he left behind.
I begin by charting the substantial state-private network that evolved
among the PAU, the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), and the
Museum of Modern Art during the Good Neighbor Policy years, from
roughly the mid-1930s to the end of World War II. The politician, capi-
talist, philanthropist, and connoisseur Nelson A. Rockefeller was deeply
involved in all three of these institutions. At the end of the war, MoMA
and the OIAA transferred many of their projects to the nascent PAU
Visual Arts Section, which bridged the cultural policies of the Good
Neighbor and cold war periods, with additional support from private
philanthropic funding sources. During the transitional period between
the hot and cold wars, Gómez Sicre’s predecessor, the Mexican cultural
diplomat Concha Romero James, brought visual arts into the rubric of
the PAU cultural programs. She also undertook initiatives that laid the
groundwork for Latin American art historical genealogies and canon for-
mation in the PAU Visual Arts Section.
The second half of chapter 1 explores events transpiring in Cuba dur-
ing the war years, just prior to Gómez Sicre’s relocation to Washington,
D.C. There, several formative experiences left their mark on Gómez Sicre’s
subsequent curatorial projects, from his fateful meeting with MoMA’s
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., which resulted in an invitation to work and study
in New York, to his polemic with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro
Siqueiros, who happened to find himself detained in Cuba because he was
barred a visa for entry into the United States. Through analysis of David
Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural, Alegoría de la igualdad y confraternidad de las
 INTRODUCTION 37

razas blanca y negra en Cuba (Allegory of the White and Black Races in
Cuba, 1943), which Gómez Sicre commissioned on behalf of his Havana
patron María Luisa Gómez Mena, I trace connections among the Cuban,
Mexican, and U.S. political and aesthetic movements that culminated in
Gómez Sicre’s invitation in 1945 to work at the PAU, as well as factors
that contributed to José Gómez Sicre’s well-known animus toward social
realism.
Chapter 2 examines the confluence of Gómez Sicre’s Latin American
and U.S. career experiences in the post-1945 era at the PAU, where he
gradually emptied the Good Neighbor–era arts exchange programs of
their emphasis on sending U.S. art to Latin America, and vice versa. This
chapter opens on the foundation of the Organization of American States
in 1948, which converted the Pan American Union into the headquarters
of the fledgling cold war Organization. As a hemispheric security pact
arose from the ashes of a trade institution, the corresponding shift in U.S.
policy priorities also ushered in a wave of domestic anticommunism that
was especially pronounced in government and diplomatic agencies. In
spite of the impact of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare on the PAU
work culture and on Gómez Sicre’s personal life, the late 1940s and early
1950s also mark the beginning of his most dynamic and innovative pe-
riod as a curator and arts administrator. In this chapter, I discuss the par-
ticipation of the PAU Visual Arts Section in various activities around the
investiture of the liberal statesman-humanist Rómulo Gallegos as presi-
dent of Venezuela in 1948, for which Gómez Sicre organized the traveling
exhibition 32 Artistas de las Américas (32 Artists of the Americas, also
known as 33 Artistas). The show toured eleven Latin American coun-
tries between 1949 and 1950. This project represents Gómez Sicre’s first
ambitious attempt to cultivate a continental consciousness in viewing
publics through art, as well as his first experiment with prominent rather
than discreet corporate sponsorship, through which he broadly linked
Latin American aesthetic modernisms to incipient formulations of mod-
ernization theory in the United States. I return to the relationship among
art, citizenship, and development in the final chapter on the Alliance for
Progress years.
The “young artist” appears frequently in Gómez Sicre’s critical writ-
ings as an agent of aesthetic and social transformation. Chapter 3 focuses
on José Luis Cuevas, a young artist closely associated with the PAU Visual
Arts Section who was from Mexico, where the venerable legacy of mu-
ralism was still quite palpable. Cuevas held his first U.S. solo exhibition
at the PAU in 1954, at the age of twenty-one, and it was a resounding
38 INTRODUCTION

success. In the following years, Gómez Sicre played Pygmalion to the

autodidact Cuevas, and their relationship became tempestuous as Cuevas
matured and exerted his autonomy. Cuevas, meanwhile, rapidly attained
the status of public intellectual in his native country, and his PAU associa-
tion facilitated a successful international career, leading not to only sales
and exhibitions but also to residencies, publications, speaking engage-
ments, and lecture tours. As the decade of the 1960s unfolded, Cuevas’s
cosmopolitan Latin Americanism, carefully tutored by Gómez Sicre, in-
creasingly embraced social values and aesthetic modalities that Gómez
Sicre was at a loss to comprehend and that stood at odds with the gen-
eral political orientation of the OAS. In the early years of their relation-
ship, however, Cuevas provided Gómez Sicre with an apt vehicle through
which to intervene in the Mexican art scene. Known for his small-scale
and intimate figurative drawings, Cuevas’s work implicitly rejected the
muralists’ indigenist and nationalist themes, along with their didactic im-
pulse and huge pictorial scale. Nonetheless, Cuevas aspired to occupy a
polemical public position comparable to that of his muralist nemeses. In
opposition to the critical Mexican characterizations of Cuevas as a “pup-
pet of U.S. imperialism” and an apolitical, commercial artist, I position
Cuevas between two competing cultures of containment, as I depict his
fraught relationship to both the Mexican state cultural apparatus and
the PAU Visual Arts Section. The Cuevas–Gómez Sicre correspondence
reveals that many of the artist’s sassy and provocative journalistic pieces,
which created a sensation in the Mexico City press during the early 1950s
and 1960s, were actually coauthored or ghost-authored by Gómez Sicre.
Their unique composition leads me to examine Cuevas’s niño terrible
persona in relation to personal, political, and institutional dynamics. By
reading Cuevas’s critical writings against the grain alongside an examina-
tion of his artistic projects, from his first solo show at the PAU in 1954
to his much-publicized Mural efímero (Ephemeral Mural, 1967), I trace
Cuevas’s growing divergence from his mentor’s curatorial values, even as
he continued to enjoy Gómez Sicre’s friendship and the favor of his PAU
connections.
A recurring theme of the first three chapters is the subterranean influ-
ence of postrevolutionary Mexican art and cultural policy on the Visual
Arts Section’s activities into the cold war period, both as a source of inspi-
ration and a model to be resisted. Chapter 4 revisits the concept of greater
Mexico as a springboard for launching concepts of hemispheric cultural
citizenship, as it charts the decline of the PAU Visual Arts Section’s influ-
ence in hemispheric art worlds by the late 1960s, amid the OAS anti-
 INTRODUCTION 39

communist response to the Cuban Revolution and the large-scale U.S.

developmentalist program known as the Alliance for Progress. During
these years, the Visual Arts Section faced increasing challenges, from at-
tacks by leftist artists and intellectuals to competition from other U.S.
institutions and even from within the Organization itself. Chapter 4 ex-
amines the intersection of visual culture and citizenship at HemisFair ’68
(HemisFeria ’68), a world’s fair held in San Antonio, Texas, in order to
commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the city. Several
PAU cultural administrators, including Gómez Sicre and Director of
Cultural Affairs Rafael Squirru, served as consultants for the fair and
recommended the use of large-scale sculpture as a spatial strategy to con-
nect the fairgrounds’ national and corporate pavilions and attractions.
If the fairgrounds functioned symbolically as a map of the hemisphere,
HemisFair’s placement of monumental art blurred the boundaries be-
tween North and South, public and private, in an effort to underscore the
fair theme of “confluence” (meaning racial and cultural mixing) and to
use art as an indicator of broad economic and cultural flows.
HemisFair ’68 provides an opportunity for me to explore points
of convergence and divergence between PAU strategies for promoting
cultural citizenship and recent scholarship on citizenship arising from
Latina/o American studies and cultural policy studies. The project of
creating hemispheric citizens at this historically charged location in the
U.S.–Mexico borderlands illuminates the way in which developmental-
ism served as a common prescription for the transformation of U.S. inner
cities and Latin American countries, in the context of the Alliance for
Progress and President Lyndon  B. Johnson’s Great Society programs.
The fact that San Antonio’s tejano population largely avoided the fair, or
even vocally boycotted it, attests to popular resistance against the type of
urban renewal and third-world uplift that the fair architects advocated.
In a brief afterword, I note that the techniques for exhibiting and con-
textualizing visual art at HemisFair ’68 are still in circulation, as a new
wave of cultural developmentalist proposals, such as Richard Florida’s
The Rise of the Creative Class, inspires U.S. cities to roll out public arts
initiatives as a catalyst for boosting sluggish urban economies. The cen-
trality of visual art to postrevolutionary Mexican cultural policy reso-
nates through the “invention of Latin American art” at the PAU and
HemisFair’s visual-spatial representation of hemispheric free trade—a
line of thinking that connects cultural policymakers across generations,
institutions, and countries—from José Vasconcelos to Concha Romero
James, José Gómez Sicre, Rafael Squirru, and Richard Florida. Amid
40 INTRODUCTION

critiques of Latin Americanism on the part of contemporary scholars,

I conclude that studies of third-world development might productively
intersect with Americanist scholarship on race and ethnicity and the
study of transamerican aesthetic movements in order to generate ways
of conceptualizing citizenship that do not privilege liberalism as their
telos.117
 CHAPTER ONE

Art Enters the Union

The Transition from World War II
to the Cold War

We also have hundreds of cards indexing specific information

on artists, which is indispensable in the framing of a policy in
the matter of inter-American interchange in the field of art. It is
essential to put this wealth of material, accumulated in more than
twenty years, at the disposal of the public, by preparing reports
and memoranda, and, in the case of the artists, biographical and
critical notes to accompany the photographs of their work that we
are constantly lending, not only to persons interested in the arts, but
also to museums considering the possibility of holding exhibitions.
—CONCHA ROMERO JAMES , PAU Division of Intellectual Cooperation,
to Irving A. Leonard, Rockefeller Foundation, 1939

From the National Beard to “Latinos, Inc.”

In winter 1945, Herbert Spenser, a public relations consultant for Standard

Oil Company, contacted Leslie Switzer, visual arts director of the Pan
American Union Division of Intellectual Cooperation, with a proposal
that they collaborate on a project to commission a series of oil paintings
from artists of the PAU member states. Each artist, Spenser explained,
would produce an aerial view of “a selected scene believed most represen-
tative of or advantageous to the best interests of HIS OWN country. The
pictures would be done in the so called modern or ‘contemporary’ style
of fine art.”1 The paintings would then enter into a competition juried by
prominent U.S. curators, and the entire collection would tour prestigious
U.S. art museums. In a note to her supervisor, Switzer provided the back-
story for this proposal: Standard Oil and an unnamed rubber company
42 ART ENTERS THE UNION

(probably owned by Standard) sought to develop a closer relationship

with two major airlines that covered Latin American routes, PanAgra and
Pan American. The paintings would serve as a gift of free publicity from
Standard Oil to the airlines by whetting U.S. tourists’ appetites for the
wondrous sights to behold through air travel to Latin America. Standard
exerted a monopoly control over oil production and refining in parts of
Latin America, but it did not want its customers to know that. Thus, each
painting would appear to be sponsored by a different national company,
each in reality a subsidiary of Standard Oil. Spenser’s proposal had two
interrelated goals: to use modern art and national landscapes to foster
brand loyalty in Latin American countries for Standard Oil affiliates,
and to promote closer ties among multinationals doing business in Latin
America.2 The PAU’s role in this process was to ensure aesthetic quality
and cultural sensitivity when approaching artists and arts institutions on
behalf of Spenser’s corporate clients.
The subterfuge outlined in Spenser’s proposal seems a far cry from
contemporary exhibitions of Latin American art in which high-profile
corporate sponsorship of major shows is the norm. Two decades later,
in fact, Standard Oil would come above ground to underwrite the Esso
Salons of Young Artists, an international art competition similar to the
one that Spenser had proposed in 1945, and organized by Switzer’s suc-
cessor at the PAU, José Gómez Sicre. This shift toward corporate visibility
was on my mind in the mid-1990s, when I was employed as a curato-
rial assistant at a U.S. art museum and assigned to work on a block-
buster traveling exhibition of Latin American art sponsored by Philip
Morris Industries, while writing my doctoral dissertation on the cultural
dimensions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As I
pored over exhibition catalogues from the previous two booms of Latin
American art in the United States, the Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s
and 1940s and the Alliance for Progress of the 1960s, I was impressed by
the quiet revolution in exhibition practices that occurred between those
two watersheds. When and why did the institutional presentation of
Latin American art move from the “national pavilion” model, practiced
at world’s fairs and biennials, to the regional model predominant in the
NAFTA era, which emphasized a Latin/o America integrated through
shared patterns of cultural consumption and market flows? When did
multinational corporations doff the national beard and begin openly to
sponsor exhibitions for the demographic that Arlene Dávila has described
as “Latinos, Inc.”?3 And, what role did U.S. government agencies and
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 43

international organizations play in brokering connections between Latin

American art and multinational corporations?
Through my research on art in the age of NAFTA, I came to see that
during the early years of the cold war, when there was comparatively
little activity in the field of Latin American art in the United States, the
Pan American Union Visual Arts Section was quietly experimenting with
strategies that pushed from the national model of visual arts presentation
toward the transnational one. José Gómez Sicre’s postwar assertions of
Latin American coevalness with the rest of the world echoed contem-
porary statements in support of NAFTA, such as that of Gómez Sicre’s
contemporary, the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, who
declared on the eve of the agreement’s passage that “NAFTA will be im-
portant for Mexicans because it is a chance for us finally to be modern.”4
In the mid-1990s, when free trade advocates were hoping that the trade
liberalization initiated in North America would eventually extend to the
entire hemisphere, blockbuster art exhibitions projected the same bright
future that Gómez Sicre had perceived in the post–World War II period.
They asserted that economic integration did not interfere with cultural
identity; if anything, in Latin American societies it was the economic
arena that would now, finally, attain the high standards of achievement
already demonstrated in the field of culture.
The circumstances that enabled the rather humble Visual Arts Section
of the Pan American Union to assume a protagonistic role in brokering
corporate, political, and artistic linkages in the service of Latin American
regional identity during the postwar period stem from the final years of
the Good Neighbor Policy. After the entry by the United States into World
War II, much of the U.S. government and private philanthropic funding
that had driven U.S.–Latin American cultural exchanges dried up, and
the PAU assumed the oversight of projects that had once been handled by
larger institutions. As for those big players, Nelson Rockefeller’s Office
of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), a wartime agency created in 1940 in
order to counter the spread of fascism in Latin America through the pro-
motion of hemispheric commercial and cultural relationships, came under
attack in Congress as the “prize boondoggle of the whole New Deal” and
was accused of infringing on the turf of the U.S. Department of State.5
The OIAA was formally dismantled in 1946, but many of its cultural
programs had already come under the aegis of the State Department by
mid-1943, reflecting new priorities after Pearl Harbor.6 In similar fashion,
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) retreated from things Latin
44 ART ENTERS THE UNION

American after over a decade of exhibiting and acquiring Latin American

art and carrying out OIAA contracts. Lincoln Kirstein, the consultant
who had assembled much of MoMA’s Latin American art collection,
made the tongue-in-cheek proposal to museum director Alfred H. Barr,
Jr., in summer 1943 that they wait another ten years until the next “po-
litical crisis . . . precipitate[s] the Better Neighbor Policy” to do another
Latin American show.7 Kirstein perceptively identified the connection be-
tween shifting political winds and fragile cultural policies. By the end of
the year, both men were on to other things. Barr euphemistically “retired”
to the position of advisory director of MoMA in October 1943, while
preparing the Cuban art exhibition that would bring José Gómez Sicre to
the United States.8 And, after a stint in the U.S. Army, Kirstein plunged
into his role as cofounder of the Ballet Society (later the New York City
Ballet).9 Although Nelson Rockefeller continued to replenish MoMA’s
Inter-American Fund for art acquisition, the museum’s last major project
in the field was the 1945 conference Studies in Latin American Art, an
epiphenomenon to the previous decade’s extensive activities.
This chapter examines these transitional years, from roughly 1940 to
1946, which paved the way for the rise of the PAU Visual Arts Section
in the two postwar decades. First, I outline the substantial institutional
connections that developed among the PAU, the OIAA, and MoMA dur-
ing the war. Then, I discuss the career trajectories of several figures who
contributed to the PAU Visual Arts Section, including most centrally José
Gómez Sicre, a self-taught critic, curator, and gallerist who entered the
inter-American revolving door when he became an advisor to MoMA’s
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., while the latter was on a brief art-buying trip to Cuba
in 1942. Their meeting paved the way for Gómez Sicre to assume the
position of art specialist at the PAU in January 1946, marking the begin-
ning of his thirty-six-year career at the Union. This narrative turns on
some remarkable contingencies, but it also reveals patterns of continuity
in terms of pre- and postwar institutional philosophies, personnel, and
organizational structures. By the end of the war, the PAU cultural pro-
grams represented a complicated array of interests and historical institu-
tional practices. With a funding stream, philosophy, and organizational
structure derived from early twentieth-century liberal philanthropies, and
a new generation of cultural workers trained under the New Deal and
Popular Front as well as in diverse national contexts, the PAU cultural
programs of the mid-1940s were sites of contestation and negotiation
between the ideological and aesthetic agendas of political elites, on the
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 45

one hand, and those of vernacular intellectual cultures, on the other. The
PAU’s prewar institutional history continued to bear on the universalist
claims that Gómez Sicre made for certain examples of Latin American
art in the postwar period; through them, one can glimpse perspectives
derived from his early intellectual formation, his first contact with U.S.
arts institutions, and his oblique response to competition between the
Cuban and Mexican avant-garde movements.

Collaboration and Competition among the Pan American Union,

the Office of Inter-American Affairs, and the Museum of Modern Art

The most obvious connection among the Pan American Union, the Of-
fice of Inter-American Affairs, and the Museum of Modern Art sits atop
each institution’s organizational pyramid. Nelson A. Rockefeller (U.S.,
1908–1979) was deeply involved in all three of these institutions, and his
family’s philanthropic involvement in international organizations dated
back to the 1920s. Even when not directly engaged in day-to-day deci-
sion making at MoMA, the OIAA, and the PAU, Rockefeller’s network
of personal, political, corporate, and philanthropic connections lent an
overdetermined causality to these institutions’ activities. Rockefeller’s
interest in Latin America began with his youthful passion for Mexican
art, particularly the murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco,
which drew him to Mexico in the early 1930s. He was an avid art col-
lector; his connoisseurship found an additional outlet when he assumed
the presidency of MoMA in 1939 and again in 1946; the museum had
been founded by his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, in 1929. Upon
graduating from college, Rockefeller invested some of his trust money in
Creole Petroleum, the Venezuelan subsidiary of his family’s Standard Oil
Company, which led to his long-term ties to that country, including nu-
merous business investments and the purchase of a personal estate once
owned by Simón Bolívar. Rockefeller’s extensive travels and enthusiasm
for Latin American art, culture, and economic resources led him to de-
velop a keen interest in U.S.–Latin American affairs, which he offered in
the service of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, first as coordina-
tor of Inter-American Affairs (1940–1944), and later as assistant secre-
tary of state under Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (1944–1945).10 A key
planner of the Chapultepec and San Francisco Conferences, Rockefeller
played an important role in crafting a cold war mission for the Orga-
nization of American States, and his influence over the development
46 ART ENTERS THE UNION

of the organization extended well into the postwar years.11 His close
personal relationships to two of the first four OAS secretaries general,
Alberto Lleras Camargo (Colombia, 1948–1954) and Galo Plaza Lasso
(Ecuador, 1968–1975), with whom he conferred on OAS staffing and
policy matters, were forged during his years of inter-American diplomacy
in the 1940s. Finally, the PAU cultural programs were awash in funds
that were, in one way or another, connected to Rockefeller or his family:
the OIAA and the Rockefeller Foundation extended grants and contracts
for PAU cultural projects and, as noted previously, Standard Oil affiliates
sponsored PAU art exhibitions into the 1960s.
At the base of the organizational pyramid, on the other hand, was
a vast number of relatively low-paid secretaries, translators, librarians,
exchange students and professors, assistants, and “specialists,” comprised
mostly of women and non-U.S. citizens, who circulated among institu-
tions and shuttled between Latin America and the United States on a sea
of short-term contracts and fellowships. The contractual, project-driven
nature of wartime cultural activities and the incestuous connections
among the institutions’ higher-ranking personnel encouraged this type
of movement. It is on this group that I focus most of my attention, for
at this level I find a great deal of dynamism and innovation in terms of
cultural policymaking—if the Pan American Union underwent a “Latin
Americanization” in the postwar years, it owed as much to the low-level
employees who brought with them diverse work and life experiences as
it did to alliances between U.S. and Latin American elites. In the Pan
American Union’s cultural branches, intellectuals who had witnessed
the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War mixed with those
who had witnessed the rise to power of Juan Domingo Perón, Gerardo
Machado, and Getulio Vargas. Functionaries trained in Mexican and
Brazilian cultural nationalist institutions introduced questions of racial
identity and mass culture to the bellaletrista predilections of an earlier
generation of cultural policymakers. And, PAU staff and contractors in-
teracted with the diplomatic corps of the OAS and national embassies,
thereby forming a fluid Latin American community of exiles, travelers,
and ambassadors loosely congregating around the PAU.
The earliest branch of the Pan American Union dedicated to cultural
matters was known as the Office of Education. Founded in 1917, the
Office of Education changed its name to Intellectual Cooperation in
1929 as its oversight grew, but it remained a sleepy unit that produced
small-scale publications, prepared area studies curricula for U.S. schools,
disseminated information about inter-American treaties, and facilitated
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 47

international exchanges for individuals and groups.12 A substantial shift

in orientation and momentum occurred when Concha Romero James
(Mexico, 1900–1987) began to work at the PAU, first as assistant chief
and then as chief of Intellectual Cooperation.13 Romero James was born
in Mexico’s northern border region, probably to a middle- or upper-class
family. She attended secondary school in Ciudad Guerrero, Chihuahua,
and enrolled in Pomona College in California in 1916, the same year that
a cross-border raid on the town of Columbus, New Mexico, prompted
the massive U.S. Punitive Expedition along the border to capture the
revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. After receiving her bachelor’s degree,
Romero James went on to do graduate coursework in Latin American
studies and education at Columbia University, and then embarked on
a career in international organizations and diplomatic service. Her la-
conic published references to the Mexican Revolution suggest that she
had reservations about certain of its radical redistributive tendencies, but
she admired its democratizing cultural initiatives that brought art and
education to the masses.14
Romero James’s archival paper trail is modest; it includes an assortment
of publications and administrative reports as well as scattered correspon-
dence reflecting her friendships with a generation of eminent latinoameri-
canista humanists, such as Alfonso Reyes (Mexico, 1889–1959), Pedro
Henríquez Ureña (Dominican Republic, 1884–1946), Gabriela Mistral
(Chile, 1889–1957), and Jorge Mañach (Cuba, 1898–1961). Romero James
was also connected to a number of U.S. feminists and international peace
activists, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), Freda Kirchwey
(1893–1976), and Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962).15 The memoir of the
Argentine writer María Rosa Oliver (1898–1977), who worked as a con-
sultant to U.S. Vice President Henry  A. Wallace through Rockefeller’s
Office of Inter-American Affairs during the mid-1940s, fondly recalls lively
Sunday afternoon gatherings in Romero James’s Washington, D.C., home
as a fixture for Latin American and U.S. intellectuals passing through
the city. Oliver characterizes Romero James as “de irrisistible simpatía,
regordeta, risueña, y rápida, unos anteojos de lentes gruesos achicaban
los ojos vivaces de esta Mexicana con esponjosa melena gris y tez muy
clara” (irresistibly sympathetic, plump, smiling, and quick-witted, with
thick-lensed glasses that made her lively eyes appear smaller, and with a
springy shock of grey hair and a fair complexion).16 Even in informal set-
tings, Oliver notes Romero James’s aptitude for diplomacy; she organized
gatherings of confidantes in her home to hash out urgent political matters
such as the 1943 coup in Bolivia, and these impromptu salons generally
48 ART ENTERS THE UNION

accommodated a range of ideological perspectives: “Su serenidad, que no

excluía carcajadas y exclamaciones, infundía al ambiente esa distensión
que permitía discusiones acaloradas sin que lleguen a la discordia” (Her
serenity, which did not exclude laughter and exclamations, infused the
ambiance with an expansiveness that permitted heated discussions, with-
out arriving at discord).17
Just as postrevolutionary Mexican cultural policy influenced the pub-
lic art and education initiatives of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works
Project Administration, Romero James “Mexicanized” cultural diplomacy
at the PAU in that she gave greater emphasis to popular education and art
and she expanded the target constituencies of PAU cultural programs.18
Although visual art had been included generally under the rubric of Pan
American cultural programs since 1910, it was not until the Seventh Pan
American Conference, held in Montevideo in 1933, that PAU-organized
art exhibitions and the circulation of materials related to visual art were
specifically endorsed as vehicles for inter-American cultural exchange.19
That year coincides with the beginning of Romero James’s tenure in
the PAU Division of Intellectual Cooperation, which spanned 1933 to
1947—a period loosely corresponding to the Good Neighbor Policy and
the New Deal.20 At the height of her PAU career, Romero James super-
vised a trilingual staff of about eight full- and part-time employees, most
of whom did double duty as specialists in a particular cultural and geo-
graphical area. In spite of her division’s limited resources, under Romero
James’s leadership Intellectual Cooperation acquired a definite character:
Latin American cultural workers became more visible within PAU activi-
ties; culture became explicitly linked to political and social movements;
mass and popular cultural forms joined elite ones; and the visual arts
became routinely included in PAU cultural activities.
Romero James’s first report for the PAU Division of Intellectual Co-
operation, “La Cooperación Intelectual en América, 1933 a 1936” (Intel-
lectual Cooperation in America, 1933–1936), lends itself to a symptom-
atic reading, for its split rhetorical modes between first-person life writing
and stultifying bureaucratic jargon suggest a subject who is trying to
negotiate her own institutional speaking position. The report opens on
a vivid image of hemispheric time-space compression brought about by
air travel and radio, which have brought “la gran familia americana”
(the great American family) closer together, and made philosophers, writ-
ers, artists, and scientists desirous of exchange with their fellows across
national borders.21 These images evoke the famous opening lines of José
Martí’s essay “Nuestra América,” in which an allegorical national sub-
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 49

ject, cast as a provincial villager, comes to consciousness of his common

interest with other Latin Americans in light of the imperialist threat posed
by the United States.22 Romero James, however, bends Martí’s overtly
anti-imperialist call for Latin American solidarity toward an intimate,
self-consciously feminine auto-ethnography of her own “development”
through cultural exchange, beginning with her “niñez provinciana” (pro-
vincial childhood) in Mexico.23 Working within the mutually reinforcing
narratives of developmentalism and the bildungsroman, Romero James
employs herself as an exemplary subject of Pan Americanism, who tran-
scends the confines of her village full of xenophobic “patriotas estriden-
tes” (strident patriots) to become a citizen of America through intellec-
tual exchange.24 The turning point in Romero James’s brief life story is
a galvanizing encounter with the Chilean educator Maximiliano Salas
Marchán, which occurred while she attended college in the United States,
the first of several such interactions with Latin American humanists on
U.S. soil. In this manner, the United States serves as an important neutral
field in her narrative, on which diverse Latin American citizens engage
one another and come to consciousness about their common interests.
Romero James’s personal story offers itself as proof that Latin American
cultural identity can flourish within Pan Americanism.
Another substantial contributor to the Mexicanist orientation of Intel-
lectual Cooperation was the musicologist Charles Seeger (1886–1979),
who joined Romero James’s staff in 1941 as chief of the Music and Visual
Arts Division.25 Born in Mexico City to parents who were U.S. citizens,
Seeger spent much of his youth in Mexico, where he developed an ap-
preciation of Mexican popular music. It was not until his contact with
the U.S. Communist movement in the 1930s, however, that he embraced
popular music as a potentially progressive social force.26 Prior to coming
to the union, Seeger had developed programs for New Deal agencies, in-
cluding the Federal Music Project of the Works Progress Administration
(1937–1941). The State Department recruited Seeger to establish the
Inter-American Music Center at the PAU, which was funded through
a complex arrangement that channeled seed money from the Carnegie
Foundation through the OIAA and then on to the PAU.27 The latter fund-
ing institutions were interested in music because recent developments
in short-wave broadcasting had made it an appealing medium through
which to foster hemispheric solidarity, and music was already being used
effectively as propaganda in Latin America by the Axis powers.28 For his
part, Seeger was attracted by the prospect of extending public, nonprofit
venues for musical performance and education to the hemispheric and
50 ART ENTERS THE UNION

eventually global levels. At the PAU Seeger built upon his previous po-
litical commitments by expanding the union’s repertoire of musical pro-
grams beyond symphonic music to include popular and vernacular forms.
He cultivated a consensual, “bottom-up” style of program development
by advocating that musicians be adequately compensated for their labor
and by opposing U.S. corporate domination of recorded music.29 Among
other issues, he worked to enforce fair pay scales for Latin American
composers contracted for publication in the United States and to secure
copyright protection for their work.30
Seeger stands out as the theoretician among the Division of Intellectual
Cooperation’s wartime corps of cultural workers; his Boasian cultural rela-
tivism and materialist perspectives on cultural transmission challenged
the elite “mentalist” ideas that informed early liberal internationalist cul-
tural policies. Seeger believed in an anticolonial and democratic New
World American musical “community” that was fundamentally opposed
to authoritarian Old World methods of training and performance.31 Just
as Romero James brought postrevolutionary Mexican art into the PAU
programs, Seeger introduced previously neglected indigenous, African
diasporic, proletarian, and folk music into them. Seeger’s ideas about ac-
culturation implied that a hemispheric musical community encompassed
a range of specific variations, each shaped by particular socio-historical
factors and patterns of interaction.32 In a nod to the PAU’s liberal roots,
he nevertheless promoted music as a relatively universal language—more
fluid than speech, in any case—and thus better equipped to break down
barriers among peoples. He conceived his mission at the PAU to be that
of engendering recognition and facilitating contact among the many “dia-
lects” of the American music community.33
As World War II increasingly dominated inter-American affairs, Romero
James’s Division of Intellectual Cooperation began to confront sensitive
and divisive issues such as class, race, and imperialism in the Americas.
One showcase for these perspectives was Points of View, a mimeographed
publication series developed by Romero James with funds from a Rocke-
feller Foundation grant that featured original and reprinted news and ar-
ticles culled from around the hemisphere. In Romero James’s words,
Points of View covered “debatable topics” on “such aspects of cultural
development as art, literature, education, scientific research, and the sta-
tus and role of the intellectual worker in a changing world.”34 In effect,
the publication became a venue for ongoing discussion about the con-
ceptual viability of “America” with a capital “A.” Among the notable fea-
tures that appeared in the series were twenty heated responses by Latin
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 51

American intellectuals to Archibald MacLeish’s controversial speech

“The Irresponsibles” (1941), published under the title, “Mr. MacLeish:
We Are Not Irresponsible.” MacLeish’s speech had originally rebuked the
“ivory tower” leftism of the New York Intellectuals for failing to support
the war effort while totalitarianism raged in Europe, and he urged leftists
to take up the “banner of Americanism.”35 Points of View also published
Edmundo O’Gorman’s famous rejoinder to the historian Herbert Eugene
Bolton, who had previously issued a call for a hemispheric approach
to the study of history, and it ran a lengthy essay by the ethnographer
Fernando Ortiz on race relations in Cuba.36 The selection of these par-
ticular authors and pieces had a definite political valence tending toward
coalitional centrism. The Points of View responses to MacLeish provided
a venue for Latin American intellectuals to affirm their support of the
Allied cause, while O’Gorman’s defense of Latin Americanism rehearsed
culturalist reservations about Pan Americanism that were already amply
vented in the PAU cultural branches under Romero James’s leadership.
Ortiz’s work on Afrocuban culture, though fundamental to modernist ar-
ticulations of Cuban national identity from the 1920s through the 1940s,
in the words of Vera Kutzinski, represented a “depoliticized ethnographic
discourse whose effect was both to recuperate and to absorb la gente de
color [people of color, i.e., Afrocubans] through their folklore.”37 Thus,
Romero James’s airing of Latin American “differences” through debates
and roundtables broached sensitive topics within a pluralist format that
avoided divisive positions and was nonetheless salutary to the PAU’s lib-
eral foundations. Though she delved into charged arenas, Romero James
reiterated the underlying liberal principles of Points of View in her edito-
rial for the publication’s inaugural issue, in which she argued against utili-
tarian foreign policy and staked a forceful claim for cultural diplomacy
and intellectual discussion as the most appropriate means of engendering
mutual trust among the hemisphere’s nations.38
A significant innovation of Romero James’s modest publication pro-
gram was that it challenged dominant stereotypes about Latin America in
the United States and sought to reverse habitual patterns of information
transmission from North to South, all the while emphasizing that the mu-
tual ignorance between North and South Americans was really no greater
than the ignorance most Latin Americans had of one another.39 An in-
tellectual roundtable titled “Is America a Continent?” that appeared in
one Points of View issue exemplifies the publication’s “working through”
nationalism in order to arrive at Pan Americanism. The piece was re-
printed from the prominent liberal Argentine literary and cultural journal
52 ART ENTERS THE UNION

Sur (1931–1992), edited by Victoria Ocampo. Ocampo was also close to

Gabriela Mistral, Romero James’s counterpart at the League of Nations,
but it is likely that the piece landed in Points of View by way of Romero
James’s friend María Rosa Oliver, who in addition to being an OIAA con-
sultant was also a member of the Sur editorial board and a participant in
the roundtable. As a Communist and a Pan Americanist, Oliver’s commit-
ments placed her on the left of Sur’s cosmopolitan intellectual spectrum,
yet her perspectives were welcome in Washington, D.C., during wartime,
given her opposition to Argentina’s Axis sympathies. At one moment in
the roundtable discussion, Oliver asks Edith Helman of Simmons Col-
lege about the reaction in the United States to the recent expropriation
of foreign-owned petroleum interests under Mexican President Lázaro
Cárdenas, to which Helman replies, “If you refer to the opinion of the
newspapers, all I have to say is that the press in the United States—as in
all other countries—is capitalistic and conservative. But if you refer to the
opinion of informed people . . . I would say that naturally they favored
the Mexican people, the Mexicans’ seizure of their natural and legitimate
patrimony.” To this Oliver responds, “That confirms . . . that the current
policy of the United States precludes any rough handling of the Latin
American countries.”40 The exchange encapsulates a recurring gesture of
the Point of View series: namely, it raises the specter of U.S. expansion-
ism, only to follow up with a reassurance of mutual solidarity through
Pan Americanism and a hearty dose of intellectual self-affirmation.
Romero James’s and Seeger’s forays into sensitive areas of U.S.–Latin
American relations are a distant cry from the fraternal soirées envisioned
by early twentieth-century PAU cultural policymakers. The shift toward
explicit political engagement on the part of Intellectual Cooperation par-
alleled a new wave of assertive inter-American cultural diplomacy that
emerged in the United States in the context of World War II. In the eyes
of U.S. policymakers and funding organizations, one benefit of Romero
James’s continual emphasis on American identity, however contested, was
that this theme “divert[ed] the traditional pro-European orientation of
the Latin intellectuals into an inter-American framework,” in the hopes of
preempting their attraction to fascism.41 By foregrounding Latin American
cultural difference, Intellectual Cooperation also helped to flag examples
of material and expressive culture—such as art, music, and literature—as
meaningful objects of exchange, which in turn complemented U.S. efforts
toward increased hemispheric trade. On matters of both politics and trade,
the Division of Intellectual Cooperation was a valuable partner of Nelson
Rockefeller’s wartime agency, the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA),
for which the PAU carried out numerous contracts.
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 53

The OIAA’s origins lay in the fact that Rockefeller was appalled by the
State Department’s low-key and seemingly ad hoc approach to cultural
diplomacy, given what he perceived as the looming threat of fascism in
the hemisphere.42 By awarding contracts to private and nonprofit institu-
tions that acted in the interests of his agency, he realized that the OIAA
could fund bold cultural initiatives, such as feature-length film produc-
tions, while incurring minimal oversight by Congress and government
watchdogs.43 The OIAA established administrative offices in New York,
Washington, D.C., and Hollywood, as well as fifty-nine coordination
committees in cities throughout Latin America.44 In addition, the agency
was well funded, with a start-up budget of $3.5 million that ballooned to
$45 million by the war’s end, and a staff that numbered approximately
fourteen hundred employees at the height of its activities.45
The OIAA’s use of cultural diplomacy for explicit military and eco-
nomic ends stood in marked contrast to the State Department’s “disin-
terested” approach to cultural diplomacy, and there were moments of
obvious friction between the two agencies.46 The tenure of the OIAA
(1940–1946) coincides with a period of continual debate among U.S.
policymakers over instrumentalist versus idealist formulations of cultural
diplomacy, in which the OIAA most often fell into the instrumentalist
camp and the State Department into the idealist one. And, although the
State Department won the battle in 1943, when most OIAA cultural ac-
tivities were folded back into the realm of regular diplomacy, the in-
strumentalists won the war when Rockefeller became assistant secretary
of state for Inter-American Affairs in 1944.47 In its pre–Pearl Harbor
phase, the OIAA Cultural Relations Division covered approximately the
same areas as the PAU Division of Intellectual Cooperation, with units
dedicated to art, music, education (scholarship), publications (literature),
fellowships, and hospitality. But after the entry by the United States into
the war, Rockefeller informed his executive staff that they were now “the
first line of defense” in the war effort, and he reconfigured the OIAA
divisions to reflect a greater concern with hemispheric security.48 At that
point, many of the programs formerly housed under the OIAA Cultural
Relations Division were transferred to a newly formed Science and
Education Division, with the intention that the State Department would
eventually assume responsibility for them. The transition was not as
smooth as anticipated, however. By mid-1943, the OIAA music projects
officially moved to Charles Seeger’s Inter-American Music Center at the
PAU, which was privately funded and carried an initial endorsement from
the State Department and the OIAA. The status of OIAA art programs
was a bit more complicated, though, because many U.S. arts institutions,
54 ART ENTERS THE UNION

such as MoMA, were active in this arena, and the State Department was
comparatively inactive in it.49 The PAU assumed some oversight of arts
activities formerly sponsored by the OIAA, but it was not until the end
of the war, when MoMA and the State Department backed off of inter-
American art projects almost completely, that the PAU became by default
the primary venue for Latin American art in the United States.
One means of apprehending the intensely intimate and yet territorial
relationships among the OIAA, the PAU, and MoMA during this period
is to observe the game of musical chairs played by low-level employees
through these institutions. Employee raiding (especially of coveted bi-
lingual employees) was evidently a source of anxiety at the PAU, to the
extent that OIAA Commissioner Rockefeller and PAU Director General
Rowe felt obliged to make a gentlemen’s agreement in 1942 that they
would confer with one another over future transfers of personnel.50 To
complicate matters, some employees wore multiple hats. By day, for ex-
ample, the Mexican American labor organizer Ernesto Galarza was PAU
chief of the Division of Labor and Social Information. After hours, he
and his wife prepared Latin American studies materials for U.S. elemen-
tary schools as part of an OIAA contract.51 The salary of the Spanish
Republican exile Gustavo Durán, who was Seeger’s assistant at the PAU,
was paid by the OIAA with funds from the Carnegie start-up grant. After
one year, Durán left the PAU to work for the State Department at the U.S.
embassy in Cuba (where he acted as a negotiator in smoothing out a crisis
involving the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros, introduced later in
this chapter). Durán returned to his former position in 1943, this time as
an official employee of the PAU.52 Leslie Judd Switzer, an art specialist
at the PAU, began her career as Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s secretary at MoMA
from 1942 to 1943, while Lincoln Kirstein and Barr were busy collect-
ing Latin American art for the museum. In summer 1944 Switzer went
to work at the U.S. Department of Education as a specialist in library
materials under an OIAA contract, for which she traveled to Mexico and
Central America in order to assemble art education materials. From there
she went to the PAU, where she worked in Romero James’s office from
1944 to 1945.53
Even more problematic than employee conflict of interest, however,
was the money trail and the appearance of impropriety surrounding the
fact that the Office of Inter-American Affairs, a U.S. government agency,
was playing a key role in funding, and even shaping, the programs of
the PAU, an international organization. Between 1940 and 1943, the
PAU administered approximately forty OIAA wartime contracts, most of
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 55

them under the aegis of Intellectual Cooperation.54 This aroused concerns

on the part of all institutions involved, including the State Department,
which as noted previously, already had tense relations with the OIAA.
Even when the State Department itself had recommended the estab-
lishment of Seeger’s Inter-American Music Center at the Pan American
Union, Director General Rowe balked that the union “could not be put
in the position of acting merely as the agent of [the State Department’s]
Music Committee.”55 Now, as the State Department prepared to as-
sume responsibility for the OIAA’s cultural programs after the entry by
the United States into the war, renewed fears about conflict of interest
spawned a flurry of communication in order to clarify institutional pro-
priety. A State Department official cautioned that continued OIAA fund-
ing of the PAU meant that the “independence of the Union appears, at
least, to be prejudiced in some measure.” He further advised that it would
be wiser for the OIAA to grant a lump sum to the PAU for the overall
purpose of “strengthening inter-American relations” rather than continu-
ing to provide small grants-in-aid for specific projects.56 The OIAA re-
sponded by defending its practices, noting, “We are doubtful . . . . as to
whether or not there would be any less appearance of American [U.S.]
domination of the Pan American Union if this Office [the OIAA] should
request of the Congress, for the purposes of the war, a lump-sum gift for
the Pan American Union and then to make so large a contribution.”57
At the end of the day, the State Department stipulated that continued
OIAA funding for the PAU must adhere to strict transparency guidelines:
funded projects had to be patently relevant to emergency war activities
and were subject to full disclosure and approval to the PAU governing
board, as well as publication in the PAU annual report.58 This protocol
may have alleviated the State Department’s fear of an international or
Congressional inquiry, but it still avoided the fundamental question that
loomed over the money trail—that is, the U.S. agenda of OIAA funding
and the PAU’s close connections to the OIAA and other U.S. government–
funded institutions. Two years later, the OIAA’s postwar planning docu-
ments had not wavered from their original perspectives. They continued
to lament the fact that inter-American cultural relations were treated as
an “orphan child” by the State Department, and to recommend that the
State Department assume more direct involvement with PAU cultural
programs: “Attention must be given . . . to any steps which could be taken
to alleviate the position of the Pan American Union when CIAA [OIAA]
funds are withdrawn from its Division of Intellectual Cooperation.”59
If State Department officials winced at the extent of OIAA involvement
56 ART ENTERS THE UNION

in PAU cultural affairs, they certainly were not about to take on direct
management of PAU cultural programs after the OIAA reorganization
in 1943. At this critical juncture, the private philanthropic Rockefeller
Foundation (RF) played an important role in helping to sustain the PAU
cultural activities after the entry by the United States into the war, espe-
cially in the visual arts. Since 1937, the Foundation had given substan-
tial support for Intellectual Cooperation’s general operating budget and
individual programs.60 In 1943 Concha Romero James approached the
Foundation with a new funding request for the development of an archive
on Latin American art. Romero James had traveled to Latin America in
1934 and 1938 in order to establish connections with artists and art in-
stitutions. She returned with names and addresses, duly typed onto index
cards for her office card catalog, as well as slides, photos, and study
prints, which Intellectual Cooperation circulated to scholars and institu-
tions in the United States. These materials were added to the burgeon-
ing, haphazardly organized files on diverse cultural topics that had been
accumulating in the PAU Division of Intellectual Cooperation since its
inception in 1917. Romero James proposed that Rockefeller Foundation
support would go toward organizing these materials for more effective
distribution to the public, and also toward the production of a series of
low-cost monographs, each focusing on a contemporary Latin American
artist and authored by a prominent critic.61
While Romero James was engaged in conversations with the Rockefeller
Foundation about her proposal, however, MoMA was pitching a similar
idea to the Foundation. Though the two parties probably did not real-
ize it, the outcome of this grant competition would determine which
institution would take the lead in assembling data on contemporary
Latin American art in future decades, given the ever dwindling financial
support for the field. At MoMA, the Spanish exile Luis de Zulueta had
been working on the museum’s Latin American art files, which he had
inherited from his predecessor, Leslie Judd Switzer.62 Given Rockefeller
Foundation funding, Zulueta proposed to produce an updated artists file
and a directory of Latin American artists and institutions for use by mu-
seum professionals. Aware of the parallel projects underway, Rockefeller
Foundation representatives advised MoMA and the PAU to confer with
one another in order to avoid duplicating labor.63 One day Romero James
made an unannounced visit to MoMA, apparently in order to check out
the museum’s archival work surreptitiously. This event resulted in a
comic RF internal memo: “[Mrs. James] led Mr. Zulueta to believe that
she was looking around to find out what she could about the work of the
Museum, by indirect questioning and not by trying to get together to dis-
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 57

cuss what was being covered. In addition, she acted as though her work
were all set up and working but did not ever mention the grant from the
RF. Mr. Zulueta was very upset about the whole matter.”64
In spite of Romero James’s hapless industrial spying, the Foundation
opted to fund the PAU over MoMA. The Harvard University Hispanist
and Rockefeller Foundation program officer Bill Berrien was impressed
by Romero James’s efficiency and dismayed by what he perceived to be
“gratuitous and unethical sniping on the part of M[o]MA in the field
of contemporary Latin American art.”65 Judging from the Museum’s in-
ternal memoranda, there was general consensus that the PAU was not
up to the task of assuming leadership in the field; most of the staff who
weighed in on the matter echoed Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s opinion that “the
Museum was the proper institution to cover the modern field,” and one
person went so far as to add, “Although the Pan-Am project may sound
well on paper, does it really do anyone any good if it is not sufficiently
good in itself?”66 In the end it was the public outreach component of the
PAU proposal that seemed to tip the balance in favor of the union. The
PAU already had more time invested in its project than MoMA, and its
constituency of “university professors, students, club women, school chil-
dren and so on,” was broader than MoMA’s target audience of “museum
clientele.”67 Perhaps the Foundation also sensed that political interest in
Latin American art had already peaked in the United States, and the PAU
would be an appropriate future headquarters for the field. In any case, the
following year Romero James hired Leslie Judd Switzer, former secretary
of MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., away from her OIAA contract at
the U.S. Department of Education, and the first grant-funded work with
the PAU art materials began to take place. Switzer sent out fifteen hun-
dred questionnaires to artists and institutions for the PAU contact files,
and she solicited suggestions for the monograph series from U.S.-based
experts on Latin American art, including her former boss Barr, his succes-
sor at MoMA, René d’Harnoncourt, and Grace McCann Morley at the
San Francisco Museum of Art.68
Meanwhile at MoMA, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., harbored bad feelings over
the outcome of the grant application, and the fact that his former secre-
tary, Leslie Judd Switzer, was now at the PAU carrying out the project he
had hoped to secure for his institution served as a reminder of the recent
competition. Leslie Judd Switzer’s loyalty to Barr is evident in her tell-all
letters to “Alfo” (Barr) about her work on the artists monograph series
at the PAU. Their correspondence makes clear that neither held much
respect for Switzer’s new supervisor, Concha Romero James, to whom
they refer derogatorily as “La Concha” or “Conchita.” Barr especially felt
58 ART ENTERS THE UNION

that Romero James’s taste in art and selection of critics who were not art
specialists was informed by personal bias rather than rigorous aesthetic
criteria.69 In one letter, Switzer seems to relish recounting to Barr that
moment at a dinner party when a stunned Romero James first learned of
MoMA’s upcoming conference Studies in Latin American Art, an event to
which she had not yet been invited. Switzer speculates that MoMA may
have deliberately mailed Romero James’s invitation late in order to di-
minish the likelihood of her attending; indeed Romero James was unable
to attend, even though her name appears in the program.70
The May 1945 conference at the Museum of Modern Art was its last
major activity in Latin American art for some time. While some critics
have regarded Barr’s remarks at the event as foreshadowing his impend-
ing rift with Lincoln Kirstein over the merits of abstract versus figurative
art, many of them appear more pointedly to be a somewhat rancorous
parting shot aimed at the PAU, in light of the grant fallout and impending
handover of the field. Barr opens his brief presentation on the problem
of maintaining momentum for the study of Latin American art in the
United States given the diminishing political and financial support for
Pan Americanism. At the same time, he takes the opportunity to criticize
politically motivated collecting practices in the first place by insisting that
aesthetic quality is more important than ideology. The vogue of Mexican
art in the United States, Barr laments, has resulted in a glut of hyper-
inflated Mexican hackwork, and the only remedy for this, in his opinion,
is the establishment of a caste of native collectors and dealers who could
serve as internal arbiters of quality before releasing art into the inter-
national arena. Barr specifically implicates Concha Romero James in his
call for more monographs and better criticism on Latin American art, as
he objects to one particular U.S. government–supported institution’s “in-
sultingly low” pay for art critics (a veiled reference to the meager hono-
raria that the PAU had been offering to critics, which Barr retained in the
published version of his remarks after conferring with Switzer to assure
that she personally would not be offended). Finally, he contrasts bom-
bastic Latin American art critics (Romero James’s intellectual circle) to
“our” (MoMA’s) critical objectivity and professional standards: “Perhaps
because of our somewhat greater concern with legitimate fact and docu-
mentation we are put off a bit by the eloquence, rhetoric and generally
poetic or philosophical approach of our Latin-American colleagues.”71
As petty as the Rockefeller Foundation grant competition may seem,
the bitterness registered in Alfred H. Barr, Jr.’s comments reveals signifi-
cant differences about the discursive construction of Latin American art
within this close-knit institutional field. At the PAU, Romero James sought
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 59

increased exposure for prominent Latin American intellectuals, many of

whom possessed a broadly humanist formation, while Barr donned a
mantle of disciplinary specificity and critical distance that favored the
“best” critics of Latin American art, including U.S. and European ones.
Here, in microcosm, was a clash between the PAU’s current of latino-
americanismo, with its roots in nineteenth-century humanism, and Barr’s
embrace of an emerging cold war professionalism, heralded by Talcott
Parsons and the New Critics. Barr’s famous graphic charts of modern-
ist movements and his 1945 installation plans for the MoMA galleries
indicate that he favored integrating selected examples of Latin American
art into the history of Western aesthetic movements, while Romero James
approached Latin American art according to a coverage model, as geo-
graphically bounded and as intrinsically worthy of study (Figure 6).72 Fi-
nally, Romero James favored arts education for the broad public, while
Barr stressed scholarly approaches to museology and curatorship. Barr
need not have preoccupied himself unduly that his perspectives on Latin
American art would wither and die in the postwar period. After all, Leslie
Judd Switzer was inserting MoMA-esque bias into her grant work at
the PAU, and soon she would be joined by another Barr protégé, José
Gómez Sicre, who would take Barr’s advice about aesthetic quality and
art markets very seriously. But the tension between Barr’s and Romero
James’s perspectives was not entirely resolved with Gómez Sicre’s arrival
at the PAU. Gómez Sicre stepped into an institutional environment rife
with deep-seated paradoxes: the Visual Arts Section’s ideologized Latin
Americanism had been nurtured by hands-on funding from public and
private sources with close ties to U.S. foreign policy; and the grant that
provided Gómez Sicre—future antagonist of social realism—a frame-
work for the “invention of Latin American art” had been secured by his
Mexican supervisor, an admirer of postrevolutionary cultural policy and
Mexican muralism. In his own curatorial projects, Gómez Sicre would
strive to fuse Romero James’s latinoamericanismo with Barr’s emphasis
on universal aesthetic values.
Twenty thousand dollars and three years later, the coveted Rockefeller
Foundation grant had yielded only three monographs, on the artists Diego
Rivera (Mexico, 1886–1957), Emilio Pettoruti (Argentina, 1892–1971),
and Mario Carreño (Chile, b. Cuba, 1913–1999), instead of the figure
of twenty to one hundred monographs that Romero James had initially
projected.73 Switzer departed from the Union before the grant period
expired, and José Gómez Sicre carried out the final grant activities.74 But
the driving concept of this modest proposal, namely that of collating
data on Latin American art for the purpose of circulating it throughout
Figure 6. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (United States, 1902–1981), “Torpedo” diagrams
of the ideal permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, as advanced
in 1933 (top) and 1941. Prepared by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the “Advisory
Committee Report on Museum Collections,” 1941. The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York: Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, 9a.15. The Museum of Modern
Art, New York. Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed
by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 61

the hemisphere, proved a powerful imaginary for the PAU visual arts
programs over the next two decades. Take, for example, a rather theatri-
cal photograph that appears in La Unión Panamericana al servicio de
las artes visuales en América (The Pan American Union at the Service
of the Visual Arts in America), a stylish 1961 publication produced by
Gómez Sicre in order to tout his office’s activities (Figure 7). In the photo
a young man dressed in a dark suit and tie, seated before a bank of file
cabinets, stares intently at the contents of a manila folder. Below him,

Figure 7. “Los Archivos de la División de Artes Visuales,” La Unión Panamericana

al servicio de las artes visuales en América, 1961. Reproduced with permission of
the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States.
62 ART ENTERS THE UNION

an elaborate flow chart maps the organization of the file cabinets and
provides statistics about their contents (three thousand index cards!).75
That young man is in fact looking at the accumulated results of an effort
to consolidate the field of Latin American art that began with Romero
James’s proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation. In those cabinets, one
can trace the emergence of a conceptual field through files organized ac-
cording to ascending spatial scales, from individual artists to countries,
and to overarching North–South continental categories such as “Latin
American Art in the U.S.” and “Latin American Art in Latin America.”
The organizing principle of the filing cabinet and the archive permeates
the format of Intellectual Cooperation’s major publications from the late
1930s and 1940s—Panorama (Correio, Correo), Points of View (Puntos
de vista), Lectura para maestros (Reading for Teachers), Educational
Trends in Latin America, and the Boletín de Música y Artes Visuales (later
Boletín de Artes Visuales)—each of which amounts to categorized lists of
news items culled from around the continent; in effect, these periodicals
promoted regional consciousness through data accretion. The art files
depicted in this photograph had passed from Concha Romero James to
Leslie Judd Switzer and then on to José Gómez Sicre. But before I describe
what their third custodian did with them, I will first trace his complex
path through this institutional landscape.

Gómez Sicre in Havana and New York

José Gómez Sicre’s initial involvement with MoMA, the PAU, and other
U.S.-based institutions came in the form of a personal friendship with
MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., whom he met while the latter was on
a brief art-buying trip to Cuba in August 1942.76 Barr sensed a kindred
spirit in Gómez Sicre’s direct and unadorned critical approach, which
he found all the more refreshing because it departed from his generally
negative impression of Latin American critics as excessively biased and
florid (as we have seen in his views regarding Concha Romero James’s
associates).77 “You are a very remarkable man, for you combine intel-
ligence and knowledge with extraordinary fairness,” Barr gushed to
Gómez Sicre in his thank-you note.78 Barr’s positive first impression en-
dured. In subsequent years, he would recommend Gómez Sicre to the
OIAA Acting Art Director René d’Harnoncourt (soon to become Barr’s
successor at MoMA) as having “a rather rare virtue among art critics in
that he seems really to be disinterested and without prejudice,” and to
Nelson Rockefeller as the “most informed and ablest critic in Havana.”79
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 63

The feeling was mutual. Gómez Sicre regarded Barr as a lifelong mentor,
although the roles of teacher and pupil were certainly reversed in the
context of Barr’s whirlwind visit to Cuba, for Gómez Sicre had already
acquired significant experience as an arts administrator in his native
country at the time of their meeting.80 In what follows I recount some
of the formative experiences of Gómez Sicre’s early career, noting espe-
cially how his fortuitous encounter with Barr served to cement postwar
bonds between Latin American avant-garde art movements and U.S. arts
institutions.
José Gómez Sicre was born in 1916 in Matanzas, Cuba, capital of the
sugar-producing region east of Havana and also a legendary center of
Afrocuban cultural and social movements. As a young man Gómez Sicre’s
family moved to Havana, where he eventually received his licenciatura in
consular law (1939) and his doctorate in social sciences at the University
of Havana (1941). Gómez Sicre’s father, Clemente Gómez, had been one
of the youngest generals in the Cuban War for Independence (1895–1898)
and was an early member of the Liberal Party. From his paternal line,
Gómez Sicre inherited his ardent anticlericism, but it was Gómez Sicre’s
mother, Doña Guillermina Sicre, who fostered his love of art. Gómez
Sicre’s maternal cousin, Juan José Sicre (1898–1972), a frequent visitor
to the Gómez Sicre home, was a well-known sculptor on the aesthetically
“progressive” end of the spectrum among the faculty at the national art
school, the Academia San Alejandro.81 Through his cousin Juan José, the
young José Gómez Sicre was exposed to a progressive intellectual culture
characterized by close ties between political and aesthetic movements.
Juan José Sicre was a founding member of the Grupo Minorista, a loosely
configured group of some fifty journalists, lawyers, poets, artists, and mu-
sicians that was active from 1923 to 1927. Inspired by the ideals of racial
equality and social justice advanced by the Cuban patriot José Martí, the
Minoristas sought to realize the thwarted republican ideals of the War
for Independence by proposing solutions to the ongoing problems of U.S.
imperialism: racism, poverty, and illiteracy; economic dependence; and
political corruption. State support for the arts was central to the group’s
1927 Declaration, which called for promotion of “vernacular art” and
“new art,” as well as for “the introduction and popularization in Cuba of
the latest artistic and scientific doctrines, theories, and practices.”82 The
Grupo Minorista was one of several influential left-liberal movements
to arise in Cuba during the years of the repressive, U.S.-backed dictator-
ship of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933) that drew their base of support
from among middle-class professionals, women’s groups, labor unions,
64 ART ENTERS THE UNION

intellectuals, and students. The more reformist and nationalist strains

of these movements supported the presidential candidacy of the centrist
Ramón Grau San Martín in 1933.83 Upon his successful election, Grau
did manage to implement significant reforms, including the abrogation
of the Platt Amendment and labor rights legislation, but his one hundred
days in office were cut short by a coup engineered by Fulgencio Batista,
who went on to rule the nation directly or indirectly for the next ten years
until Grau’s reelection in 1944.
Though the reformist spirit of his older cousin’s generation continued
to influence José Gómez Sicre, the latter’s own youth and adolescence
were overshadowed by the depression, wartime scarcity, and the years of
political instability marked by Batista’s increasingly central presence in
Cuban politics prior to the 1959 Revolution. Opposed to both Machado
and Batista, Gómez Sicre recalled the civic culture of his formative years
as apathetic, stagnant, and mediocre, with little or no possibility of social
mobility for those lacking money and personal connections. Though he
conceived of a career in diplomatic law as a means of escaping Cuba
and its stifling atmosphere, he spent at least some of his time in graduate
school auditing Luis de Soto’s art history courses at the University of
Havana. Since adolescence, he had been drawn to curatorship; his first
exhibition of young artists from Matanzas in 1934 was an early indica-
tion of his eventual career path.84 Upon completing his doctorate, Gómez
Sicre took a one-month certificate course in journalism and dedicated
himself to writing art criticism, while supporting himself through a low-
paying job with the national lottery. In his off hours he authored the
monthly art page for the progressive paper El mundo and delivered pub-
lic lectures and radio shows on art.85
In spite of the difficult economic and political climate that marked
Gómez Sicre’s youth, he was immersed in a vibrant intellectual scene
that interwove ongoing projects around Cuban cultural identity with
European intellectual movements, such as surrealism and existentialism.
As a young man, Gómez Sicre admired the Afrocubanista movement in
literature, music, and the arts, which extended roughly from the years
of the Machado dictatorship until 1940, although many visual artists
continued to work in an Afrocubanista vein longer than their literary
counterparts. Implicitly anti-imperialist and antidictatorial, the movement
attracted mainly criollo (white) intellectuals but also some black and
mulato intellectuals who sought to create a capacious national cultural
identity (cubanía) that rejected the values of U.S. and Spanish colonial-
ism.86 Gómez Sicre’s teenage scrapbook is filled with late-period Afro-
Caribbean poetry by figures such as Nicolás Guillén (Cuba, 1902–1989)
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 65

and Luis Palés Matos (Puerto Rico, 1898–1959) lovingly clipped from
newspapers, and his early cultural activities demonstrate an eagerness to
pursue Afrocubanismo in the visual arts.87
As a young man, Gómez Sicre did not limit his interest to Afro-
Caribbean inspirations, but also felt a strong attraction toward indige-
nous Caribbean and Mexican art. In 1940, he traveled to Santo Domingo
to attend the Caribbean International Conference, where he undertook a
study of indigenous Taino pottery and carving. Shortly afterward, while
recovering from the sting of his broken engagement to the poet Fina
García Marruz, he made a trip to Mexico City, where he studied the
fresco techniques of the Mexican muralists and pre-Columbian arts. He
returned to Mexico in 1942; there he was the guest of Lupe Marín, ex-
wife of the muralist Diego Rivera, and he interviewed José Clemente
Orozco, the Mexican muralist whom he most admired. Upon returning to
Cuba, Gómez Sicre published a series of articles in El mundo on Mexican
politics, society, and culture, including his interview with Orozco. The
year 1942 was noteworthy for its epiphanic encounters; in addition to
his meetings with Barr, Gómez Sicre also became acquainted with the
Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda in Mexico, and he would express
a lifelong admiration for both men.88
During the early 1940s, Gómez Sicre also crossed paths, though not
always cordially, with the most distinguished Cuban intellectuals of his
generation, who converged around small but dynamic cultural venues
in Havana such as El Lyceum and the Institución Hispano-Cubana de
Cultura.89 At the Hispano-Cubana, Gómez Sicre worked under the eth-
nographer Fernando Ortiz to organize a fine arts section, for which he
curated exhibitions of Cuban and Haitian art. With his friend, the writer
and ethnomusicologist Alejo Carpentier, he brought important exhibi-
tions of European modern art to El Lyceum, including the work of Joan
Miró, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Raoul Dufy. Alejandro Anreus
notes that two Pablo Picasso exhibitions that Gómez Sicre organized
at El Lyceum, again in the important year of 1942, strongly impacted
Gómez Sicre’s developing taste.90 For him, Picasso was the epitome of the
antibourgeois, bohemian, and aesthetically intrepid modernist, and the
fact that Picasso supported the Spanish Republic linked him sympatheti-
cally to progressive movements in Cuba. More importantly, as Juan A.
Martínez observes, Picasso’s engagement with primitivism, however ap-
propriative of African art, provided a model that invited Cuban artists
and intellectuals to explore Afrocuban culture and to intervene and par-
ticipate in transatlantic aesthetic modernist movements.91
Gómez Sicre also made enemies in the course of his cultural activities.
66 ART ENTERS THE UNION

His falling out with the most internationally acclaimed Cuban modernist
painter and Picasso protégé, Wifredo Lam, is often cited as the reason why
Lam declined to participate in MoMA’s 1944 exhibition of Cuban art.92
The ostensible basis of their quarrel was Lam’s disapproval of Gómez
Sicre’s selection of illustrations for the exhibition’s companion publica-
tion, although the two evidently had previous disagreements stemming
from Gómez Sicre’s direction of the Galería del Prado in Havana. Lam
scholar Lowery Stokes Sims emphasizes that the tensions between the
two went deeper than professional quarrels. Lam was reluctant to be
pigeonholed as a “Cuban artist” by MoMA, a major metropolitan arts in-
stitution, and Gómez Sicre, with unconcealed resentment, regarded Lam
as a European-identified painter who had conveniently “discovered” his
Cuban identity when obliged to flee France during the Occupation.93 As
a result of his conflict with Lam, Gómez Sicre also broke with Lam’s sup-
porter, Lydia Cabrera, a renowned ethnographer of Afrocuban cultures
in her own right.94 Gómez Sicre’s maximum antagonists, however, were
members of the “small group of exquisite super-intellectuals” known as
the Grupo Orígenes, associated with the eponymous journal that ran
from 1944 to 1954, and around whom several Cuban vanguardia paint-
ers also congregated.95 Their most famous member was poet, essayist,
and novelist José Lezama Lima, whose Catholicism, exuberant take on
cubanidad, and neobaroque literary aesthetic were at odds with Gómez
Sicre’s autodidacticism, sparse critical style, and jaundiced view of Cuban
public culture. Because Grupo Orígenes was associated with a prominent
journal, it served as an important link between the Cuban vanguardia
and other international aesthetic modernist movements. Gómez Sicre’s
animosity toward what he felt was the group’s pretentiousness and con-
servatism perhaps also compelled him to seek out alternate routes of
modernism that bypassed these local opponents, including his pursuit of
relationships with U.S.-based institutions.
Upon Barr’s return to New York after his purchasing trip, he wrote to
Gómez Sicre and encouraged him to undertake the first ambitious critical
survey of contemporary Cuban painting.96 The result of this suggestion
was the bilingual monograph Pintura cubana de hoy (Cuban Painting
Today, 1944), a pioneering study that served as a de facto catalogue for
MoMA’s exhibition of Cuban art in spring 1944, which displayed the
fruits of Barr’s purchasing trip. Gómez Sicre’s study is a paean to two gen-
erations of Cuban vanguardia painters, many of them his personal friends.
The senior artists featured in the book are known as the Generation of
1927 because of their participation in the pioneering Primera Exposición
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 67

de Arte Nuevo (First Exhibition of New Art) in that year; they are con-
temporaries of the Grupo Minorista.97 Among this cohort are Eduardo
Abela, Carlos Enríquez, Antonio Gattorno, Víctor Manuel, Amelia
Peláez, and Fidelio Ponce de León. The second wave of vanguardia paint-
ers includes members of Gómez Sicre’s own generation who were born
in the first two decades of the twentieth century and reached maturity
in the 1940s: Mario Carreño, Wifredo Lam, René Portocarrero, Felipe
Orlando, Mariano Rodríguez, Cundo Bermúdez, Jorge Arche, and Luis
Martínez Pedro. Through biographical sketches of these fourteen paint-
ers, as well as brief profiles of several emerging artists and “popular” (i.e.,
vernacular) painters, Gómez Sicre’s narrative stresses the importance of
their collective rupture with Cuba’s “official” and European-identified art
institution the Academia San Alejandro, which elsewhere he had acerbi-
cally described as “a colonial echo of a Spanish echo of the moribund
Academy of Rome.”98 From the European-trained artists to those self-
taught, Cuban vanguardia painting drew on a diverse range of European
modernist idioms, including postimpressionism, expressionism, realism,
fauvism, cubism, and surrealism, and it adapted these modes for the ex-
pression of Cuban cultural perspectives. New York critics responding to
the MoMA exhibition readily identified the group’s “tropical” palette as
its unifying trait, though the painters shared other substantive bonds,
including a generational basis in the reformist movements that arose
during the Machado dictatorship, a pervasive antiacademicism, and a
commitment to representing previously neglected aspects of Cuban soci-
ety through a thematics of rural landscape and peasantry, urban scenes,
everyday life, and Afrocuban culture.99
In order to facilitate Gómez Sicre’s travel to New York to assist with
mounting the Cuban painting exhibition, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., sponsored
Gómez Sicre’s application for a short-term fellowship to study art criti-
cism at New York University. After the entry by the United States into the
war, New York was no longer the raucous, libertine metropolis that had
hosted so many Good Neighbor arts exchanges during the late 1930s and
early 1940s, but Gómez Sicre’s residency nonetheless provided him with
a set of important institutional contacts. And, thanks to a small group of
Latin American artists and the company of his close friend, the vanguar-
dia painter Mario Carreño, Gómez Sicre was also able to indulge in a bit
of Greenwich Village bohemian life during his six-month stay.100 Gómez
Sicre arrived in winter 1944, just in time to audit an art criticism course
with Erwin Panofsky at New York University and an art history course
with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia.101 Barr had recommended Schapiro
68 ART ENTERS THE UNION

to Gómez Sicre as “a very brilliant teacher,” and although both Panofsky

and Schapiro made a lasting impression on the young man, Gómez Sicre
found Schapiro’s lectures on Cézanne absolutely dazzling.102 In inter-
views conducted by Alejandro Anreus with Gómez Sicre shortly before
the latter’s death, Gómez Sicre mused that “[Schapiro] es la única prueba
de que para ser un verdadero Marxista hay que ser brillante” ([Schapiro]
is the only proof that to be a true Marxist, one has to be brilliant).103 It
is worth briefly outlining some of Schapiro’s ideas in order to highlight
their resonance with Gómez Sicre’s own evolving intellectual formation
at this point in the mid-1940s.
At the time of Gómez Sicre’s visit to New York, Schapiro was assistant
professor of art history at Columbia, where his lectures had acquired
a reputation as a rite of passage for newcomers to the New York art
scene.104 Already, Schapiro shared a long history of polemical interac-
tions with Gómez Sicre’s MoMA sponsor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Schapiro had
famously taken Barr to task in his 1937 essay “Nature and Abstract Art,”
in which he insisted that all art, even abstract art, was imbricated in the
material and social conditions of its production. Given the ideological
and methodological differences between Barr’s formalism and Schapiro’s
idiosyncratic historical materialism, it is difficult to comprehend Gómez
Sicre’s intense and enduring admiration for both of these mentors.105 On
the surface, Gómez Sicre’s labors at the PAU more closely approximate
those of Barr. When asked for a summation of his life’s work at the close
of the Anreus interviews, for example, Gómez Sicre’s self-fashioned epi-
taph pays homage to Barr: “Fui un crítico claro y un curador que creó
una escala de valores” (I was a clear critic and a curator who created a
scale of values).106 Yet, both Barr and Schapiro thought carefully about
the status of Latin American art in the U.S. art market, and while Barr
may have encouraged Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic judgment and museologi-
cal skills, Schapiro provided an opportunity for him to refine his ideas
about the role of art in society. The latter, albeit decoupled from the larger
framing narrative of revolutionary struggle, contributed to Gómez Sicre’s
vision of modern art as a catalyst for development in Latin American
societies.
Like many leftist critics in the early 1930s, Schapiro had criticized par-
ticular currents of modernism for being decadent and self-absorbed, but
by the 1940s, along with his shifting political perspectives, he tempered
these earlier claims to acknowledge the avant-garde’s conservative as well
as its resistant and critical tendencies. David Craven observes that toward
the end of a transitional period in late 1930s, as Schapiro grew increas-
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 69

ingly alienated from Soviet Communism, he came to value “subjectiv-

ity . . . as a much more progressive means for contesting hegemonic values
as well as for affirming alternative ones [than he had previously].”107
Schapiro further posited that the self-reflexive impulse inherent in some
modernist aesthetics could prompt awareness on the part of spectators
and artists regarding their social relationships. Schapiro theorized that the
social function of art was its “capacity to unite or consolidate [people],
to concretize their common experience, and to enable the individual to
acquire the results of others’ thinking and feeling and perception” and
that “art is a value involved in other values, and potentially a means in
all human relations.”108 Schapiro shared with his Frankfurt school col-
leagues an appreciation of the avant-garde as a potentially progressive
social force, but in contrast to both the Frankfurt school and orthodox
communists, he declined to place realism and abstraction or high and
mass culture on a hierarchical scale of values; in fact, in insisting on the
human intervention involved in constructing all aesthetic artifacts, from
photographs to abstract paintings, he rejected the high-low and realism-
abstraction binaries altogether.
Although one can glimpse Schapiro-esque claims for the power of
modern art to foment collective consciousness in Gómez Sicre’s advance-
ment of contemporary Latin American art, perhaps Schapiro’s most obvi-
ous contribution to Gómez Sicre’s thinking about Latin American mod-
ernisms and modernity was his articulation of a nuanced, antireflexionist
model for understanding the relationship among aesthetic form, pa-
tronage, and contexts of reception.109 In a famous case study of Diego
Rivera’s public murals commissioned under the counterrevolutionary re-
gime of Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1933), Schapiro argued that a revo-
lutionary work of art could be produced under a reactionary patron, and
that aesthetics sometimes developed in advance of corresponding socio-
political movements. Alicia Azuela notes that in his critical writings on
Rivera, Schapiro finds that the “meaning” of a given work of art is to be
“judged with recourse to its positive effects within the social movement
that generates it.”110 Like Rivera, Gómez Sicre also came to maturity
in a context in which aesthetic modernisms were not coterminous with
modernization, and promoting cultural nationalism paradoxically meant
cultivating foreign patrons. Taken as an ensemble, Schapiro’s elaboration
of Trotsky’s concept of “uneven and combined development” in relation
to hemispheric American modernist movements, as well as his rejection
of emerging cold war aesthetic oppositions between realism and abstrac-
tion, offered Gómez Sicre a glimpse of an appealing “third way” that he
70 ART ENTERS THE UNION

would subsequently refine through his promotion of select young Latin

American artists in the early 1950s.

Cuba, Mexico, and Committed Art

The fact that Mexican muralism was the only modern art movement
from Latin America to find its way into Schapiro’s critical writings, or
to earn a coveted position on Barr’s “torpedo charts” for that matter,
also points to postrevolutionary Mexico as a deeply conflicted source of
aesthetic inspiration for Gómez Sicre. The art historians Juan Martínez
and Olga María Rodríguez Bolufé have each noted that Mexico was a
pole of attraction for many Cuban intellectuals of Gómez Sicre’s genera-
tion.111 Several painters associated with the Cuban vanguardia resided
in Mexico for extended periods; Cuban periodicals featured coverage of
the Mexican art scene; and the Communist movements in both countries
were closely linked. After undertaking his own pilgrimage to Mexico,
another crucial event in terms of Gómez Sicre’s intellectual formation
occurred in 1943, when he sustained a polemic in Havana with the re-
nowned muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
An earlier MoMA buying trip provides the backstory for this encoun-
ter. In spring 1942, Nelson Rockefeller had sent MoMA’s Lincoln Kirstein
on a “spying and buying trip” through the Southern Cone countries.
Kirstein was to purchase art for the Museum’s Latin American collection
while also forwarding confidential reports about Axis activities directly
to Rockefeller—thereby effectively carrying out simultaneous missions
for MoMA and the OIAA. Of all the art that he surveyed, Kirstein re-
ported to Rockefeller, he was most impressed by Siqueiros’s new murals
at Chillán, Chile.112 Siqueiros had fled Mexico in order to avoid reper-
cussions from his participation in the May 1940 assassination attempt
against Leon Trotsky, and he arrived in Chile through the intervention of
the poet Pablo Neruda, then the Chilean consul in Mexico. Encouraged by
Kirstein’s enthusiasm, and anticipating a MoMA commission, Siqueiros
obtained a visa at the U.S. embassy for travel to the United States in order
to attend the spring 1943 exhibition at MoMA that would showcase
Kirstein’s new Latin American purchases.113 Upon his arrival in Havana
en route to New York, however, Siqueiros was outraged to learn that his
visa had been revoked under instructions from the U.S. Department of
State. The reasons: “Siqueiros’s alleged membership in the Communist
Party” and “his alleged implication in the murder of Sheldon Hart, an
American citizen,” who had been Trotsky’s assistant.114 In an angry let-
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 71

ter to the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Siqueiros denounced the withdrawal

of his visa as “un acto de discriminación política absolutamente injus-
tificable” (an absolutely unjustifiable act of political discrimination).115
Meanwhile, the artist, his wife, and daughter found themselves stranded
in Havana’s Hotel Biltmore Sevilla with dwindling funds.
In an unusual act of cooperation with the State Department, facilitated
by the social acquaintance of Nelson Rockefeller with then U.S. ambas-
sador to Cuba Spruille Braden, the OIAA stepped in to defuse a poten-
tially difficult situation at a time when the U.S. wartime alliance with the
Soviets was in effect. It was Rockefeller who came up with the idea to
offer Siqueiros an OIAA commission to paint a mural “on a subject of
Cuban American democratic relations” for the Cuban-American Cultural
Institute (an OIAA affiliate), surmising “that, if he is given some work to
do, and if tact is employed in the treatment of his case, the ill effects of
the cancellation of the visa can be overcome. Otherwise, it is feared that
the effects might be very harmful, as Sr. Siqueiros is undoubtedly a very
influential person in artistic circles.”116 The result of these machinations
was a modest project, the painting Dos cumbres de América: Lincoln
y Martí (Two Mountain Peaks of America: Lincoln and Martí), which
was executed in June 1943.117 But the $2,500 Siqueiros received for the
mural was nowhere near the $16,000 sum that he had requested, and
been denied, for a major project at Havana’s Biblioteca Nacional.118 The
artist was in arrears at his lodgings and was actively seeking more local
commissions.119
Gómez Sicre was excited about Siqueiros’s presence on the island, al-
though skeptical of the muralist’s political affiliations—a feeling perhaps
exacerbated by the Batista regime’s recent entry into an alliance with
the Cuban Communist Party. Responding to the ubiquity of wartime
propaganda, Gómez Sicre delivered a lecture at the Institución Hispano-
Cubana on the topic “El cartel considerado como arte” (The Poster
Considered as Art) several months prior to Siqueiros’s arrival. In his
lecture, Gómez Sicre made an exception for individual masterpieces by
Orozco and Rivera, but expressed general “escepticismo al mural mexi-
cano por querer ostentar exceso de funcion pedagógica en detrimento de
valores plásticos que debiera poseer” (skepticism toward Mexican mural-
ism for wanting to display excessive pedagogical function to the detri-
ment of aesthetic values that it should possess), and he further lamented
the loss of scale and permanence that accompanied the shift from fresco
to paper in contemporary poster art.120 Siqueiros, in contrast, was at that
moment actively recruiting American artists for the antifascist Comité
72 ART ENTERS THE UNION

Continental de Arte para la Victoria (Continental Committee of Art for

Victory). Shortly after his arrival in Cuba, he delivered a lecture, “En la
guerra, arte de guerra” (In Wartime, War Art), that elaborated his views;
this lecture was sponsored by the Cuban Ministry of Defense.121 Sensing
an opportunity, Gómez Sicre invited Siqueiros to the Institución Hispano-
Cubana in June 1943 for a debate on the same topic, this time including
his friend, the muralist-inspired painter Mario Carreño; their three-way
polemic lasted from 9:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m.122
“[Siqueiros’s murals] will always be very interesting,” Gómez Sicre
recapped to Barr afterward, “although I personally do not believe in his
political theories.” As for the outcome of their five-hour debate, he noted,
We didn’t obtain any result but each one exposed his real mind.
We [Gómez Sicre and Carreño] still do not believe on political art
and, against Siqueiros opinion, we think that French art and spe-
cially school of Paris is absolutely determinative in the present and
the future of the art of the whole world (at least into formal field).
This is the general opinion of the Cuban painters and myself. In
the field of tecnic they do not deny new materials and for example,
for demonstrating it, Carreño is painting duco [an industrial paint
used by Siqueiros] now with a great success in the use of colors and
qualities.123

In spite of their political differences, Gómez Sicre was still impressed

by Siqueiros’s techniques, innovative use of materials, and his openness
toward working with Cuban artists. During Siqueiros’s travels in exile in
Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, New York, and Los Angeles, he had developed
the practice of recruiting local artists and young apprentices to work with
him on large-scale projects. Eager for his own colleagues to have such an
opportunity to learn from the master, Gómez Sicre asked Barr to write
to Cuban “personalities” recommending Siqueiros for commissions.124
Meanwhile, he personally worked to secure a commission for the artist
at the elegant El Vedado district residence of María Luisa Gómez Mena,
who was married at the time to Gómez Sicre’s friend Carreño. According
to Gómez Sicre, he even persuaded Gómez Mena to pick up Siqueiros’s
hotel bill and to lodge him and his family in her home.125
The aristocratic Gómez Mena was a free-spirited Maecenas to the
group of Cuban vanguardia painters whom Barr had come to survey in
summer 1942. She and her husband, Mario Carreño, had hosted Barr’s
visit, and several months later she founded La Galería del Prado as a
showcase for Cuban modern art, where Gómez Sicre briefly served as di-
rector.126 In addition to Carreño, the Galería represented leading first- and
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 73

second-generation vanguardia artists, including, among others, Carlos

Enríquez, Amelia Peláez, Fidelio Ponce de León, René Portocarrero, and
Mariano Rodríguez. The gallery sought to capitalize on a small circle of
modern art collectors, mostly middle-class professionals, which had been
growing in Havana since the 1930s. Almost as soon as the gallery opened,
however, Gómez Mena and Gómez Sicre entered into conflict over her
preferential treatment for certain artists (his version), and although he
and Gómez Mena parted ways at the gallery, they remained friends.127
Then, nearly a year after that chapter in their relationship had concluded,
Gómez Sicre brokered the deal between Siqueiros and Gómez Mena—
and he soon came to regret it. In October 1943, Siqueiros unveiled
his new work for the Gómez Mena–Carreño residence, Alegoría de la
igualdad y confraternidad de las razas blanca y negra en Cuba (Allegory
of Equality and Confraternity of the Black and White Races in Cuba,
1943).128 The reaction of the underwhelmed Gómez Mena to the work
suggests profound disgust and even anger; she reportedly dismantled the
mural, offering chunks of it to her friends.129 But, several black-and-white
archival photographs of the intact work suggest the formal challenge that
Siqueiros set out for himself through this project—to employ adjusted
perspective and chiaroscuro in order to make the painting’s massive fig-
ures appear to be emerging from a large, multiplanar vaulted alcove on
the top floor of the apartment (Figure 8).130 The mural’s triangular com-
position depicts the nude titan Prometheus as its central figure. Bearing
the gift of fire in one outstretched hand, he descends toward black and
white nude female figures, seated symmetrically in the lower left and right
of the mural, respectively.
Days after the mural was unveiled, Gómez Mena and Gómez Sicre shot
off simultaneous confidential letters to Barr expressing their displeasure
with the work. Gómez Mena was blunt: “I want to be really sincere on
this matter. Its art quality does not please me personally and I cannot live
with the mural, but I may be a poor judge on this matter, so I will send
you some photos so you can judge for yourself.”131 Gómez Sicre, on the
other hand, was guilt-ridden, perhaps preemptively so, in order to deflect
Barr’s potential irritation at having been asked to recommend the artist.
“I was one of who, in the first moment, insist on her to give the wall to
Siqueiros, remembering his good pictures and the beautiful frescos at the
Preparatory School,” Gómez Sicre admitted. He continued,
Now, I can’t say a word to Maria Luisa, because I can’t defend what
he has painted in her home. It is a very large and complicated symbol-
ism, horrible in composition and color. Now I recognize myself guilty
74 ART ENTERS THE UNION

Figure 8. David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexico, 1896–1974), Alegoría de la igualdad y

confraternidad de las razas blanca y negra en Cuba (Allegory of the Confraternity
of the Black and White Races in Cuba), Havana, Cuba, 1943 (destroyed). Un-
identified photographer. Acervo INBA—SAPS—Fondo David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

and at the same time am upsetting because I hoped a good realization

as the murals of Chillán I saw through photographs. This is my private
opinion and I implore you to keep it secretly because I was the princi-
pal supporter of the idea in the first moments.132
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 75

It is true: Alegoría paled in comparison to the formally complex, dynamic,

and ambitious Chillán murals so admired by Gómez Sicre and Kirstein,
but neither was this venue as grand. Instead, it appears, Siqueiros played
up concupiscence for a private commission, as he had on other occa-
sions.133 Yet, given its patrons’ general awareness of Siqueiros’s previous
work, it is worth questioning why this mural offended so deeply. A virtual
exhibition organized by the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City
on the topic of Siqueiros’s work abroad attributed the mural’s dismal
reception to “racism” and “politics.”134 The artist’s intention, according
to the exhibition, was to make a statement in favor of racial equality in
Cuba; in Siqueiros’s words, it was “un pequeño aporte profesional de su
autor a la lucha de los sectores progresistas del pueblo cubano contra
los restos de discriminación racial que aún subsisten lamentablemente en
la democrática tierra de Maceo” (a small professional contribution on
the part of its maker to the struggle of progressive sectors of the Cuban
people against the vestiges of racial discrimination, which lamentably still
subsist in the democratic land of Maceo).135 Siqueiros’s wife, Angélica
Arenal, speculates that such racism was most likely shared by the mu-
ral’s elite patrons.136 The explanation of racism offered by the Siqueiros
virtual exhibition is overly simplistic, in my view. If Gómez-Sicre’s van-
guardia colleagues were racist, then like the indigenism of their Mexican
counterparts they tended toward philia rather than phobia. As noted
previously, Gómez Sicre admired Afrocubanismo and other Caribbean
aesthetic movements that had been embraced by some criollo intellectu-
als, and Gómez Mena and Gómez Sicre welcomed, if not touted, the ad-
dition of the Afrocuban artist Roberto Diago to the Galería del Prado’s
stable.137 In recognition of the ethnographic projects carried out by his
colleague Alejo Carpentier, moreover, Gómez Sicre incorporated several
of Carpentier’s drawings of Afrocuban religious symbols into the book
design of Pintura cubana de hoy. Their strategic placement as overleafs
in the text suggests a telluric Afrocuban wellspring that literally subtends
vanguardia painting, much as Carpentier himself had featured such in-
signia at the conclusion of his Afrocuban novel ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! (1933).
Following the publication of Pintura Cubana de hoy, Gómez Sicre even
sent gifts of Afrocuban religious fetishes to MoMA administrators.138
A related but unexplored aspect of the mural’s reception, however,
revolves around its representation of race in relation to gender and nation
through its tripartite allegorical composition, which in effect poses the
static terms of a dialectic begging for animation. Following this avenue of
inquiry helps to shed light on Gómez Sicre’s attacks against social realism
76 ART ENTERS THE UNION

by casting them as a nationalist response rather than merely reflexive

racism or antileftism. In terms of its sobriety and its triangular composi-
tion, Alegoría avails itself of a postrevolutionary Mexican formula. It
adapts a scenario that came to be the officialist narrative of mestizaje
in postrevolutionary Mexico, which stressed the consensual relationship
between Hernán Cortés and his indigenous translator and mistress, La
Malinche, leading to the tragic yet necessary birth of their son Martín,
the “first” mestizo Mexican citizen. The logic of this familial-national
allegory, as David Luis-Brown explains, was that “a mestizo civilization
built along European lines with indigenous trimmings could resolve social
problems and place Mexico on an equal footing with other nations.” But,
Luis-Brown goes on to note, officialist mestizaje actually produced social
inequality, as its very conditions were predicated on the “de-Indianization
of Indians.”139
In Siqueiros’s permuation of mestizaje into mulatez for the Cuban
context, the selection of the titan Prometheus as emblematic of the de-
colonizing intellectual, stealing the fire of Zeus (racial equality) and carry-
ing it to two passive women, in contrast, looks uncomfortably like a
caricature of the master’s position between wife and mistress in a planta-
tion economy.140 In this respect, the narrative composition of the mural
evokes Gilberto Freyre’s foundational Brazilian study Casa-grande e
senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933), a generational counterpart
to Mexican indigenist tracts, which celebrates the benevolent Portuguese
master’s sexual dalliances as a catalyst to Brazilian racial democracy
at the national level.141 The mural stops short, however, at depicting a
Cuban child-citizen in the form of an embodied mulato; instead, it offers
the prospect of future insemination by an otherworldly intellectual god,
not unlike the peripatetic revolutionary artist himself. For their part, the
receptive women of Alegoría, their legs parted and intertwined, hands
resting on one another’s thighs, promise a rather somber, consensual
ménage à trois, rather than betrayal or rape, as the foundation of Cuban
national identity.
The fact that my only access to this mural is through black-and-white
photographs suggests another possibility: can we interpret Siqueiros’s
Prometheus to be black or mulato? Does the painting relocate the gen-
erative aspect of mulatez from the earthly to the supernatural realm?
Prometheus’s face is hidden from the spectator. He looks downward to-
ward the women, and his most striking feature is his dark hair, which
dominates the upper half of the picture plane. In photographs of the
mural, the tonality of Prometheus’s skin appears to be a shade in be-
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 77

tween that of his two female companions, but in a preliminary sketch

for this work, in which Siqueiros could have used shading to represent
Prometheus’s racial characteristics in relation to the two female figures,
he did not, instead portraying Prometheus in the same manner as the
white female figure (Figure 9). Though it would be interesting to con-
jecture that the mural’s scandal lay in its depiction of Prometheus (the
intellectual/artist) as a metaphysical, hybrid solution to racial inequal-
ity, conjured by earthly Cuban women, I am inclined to believe that the
work opts for the more conventional representation of race mixing;
though Siqueiros was renowned for his heterodox Christological images,
his representations of gender and sexuality were less iconoclastic. In the
dominant theories of race developed in Mexico and Brazil, race mixing
operated exclusively through the bodies of women of color. In the words
of Zita Nunes, “The father of the nation is thus the white man, the only
appropriate sexual partner for both white women and women of color,
who . . . undergo their own process of embranquecimento [whitening]
from mina to mulatta to quadroon and octaroon.”142 Because it threat-
ened the conventions of patriarchy, the idea of a white woman having
sex with a black man (or of interracial lesbian sex, for that matter) was
simply unthinkable as a path to racial democracy. In Siqueiros’s mural,
the black female figure is distinguished from her white companion by
the knot of her headwrap, in contrast to the discreetly draped scarf that
reveals more of the white figure’s hair, details suggestive of class as well
as cultural difference. (Siqueiros eliminated the headwraps in a small-
scale re-creation of the mural later executed in Mexico, consequently
foregrounding skin color as the major difference between the women.)
In making adjustments to prevailing discourses of Mexican mestizaje
for the Cuban context, Siqueiros draws parallels between indigenous
Mexicans and Afrocubans, and he insinuates that Cuban racial equality
might be resolved through external intervention. The fact that I have
turned to examples from the regional hegemons Brazil and Mexico in
order to elucidate Siqueiros’s compositional scheme points to the absence
of such discourses emanating from the Cuban cultural sector. It is impor-
tant to note that progressive Cuban intellectuals of Gómez Sicre’s genera-
tion thought carefully about race relations, but they did not tout a family
romance scenario of mulatez as a viable national foundational narrative,
in a manner comparable to the Mexican one. Instead, their cultural pro-
duction tended toward the development of a contrapuntal image reper-
toire that elevated guajiro (white or mixed-race peasant) and Afrocuban
cultures as dual bases of cubanía. For example, the ethnographer Fernando
78 ART ENTERS THE UNION

Figure 9. David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexico, 1896–1974), study for Alegoría de

la igualdad y confraternidad de las razas blanca y negra en Cuba. Photograph
by Guillermo Zamora. Acervo INBA—SAPS—Fondo David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

Ortiz’s landmark study of the Cuban monocrop economy, Contrapunteo

cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar,
1940), revolves around sophisticated, dialectical sexplay between the black
and white crops tobacco and sugar. The study offers the vega, or small
family-owned farm, as a mediating, utopian space between Cuba’s two
dominant plantation systems.143 Closer to Siqueiros’s own commitments,
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 79

the musical poesía negra (black poetry) of Nicolás Guillén, who went
on to become a major intellectual of the Cuban Revolution, underscores
the common interests of whites and blacks through their shared experi-
ences of hunger, poverty, and political disenfranchisement. For the critic
Vera Kutzinski, Guillén’s work advances a male homosocial imaginary
that borders on the homoerotic; women are utterly invisible in some of
Guillén’s best-known poems about racial unity such as “Balada de los dos
abuelos” (Ballad of the Two Grandfathers).144 Unlike the Mexican ver-
sion of mestizaje, which sanitizes the foundational act of rape, Kutzinski
finds that Cuban intellectuals often suppressed the black woman’s body
altogether, preferring instead to depict a highly sexualized and abstract
mulata who cannot speak her origins: “The mulata may be the signifier
of Cuba’s unity-in-diversity, but she has no part in it.”145 Among the van-
guardia painters, Carlos Enríquez’s famous painting El rapto de las mu-
latas (The Abduction of the Mulatas, 1938) reiterates this rather conven-
tional criollo perspective on mulatez. While the painting decries Spanish
colonial violence in its depiction of rapacious Spaniards, its foreground
proffers titillating and literally abstract fragments of the mulatas’ nude
upper bodies to the spectator. In contrast to Enríquez, the mixed-race
painter Wifredo Lam, upon his return to Cuba, developed a hermetic,
abstract visual vocabulary rooted in the Afrocuban spritual traditions
associated with his matrilineal heritage. Lowry Stokes Sims identifies this
aesthetic turn in Lam’s oeuvre to the anguish the artist felt as he regarded
the vast numbers of mulatas who had turned to prostitution and the in-
ternalized self-hatred of mulatos within Cuba’s polarized socioeconomic
and racial structure.146 Given this range of lyrical and socially committed
work on race coming from Cuban artists and intellectuals, I suspect
that Gómez Sicre and Gómez Mena reacted so strongly to Siqueiros’s
“allegory” because they found it clumsy and literal, too closely reflective
of present-day race relations and too distantly evocative of democratic
utopian ones.
Reflecting on the Alegoría affair years later, Gómez Sicre chalked up
the mural’s dismal reception to broad cultural differences: “Son dos sen-
sibilidades nacionales muy diferentes. La cubana es íntima, sensual, llena
de humor, más bien pagana. La sensibilidad mexicana es más bien monu-
mental, morbosa, amarga, creo que religiosa” (They are two very differ-
ent national sensibilities. The Cuban is intimate, sensual, full of humor,
rather pagan. The Mexican is rather monumental, morbid, bitter, reli-
gious, I believe).147 In spite of this belated nod toward cultural relativism,
Gómez Sicre’s encounter with Siqueiros galvanized his lifelong animus
80 ART ENTERS THE UNION

toward Mexican muralism, and in the postwar period this sentiment as-
sumed an overt ideological profile.148 Among the “three great muralists,”
Gómez Sicre made an exception for Orozco, whose expressionism and
skeptical attitude he admired, but he was especially critical of Rivera and
Siqueiros for what he perceived to be their pandering to foreign tastes,
machista triumphalism, and willingness to compromise their political
principles at the prospect of undertaking lucrative society portraits and
tourist curios.149
The striking thing about Gómez Sicre’s critique of Siqueiros is that
it so closely resembles Siqueiros’s own criticisms of the muralist move-
ment, and of Diego Rivera’s work in particular.150 The parallels between
Siqueiros and Gómez Sicre do not stop there. In the arts, both were mod-
ernists, antiacademicist, strongly committed to renovating public arts cul-
tures through supporting and mentoring young artists, and opposed to
folkloric or tropical representations of Latin America. On political mat-
ters, both were anticlerical, anti-imperialist, and antifascist. Siqueiros’s
criticisms of Zhdanovism and his commitment to aesthetic experimen-
talism got him in trouble with the Communist Party in the early 1950s,
leading Laurance Hurlbert to conclude that the would-be assassin of
Trotsky “clearly had more in common with Trotsky’s more sophisticated
approach to art than with Stalin’s limited esthetic conceptions.”151 I em-
phasize these sub-rosa connections between Siqueiros and Gómez Sicre
in order to suggest that Gómez Sicre’s ambivalence about the Mexican
school may have been based in part on his fear of the Cuban vanguar-
dia’s perceived similarity—or worse, its derivativeness—in relation to
the Mexican muralists. Siqueiros’s visit to Cuba did leave converts in its
wake, including Gómez Sicre’s friend Mario Carreño, who served as one
of Siqueiros’s assistants in the painting of Alegoría and enthusiastically
took up industrial paint and social realist themes (for a second time) fol-
lowing the muralist’s visit, as noted for example in the diagonal composi-
tion and sinuous modeling of his interracial proletarian subjects in the
ink and gouache drawing Sugar Cane Cutters (1943), which was acquired
by MoMA (Figure 10). (Given the strong negative reaction of Carreño’s
spouse, María Luisa Gómez Mena, to Alegoría, it may come as little
surprise that the couple divorced shortly after Siqueiros’s visit.)152 The
Cuban vanguardia was more loosely configured and aesthetically diverse
than the Mexican muralists, but the work of other individuals within the
movement, such as Eduardo Abela, Antonio Gattorno, Carlos Enríquez,
and Mariano Rodríguez, reveals an admiration for and engagement with
Mexican muralism.153 From the perspective of MoMA administrators,
Figure 10. Mario Carreño (Chile, b. Cuba, 1913–1999), Sugar Cane Cutters, 1943.
Ink and gouache on paper, 30 3/8 x 22 1/8 inches (77.2 x 56.2 cm). Inter-American
Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / CREAIMAGEN, Santiago de Chile. Digital image copy-
right The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
82 ART ENTERS THE UNION

Cuba possessed a minor arts culture compared to that of Mexico. When

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., met Gómez Sicre in Havana in 1942, he was en route
from a Mexican buying spree, where he considered a $700 Orozco paint-
ing to be a bargain. But only $500 of Barr’s $26,000 overall purchasing
budget was allocated for acquisitions of Cuban art.154 Gómez Sicre was
well aware of Mexican art’s popularity in the United States and the fact
that the Cuban vanguardia was competing with Mexico and other Latin
American countries for U.S. support, patronage, and gallery space. His
criticisms of the Mexican school thus reveal much about his own aspira-
tions and fears for the Cuban vanguardia. Acutely conscious of how re-
gional and vernacular images instantly played as “exotic” abroad, Gómez
Sicre’s negative characterization of muralism as a totalizing, mimetic aes-
thetic helped him to construct a Cuban “comparative advantage” out of
the pluralist and poetic sensibilities of his native vanguardia.
Had he met Siqueiros in another location during the Popular Front
years, Gómez Sicre’s curatorial taste might have developed along more
catholic lines, like that of his mentor Barr.155 Gómez Sicre’s curatorial
preferences were in fact eclectic, and he would forever lionize his commit-
ted troika of Neruda, Orozco, and Picasso, but he drew the line at social
realism and indigenism, which he came to identify with the most head-
strong and doctrinaire Stalinist among Mexico’s “three great muralists.”
Years before the Truman Doctrine and the Cuban Revolution, the con-
tours of Gómez Sicre’s cultural cold war were beginning to take shape,
and its primary coordinates were Havana and Mexico City rather than
Moscow and Washington, D.C. The Cubacentrism of Gómez Sicre’s anti-
communist perspective is underscored in the earliest reference to Soviet
cultural policy that I encountered among his papers. In 1945, Gómez Sicre
found himself outraged at the chilly reception that an exhibition Cuban
vanguardia painting had reportedly received at the Cuban embassy in the
Soviet Union. In a column for El mundo he walked a thin line: on the one
hand, he defended the vanguardia before a conservative Cuban critic who
alleged that the painters had been invited to exhibit in the Soviet Union
merely because they were communist sympathizers, while on the other,
he condemned the Soviets for their suppression of experimental art and
artists. Gómez Sicre maintained that the work of the Cuban vanguardia
differed from Soviet art in that the former did not mix art and politics.156
The very next year Gómez Sicre was installed at the PAU, and now de-
racinated from its Cuban context, this assertion that “art and politics do
not mix” would become a plank in “Mi credo,” Gómez Sicre’s personal
manifesto for a continental American art. Through the years, the lemma
would become a hoary chestnut of his curatorial philosophy.157
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 83

It is not difficult to perceive the ghost of the underdog Cuban van-

guardia in Gómez Sicre’s future struggles on behalf of the continent’s
cosmopolitan, outward-looking young artists who resist the stranglehold
of stagnant nationalist cultural institutions, and to glimpse the figure of
Siqueiros in Gómez Sicre’s continual invective against Zhadnovism, as for
example, in his heady 1959 declaration: “El momento del arte de América
no es de indigenismos, campesinismos, obrerismos, ni demagogías. Es de
afirmación de valores continentales de esencia universal” (The moment of
American art is not of indigenisms, peasantisms, workerisms, or dema-
gogueries. It is of the affirmation of continental values of a universal
essence).158 As the scope of Gómez Sicre’s activities at the Pan American
Union expanded over the following decade, the main targets of his cu-
ratorial project, not surprisingly, became the bastions of social realism—
Mexico, and the strongly indigenous nations of Ecuador and Peru159—or
what his fellow critic on the left, Marta Traba, would later describe as
the continent’s aesthetically inward-looking “closed-door” countries.160
Gómez Sicre’s spiteful denunciations of leftists and outrageous zingers
about the “Mexican inferiority complex” often seemed opportunistic,
spewing forth when his authority was threatened or when he wished to
gain the confidence of like-minded intellectuals.161 They were also exacer-
bated by the fact that, on paper at least, the cultural arm of the OAS was
headquartered in Mexico City, where, Gómez Sicre feared, hordes of ap-
paratchiks threatened to undermine his work. Even amid the wave of U.S.
interventions in Central America and the Caribbean during the 1980s,
Gómez Sicre’s archvillains at the PAU remained Mexican, Peruvian, and
Ecuadorian diplomats whom he accused of trying to commandeer the
union’s cultural programs by acting on secret orders from the Soviets.162
Such accusations reached a histrionic crescendo at the end of his career,
when Gómez Sicre felt thwarted in naming his successor at the Museum
of Modern Art of Latin America and enlisted the personal assistance of
President Ronald Reagan.163
Given Gómez Sicre’s opinions articulated in response to Siqueiros’s
visit, his later opposition to the Cuban Revolution was somewhat predict-
able. Fidel Castro’s injunction from his 1961 “Words to the Intellectuals,”
“Dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nada” (Within
the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing), must have
appeared to Gómez Sicre like the uncanny return of Siqueiros’s “No hay
mas ruta que la nuestra” (There is no route but ours). And, the revolu-
tion’s promotion of social realism as an official aesthetic during the
“quinquenio gris” (grey five-year period, beginning in 1971) must have
seemed the naturalization of an aesthetic that Gómez Sicre had taken
84 ART ENTERS THE UNION

pains to distance from his native country. Although I return to the Cuban
Revolution later in this study, for the purpose of closing this narrative of
his early career I turn to an anecdote in which the middle-aged Mario
Carreño and Gómez Sicre recall their encounter with the famed mural-
ist. Carreño eventually became a well-known artist and professor of art
in Santiago, Chile, where he was active in university reforms during the
Salvador Allende regime. In the late 1970s, however, he was capriciously
ordered to leave the country under the Pinochet dictatorship because,
as he wrote to Gómez Sicre, someone had anonymously reported that
“mi auto estaba estacionado en el cementerio al lado de la tumba de
Pablo Neruda” (my car was parked in the cemetery beside Pablo Neruda’s
tomb)—an understated, yet charged, allusion to the generational bond
that they shared with their late mutual friend and Communist Party mem-
ber.164 In spite of Carreño’s early enthusiasm for muralism and the tem-
poral and geographical distance now separating him from Gómez Sicre,
Carreño’s letters to Gómez Sicre from the 1960s interestingly underscore
a commitment to uphold the ideals of “their” vanguardia, as an expres-
sion of Cuban national identity, in opposition to what they characterize
as Siqueiros’s (Mexican) chauvinism.165 As Carreño writes:
Certainly, I was surprised to read [in] an interview with Siqueiros in
“Lunes de la Revolución” [Monday of the Revolution, a Cuban peri-
odical] his declarations about the failure of Mexican painting, its theo-
ries, etc. In other words he was saying: “that the Mexican Revolution
had failed and with it, painting.” . . . “New methods and a new focus
were needed.” Damn! And to think that demagogue has been deceiv-
ing so many poor fools with his slogan of “there’s no route but ours”
or “socialist realism.” He’s a miserable politician. I found out that he
meddled with the abstract painters in Caracas and they sent him to
hell. Little by little the cretin will be discredited. But, nevertheless,
there are still a lot of people who see him as a great “master,” espe-
cially the “revolutionaries” of Cuba.
Your campaign against those people seems good to me, I mean
people like Siqueiros and company, but be careful, don’t give them
too much importance—those people are still powerful. One must
approach the problem with political tact. If you don’t, they can make
your life uncomfortable, and realistically, you don’t need that kind of
discomfort.166

These two vanguardia veterans’ triangulation against Siqueiros points to

differences between Siqueiros and his former Cuban hosts in terms of their
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 85

roles as intellectuals in relation to their respective states. While in Cuba

in 1943, Siqueiros’s Communist affiliation allied him with the Batista
government, and although temporarily in exile from Mexico, Siqueiros
exuded the aura of an intellectual in the service of the revolution accord-
ing to the Vasconcelian and Soviet models.167 Carreño and Gómez Sicre,
in contrast, grew up during the Machado dictatorship, a period marked
by widespread censorship, suspension of university functions, and state
violence, and they came to maturity in the period of dramatic political
and economic instability that followed it. The reform movements that
they had experienced arose from a small middle class that demanded
the installation of the Republic so recently gained and then immediately
lost to the United States as an outcome of the Spanish-Cuban-American
War. Gómez Sicre’s and Carreño’s views aligned heightened subjectivity
with freedom and regarded politics and aesthetics as separate but related
arenas connected through their mutual opposition to “officialism” and
bourgeois values, and their support for Afrocuban cultural nationalism.
Like many of their contemporaries, they looked within the nation for
inspiration while also reaching beyond it, to places like Mexico, Paris,
and New York, for support and patronage. From their vantage point, and
given the wartime restrictions on transatlantic travel, Mexico provided a
model of an autonomous and thriving American arts culture to be emu-
lated, but it was also a formidable metropole to be resisted.

Conclusion: Gómez Sicre on “Our” Side of the Fence

Upon returning to Cuba in June 1944 after his six-month sojourn in

New York, Gómez Sicre energetically threw himself into numerous proj-
ects. The first of Batista’s presidential terms had come to an end, and the
Auténtico Party candidate Ramón Grau San Martín was elected to his
second term as president (1944–1948). During Grau’s brief presidency
one decade earlier, he had given modest support to cultural projects, and
Gómez Sicre hoped that Grau’s reelection would once again bode well
for the arts. In July 1944, Gómez Sicre had a brief interview with Grau,
in which he asked the president to lend his support to the new Cuban
art—in light of its recent success in New York—by providing a perma-
nent exhibition space for modern art and scholarships for young artists.
In addition, Gómez Sicre was preparing several exhibitions of Cuban
art for travel to venues in Haiti, Guatemala, and Argentina; pooling
resources with Carreño to start an inter-American artist file and lend-
ing library for Cuban art students; and organizing a group of painters to
86 ART ENTERS THE UNION

petition the new regime for support.168 Meanwhile, he began to train oth-
ers to mount exhibitions and sought to occupy a less prominent role as an
arts impresario in the Havana press. Through these means, he reported to
Barr, “I will try to connect more and more people with our movement to
make it wider and wider every day.”169 His stated objective, since the time
of his New York University fellowship application, was nothing short of
Promethean—to steal the fire of MoMA in order to found a modern art
museum in Cuba.170
At the same time, Gómez Sicre confessed to Barr that he harbored “an
awful wish to see Manhattan again,” where several vanguardia painters
had recently relocated.171 One opportunity seemed to present itself in
March 1945, when the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who had been
working in MoMA’s film department under an OIAA contract, embarked
on his ill-fated journey to Warner Brothers Studios in Hollywood. With
him on this journey was his compatriot Luis de Zulueta, introduced ear-
lier in this chapter, who was the keeper of MoMA’s Latin American art
files.172 Mario Carreño wrote to Barr immediately to ask if Gómez Sicre
could have Zulueta’s position, to which Barr replied that it probably was
not going to be filled.173 But several months later, another opportunity
arose that happened to coincide with a visit Gómez Sicre had planned to
the United States in winter 1945. Gómez Sicre intended to visit Ramón
Osuna in Washington, D.C., a Cuban diplomat and contemporary Cuban
art collector who had recently transferred to the Cuban embassy in the
United States.174 At the same time, Leslie Judd Switzer, Barr’s former sec-
retary who had moved to the PAU, was preparing to relocate to Florida.
In December, she wrote to Barr with good news of her imminent depar-
ture from the Union, and her recruitment of Gómez Sicre as her successor:
Pepe [José Gómez] Sicre has been down here for the past two days
and seems definitely to be my successor. I’ve worked like a dog to get
him in here, because I wanted someone on our side of the fence to be
here, and someone we could all work with and through. La Conchita
[Romero James] seems very pleased to have him and unless there are
personality difficulties I think the affair should go nicely. I am going
to continue with translating and editing from Florida, and expect to
correspond frequently with Pepe, and do hope it will turn out to be a
good solution. I think possibly as a Latin American he may have many
advantages over a North American in the job, and his contacts in
several of the Latin American countries should be useful.175

Gómez Sicre moved into Switzer’s apartment and officially commenced

employment with the Pan American Union in the second week of January
 ART ENTERS THE UNION 87

1946.176 Eleven months later, PAU Director General Leo S. Rowe died
in a car accident, and the union’s future was plunged into uncertainty,
until it was reborn as headquarters of the Organization of American
States two years later in 1948. In the next chapter, I examine Gómez
Sicre’s initial efforts to extrapolate his early U.S. and Cuban career ex-
periences to a continental level. For the moment, I leave him on the
threshold of institutions, eras, and countries, as I ponder Switzer’s state-
ment that he is “on our side of the fence”—a phrase that in the 1940s
has decidedly political overtones. I believe that Switzer is referring to a
MoMA-esque internationalism and its emphases on critical distance and
aesthetic autonomy—what she termed a “no-compromise-with-quality”
position.177 These values had initially attracted Barr to Gómez Sicre, and
they pertain to the PAU’s “disinterested” liberal cultural foundations as
well. Switzer predicts that Gómez Sicre, being Latin American, will make
a better operative for “their side” than she did, but that is debatable. The
days of the progressive Mexicanists—Romero James and Seeger—at the
PAU are numbered, it is true, and Gómez Sicre is definitely a friend of
MoMA, but his multilayered intellectual formation makes him partisan
to aspects of both Romero James’s culturalist latinoamericanismo and
MoMA’s emphasis on transcendent value, allegiances which he tried to
reconcile through a curatorial program focusing on individual geniuses
arising from urban, rather than “national,” art centers.
In light of dwindling funding for inter-American activities in the United
States after World War II, the institutional tussles over territory, money,
and personnel described in this chapter became moot, but the web of per-
sonal and institutional relationships established during the war years con-
tinued to provide a lasting framework for PAU cultural projects. Among
those figures introduced here, Barr remained a supporter of Gómez Sicre
and helped to plan Gómez Sicre’s first grand tour of Europe in 1949,
thereby facilitating his introductions to several prominent artists.178
Gómez Sicre likewise maintained a strong relationship to Barr, provid-
ing advice to him regarding purchases for Rockefeller’s Inter-American
Fund, and sometimes even funneling works directly from his own PAU
exhibitions to MoMA’s permanent collection.179 Leslie Judd Switzer re-
turned to the Washington, D.C., area in 1951; under her married name
Portner, and with a letter of recommendation from Barr, she became the
art critic for the Washington Post in 1952, where she reviewed Gómez
Sicre’s PAU exhibitions with almost unwavering enthusiasm.180 Gómez
Sicre in turn translated and circulated excerpts of her reviews throughout
the hemisphere in the PAU publication Boletín de Música y Artes Visuales
as evidence of his curatorial acumen and the success of Latin American
88 ART ENTERS THE UNION

artists abroad.181 In 1960, Portner, now using the new married name of
Ahlander, became a member of the PAU Art Acquisitions Committee,
selecting works that would eventually form the permanent collection of
the Pan American Union’s Museum of Modern Art of Latin America.182
As for Siqueiros, Gómez Sicre locked horns with him repeatedly over the
next decade, but this time through an intermediary, the young Mexican
artist José Luis Cuevas. As I discuss in chapter 3, Gómez Sicre’s ongoing
taunts at the Mexican muralists put an end the civil tenor that he and
Siqueiros had sustained throughout their interactions in Cuba.
The pioneering work of Concha Romero James and Charles Seeger at
the PAU in the 1930s and 1940s foregrounds the extent to which Latin
American state-sponsored cultural movements, such as Mexican mural-
ism, were fundamental to inspiring PAU program linkages among art,
education, cultural identity, and continental consciousness from the mid-
1930s to the mid-1940s. One of the great ironies of Gómez Sicre’s career
is that in spite of his antipathy toward committed art he could never
have achieved what he did without it. He was indebted to muralism for
the hemispheric institutional-intellectual network that it convened in the
prewar years, as well as for raising the possibility of an “American art”
well before Clement Greenberg celebrated the triumph of the New York
school of abstract expressionist painters. At the same time, Gómez Sicre’s
reputed “invention of Latin American art” in the cold war years could not
have occurred without his predecessors’ close philosophical and finan-
cial ties to U.S. government agencies and institutions, ambitious archive-
building, and successful pursuit of corporate and foundation funding.
Although the Pan American Union’s cultural programs were established
according to the goals and interests of U.S. policymakers at the OIAA, the
State Department, and philanthropic foundations, the PAU programs did
not simply materialize as the result of a top-down mandate, nor were they
entirely assimilable to the programs of their institutional counterparts.
Rather, they developed through personal initiatives within a competi-
tive inter-American institutional field, and the tensions unleashed in that
field—between the PAU’s latinoamericanista humanism and MoMA’s
internationalism and disciplinary specificity; between programs designed
for elite or mass audiences; and over what counted as “culture” and who
represented “America”—extended well beyond Washington, D.C., into
diverse hemispheric contexts, as we will see in the following chapters.
 CHAPTER TWO

El Arte Que Progresa

Modernization, Modern Art,
and Continental Consciousness

Finally, if our request [for materials] can now become a suggestion,

we would advise that the catalogues, articles, journalistic notes, and
simple informative brochures not be taken as a mere manifestation
of limited local scope, but rather as momentous documents for all
people throughout the continent. This way we will get to know one
another better. This way our culture will have a more advantageous
destiny . . . In this manner we hope to continue this function of
disseminating, expanding names, movements, deeds that are part
of the cultural history of America.
—JOSÉ GÓMEZ SICRE , Boletín de Artes Visuales, 1956–1957

Cold War Latin Americanism in the OAS

In winter 1946, the former Colombian president Alberto Lleras Camargo

reluctantly abandoned his dream of launching Semana, a news magazine
on the order of Time, in order to submit his name as a candidate for
the position of director general of the Pan American Union. The position
had been unexpectedly vacated following the death of Leo S. Rowe, who
had held the directorship for twenty-six years.1 Lleras was no stranger to
the Pan American movement; he had labored assiduously at the Inter-
American Conference on Problems of War and Peace (the Chapultepec
Conference), held in Mexico City in 1945, and at the United Nations
Conference in San Francisco during that same year, in order to ensure
that some form of the inter-American regional system would be incor-
porated into the new United Nations structure after World War II. One
year later, with the Pan American Union’s top position up for grabs at
90 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

a delicate historical juncture, Lleras confessed to his former conference

ally, Nelson Rockefeller, that he was loathe to see his efforts take “un
rumbo burocrático” (a bureaucratic course) were the union to fall into the
wrong hands.2 In spring 1947, Lleras received a congratulatory letter from
Rockefeller confirming Lleras’s successful election at the PAU, as he pre-
pared to quit his barely occupied editorial office in Bogotá. Rockefeller’s
letter also included a portentous remark: “President Truman’s message
yesterday to the joint session of the two houses, in my opinion marked
the turning point in the history of the foreign policy of the United States.”3
The message to which Rockefeller alluded committed U.S. economic and
military aid to Greece and Turkey in order to check the spread of com-
munism in those countries. Later dubbed the Truman Doctrine, it be-
came a key formulation of the emerging U.S. policy of containment. Both
Rockefeller and Lleras shared a set of core beliefs in Pan Americanism,
anticommunism, and social-minded developmentalism, but for Lleras,
whose election to the position of PAU director general occurred on the
very day that President Harry S. Truman aired his new cold war policy,
Rockefeller’s news presented a host of immediate strategic concerns:
How would the new global orientation of U.S. foreign policy impact the
inter-American system? And how would the PAU negotiate the postwar
shift in priorities from antifascism to anticommunism?
As the only “surviving child of the Western Hemisphere idea” in the
postwar period, the inter-American system of governance, headquartered
at the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C., entered the cold war as
the administrator of two important security treaties that stressed anti-
aggression within the Americas and mutual protection from “external”
threats, namely communism.4 Lleras’s international conference experi-
ence served him well during his first two years in office at the PAU. In
1947 he shepherded the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance
(the Rio Treaty), which solidified the hemispheric defense network that
had been outlined in the Act of Chapultepec of 1945. The following year,
at the Ninth Inter-American Conference of American States in Bogotá,
he oversaw the ratification of the Treaty on Pacific Settlement and the
Bogotá Charter. The latter document brought the Organization of Ameri-
can States (OAS) into existence as the supreme governing body of the
inter-American system of governance.5 Thereafter, Lleras became the first
secretary general of the Organization of American States, while the name
“Pan American Union” was retained to refer to the Organization’s gen-
eral secretariat in Washington, D.C.6
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 91

Though Pan Americanism had played an important role in U.S. foreign

policy during World War II, the movement entered the postwar period
under a cloud. It retained a stigma as a “haven for isolationists” among
some circles, stemming from debates about the entry by the United States
into the war.7 And, along with Truman’s global perspective on contain-
ment, foreign aid priorities were also changing; the Marshall Plan and
other programs directed substantial resources toward war-torn Europe
and Asia instead of Latin America. Finally, U.S. commitment to the Allied
forces brought growing skepticism toward what Arthur Whitaker terms
the “rational-mystical character” of hemispheric exceptionalism that
underwrote the Pan American movement, which was predicated on a
distinction between the Old and New Worlds.8 Many U.S. policymakers
perceived regionalism to be outdated and anathema to the new global
multilaterialism represented by the United Nations, while for others, new
area designations arose to supplant previous ones, including the three
worlds concept, devised at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which
charted the postwar contours of the world financial system.9 According
to this emerging geographical configuration, Latin America was less
closely aligned with the West, and instead more closely associated with
the decolonizing and “underdeveloped” regions of Africa and Asia.
Lleras thus faced substantial challenges from the United States as he
assumed his new position at the Pan American Union. While President
Truman at least supported modest foreign aid for Latin America through
his administration’s Point Four program, Truman’s successor, Dwight D.
Eisenhower, who was elected in 1952, emphasized containment to the ex-
clusion of development and repeatedly rebuffed Latin American requests
for economic support.10 Following Eisenhower’s victory, Lleras expressed
his concerns about the new Republican administration to his confidant
Rockefeller:
I expect I shall have to start a new card index of senators, represen-
tatives and other officials of the Government who are probably not
very familiar with our Organization, and I should like to have you tell
me who would be the best ones for the purpose. . . . I do feel rather
perplexed. My task in the months ahead is going to have some mis-
sionary aspects once more. I can see myself starting with some of the
Republican leaders, practically from scratch, telling them that in 1889
the Pan American Union, etc. . . . and also why it is the United States
is paying 66% of our expenses when its policy is to pay only 33% in
other international agencies.11
92 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

Just as the glacier of Pan Americanism was retreating in the North, how-
ever, the inter-American system was gaining in popularity among certain
sectors of Latin American liberal elites, who, like Lleras, saw the OAS as
a potential conduit to foreign aid that would spur national development
programs, as well as a gateway to collective representation in the postwar
international community.12 Though hemispheric security was a priority
of the United States in the new organization, for many Latin American
political leaders, the incentive to form a regional alliance went beyond
a desire to gain access to international arenas and an entrenched fear of
communism; it was also perceived as a means to check U.S. expansion-
ism. As Michael Shifter observes, “The OAS Charter represented an ‘im-
plicit bargain’ between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere,
whereby the United States would not intervene in the internal affairs of
its neighbors, and in return, the Latin American countries would support
the United States at the international level and assume collective respon-
sibility for peace and security in the Americas.”13
The diverging motives for embracing Pan Americanism on the part
of the United States and Latin American governments contributed to the
“Latin Americanization” of the Pan American Union’s institutional cul-
ture and programs in the early years of the cold war. During his tenure,
Lleras sought to transform the union from its former status as a commerce
and trade promotion office to being a modern, Latin America–dominated
multilateral organization. After the formal creation of the OAS in 1948,
Lleras immediately undertook a thorough reorganization of the union’s
divisions, including its cultural branches. The climate at the PAU be-
came one of renovation, professionalization, and modernization, as an-
other wave of appointees and civil servants from Latin America arrived
to staff its various offices. The beginning of José Gómez Sicre’s tenure
at the union in January 1946 coincides with this transitional period in
the institution’s history. This chapter discusses the changing climate at
the PAU in relation to broad political trends in the United States, at the
same time that it examines the early cold war activities of the PAU Visual
Arts Section in Latin America. I discuss the place of cultural programs
within the new administrative structure of the Pan American Union and
the impact of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare on the union’s work
culture and on Gómez Sicre in particular. I then turn to consider two of
José Gómez Sicre’s first major projects targeted at Latin American coun-
tries, Exposición Interamericana de Pintura Moderna (Inter-American
Exhibition of Modern Painting) and 32 Artistas de las Américas (32 Art-
ists of the Americas), the exhibitions of hemispheric American painting
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 93

that he organized in 1948 and 1949–1950, respectively. These shows are

significant not only for their interconnected emphases on modernist aes-
thetics, economic and political liberalism, and continental consciousness,
but also because they took place in locations where the Pan American
Union visual arts programs would eventually establish a prominent pro-
file. I conclude with an overview of Gómez Sicre’s evolving curatorial
values and administrative style during the decade of the 1950s, as he
forged an inter-American arts network by availing himself of diplomatic
and multinational corporate connections. Gómez Sicre’s promotion of “el
arte que progresa” (art that progresses) during the early part of the de-
cade anticipates liberal internationalist currents of modernization theory,
a social scientific field that proposed a universal framework for plotting
the course of global economic development, which was in turn inspired
by concepts of “modernity” circulating in the contemporary art world.14

Cleaning the Stable and Banishing the Parrots

in the Cultural Branches of the PAU

Shortly after arriving in Washington, D.C., Alberto Lleras Camargo re-

organized the Pan American Union offices to create administrative units
that would correspond to the three principal councils of the Organi-
zation of American States: the Juridical, the Economic and Social, and
the Cultural.15 As a counterpart to the OAS Inter-American Cultural
Council (IACC; Consejo Cultural Interamericano), Lleras reorganized
the PAU Office of Intellectual Cooperation into a new entity known as
the Department of Cultural Affairs. A 1948 organizational chart depict-
ing the reorganized PAU offices in relation to the major branches of the
OAS shows the results of Lleras’s labors (Figure  11). The Washington,
D.C.–based Department of Cultural Affairs was to provide administra-
tive service for the IACC, which was headquartered at the Secretaría de
Educación Pública (SEP; Secretariat of Public Education) in Mexico City.
In spite of Gómez Sicre’s persistent fears that the Inter-American Cultural
Council would usurp his visual arts programs, the IACC led a languid ex-
istence in comparison to its other OAS counterparts; it held its first meet-
ing only in 1951 and established a standing committee in 1952.16 Several
prominent Latin American intellectuals did cycle through the Inter-
American Cultural Council, including Mexican Secretary of Education
Manuel Gual Vidal and Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, but both
the Council and its standing committee suffered persistent membership
and quorum problems. With institutional memory and administrative
94 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

momentum on its side, the Pan American Union Department of Cultural

Affairs acquired more prominence within the Organization than OAS ar-
chitects had likely anticipated. When the Inter-American Cultural Council
did issue declarations about the arts, for example, as in its 1951 call for a
“Program for Encouragement of the Arts,” or its 1954 recommendation
“to organize in each national museum a section of American art for the
exhibition of representative works of all the countries of the Continent,”
it often looked to Gómez Sicre’s Visual Arts Section at the Pan American
Union for direction and leadership.17
One of the Inter-American Cultural Council’s most important early
charges, to produce a Cultural Charter of America, was never brought to
a vote before the supreme body of the Organization of American States,
due to the repeated postponement and ultimate cancellation of the Inter-
American Conference at which the Cultural Charter was to be ratified in
1959.18 The draft Cultural Charter is, nevertheless, a fascinating docu-
ment for its advancement of a racially egalitarian hemispheric America,
in a manner reminiscent of the formulations crafted by previous genera-
tions of modernista intellectuals such as José Martí and Manuel González
Prada: “The whole history of America emphasizes the fact that there are
no superior or inferior races, but only ethnic types with diverse incli-
nations, aptitudes, and traditions, and that, given favorable opportuni-
ties, all are equally capable of achieving the highest and noblest levels
of culture.”19 As in the PAU cultural programs during World War II, the
draft Cultural Charter’s emphasis on mestizaje leading to a uniquely
New World identity curbed the potential for the identification of Latin
American elites with Francoist Spain. The draft Cultural Charter further
stressed the need for mass cultural and educational programs, similar to
the ambitious state-sponsored initiatives that accompanied the Brazilian
and Mexican governments’ respective import substitution industrializa-
tion policies.20 Had the Cultural Charter been ratified and the IACC
been more assertive, greater resources might have been directed toward
Mexico City to give rise to a wave of populist, pan–Latin American mass
cultural programs that would have genuinely threatened to overshadow
Gómez Sicre’s projects. Instead, the PAU remained the de facto cultural
center of the Organization of American States. The PAU Department
of Cultural Affairs’ first cogent articulation of its own cultural policy
would not come until much later, in 1962; even then, the structure of the
Organization of American States on paper remained much the same as
it was in 1948 (Figure 12), with cultural activities nominally centered in
Mexico City and practically located in the United States.21 As the decade
Figure 11. Organization of American States and reorganized offices of the Pan
American Union, 1949. Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat
of the Organization of American States.
96 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

of the 1950s wore on without ratification of the Cultural Charter, the

Visual Arts Section of the PAU enjoyed increasing autonomy and spe-
cialization, eventually splitting away from the Music Section to become
a division in its own right in 1961. The question of a comprehensive
approach to cultural matters within the OAS, meanwhile, remained unre-
solved and would not be taken up by the Organization again until 1969,
as we shall see in the final chapter of this study.

Figure 12. Organization of American States organizational chart in 1962, high-

lighting the cultural branches. Department of Cultural Affairs divisions are lower
left. Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of
American States.
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 97

Nelson Rockefeller worked closely with Alberto Lleras Camargo on the

selection of appointees for key positions within the new Organization of
American States, and the two shared an ongoing consultative relationship
throughout Lleras’s term in office. Lleras and Rockefeller demonstrated
sensitivity to the nationality of the incoming director of Cultural Affairs
in order to ensure even representation of OAS member states among the
various offices of the union and to avoid appointing intellectuals who
might be perceived as communists.22 Eventually, Lleras recruited the
eminent Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre to direct the new department.
Like many postwar arrivals at the PAU, Basadre had become involved
in Pan American intellectual networks in the 1930s and 1940s through
cultural diplomacy initiatives that brought him to the United States on li-
brary, leadership, and visiting professor grants sponsored by the Carnegie
Foundation and the State Department.23 In Peru, Basadre was professor
of history at the University of San Marcos in Lima, and he also served
as head of the Peruvian National Library. As a young man, moreover,
he had acquired impeccable credentials in the modernist aesthetic and
political movements that had sought to “peruanizar al Perú” (peruvianize
Peru). As a founding member of the journal Amauta (1926–1930) and
an associate of the legendary Marxist indigenist intellectual José Carlos
Mariátegui, Basadre was a promoter of young scholars and open-minded
inquiry. His intellectual formation dovetailed well with Gómez Sicre’s
own involvement in Afrocubanismo and the Cuban vanguardia, as well
as with Lleras’s aspirations for a Latin America–centric cultural agenda at
the Pan American Union. It is telling that in their early years at the union,
Basadre described his work as “limpiar el establo” (cleaning the stable),
while Gómez Sicre personally announced his desire to banish the parrots
from the PAU central patio.24 For both men, these symbolic acts indicated
their commitment to renovate the cultural branches of the PAU by dis-
abusing them of the exotic and folkloric qualities that seemed to accrue
to all things Latin American upon entry into the United States, and to
replace that type of U.S.-inflected Latin Americanism with contemporary
cultural forms that would be taken “seriously” in international arenas.
Basadre’s and Gómez Sicre’s respective agendas implicitly positioned
them against Concha Romero James’s generation and her aesthetic pref-
erences. As for the former director of Intellectual Cooperation, Romero
James moved into a newly created position as Basadre’s special advisor,
in which she served as a PAU liaison to UNESCO in the field of educa-
tion.25 Even though the leadership of the PAU cultural branch changed,
the units of Romero James’s former office remained much as they were
98 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

during the war.26 Charles Seeger continued to direct the Division of Music
and Visual Arts, now under the aegis of Cultural Affairs, with José Gómez
Sicre overseeing the division’s visual arts activities.
From Seeger’s perspective, the Lleras administration ushered in a
period of growth and expansion for the Division of Music and Visual
Arts: “The new secretary-general, Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia,
was . . . very able, a liberal Colombian politician, and did an excellent job
with the Pan-American Union as a whole. I had more money to spend;
the library grew; the record collection grew; and I finally was given some
money for consultants from Latin America.”27 Along with the new cadre
of administrative employees from Latin America, however, careerism ar-
rived to transform the informal and familial work culture that had been
regnant during the Rowe era. A symptom of this transition, according to
Seeger, was an uptick in petty bitchery among the meritocratic employees:
The Organization of American States had set up a bureaucracy in
1948 in which, in the course of five years, most of the employees
except the typists (that is, the technical men in between the clerical
level and the executive level who were heads of divisions, about six
of them) spent at least a third of their time in the corridors gossiping,
and probably another third of their time intriguing, each one of them
trying to get ahead of the other and spending about one-third of their
time on the business that was to be done.28

National rivalries and the anticommunist sentiment that seized the U.S.
diplomatic community in the late 1940s and 1950s exacerbated garden-
variety office politics. Even though this was a period of Latin Americaniza-
tion of the PAU staff and programs, U.S. agencies nevertheless exerted pres-
sure over the everyday management of the institution. After Eisenhower’s
election, parrots were not the only PAU residents caught in the crosshairs;
Seeger and Gómez Sicre, among others, also came under suspicion as
the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare extended their reach into U.S.-
based international organizations. Since 1947, the House Committee on
Un-American Activities hearings and other congressional inquiries had
identified “commies and queers” as interrelated threats to U.S. security.
But in 1950 the dual menaces became further connected when Senator
Joseph McCarthy famously alleged that the State Department harbored
205 card-carrying Communists, an unsubstantiated claim that neverthe-
less inaugurated a new wave of highly publicized anticommunist witch
hunts in the United States. As the Republican Party mounted a post-
war backlash against the New Deal, it repeatedly characterized the State
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 99

Department as the domain of effete Ivy League intellectuals and soft

internationalists, stereotypes laced with insinuations of nonnormative
sexuality. As the epitome of an alleged moral and political laxity fostered
by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, the State Department be-
came the test case for new employee screening measures that were even-
tually implemented throughout the entire federal government during the
late 1940s and 1950s.29
The historian David Johnson explains that the Red Scare and its less
well-known companion, the Lavender Scare, were not mere responses to
the emerging bipolar world order; rather, they had domestic roots in the
trenchant political tensions between Republicans and Democrats, isola-
tionists and internationalists, and the legislative and executive branches of
the U.S. government that stemmed from the dramatic changes to govern-
mental structure wrought during the New Deal and World War II. By the
time that McCarthy made his famous speech, Johnson notes: “there were
very few if any, Communists in the federal government. That was one
reason why the net kept widening to include Leftists and those thought
to be at least sympathetic to the Communist cause. But the claims that
the federal government contained many homosexuals and other security
risks was true.”30 Johnson argues that the Red Scare and the Lavender
Scare mutually reinforced one another; however, as the parameters of
the panic broadened, the former garnered more publicity while the lat-
ter yielded more victims. Widespread and humiliating security screenings
that barred suspected homosexuals from federal employment continued
well into the 1960s and extended, moreover, to international organiza-
tions in which the United States participated. The State Department pro-
vided unsolicited employee “suitability” guidelines to the United Nations
and UNESCO, while NATO allies voluntarily adopted screening proce-
dures modeled on those of U.S. federal agencies.31
Even though the Pan American Union was the headquarters of a multi-
lateral organization and its ambassadorial corps was protected by proto-
cols of diplomatic immunity, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and
the Department of State were active in enforcing loyalty oaths and security
procedures there as well. Ostensibly, the new screenings pertained to U.S.
employees of the Pan American Union under the mandate of Executive
Order 10422, a law passed by Eisenhower in January 1953 that prescribed
guidelines for implementing security checks on U.S. citizens employed at
the United Nations and related agencies. State Department documents
describing how the executive order was carried out at the PAU, however,
suggest that the new procedures also afforded U.S. government agencies
100 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

a means to monitor the political orientation of Latin American delega-

tions. Since the OAS was founded on anticommunist principles, those
who did not welcome the new procedures appeared to be suspect. One
State Department framework document about PAU loyalty screenings
characterized them as a protective and friendly gesture extended toward
Latin American governments: “The United States, as member of inter-
American organizations, is interested in their [Latin American nations’]
welfare and should cooperate with them in keeping themselves free from
communist influences.”32 Nevertheless, OAS Secretary General Lleras
and other PAU personnel resisted FBI requests to interview “alien super-
visors” about the loyalty of U.S. citizen employees whom they supervised,
while a State Department memorandum suggests that some officials were
less concerned about the security risks posed by U.S. citizens than they
were with the threat of suspected communists among the Guatemalan
delegation to the OAS in light of the recently elected left reformist admin-
istration of President Jacobo Arbenz.33
Given its employees’ connections to leftist international movements,
the PAU Department of Cultural Affairs was also vulnerable to the anti-
communist and antihomosexual paranoia that gripped Washington, D.C.,
in the late 1940s and 1950s. The most visible casualty of this hostile cli-
mate was Division of Music and Visual Arts chief Charles Seeger, whose
associations with Communists dating from the 1930s effectively forced
him to resign his position at the Pan American Union in 1953, two years
before his anticipated retirement date. The State Department began gradu-
ally revoking Seeger’s diplomatic passport privileges in 1949, until he was
finally refused a passport altogether when he requested one to attend a
UNESCO music function over which he was to preside. That same year
Seeger also became the target of an FBI investigation regarding his con-
scientious objector status during World War I, but with the apparent ob-
jective of revealing details about his former colleagues in the Composers
Collective of New York and his connections to contemporary inter-
national organizations. The FBI also questioned Seeger about his son,
the folksinger Pete Seeger, who had already fallen prey to the blacklist.34
Concha Romero James was likewise squeezed out of her position in
1947 and officially left the union in 1952. Her involvement in progressive
international women’s movements was a red flag under the prevailing
climate, though it appears that her resignation was hastened by her new
coworkers’ prejudices toward her age, gender, and intellectual circle, all
of which made her appear a vestige of Rowe-era Pan Americanism within
the postwar institution. I surmise that Romero James is the araña peluda
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 101

(cunt; literally, furry spider) on whose departure Mario Carreño congratu-

lates Gómez Sicre in one of his letters, as well as a denizen of “the stable”
that Jorge Basadre lamented he had to clean when he became director
of Cultural Affairs.35 Clearly Romero James understood her new title as
PAU liaison to UNESCO to be a demotion and banishment. In a letter to
her friend Gabriela Mistral, dated March 1951, she wrote, “He venido a
pasar varios meses en Europa para tratar de olvidarme de las groserías
que mi hicieron en la Union Panamericana obligándome a salir en el mes
de abril, esto es hace casi un año. ¡Qué hipócritas y qué insignificantes
desde el punto de vista moral suelen ser algunas personas a quienes uno
admira por su inteligencia” (I’ve come to spend a few months in Europe
to try to forget the rudeness I experienced at the PAU, which obliged me
to leave in April, about a year ago [1950]. How often it seems that those
whom one admires for their intelligence turn out to be hypocritical and
morally insignificant!).36 It is likely that Gómez Sicre fell into this hos-
tile camp, for evidently, shortly after Romero James recruited him to the
union, their relationship deteriorated. Less than a year after his arrival,
Romero James gently criticized Gómez Sicre for his autocratic tendencies,
reminding him, “Yo he luchado por años a fin de darle un lugar al arte en
el marco de nuestras actividades” (I have struggled for years with the goal
of giving art a place within the framework of our activities), and then
going on to reproach him, “Usted iba andando expresándose muy mal de
mí, diciendo que no sé nada de nada, y que la actividad artística se debe
independentizar del resto de mi oficina” (You were going around saying
bad things about me, saying I don’t know anything about anything, and
that the artistic activity should be made independent from the rest of my
office). She urged him to adopt a more collaborative working method,
evidently to no avail: “No se trata de pedir autorización, o permiso, sino
de cambiar ideas. Eso es todo” (It’s not a matter of asking for [my] au-
thorization, or permission, but rather of exchanging ideas. That’s all).37
In spite of his conflicts with Romero James, Gómez Sicre’s own con-
nections to the Cuban leftists who had participated in the vanguardia
and related cultural movements, as well as to prominent Latin American
Communists, placed him on the same “side of the fence” as Romero
James and Seeger in the context of the Red Scare. In 1950, Gómez Sicre
became the subject of an FBI investigation, initiated in order to probe his
connection to an alleged Czech agent who had been arrested in Brazil
with Gómez Sicre’s name and address on his person. (Gómez Sicre later
received a letter from this individual, who introduced himself as an artist
with hopes of traveling to the United States and exhibiting his work at the
102 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

Pan American Union.)38 Gómez Sicre’s FBI file indicates that the investi-
gation ultimately yielded nothing to suggest a breach of loyalty in rela-
tion to the Czech agent, but the investigation lasted for nearly three years
and involved surveillance of Gómez Sicre’s telephone calls, mail, travel,
and known associates in New York, Washington, D.C., and throughout
Europe and Latin America. This in itself turned up a lot of dirt about
Gómez Sicre from FBI informants, many of whom appear to have been
PAU personnel or frequent visitors at the union. Among the reported
information: Gómez Sicre published art criticism in a Venezuelan “Com-
munist front” publication (probably El nacional of Caracas, Venezuela’s
largest daily newspaper); he shared his home with a man (possibly Raúl
Nass, former personal secretary to ousted Venezuelan president Rómulo
Gallegos); he was a friend of a “foremost Mexican painter and an out-
and-out communist [perhaps Siqueiros or Rivera] . . . [and also a friend
of ] Pablo Picasso, a Spanish painter now living in France and a ‘known
Communist’ ”; he associated with a group of PAU employees, some of
whom were suspected communists, and who had also discussed forming
a labor union; and he was a homosexual, based on his association with a
male artist who was “extremely effeminate.”39 One informant described
Gómez Sicre as a “fellow traveler” of the “intellectual or student ap-
proach,” and another alleged that he was an outright communist who
took the Russian side in the Korean conflict.
The barrage of hearsay compiled in Gómez Sicre’s FBI file raises ques-
tions as to how he managed to survive the McCarthy era, and even to
thrive professionally during this period, while other colleagues at the union
did not fare as well, and why he chose to remain in the United States during
an increasingly difficult period. In the Anreus interviews, conducted late
in his life, Gómez Sicre commented that during the McCarthy era, he had
been the subject of an investigation and only managed to hang onto his
job thanks to his brother’s Auténtico Party connections.40 Gómez Sicre’s
brother, Clemente Ricardo Gómez Sicre, was chief of the Investigating
Unit of the Cuban Army (specializing in military intelligence) during
the second administration of the Auténtico Party (1944–1952), and the
Auténticos held animosity toward the Cuban Communist Party, Fulgencio
Batista, and the new reformist Ortodoxo Party, founded in 1947 on an
anticorruption platform. Were the Cuban and U.S. anticommunist move-
ments coordinated, and to what extent did the countries’ intelligence
agencies collaborate with one another? Did Clemente Gómez Sicre pro-
tect his brother José from falling victim to a Cuban or U.S. investigation?
If so, did such protection come at a cost? I am able only to identify the si-
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 103

lences that demarcate Gómez Sicre’s past from his present at this moment
in his career, but his subsequent denunciation of Auténticos, Ortodoxos,
and Communists alike, amply aired in the Anreus interviews, appears to
stem from this period in his life.
Nevertheless, Gómez Sicre did hang on at the union, in an increas-
ingly button-down conservative work culture, seemingly ill-suited to his
brash, bohemian, and antiauthoritarian temperament. After six years at
the PAU, Gómez Sicre’s dream of gaining professional experience in the
United States in order to return home and spearhead the Cuban contem-
porary art movement seems gradually to have faded, as opportunities
for him in his native country also diminished. A coup returned Batista
to power in 1952, bringing the Auténtico Party’s presidential rule to an
end amid accusations of rampant corruption during the administrations
of Ramón Grau San Martín (1944–1948) and his successor, Carlos Prío
Socarrás (1948–1952). Gómez Sicre’s cultural allies in Cuba were fewer
in number as well. The Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura folded
after the war, and several prominent artists of the vanguardia had moved
abroad, including Gómez-Sicre’s close friend Mario Carreño, now di-
vorced from the arts patron María Luisa Gómez Mena. Finally, in 1947
Gómez Sicre’s former fiancée, the poet and critic Fina García Marruz,
went to the other side, as it were, by marrying the Catholic, and later
revolutionary poet Cintio Vitier, a member of Gómez Sicre’s intellectual
nemesis, the Grupo Orígenes.41
If his leftist connections made him a target of the Red Scare, then
Gómez Sicre’s marital status and personal associations also marked him
in the context of the Lavender Scare, for as David Johnson points out,
bachelorhood itself was perceived as suspect during this period. In the
long run, it was Gómez Sicre’s sexuality, rather than his leftist connec-
tions, that proved enduring grist for defamatory rumor. In 1951, at the
height of the panic in diplomatic circles, Gómez Sicre went on a lecture
tour of the Amerika Häuser in eight West German cities, sponsored by the
United States High Commissioner’s office. On the tour he spoke about
Latin American art and organized exhibitions in the U.S.-controlled sec-
tor of Berlin and in other cities, and he managed to include leisure ex-
cursions to Italy, Egypt, Greece, Belgium, Holland, and England in his
itinerary as well.42 It was while on his postlecture tour vacation in “mi
inolvidable Italia” (my unforgettable Italy) that he entered into a hasty
marriage with a young Venetian woman. Although one of their divorce
documents indicates that she was fourteen years old at the time of their
marriage, it appears that Gómez Sicre described his bride to others as
104 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

being seventeen.43 It took Gómez Sicre several months to arrange for his
wife to join him in the United States, and when she ultimately quit their
domicile in 1954 Gómez Sicre absolved himself before her parents as the
weary, self-deceived victim of a May–December romance, while urging
his attorney to avoid paying alimony at all costs.44 For the rest of his ca-
reer, he remained single and resided with his mother, Doña Guillermina,
in Washington, D.C., until her death in 1974. Gómez Sicre’s marriage was
not enough to dispel the persistent rumors about his sexuality that had
followed him from Cuba, however. Sometime in the early 1940s, before
his move to the United States, he was accused of molesting a ten-year-old
girl in Havana, a charge that may also have factored into his decision to
relocate permanently to the United States. Over the next four decades,
an anonymous person reminded Gómez Sicre of the scandal by mailing
photocopies of a sensationalist newspaper clipping about it to him at his
residence. In the Anreus interviews, Gómez Sicre acknowledges this story.
Without commenting on its veracity, he regrets the grief that publicity
about the alleged incident had brought to his family in Cuba.45
Amid archival evidence of intimate same- and opposite-sex relation-
ships, not to mention the wildcard allegation of pedophilia, the “truth”
of Gómez Sicre’s sexual self-identification remains elusive to me. Several
former coworkers at the PAU who knew him in the later decades of his
career readily described him as “gay,” but he remained discreet about
his sexuality in public arenas and relied on the youthful amour fou for
Fina García Marruz as an explanation for his lack of a visible long-
term relationship. The scattered correspondence among his papers de-
scribing intimate relationships with men, moreover, resists emplotment
according to contemporary U.S.-based taxonomies, such as in/out or pre/
post-Stonewall, and instead suggests that Gómez Sicre displayed differ-
ent modalities of openness in different contexts. Paradoxically, while the
PAU may have offered Gómez Sicre an immediate refuge from his trou-
bling Cuban past, the discretion exacted by the Lavender Scare appears to
have propelled him toward liaisons in other Latin American countries.46
Gómez Sicre’s most copious sets of correspondence from the antihomo-
sexual panic of the late 1940s and 1950s demonstrate that, even among
intimates, his relationships were marked by different sexual valences. The
Carreño letters are full of homosocial elbow-ribbing about Gómez Sicre’s
girlfriends along with gauntlets defying him to settle down, while his cor-
respondence with the Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, introduced in the
next chapter, can only be described as passionate and tempestuous, if not
sexually explicit. The Cuevas correspondence also begins with bonding
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 105

over women, but as the years progress, through quarrels and reconcilia-
tions, expressions of jealousy and tenderness, it chronicles the crisis that
the artist’s marriage and maturation represented for his mentor.
The details of Gómez Sicre’s sex life are less important for the purpose
of this study than for the way in which an imputed sexuality figures
prominently into his profile as an arts administrator within the evolving
fields of Pan Americanism and the cultural cold war in the Americas.
In these contexts the most frequent innuendo surrounding Gómez Sicre,
palpable even in contemporary criticism, concerns his erotic investment
in young male artists.47 In its most damning versions, Latin American
critics portrayed Gómez Sicre as an agent of U.S. imperialism who sought
to undermine the vitality of particular national or regional schools of
art through the recruitment and manipulation of young foreign-identified
painters and sculptors. As in the logic of the Lavender Scare, this char-
acterization reflects a set of overlapping cultural, political, and semantic
fields that, in many postwar Latin American contexts, aligned homo-
sexuality with cosmopolitanism and internationalism, and heterosexual-
ity, in contrast, with nationalism and patriotism. Gómez Sicre’s curatorial
emphases on youth and renovation, though ascendant values in many
postwar urban art scenes, reinforced his association with the former set
of qualities, which were often just as charged in Latin American contexts
as they were in the United States.
It is important to recall that Gómez Sicre’s curatorial values substan-
tially predate this period, however, and they also have precedents in
the Pan American movement. When he disseminated the myth of his un-
requited love for Fina García Marruz, for example, Gómez Sicre was per-
haps unaware that he took a cue from previous generations of queer Pan
Americanists, from Gabriela Mistral to Walt Whitman, who cultivated
stories of early tragic heterosexual love affairs not only to account for
their unmarried status but also as a means of explaining their exten-
sion of affective community to a hemispheric scale. In spite of his con-
flicts with Romero James, Gómez Sicre’s extensive travel and develop-
ment of a hemispheric network of male colleagues and friends through
arts exchanges in his early years at the PAU closely parallels his former
supervisor’s cultivation of a hemispheric feminist network in the 1930s
and 1940s in pursuit of her own revisionist “Nuestra América.” Romero
James’s and Gómez Sicre’s respective quests for sororal and fraternal pan-
latinidad resonate with the role that Kirsten Silva Gruesz has termed
“ambassador of culture” in her study of the transnational alliances forged
among nineteenth-century letrados who resided or traveled in the United
106 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

States.48 As in the case of many of the figures presented in Gruesz’s study,

the postwar corps of international civil servants at the PAU inhabited a
liminal space between a holistic, remembered concept of the nation and
everyday life within a contemporary U.S.-based international institution.
In Gruesz’s terms, these ambassadors performed, rather than enforced,
national identity, or, to paraphrase the wry observation of one former
PAU employee whom I interviewed, they acted as representatives of their
countries yet few would have been comfortable actually living in them.49
Being an ambassador of culture in the sense that Gruesz identifies
also implies a certain privilege of mobility between public and domestic
spaces, and in cities and across geopolitical borders. As Gómez Sicre’s
Cuba became an increasingly distant ideal, the contours of his pan-
Latino fraternity acquired greater definition through travel and corre-
spondence, punctuated by scenes of melancholic corumination with other
Latin American intellectuals about their memories of home. A shared
moment of empathy between Gómez Sicre and Jorge Basadre finds them
dipping into the well of the quintessential fin-de-siècle ambassador, José
Martí, in order to give voice to their status of “ni de aquí, ni de allá”
(from neither here nor there). In 1950, Basadre returned to Peru on a
Rockefeller Foundation grant, where the “democratic spring” of the
José Luis Bustamante y Rivero presidency (1945–1948) had definitively
ended, thanks to a military coup. Basadre wrote to Gómez Sicre about
his pervasive feelings of alienation in Lima and wondered if he made the
right decision to leave Washington, D.C. (in fact, he would soon return to
the United States). Gómez Sicre consoled his former colleague by assuring
him that even with comparatively easy access to Cuba, he, too, felt the
same ambivalence toward his native country:
For those experiences [of homesickness] that have affected me twice
over the past three years, I have the advantage of having my country
five hours away. Every time I feel the urge to return and remake my
life there, I go back and that way I inoculate myself against the un-
conscious that provokes those desires in me . . . In truth everything
that you’re telling me about Peru is the same in my country, with dif-
ferent variations or categories. Everything’s the legacy of a disordered
[desgobernada] Spain that didn’t know how to leave anything but
refuse [taras] in the throes of its American rule.50

Gómez Sicre writes of Spanish colonialism as such a fresh wound that

it is as if the five decades separating him from his compatriot Martí had
not transpired. But when it comes to his description of Washington, D.C.,
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 107

Gómez Sicre might as well be the author of the Escenas norteamericanas

(North American Scenes) himself. Here the familiar image repertoire of
the United States’s dehumanizing, leveling modernity and perversion of
the “natural” sex-gender order predominate, especially with regard to the
absence of appropriately feminine women at the hearth. In recounting to
Basadre a difficult illness recently suffered by his mother, Gómez Sicre
laments “esa frialdad [de] ambiente y . . . esa indiferencia sajona hacia
los valores que los latinos estimamos del deber filial y del amor por la
familia” (that cold atmosphere and . . . that Saxon indifference toward
the values of filial duty and love of family that we Latinos esteem), and
this city “de gentes que habita en ‘rooming houses,’ llenos de fugitivos del
hogar” (of people who live in ‘rooming houses,’ full of fugitives from their
home).51 In juxtaposing such fervent expressions of cultural national-
ism to the aura of queer internationalism surrounding Gómez Sicre, one
perceives the tense personal divisions of labor and space that parallel his
professional promotion of a culturalist Latin American modernity from
within a U.S.-based institution. Gómez Sicre complied with his Latino fil-
ial duty to his mother in his Washington, D.C., home, while also enjoying
a degree of mobility and mutability of identity enabled by his immersion
in the very “Saxon” modernity that he denigrated.
The literary critic José Quiroga in his study Tropics of Desire points
out that geopolitical borders serve as powerful zones of passage for queer
Latina/o American intellectuals, who have often found themselves obliged
to travel abroad under the pretext of doing “cultural work” in order to
enjoy a degree of sexual openness or activity that would be inconceivable
at home. Quiroga argues that the practice of cultivating a transnational
coterie through intellectual and sexual “tourism” serves as a profound
material basis for the encoded aesthetics and multiple audience address
markers that characterize the literary production of early twentieth-
century queer Latinas/os.52 In sympathy with this practice, Quiroga de-
nounces as an act of “betrayal” the ostracism of Gómez Sicre by a fellow
Cuban homosexual that took place in 1947 at Middlebury College in
Vermont. On this occasion, José Rodríguez of the Grupo Orígenes, who
was then in residence at Middlebury, joined several Cuban colleagues
in boycotting a lecture on Latin American art given by Gómez Sicre. As
Rodríguez Feo reported to José Lezama Lima, his friend and collaborator
back in Cuba, “Por lo visto todos aquí se enteraron de qué clase de tipo
es y su famosa seducción pasó de boca en boca empujada hábilmente
por las lenguas chismosas de la Sra. de Mañach” (Obviously, everybody
around here found out what kind of a guy he is and the story of his
108 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

famous seduction was spread all around, thanks to the gossipy tongue of
Mrs. [Jorge] Mañach). For Quiroga, the coup de grâce is not Rodríguez
Feo’s boycott of Gómez Sicre’s lecture per se, but the impersonal footnote
attached to the published version of this letter: “José Gómez Sicre . . .
crítico de arte, se vio obligado a abandonar al país al ser acusado de
pederastía” (José Gómez Sicre . . . art critic, was obliged to abandon the
country [Cuba] because he was accused of pederasty). Quiroga under-
stands this gesture to be not only an act of scapegoating but also a corro-
sive disavowal on Rodríguez Feo’s part of his own sexual and geographi-
cal compartmentalization. As Quiroga notes sadly, “Chances are that the
pederast would have been entertained in Cuba, but not invited to dinner
in polite company in Vermont.”53
As we have seen, Gómez Sicre’s tensions with the Grupo Orígenes pre-
date this encounter, and they revolved around broad differences: Gómez
Sicre was an autodidact journalist, they were literary intellectuals; he was
anticlerical, most of them were Catholic. In terms of Gómez Sicre’s own
self-presentation, Rodríguez Feo’s footnote is interesting for its identifi-
cation of Gómez Sicre’s expatriate status with “pederasty” rather than
“pedophilia.” This may be an act of unconscious mutual recognition, in
spite of Rodríguez Feo’s efforts to distance himself from Gómez Sicre; the
footnote suggests that the stories of child molestation and the broken en-
gagement, both acknowledged by Gómez Sicre, were themselves screens
masking an even more shrouded homosexuality.
Distanced from homosexual Cuban intellectuals who might under dif-
ferent circumstances have proven allies, Gómez Sicre engaged in his own
games of betrayal and ostracism by liberally exchanging volleys of epi-
thets with assorted maricones (faggots) from the protection of his office
at the PAU. At the same time that internationalism and cosmopolitan-
ism were being linked to homosexuality in the United States, Gómez
Sicre plunged into the value hierarchies of gender and sexuality that
circulated in critical debates about aesthetics and modernity in many
Latin American intellectual sectors during the 1940s and 1950s. In these
contexts, mariconería (faggotry) was commonly invoked as a negative
but metaphorical description of an artwork or artist, while with only a
slight shift of inflection the term could veer into an outright ad hominem
attack. The boisterous homosociality of the Carreño correspondence is
sprinkled with literalist barbs about Latin American intellectual mari-
cones, such as José Lezama Lima of Grupo Orígenes and Salvador Novo
of the Mexico City–based Grupo Contemporáneos, for example, while
at the same time, Carreño condemns as mariconería all things pedantic,
pretentious, or French.54 In this complex terrain of interlocking hemi-
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 109

spheric cultural movements, Gómez Sicre occupied an unstable position

that makes his own homophobic barbs appear to be self-defensive or pre-
emptive. He joined Carreño in deriding mariconería, for example, yet in
Mexico and other contexts where Gómez Sicre launched concerted cam-
paigns against nationalist arts movements, he and his favored artists were
frequently subjected to precisely the same kind of epithets, including the
damning extranjerizante (foreign-identified).
A polyglot and vernacular dexterity in terms of working methods
and professional self-presentation thus belied Gómez Sicre’s assertion
of universal standards for the new Latin American art. The phrase “el
arte que progresa” captures his sense of the dynamic imperative for art
by linking cultural production to social progress.55 If Brazilian President
Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961), a great promoter of modern art and
architecture in a modernizing Brazil, could describe the São Paulo Bienal
as “[una] patria común de ideas, de modos de ver, de choques y afir-
maciones del tiempo presente” (a common nation [patria] of ideas,
ways of seeing, shocks and affirmations of the present) for its ability to
harness new aesthetics in the interests of forging bonds of community
across space and time, then for Gómez Sicre, art was all this as well as
an economy.56 Like Lincoln Kirstein and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., at MoMA,
Gómez Sicre employed “exportability” as a positive critical term, and he
believed that Latin American art gained in critical and monetary value
through circulation and exposure outside of its country of origin. His de-
sire to move art throughout the hemisphere and in other global contexts,
however, sometimes chafed against tariffs and patrimony legislation, and
several of Gómez Sicre’s editorials in the Boletín de Artes Visuales are
calls for free trade in the arts.57 Even so, Gómez Sicre effectively devised
several strategies for circumventing trade barriers, particularly through
his use of corporate patrons and the diplomatic service as carriers of art
and art criticism. Unlike previous inter-American initiatives of the Good
Neighbor Policy years, which as discussed in chapter 1, tended to cloak
corporate sponsorship in a mantle of nationalism, Gómez Sicre brought
corporate sponsorship into the open and even capitalized on corporate
multinational profiles in an effort to downplay national designations while
foregrounding regional and transnational ones.
It appears that Gómez Sicre came to appreciate the collaborative pos-
sibilities for art and ambassadorship from his own training in diplomatic
law and his experiences in Cuba, where middle-class professionals and
intellectuals mingled in overlapping circles of bohemianism, connoisseur-
ship, and the foreign service. Around the same time that Gómez Sicre
became involved in his defense of the exhibition of vanguardia painting
110 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

at the Cuban embassy in Russia, his friend Héctor de Ayala was named
ambassador to France under President Grau, and Gómez Sicre immedi-
ately apprehended the potential benefit to Cuban vanguardia artists of
Ayala taking his extensive contemporary Cuban art collection with him
to Paris.58 And it was another diplomat and collector, Ramón Osuna, who
in part paved the way for Gómez’s move to Washington, D.C., in 1945.59
Once the OAS was founded, and Gómez Sicre established a schedule
for regular rotating exhibitions at the PAU, he acted as an informal art
dealer to the OAS ambassadorial corps by cultivating relationships with
diplomats and underselling artists’ work to them directly from his PAU
exhibitions. Sometimes the artists complained about this practice, but
Gómez Sicre countered that he was stimulating their careers by circulat-
ing their work throughout the hemisphere.60

Venezuela’s “Democratic Spring” and the

32 Artistas de las Américas Exhibition

In availing himself of preexisting hemispheric corporate and diplomatic

networks, Gómez Sicre proceeded to launch postwar arts projects in
diverse Latin American locations, often ones lacking a substantial arts
infrastructure. One of his first large-scale curatorial projects after assum-
ing his position at the PAU was a 1948 exhibition of contemporary art
of the Americas, Exposición Interamericana de Pintura Moderna, which
was held in honor of the inauguration of Venezuelan President Rómulo
Gallegos. This was succeeded by an ambitious traveling exhibition of
paintings and drawings, 32 Artistas de las Américas, which was spon-
sored by the United Fruit Company and the Grace Line shipping firm.
Both events were heralded by optimistic press coverage and publicity that
promoted the exhibitions’ range of modernist aesthetics as a break with
the oppressive weight of tradition, thus consecrating the “look” of Latin
American postwar modernity as one of new visual aesthetics, especially
ones marked by abstract forms, bold coloration, and diversity of personal
expression.
In 1947, Rómulo Gallegos became the first Venezuelan president to be
elected through universal suffrage.61 As a revered statesman-humanist,
Gallegos was a novelist and educator associated with the left progres-
sive political movement in Venezuela known as Acción Democrática.62
The aging letrado succeeded the presidency of the movement’s founder
Rómulo Betancourt, who had brought Acción Democrática to national
rule in 1945 in what he characterized as a revolutionary coup marking
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 111

the end of a long succession of military presidents, a period overshadowed

by the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez (1922–1929; 1931–1935).63 The
trienio, or three-year period of Acción Democrática rule from 1945–1948,
witnessed a relaxation of censorship in the Venezuelan press and an effer-
vescent burst of intellectual and creative activity. Gallegos’s inauguration
was an auspicious event for those postwar Pan Americanists who favored
democratic social reform and economic development, for it took place
in February 1948, just prior to the Ninth Inter-American Conference in
Bogotá, where the OAS Charter was to be ratified. The new Venezuelan
president’s affirmation of liberal humanist values, moreover, was salutary
to both the old- and new-wave Latin Americanists who intermingled in
the PAU cultural branches during the transitional postwar years.
Nelson Rockefeller, who had been deeply involved in the Pan American
movement before and after the war, took note of the cultural, economic,
and political opportunities signaled by Gallegos’s election. Rockefeller
held extensive business interests in Venezuela, in his family’s petroleum
business, as well as in hotel and road construction, agriculture, and food
brokerage. In the postwar years, Rockefeller turned to Venezuela as an
arena in which he could enact through private-sector financing the type
of large-scale foreign aid projects that were quickly losing favor in the
United States, ones inspired by New Deal initiatives such as the Tennessee
Valley Authority.64 While the Acción Democrática government legislated
social reforms and demanded that Venezuelans reap a greater share of
the profits generated by the nation’s substantial oil deposits, its leaders
also cultivated foreign investors like Rockefeller and members of the na-
tional bourgeoisie in an effort to project a centrist public image.65 The
intersection of Rockefeller’s multinational corporate and art connections
with the new progressive regime provided the context for MoMA admin-
istrators to delegate to Gómez Sicre the task of curating the Exposición
Interamericana de Pintura Moderna in collaboration with the Venezuelan
Ministry of Education. The show opened at the Museo de Bellas Artes in
Caracas on February 16, 1948, one day prior to Gallegos’s official investi-
ture ceremony. Contemporary art provided a striking backdrop for a gala
celebration that included Concha Romero James, José Gómez Sicre, and
Nelson Rockefeller among a host of dignitaries and heads of state.66 The
fact that this exhibition debuted alongside an ambitious three-century
survey of Venezuelan painting suggests the tactful approach of early PAU
endeavors in the visual arts, which highlighted formal aesthetic connec-
tions among the “best” examples of the national schools while building
toward a hemispheric visual imaginary.67
112 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

The relatively small exhibition organized by Gómez Sicre for the

Gallegos inauguration consisted entirely of paintings from MoMA’s study
collection and acquisitions from the museum’s Inter-American Fund,
which had been endowed anonymously by Nelson Rockefeller during the
war.68 The approximately twenty works on display were a cross-section
of MoMA’s Latin American purchasing trips of the Good Neighbor Policy
years. The show featured a broad range of aesthetics and themes, includ-
ing figure studies, still lifes, landscapes, urban scenes, folkloric themes,
historical subjects, and abstractions. Postrevolutionary Mexican painting
figured prominently in the mix, through a cluster of realist works by Diego
Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, José Chávez Morado, and Raúl Anguiano.
Additionally, a work by the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari and an
animal study by the Oregon-based Works Progress Administration artist
Derrel Austin suggested the widespread influence of Mexican muralism in
other parts of the Americas. (Venezuela’s best-known social realist painter,
Héctor Poleo, presumably was represented in the companion exhibition
of Venezuelan art at the Museo de Bellas Artes.) Gómez Sicre’s selection
showcased other aesthetic currents as well, notably abstract and figura-
tive paintings inspired by fauvism, cubism, and surrealism, which were
best represented by the Southern Cone artists Raquel Forner, Líbero Badii,
Emilio Pettoruti, and Horacio Butler of Argentina and Roberto Matta of
Chile. Two early twentieth-century masters, the Uruguayans Pedro Figari
and Joaquín Torres García, rounded out the selection, with a costumbrista
(folkloric realist) theme and a constructivist landscape, respectively.69
Most of the works on display dated from the 1930s and 1940s, and nearly
half of the featured artists were born in the nineteenth century, with the
eldest among them, Pedro Figari (1861–1938), already deceased. Thus, the
show neither debuted new works nor emerging artists, though PAU pub-
licity lauded the exhibition as “a milestone in the history of modern art in
Venezuela” because it was the first time that many of these artists had their
work exhibited in Caracas.70 The exhibition drew Rockefeller’s attention
to José Gómez Sicre’s talent, and President Gallegos was so pleased with
the result that he extended his personal thanks to Rockefeller, Alfred H.
Barr, Jr., and Réne d’Harnoncourt.71 Later that year, several members
of Gallegos’s presidential staff made a follow-up visit to MoMA, where
Gómez Sicre treated them to a tour and private screening of Luis Buñuel’s
Un chien anadalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) from the museum’s film
collection. There the Venezuelan delegation and Gómez Sicre discussed
with MoMA staff plans for a follow-up exhibition in Venezuela, as well
as ideas for the 32 Artistas de las Américas show.72
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 113

Grounded as it was in MoMA’s collecting initiatives of the Good

Neighbor Policy, the Caracas exhibition presented an eclectic yet equani-
mous range of pre-1945 hemispheric modernist aesthetics that implicitly
challenged the landscape painting tradition associated with Venezuela’s
Academia de Bellas Artes. Gómez Sicre’s selection was not especially re-
vealing of his own aesthetic preferences, nor did it evince his incipient
distaste for social realism, although two former adversaries, Wifredo
Lam and David Alfaro Siquerios, both represented in MoMA’s perma-
nent collection, were conspicuously absent from the Venezuelan show.
Gómez Sicre did, however, use the occasion of his presence in Caracas as
an opportunity to air his own perspectives in the Venezuelan press and
cultivate relationships with young Venezuelan artists who later exhibited
their work at the PAU. Gómez Sicre’s journalistic interventions offer a
lucid presentation of his curatorial values at this moment in his career.
In a polemical essay, “Mi credo,” Gómez Sicre first introduced himself to
the Venezuelan public shortly after assuming his position at the PAU. The
essay appeared in May 1946 as a full page in the Caracas daily, El nacio-
nal; thereafter, Gómez Sicre’s column, “Notas del arte,” became a regular
feature of the paper.73 “Mi credo” elaborates Gómez Sicre’s earlier posi-
tions vis-à-vis Siqueiros. It boldly advocates for formalist art and art criti-
cism that will serve as a cosmopolitan lingua franca in the postwar inter-
national arts scene: “Odio los localismos y menosprecio el nacionalismo
exigente que quiere atar las formal al contenido” (I hate localisms and
I disparage demanding nationalism that wishes to tie form to content).
Among the supporting planks of this platform: art and politics are “cor-
rientes paralelas que no deben confluir” (parallel currents that should
not flow together); the masses should be trained to appreciate difficult
art instead of consuming facile genres; and modern art must continually
nourish itself “de viejas cenizas o de frutos exóticos” (from old ashes or
exotic fruit).74 The contradictions of adapting a European avant-garde in-
terest in primitivism to Latin American art worlds become evident in this
last injunction, for in spite of his professed hatred of “localisms,” Gómez
Sicre’s advice to seek “old ashes” and “exotic fruit” meant, more often
than not, artists looking within their own societies rather than following
the examples of Gauguin, Picasso, and children’s art. In his challenge to
transcend the doctrinaire dead ends of European modernist movements,
Gómez Sicre argues that selective incorporation of canonical and ver-
nacular visual cultures on the part of emerging Latin American artists is
an appropriate tactic of ingress for those seeking access to the postwar
international arts scene.
114 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

In the context of his visit to Caracas for the Exposición Interamericana,

Gómez Sicre issued a proposal encouraging a group of young Venezuelan
painters to form El Taller Libre de Arte (Free Art Workshop), as “an al-
ternative to studying abroad.”75 Founded in July 1948, five months after
Gallegos’s inauguration, El Taller was inspired by contemporary devel-
opments in the Parisian art world, where several of its members had
studied, and the group organized some of the first abstract art shows in
Venezuela.76 Alejandro Otero (1921–1990), a founding member of El
Taller, is often credited with introducing abstract art to Venezuela in 1949
through his Cafeteras (Coffeepots) series, which departed from cubist ex-
periments in the radical defamiliarization of everyday objects by breaking
them down into abstract, planar forms and abandoning the use of per-
spective.77 Otero executed the Cafeteras series in Paris during the years
1946–1948 under the inspiration of Picasso’s recent still lifes, including
one in particular that depicted a coffeepot.78 The airy, expressive brush-
strokes, dynamic diagonal composition, and interplay of black lines and
primary colors against white or monochromatic fields characteristic of
Otero’s later Cafeteras, however, contrast with Picasso’s rectilinear com-
positions and foreshadow the studies in geometric abstraction and optical
kineticism for which Otero would later become famous (Plate 2). Gómez
Sicre invited Otero to hold a solo exhibition at the PAU in December
1948, where the Cafeteras were the central attraction.79 Gómez Sicre’s
effusive coverage of Otero’s PAU exhibition in El nacional in turn primed
Caracas audiences for the positive reception of Otero’s work in the art-
ist’s native country by confidently assigning the imprimatur of “Picasso
1945” on the “distendido cubismo expresivo” (relaxed expressive cub-
ism) displayed in Otero’s still lifes.80
Conferring critical value on Otero’s work based on its proximity to
a European master was a sensitive matter, given that it threatened to
reinscribe Paris as capital of the art world precisely when Gómez Sicre
sought to obviate the imperative for young artists to travel there. The
arguments outlined in Gómez Sicre’s columns and open letters for El
nacional gingerly navigate the dilemmas of Eurocentrism, neocolonial-
ism, and discipleship through appeals to a postwar community of artists
engaged in a common aesthetic project. But, for good measure, they also
include frequent reminders of the fictive kinship promised by Picasso’s
“legítima sangre española” (legitimate Spanish blood) as well as that of
his cubist compatriot Juan Gris.81 Gómez Sicre finesses the European
question by sanctioning transatlantic connections as a form of tutelage,
applicable when a pupil rigorously pursues an aesthetic problem initiated
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 115

by a qualified master, regardless of their respective geographical loca-

tions. Gómez Sicre thus depicts a decentralized art world in which aes-
thetic communities transcend geopolitical and sociocultural differences.
The young Latin American artist, as Gómez Sicre explains, should neither
embrace originality nor pursue the destruction of form for its own sake,
but rather choose aesthetic problems judiciously and pursue them with
discipline. Of course, this sounds a like an anti-institutional variant of the
academicism that Gómez Sicre abhorred, but through such arguments,
Gómez Sicre preempted derisive allegations of “imitativeness” in regard
to Latin American art, while also distancing himself from the contempo-
rary U.S.-based formalist critics who predicated American exceptional-
ism on a radical break with Europe.
The buoyant mood of the 1948 inaugural celebration and exhibi-
tion was not to last. Gallegos was overthrown in a bloodless military
coup in November 1948 after only nine months in office, and the Acción
Democrática leadership went into exile. The ensuing decade of mili-
tary rule in Venezuela culminated in the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez
Jiménez (1952–1958), and the next direct elections would not occur until
1959 with the return to the presidency of Acción Democrática leader
Rómulo Betancourt. But the artistic, corporate, and diplomatic con-
nections that coalesced in the 1948 Exposición Interamericana endured
through the 1950s. Rockefeller, for his part, continued to conduct business
in Venezuela under the successor military regime, and the progressive
artists who had risen to prominence in the late 1940s, such as Otero,
executed government projects over the course of the next decade.82 After
his return to Venezuela from Paris in 1952, Otero proceeded to carry
out a series of institutional changes that were salutary to Gómez Sicre’s
perspectives, for example, initiating reforms at the Escuela de Artes
Plásticas (School of the Visual Arts) and serving as coordinator of the
Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas. As the historian Marguerite Mayhall
has observed, the momentum initiated during the trienio contributed to
abstraction gaining favor over social realism in a series of debates that
took place among Venezuelan critics through the 1950s. The critical and
aesthetic perspectives that emerged dominant in Venezuela by the end
of the 1950s through the 1960s, however, favored European-identified
abstract art movements, especially kineticism and geometric abstraction.
Though Gómez Sicre provided early impetus for the abstractionist turn
in Venezuela, his protégés ultimately proved reluctant to incorporate their
mentor’s openness to vernacular visual culture into their own aesthetic
repertoires.83
116 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

As Gómez Sicre soon learned, the agonistic approach to curatorship

that he devised for the Venezuelan exhibition was adaptable in other
contexts, where an array of Latin American modernist aesthetics could
easily be cast as a challenge to nationalist arts cultures. Gómez Sicre’s
next project, 32 Artistas de las Américas, was an ambitious traveling
exhibition of paintings and drawings by Latin American and U.S. artists
that also drew heavily on MoMA’s permanent collection and technical
support. The exhibition toured eleven Latin American countries from
January 1949 to February 1950. The first leg of the tour was sponsored
by the Grace Line shipping firm and traveled by boat to Panama, Ecuador,
Colombia, Peru, and Chile. The addition of a landscape painting by the
Honduran artist José Antonio Velásquez from the private collection of a
United Fruit Company executive necessitated a change in the exhibition
title to 33 Artistas de las Américas for the second leg of the tour, which
traveled by air to Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua,
and Costa Rica through the subvention of the United Fruit Company.84
Six of the paintings previously included in the Venezuelan selection were
also part of the 32 Artistas exhibition. In all, seventeen of the relatively
small format oils, gouaches, watercolors, and drawings featured in the
exhibition came from MoMA’s permanent collection, and the rest were
loans from private collections and galleries in the United States.85 These
latter sources enabled Gómez Sicre to broaden the range of artists and
styles that had been included in the Venezuelan show through the ad-
dition of works by four Cuban vanguardia painters, two Haitian art-
ists, and individual works by artists from Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua,
and Honduras. Gómez Sicre also selected three Venezuelan pieces for
32 Artistas, including a painting by Alejandro Otero and a drawing by
Mateo Manaure, both associated with the newly founded Taller Libre
de Arte. Finally, Gómez Sicre introduced pieces by three rather senior
U.S. modernists represented by New York’s Downtown Gallery: Stuart
Davis, Arthur Dove, and Karl Zerbe. Although 32 Artistas featured sev-
eral emerging artists who were in their thirties at the time, such as Percy
Deane (Brazil), Cundo Bermúdez (Cuba), and Gonzalo Ariza (Colombia),
the age range of artists and dates of their works still favored the senior
generations, as in the selection for the Venezuelan exhibition. Like the
Venezuelan show, the selection of works for 32 Artists spanned a range
of styles and movements, in the words of Gómez Sicre, “abarcando desde
el realismo mas acendrado, como en el caso de Héctor Poleo, hasta la
abstracción radical de un Carlos Mérida o Emilio Pettoruti. Esto ha dado
la oportunidad de mostrar una exposición no convencional, de muy poco
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 117

caracter ‘oficial’ ” (departing from the most unblemished realism, as in the

case of Héctor Poleo, to the most radical abstraction of a Carlos Mérida
or Emilio Pettoruti. This has provided the opportunity to show an un-
conventional exhibition, with few “official” overtones).86
Unlike its Venezuelan predecessor, 32 Artistas was not conceived as
an accompaniment to a particular liberal democratic regime, although
several countries in which it toured were undergoing their own “demo-
cratic spring,” such as Guatemala, where the New Deal–inspired educator
Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1945–1951) had recently been democrati-
cally elected to the presidency. Instead, this traveling exhibition explicitly
linked modern art to economic development and it broadly celebrated a
new aesthetic horizon enabled by conceiving of American art as a cate-
gory that transcended national boundaries. The three U.S. artists whose
work was included in the exhibition were somewhat marginalized in the
critical reception of 32 Artistas as a “Latin American” event. To the best
of my knowledge, 32 Artists was the first traveling exhibition consisting
primarily of Latin American art organized for Latin American viewing
publics. In this respect, the show broke with Good Neighbor Policy mod-
els of inter-American exchange in the arts, which tended to send U.S. art
to Latin America and vice versa.
Relying on PAU corporate connections, Gómez Sicre deliberately tar-
geted 32 Artistas at countries in which national arts institutions were
weak and U.S. investment was strong.87 During World War II, the Pan
American Union’s Office of Intellectual Cooperation had effectively se-
cured funding from the Grace Line to underwrite inter-American edu-
cational scholarships. Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator
of Inter-American Affairs had similarly developed a network of private
funding for its wartime cultural initiatives, targeting firms with substantial
Latin American interests, such as the National City Bank, Pan American
Airways, Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and Mine Grande Oil
Company.88 In contrast to these precedents, which only discreetly ac-
knowledged their funding stream, Gómez Sicre brought corporate pa-
tronage into the light in his publicity for 32 Artistas, making the cir-
culation of art and aesthetics appear thematically harmonious with the
activities of sponsors engaged in the exportation and transportation of
commodities throughout the hemisphere.
Through his work on the 32 Artistas show, Gómez Sicre’s idea of Latin
American art as a cosmopolitan and continental phenomenon crystal-
lized as he confronted everyday practical issues of circulating art across
national borders. His concept of the continent as divided into an east
118 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

coast and west coast for the purpose of this traveling exhibition, for ex-
ample, was not driven by inherent cultural or political features; rather,
it reproduced the itineraries of large-scale exhibitions organized during
the Good Neighbor era, which were shaped by logistical concerns for
moving art through existing shipping and air routes.89 The regional inter-
ests of the exhibition’s corporate patrons help in part to account for 32
Artistas’s itinerary, which was oriented toward the countries of Central
America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific coast of South America (United
Fruit Company was active in the former two regions, and the Grace
Line in the latter). Another rationale for this tour, according to Gómez
Sicre, was to bring modern art to those countries that had weak econo-
mies, small arts institutions, and limited cultural exchange with Europe
and the United States. Consequently, the show avoided locations with
long-standing aesthetic modernist movements, such as Brazil, Mexico,
Argentina, and Venezuela, while at the same time it prominently featured
work from those very countries, “promoviendo así la familiarización con
los nombres provenientes de unos países en otros” (thus promoting the
familiarization of names from some countries in other ones).90 Brazil,
Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, the United States, Haiti, and Uruguay
were not included on the exhibition tour, but art from those countries
was amply represented in the exhibition by two to four works each. The
exhibition featured no works from three of its host countries, El Salvador,
Peru, and Panama, while six host countries were represented through one
painting each, Colombia through two, and Cuba through four.
In most of the show’s host venues, there was little to rival the state
support for the visual arts found in Mexico or Brazil, but 32 Artistas did
have an agenda in its curator’s opposition to the decorative, impressionist-
inspired painting favored by several academies and art schools in Central
American countries, particularly in Guatemala and El Salvador. This type
of art was associated with local currents of indigenismo, a cultural move-
ment through which (often criollo) artists celebrated ancient indigenous
civilizations and folkloric themes as a form of nationalist expression. Prior
to Gómez Sicre, Leslie Judd Switzer had criticized this type of art during
her wartime travels through Central America as an OIAA consultant. Re-
garding contemporary Salvadoran painting, for example, she complained
to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., that
the art movements are perhaps lacking much vitality—pleasant
impressionism—idealized Indians—slick, posterish surfaces—and
make little growth from one year to another . . . Gauguin bears down
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 119

rather heavily on the painters here, as opposed to a broken, light, clear

impressionism in Guatemala—in either case one dies in a welter of
uncomposed Impressionism from gentle charming people—how I wish
they would paint with their machetes!91

Gómez Sicre not only shared Switzer’s views, but in his case his distaste
was all the more pointed, given his previous negative personal experience
in organizing an exhibition of Cuban vanguardia painting in Guatemala
in 1945, just prior to moving to Washington, D.C. Venting his frustration
to Barr on that occasion, he wrote:
Many people [are] absolutely confused and disappointed with the
Cuban distortions. Many of them think it is a joke and, of course,
never a serious art expression. By this result you may consider which
is the status of this country concerning art. For example, Carlos
Mérida, who was born here, is considered a fake personality and
something to be forgotten as a fault of the country. [The] painting is
in fact of very poor meaning. A special sort of “indigenist academi-
cism” is the prevalent current in the midst. A mild and picturesque
impressionism of indians, “güipiles” and pottery treated in the worst
plastic invention.92

The Guatemalan artist mentioned in Gómez Sicre’s letter, Carlos Mérida

(1891–1984), had spent the greater part of his career working in Mexico.
In a bold statement on Gómez Sicre’s part, 32 Artists featured Mérida’s
abstract painting Todo en rosa (All in Rose, 1943) as its only work by
a Guatemalan artist (Plate 3). Similarly, the show also introduced Mujer
con piña (Woman with a Pineapple, 1941) a primitivist cubist work by the
Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991), who was not affiliated with
the muralist movement and had spent the majority of his career in Paris
and New York, having been marginalized within the Mexican art scene
during the postrevolutionary period (Plate 4). Both Mérida and Tamayo
were of indigenous heritage (Maya Quiché-Zapotec and Zapotec, respec-
tively), and they produced abstract work inspired by indigenous tradi-
tions and iconography. Their inclusion in 32 Artistas indicates Gómez
Sicre’s early efforts to forge alternate, continental art historical genealo-
gies for Latin American modernism by reclaiming and validating the
work of artists who had been underrepresented within their respective
national arts cultures, and who were nevertheless strongly invested in
aesthetic explorations of indigenous American cultures.
Later in his career, Gómez Sicre proclaimed his aversion to the na-
tional selection model for organizing exhibitions entirely, on the grounds
120 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

that it sanctioned mediocrity.93 National groupings were retained for the

32 Artistas gallery guides but abandoned in at least some of the show’s
installations. Gómez Sicre traveled with the exhibition to several venues
where he personally oversaw its installation, while in other locations he
evidently left the installation of the show up to local facilitators.94 Luis
Alfredo Cáceres, Gómez Sicre’s old friend and the Salvadoran artist and
director of the Escuela de Artes Gráficas, supervised the installation of
32 Artistas at the Ministry of Culture in San Salvador, for example, and
reported to Gómez Sicre how pleased he was with a display that stressed
color and aesthetics over national groupings: “Coloqué los cuadros no
por orden geográfico sino por cromatismo y estilo, de manera que pueda
lograr, dentro el espacio y la luz del salón, el realce de cada cuadro y del
conjunto y luce muy bien” (I didn’t hang the paintings by geographical
order, but rather by color scheme and style, so that I could achieve the
enhancement of each work within the space and light of the salon, and it
looks very good).95 This formalist and movement-oriented approach to
display recalled the installation practices devised by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
for the installation of modernist works in MoMA’s galleries.96 In the case
of 32 Artistas, one might describe Gómez Sicre’s exhibitionary techniques
as tending toward a modified modernist installation, one that was the
peculiar product of pre- and postwar Latin Americanist currents circulat-
ing in the PAU cultural branches. In casting the aesthetic as a (relatively)
autonomous realm in relation to other social arenas, 32 Artistas detached
art from interpretative frameworks associated with European museology
that were based on underlying values of nation or civilization. Yet at the
same time, the criteria for inclusion in the exhibition stressed an implic-
itly continental perspective.97
From newspaper coverage and publicity photographs, it appears that
32 Artistas was installed in venues frequented by educated upper- and
middle-class urban dwellers, such as in national ministries of tourism and
culture and arts academies. In Havana, for example, it was installed in
El Lyceum, where Gómez Sicre had many personal contacts. Yet accord-
ing to a PAU source, some 18,300 people attended the exhibition at the
National School of Fine Arts in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a considerable
turnout for this city of 80,000 people. This figure suggests that in certain
venues, broad sectors of the public attended the show.98 Coverage of the
exhibition in the OAS magazine Américas noted that the paintings by
Carlos Mérida, Mario Carreño, and Emilio Pettoruti generally tended
to please critics but not the public (these works corresponded to Gómez
Sicre’s own critical preferences), while works by the U.S. abstractionists
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 121

Arthur Dove and Stuart Davis “left the Latin Americans cold.”99 Gómez
Sicre seems to have been as delighted by outraged responses to the show
as he was by the enthusiastic ones—it was as though he were getting the
exhibition’s host venues through the “Armory Show phase” in order to
prepare the ground for the emergence of a new generation of artists, crit-
ics, and educators.
The coverage of 32 Artistas by Américas stressed diversity of expres-
sion as a uniquely American trait encapsulated in the exhibition’s range of
aesthetics. The absence of a dominant art school in the hemisphere indi-
cated the presence of artistic freedom, adaptation to the local, and a lack
of dependence on European models.100 The concept of artistic freedom,
common to waning antifascist and emerging anticommunist discourses
in the United States, likewise figured prominently in Gómez Sicre’s brief
introduction to the gallery guide: “Sin estar animada por el menor deseo
de pugna, el propósito de la exhibición es manifestar que en América el
hombre deja a su espíritu recorrer todas las categorías y dimensiones de
la creación, como corresponde a un continente cuyo primer designio es el
de la libertad” (Unmotivated by the slightest desire for conflict, the pur-
pose of this exhibition is to demonstrate that in America, man allows his
spirit to traverse all types and dimensions of creation, as befits a continent
whose primary plan is that of liberty).101 The Américas review, further-
more, linked art to economic development in a metaphor that was sure to
evoke connections with the newly inaugurated U.S. export processing in-
dustrialization program in Puerto Rico, Operation Bootstrap (Operación
Manos a la Obra, 1948), the prototype for contemporary hemispheric
free trade initiatives: “In many instances the creatively independent artist
in the New World has lifted himself by his own bootstraps. He has often
been geographically isolated. He has had relatively little support and
encouragement at home.”102
Gómez Sicre’s personal correspondence regarding the exhibition, in
contrast to his official statements, suggests that his primary concern was
how “young artists” would respond to the event.103 As he wrote to his
friend Cáceres, for example: “Le ruego mantenerme enterado del desen-
volvimiento de la muestra y de la utilidad que pueda haber tenido en los
artistas jóvenes del país, así como las reacciones, favorables u opuestas, que
haya desptertado al público en general” (I beg you to keep me informed
of the development of the show and the use value it may have had on the
young artists of the country, as well as the reactions, favorable or opposed,
that it awakened among the public in general).104 Cáceres responded by
sending Gómez Sicre a clipping packet of local exhibition reviews with a
122 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

cautionary note, “Entre ellos algunos van que le van ha hacer reír, escritos
por personas que aman la academia y que siguen hablando de Miguel
Angel, Leonardo da Vinci, etc., para darse tono de entendidos” (Among
them are some that will make you laugh, written by people who love the
academy and who still speak of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.,
to make themselves sound well-informed).105 But Cáceres also reassured
Gómez Sicre that his mission had been accomplished: “Le digo con sin-
ceridad que la exposición de 33 artistas de las Américas causó sensación,
casi asustó a ciertas gentes, ‘estos pintores están locos,’ ‘ésta es pintura de
pintores que no saben pintar.’ Pero yo aprendí mucho, y también otros
pintores, aprendí a ver que la renovación está en la propia plástica, no
en el motivo” (I tell you sincerely that the 33 Artists exhibition caused a
sensation; it almost frightened some people—‘those painters are crazy,’
‘that’s the work of painters who don’t know how to paint.’ But I learned a
lot and other painters did, too. I learned that [artistic] renewal is in formal
aesthetics [plástica], not in the pictorial theme [motivo]).106
In terms of its Latin American scope, selection of works, publicity,
and patronage, 32 Artistas pointed the way toward future PAU cultural
projects of the 1950s and 1960s, which continued to fine-tune the re-
gional modernist installation. Further, 32 Artistas marks the beginning
of Gómez Sicre’s long-term investment in the art worlds of the Northern
Andean and Central American OAS member states, especially Venezuela,
Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, where
over the course of the next decade he cultivated close connections with in-
dividual artists and critics. In addition to curating his own Pan American
Union Salons at the São Paulo Bienal, Gómez Sicre also organized the na-
tional salons of Venezuela and Chile at the Bienal in 1953; those of Haiti,
Colombia, and Honduras in 1957; and those of Bolivia and Guatemala in
1961. He used his PAU Salons to give exposure to young artists who he
felt were not receiving due recognition in their native countries. As in the
case of his promotion of Otero and the Taller artists, this process involved
generating international exposure as a means of making local audiences
favorably receptive toward young artists’ work.107

Continental Consciousness-Raising
through the Boletín de Artes Visuales

The survey exhibition model that Gómez Sicre debuted through the
Exposición Interamericana and 32 Artistas was an expensive and labor-
intensive strategy for nurturing Latin American cultural consciousness,
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 123

and as such it was not viable in the long term. Moreover, these exhibitions
depended heavily upon MoMA’s Latin American holdings, which were
eclectic to begin with and now quickly becoming dated. After 32 Artistas
concluded its tour, the PAU Division of Music and Visual Arts publication
Boletín de Música y Artes Visuales (BMAV; 1950–1956) quickly filled the
breach by establishing itself as a comparatively cost effective means of
reaching Spanish-language readers throughout the Americas when and
where PAU exhibitions could not. The Boletín followed the catalogue
format that was established in the PAU cultural publications during the
Concha Romero James era. Within its first year of publication, the jour-
nal achieved a circulation of 3,500, and production values steadily im-
proved throughout the 1950s so that the publication went from being
a modest newsletter mimeographed on PAU letterhead to a semiannual
illustrated magazine typeset and printed on high-grade paper stock.108 By
1957, the Visual Arts Section no longer shared the publication with the
Music Section, and the journal title became simply the Boletín de Artes
Visuales (BAV; 1957–1973).109 José Gómez Sicre first identified himself in
a Boletín news item in October 1952; thereafter, his presence in the jour-
nal increased to the point of contributing a signed editorial to each issue
by 1957. In succinct prose, Gómez Sicre’s editorials militated against na-
tionalism and mediocrity in the arts and argued in favor of free trade,
Latin American cultural pride, and aesthetic quality.110 Occasionally, he
reserved this space to offer homage to beloved art-world figures, such as
MoMA’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida.111
As the opening epigraph of this chapter indicates, Gómez Sicre envi-
sioned the Boletín as a means of carrying on the archival project initi-
ated under Concha Romero James by having the periodical serve as a
centralized listing of art events taking place in Latin America. To read
successive issues of the journal is not only to glimpse the excitement,
debate, and growth that marked postwar arts scenes in the Americas but
also Gómez Sicre’s interventions in them. Indeed, the journal was espe-
cially diligent in tracking the career moves of artists who had exhibited
at the PAU; likewise, artists who had PAU connections frequently for-
warded notes about shows and events for inclusion in the Boletín. The
journal grouped art news items by national subheadings, and its early
issues featured stories from the Americas and Europe, as well as countries
such as Japan, Taiwan, Morocco, and the Soviet Union, particularly when
Latin American artists exhibited in those locations. The Boletín covered a
broad spectrum of visual art, cinema, theater, architecture, and landscape
design, and it demonstrated an ongoing interest in art from countries
124 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

that did not come under OAS representation, such as Canada and Puerto
Rico. Even after the Cuban Revolution, the journal continued to provide
idiosyncratic coverage of Cuban art events.
From its inception, the Boletín de Artes Visuales was preoccupied with
the shifting global configuration of the art world after the war. The sec-
ond issue of the Boletín, for example, features replies by Rufino Tamayo
and Roberto Matta to a survey about whether the school of Paris is con-
demned (Tamayo: “Lo que me retiene aquí es simplemente su admirable
atmósfera de libertad en la cual todo espíritu creador puede desarrollarse
sin limitaciones” [What keeps me here (in Paris) is simply its admirable
atmosphere of freedom in which any creative spirit can develop without
limitations]).112 As in Gómez Sicre’s manifesto “Mi credo,” his appar-
ent objective in airing such stories was not to dethrone Paris but rather
to recognize new art centers that were just as vibrant as Paris, includ-
ing the PAU, which appears as a subheading in the Boletín for the first
time in 1951, as though it were a country in its own right. (Parallel to
this anomalous classification, the PAU Salons at the São Paulo Bienal
assumed a function typically reserved for nation-states.) The global map-
ping of Latin American art provided the primary organizational logic
for the Boletín, while travel provided the second: Which Latin American
artists were in Paris at the moment? Mexico? New York? Lima? Buenos
Aires? And who was returning home? Occasionally, the blurbs feature
subtle comments that tip Gómez Sicre’s editorial hand: the Ecuadorian
artist Manuel Rendón carries the epithet of “the first Ecuadorian to break
with the indigenist tradition,” and Jean-Paul Riopelle is hailed as “the
Canadian Jackson Pollack.”113 By the end of the 1950s, the need for such
framing diminished significantly. The geographical scope of the journal
had come to focus almost exclusively on the reception and circulation of
Latin American art in Latin America, with the publication format itself
serving as proof that the “art centers” that Gómez Sicre celebrated had
achieved critical mass.

Conclusion: The PAU Visual Arts Section

and the Rise of Modernization Theory

The early cold war projects of the PAU Visual Arts Section carried on the
tradition of the Good Neighbor Policy cultural exchange programs, but
they also broke with them in significant ways, namely in terms of their
gradual shift toward Latin American content for Latin American viewing
publics and their abandonment of “spying and buying” tactics in favor
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 125

of bringing corporate and political interests more closely and visibly in

alignment with the art world. As we have seen, the early PAU visual arts
projects revolved less around containment than they did around the pro-
motion of economic and political liberalism in Latin America. The visi-
bility and popularity of modern art in Latin America increased as a wave
of progressive reforms swept many countries, and these movements drew
greater inspiration from the New Deal than they did from the cold war.
Nevertheless, the institutional framing of Exposición Interamericana and
32 Artistas anticipates some of the dominant U.S. foreign policy para-
digms of the cold war, particularly modernization theory, a diverse body
of perspectives that rose to prominence among U.S. policymakers during
the 1950s through several important studies conducted by W. W. Rostow
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International
Studies, as well as sociological research advanced by scholars such as
Edward Shils and Talcott Parsons.114 Nils Gilman describes moderni-
zation theory as “the foreign policy analogue to ‘social modernism’ at
home [in the United States], namely the idea that a meliorist, rational-
izing, benevolent, technocratic state was capable of solving all social and
especially economic ills.”115 According to Gilman, early modernization
theory took up many of the social welfare concerns of the New Deal,
while the historian Michael Latham notes its more distant affiliation with
Enlightenment rationalism, especially in its driving concept of evolution-
ary social progress spearheaded by human endeavor.116 Both Gilman and
Latham observe that the contrast between tradition and modernity was
at the heart of modernization theory; as Gilman notes, the classifica-
tion of different types of societies as either traditional or modern based
on their respective degrees of development “in technology, military and
bureaucratic institutions, and the political and social structure” in turn
facilitated comparative analysis of regions across the globe according to a
universal standard of progress, for which the norm was always, implicitly,
the United States.117 Frank Ninkovich has remarked that modernization
theorists perceived themselves not just as modernizers but as modernists
as well in that they felt themselves capable of revolutionizing the whole
of human existence: “[They] were just as much participants in the con-
ceptual revolution of modernity as were avant-garde artists, litterateurs,
and musicians. They understood that modernity implied a revolutionary
break with traditional social and cultural forms.”118
The modernization theorists’ debt to aesthetic avant-garde movements
for providing them with scenarios of radical social transformation makes
one appreciate the extent to which Gómez Sicre’s triumphalist criticism
126 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

and early PAU exhibitions complemented, and perhaps even helped to

inspire, the boom in modernization theory in the mid- to late 1950s.
Lleras and Rockefeller, both deeply involved in the cultural dimensions
of Pan Americanism, also served as important bridge figures in New
Deal and early cold war hemispheric policymaking circles, and they sub-
scribed to many of the central concepts of modernization theory avant
la lettre. Eventually, even the containment-oriented Eisenhower admin-
istration came to accept the prescriptions of modernization theory as
a means to counter the potential threat of anti-imperialist nationalisms
in the decolonizing third world.119 In light of later developments, the
Exposición Interamericana resembles what contemporary pundits refer
to as dempro—that is, cultural diplomacy aimed at the promotion of
liberal democracy—while 32 Artistas cast modern art as a harbinger of
economic development.120 Gómez Sicre himself deployed the analytical
keywords of modernization theory, tradition and modernity, universalism
and regionalism, in a manner similar to the modernization theorists, and
he shared its adherents’ antipopulist and technocratic views with regard
to arts administration.121 Unlike the modernization theorists, however,
Gómez Sicre was, above all, committed to the primacy of the cultural in
bringing about social transformation. His Boletín editorials insist that
the transformation of consciousness is a precondition for social and eco-
nomic change and that art is a catalyst for such transformation. On oc-
casion, Gómez Sicre’s fervent culturalism also borders on attacking the
implicit U.S.-centrism of modernization theory, and it begins to resemble
third-worldist calls for delinking from the West, as in these excerpts from
a 1959 Boletín editorial:
Some specialists are starting to admit, additionally, that little or no
economic advantage can be registered in the incipient industrializa-
tion of our continental wealth, without first arriving at full cultural
consciousness. One can admit that there are fewer cultural instruments
more direct and effective, and less alterable, than the visual arts. . . . I
believe that America is now arriving at a degree of maturity in its art
so that it does not require the mercy of other continents to grant it a
place in the sun in the universal concert of creative thought. Our place
can be obtained by us ourselves, beginning within our own geographic
boundaries.122

Gómez Sicre’s call for Latin American cultural autonomy, heightened

through his repeated use of the latinoamericanista nuestra (our), is, of
course, complicated by his simultaneous invocation of the developmen-
 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA 127

talist madurez (maturity), implying implicit norms and hinting at the

changing perspective entailed in his strategy of fomenting a regional arts
culture based on foreign capital investment.
While 32 Artistas was touring through Central America, Gómez Sicre’s
old friend of the Popular Front, the Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda,
published his monumental Canto general (General Song), an encyclo-
pedic volume of poetry that proposed to chronicle the history of Latin
America. The Canto features a memorable poem titled “La United Fruit
Co.,” which begins as a parody of Genesis as it depicts predatory U.S.
corporations descending on the countries of Central America:
Cuando sonó la trompeta, estuvo
todo preparado en la tierra,
y Jehová repartió el mundo
a Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, y otras entidades:
La Compañía Frutera Inc.
se reservó lo más jugoso,
la costa central de mi tierra,
la dulce cintura de América.

When the trumpet blared everything

on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
United Fruit Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest,
the central seaboard of my land,
America’s sweet waist.123

If Neruda’s poem about the threat to Latin American sovereignty posed

by United Fruit Co., Ford Motors, and other multinationals, issued on
the eve of the U.S.-organized overthrow of the Jacobo Arbenz regime in
Guatemala in 1954, aroused qualms in Gómez Sicre, they did not leave
an archival trace. At this point in his career, I believe, Gómez Sicre, like
Meyer Schapiro, perceived patronage as secondary to the galvanizing
power of art to effect social transformation; at the most, corporate pa-
tronage was a temporary catalyst until self-sufficient arts networks could
become established throughout the continent.
The diverging paths of Neruda and Gómez Sicre in 1950 suggest the
growing impact of the cold war on their respective careers, even as this
128 EL ARTE QUE PROGRESA

moment found both men united in thinking on a continental scale and

drawing on their shared aesthetic formation in interwar avant-garde
movements. For Gómez Sicre, the cold war brought challenges that are
only symptomatically suggested in his dexterous self-presentation in di-
verse contexts, but this was also a period of intense and productive work
for him. In fact, many of his major curatorial successes occurred in the
wake of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare and during rocky times
for the Organization of American States. The roster of PAU exhibitions
of the late 1940s and early 1950s features the names of many artists
who went on to achieve international recognition and enjoy a long-term
relationship with the PAU Visual Arts Section, including Alejandro Otero
(Venezuela, 1948), Fernando de Szyszlo (Peru, 1953), José Luis Cuevas
(Mexico, 1954), and Alejandro Obregón (Colombia, 1955). Eventually,
their success enabled Gómez Sicre to replace the programmatic formu-
lations of “Mi credo” with references to his own list of curatorial tri-
umphs. The capaciousness of Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic taste in these early
years of the cold war is striking. Certainly, there is a basis for his cura-
torial judgment in European and American modernist movements, but
the ascendant values of his critical vocabulary—authenticity, youth, free-
dom, renovation—tend to favor social and philosophical concepts rather
than particular aesthetic approaches. In the early 1950s, Gómez Sicre
mobilized all of these concepts as he once again turned his attention to
Mexico, one of the most powerful and politicized bases of social realism
in the Americas.
 CHAPTER THREE

José Luis Cuevas,

Panamerican Celebrity

If Franz Kafka were Mexican, he would have been a costumbrista.

—Anonymous saying

Cuevas is like the Quijote; many talk about it, but few have read it.
—JACOBO ZABLUDOVSKY on Cuevas’s art

The “Young Artist” at the Pan American Union

Over a two-month period, in the middle of a blistering Washington, D.C.,

summer, the PAU’s makeshift art gallery exhibited forty-three drawings
and watercolors by a relatively unknown twenty-one-year-old Mexican
artist named José Luis Cuevas.1 The show featured portraits from Mexico
City’s psychiatric hospital and morgue and from the city’s poor neighbor-
hoods, including the midwives of the Hospital Morelos, the prostitutes
of El Calle del Organo, and the malnourished and disabled children of
Nonoalco and Candelaría de los Patos.2 Ranging in price from $15 to
$40, Cuevas’s works sold out completely, with several pieces purchased
through agents on behalf of U.S. collectors and museums.3 From the per-
spective of both artist and curator, the show was a resounding success. For
Cuevas, it provided an immediate professionalization and a springboard
to critical recognition, leading to a meeting with MoMA’s Alfred H. Barr,
Jr., coverage in Time magazine, and New York gallery representation,
as well as an enthusiastic reception in Paris and the blessing of Picasso.
Within days of the vernissage, Cuevas made his first lithograph; within a
decade, he would go on to become a leading figure in the boom of Latin
130 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

American drawing and printmaking.4 For José Gómez Sicre, who had
struggled to get Latin American artists to exhibit at the PAU, the show
marked the beginning of an upward career trajectory and greater visi-
bility for the PAU arts programs.5
A photograph taken at the Cuevas opening captures the modest instal-
lation of the exhibition. Cuevas stands stiffly before several of his works
as he chats with two senior diplomats, both distinguished men of letters:
one is the Brazilian novelist Erico Veríssimo, PAU director of Cultural
Affairs and Gómez Sicre’s supervisor, and the other is Luis Quintanilla,
the Mexican ambassador to the OAS and erstwhile poet and playwright
affiliated with the Mexican Revolutionary Estridentistas group. Behind
them, one can glimpse Cuevas’s Madman and Madwoman (both 1954),
two brush-and-ink drawings that MoMA picked up from the show
(Figures 13–15).6 Amid the signs of success registered in this photograph,
the image also records a difficult moment in early OAS history in which
tensions between Mexico and the United States were brought to the
fore. Two weeks prior to the opening of the exhibition, a CIA-organized
coup overthrew the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz presidency in
Guatemala. The coup was preceded by OAS debates in which the United
States sought to censure the Arbenz regime through John Foster Dulles’s
anticommunist “Caracas Declaration,” a document that the Mexican
delegation ultimately abstained from signing on noninterventionist prin-
ciples.7 In the aftermath of this event, this photograph places Cuevas
in mixed company, aesthetically and politically speaking, between the
avant-garde cultural nationalism of his compatriot Quintanilla, and the
Pan American liberalism of Veríssimo, a founding member of the Con-
gress for Cultural Freedom’s Brazilian branch.8 As José Luis Cuevas’s
international reputation grew in the years following the PAU exhibition,
so did a campaign against him in Mexico, waged primarily by artists and
intellectuals who alleged that Cuevas was a partisan of the latter camp,
an agent provocateur of the OAS and, by association, of the U.S. gov-
ernment. Those criticisms have largely faded with the decades, however,
and critics today are more likely to decry Cuevas’s commercialism and
shameless self-promotion than his ideological affiliations. This chapter, in
contrast, proposes to revisit the undercurrent of tension swirling around
Cuevas’s PAU opening, for which I follow the neophyte artist as he ma-
neuvers between competing institutional cultures and aesthetics, with one
oriented toward Mexican cultural nationalism and the other toward cold
war Pan Americanism.
Cuevas is likely the prototype for the “young artist,” a recurring pro-
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 131

Figure 13. José Luis Cuevas (second from left) at the opening of his 1954 solo exhi-
bition at the Pan American Union. To his left are OAS Ambassador Luis Quintanilla
of Mexico and PAU Director of Cultural Affairs Erico Veríssimo; to his right is
Mrs. Quintanilla. Photograph courtesy Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación
“Octavio Paz,” Museo José Luis Cuevas. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

tagonist of Gómez Sicre’s critical writings and curatorial projects, who

appears as an agent of social transformation in Latin American societies.
Gómez Sicre’s considerable efforts to produce a flesh-and-blood embodi-
ment of this imago in the largely self-taught Cuevas cannot be under-
estimated. In the early years of their relationship, Gómez Sicre served
as an intellectual mentor, career advisor, accountant, publicist, archivist,
confidant, and matchmaker to his protégé. As Cuevas grew up and in-
creasingly asserted his autonomy instead of seeking affirmation from
Gómez Sicre, the dynamic of their relationship began to change; there
were passionate break-ups and reconciliations over Cuevas’s “bourgeois”
marriage and family life, his self-presentation in the media, his experi-
mentation with new aesthetic modalities, and his spontaneous responses
to events in Mexico. Cuevas and Gómez Sicre maintained a friendship
Figure 14. José Luis Cuevas (Mexico, b. 1934), Madman, 1954. Brush and ink,
25 1/4 x 18 3/8 inches (64.1 x 46.6 cm). Inter-American Fund (265.1954). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City. Digital image copyright The Museum of
Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Figure 15. José Luis Cuevas (Mexico, b. 1934), Madwoman, 1954. Brush and ink,
25 1/8 x 19 1/2 inches (63.8 x 48.5 cm). Inter-American Fund (266.1954). The
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City. Digital image copyright The Museum of
Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
134 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

until Gómez Sicre’s death, but the period of their closest professional col-
laboration spans the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter fo-
cuses on several important moments from that period in order to explore
how Cuevas’s panamerican success assumed different forms in the U.S.
and Mexican contexts. Cuevas’s divergent profile in each country owes
something to his keen awareness of their respective cultural institutions
and policies. Cuevas skillfully negotiated the perils of Pan Americanism
and nationalism through his self-conscious presentation in the media and
his canny use of allegory and citation, although, I argue, the Pan Ameri-
can Cuevas and the national Cuevas often seemed to address different
publics and issues. In the United States, Cuevas was portrayed as an
angst-ridden visionary of the postwar era, while in Mexico he was a con-
summate parodist and staunch critic of the national political and artistic
culture. In this binational dynamic, Cuba also played a significant role.
Gómez Sicre’s negative personal experience with David Alfaro Siqueiros
in Havana influenced his interactions with other Mexican artists, and
Cuevas’s own Cuban heritage likewise helped to cement his friendship
with Gómez Sicre. As Cuba became a focus of the cold war in the Ameri-
cas during the 1960s, the PAU cultural programs became increasingly
concerned with countering Latin American intellectuals’ support for the
Cuban Revolution. Cuevas’s early vocal support for the Cuban Revolu-
tion drove another wedge into his friendship with Gómez Sicre, but it
also obliged Cuevas to come to terms with the Mexican state—that is,
to reconcile his bold statements in favor of Cuba with his comparative
quietism regarding Mexico’s domestic policies of anticommunism.
Cuevas’s art has been the subject of perceptive and thorough scholarly
study,9 but his role as a writer and public intellectual merit further atten-
tion, for they illuminate the larger question of how Latin American artists
attempted to resolve the concepts of an autonomous national or local
culture with a burgeoning postwar international art market, increasingly
concentrated in the United States. Cuevas’s celebrity generated volumes
of spirited polemics penned by him and his detractors; the artist’s writ-
ings arguably became as influential as his art among American publics.
But some of Cuevas’s most well-known and provocative early essays, as
revealed in correspondence recently made available to researchers, were
written in close collaboration with Gómez Sicre, making Cuevas’s writ-
ing itself a site of authorial and institutional negotiation, and at times,
drawing attention to contrasts between the visual and verbal registers of
Cuevas’s work. Cuevas’s extensive travel along Gómez Sicre’s hemispheric
art circuit in the early years of his career led to an advocacy of pan–Latin
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 135

American modernist movements that Cuevas aired in the Mexican press

in an effort to reform the Mexican cultural establishment. In the 1950s
and 1960s, the writerly collaborations of Cuevas and Gómez Sicre ap-
peared as a series of polemics, especially in the progressive México en la
cultura supplement of the Mexico City daily Novedades. By the 1970s
and 1980s, when Gómez Sicre’s presence in Cuevas’s career was far less
pronounced, Cuevas’s journalistic interventions veered toward human
interest stories, serialized in regular columns for the magazine Personas
and El buho (the Sunday supplement to the major Mexico City daily
Excélsior), and later, often compiled into anthologies. These later writ-
ings stray from the art world to chronicle the movements of Cuevas’s
glamorous life—from encounters with important people to sexual affairs
and fantasies, trips, and opinions about culture and politics. But they also
return time and again to revisit and embellish the formative episodes of
his early career.10 Gómez Sicre perhaps little imagined that the rarefied
intimacy and subjectivity he so admired in Cuevas’s early drawings could
be transformed through the mass media into a confessional arena that
made Mexican audiences more attuned to Cuevas’s personal life than his
art. As an exercise in public image-making, however, Cuevas’s life writ-
ing clearly charts the transformation of the artist’s role from educator to
celebrity that accompanied the postwar shift in the Mexican art world
from muralism to easel painting.11
While this chapter raises the question of Cuevas’s agency in relation to
the institutional and critical positioning of his work, it also revisits Gómez
Sicre’s conflicted relationship to the Mexican art world. David Alfaro
Siqueiros was the only one of “los tres grandes” who lived long enough
to witness Cuevas’s career ascent; initially, Siqueiros was an explicit tar-
get of Cuevas’s invective, but by the late 1960s, and no doubt much
to Gómez Sicre’s consternation, Cuevas and Siqueiros became allies. In
the early 1950s, however, Cuevas’s Mexican citizenship provided Gómez
Sicre with a “legitimate” point of entry for advancing his curatorial and
aesthetic objectives in the birthplace of muralism. Intimate, informal, and
small in scale, the drawings that Cuevas debuted at the PAU implicitly re-
jected the Mexican school’s emphasis on collective subjectivity forged in
relation to narratives of national myth and history. As Cuevas matured,
the human body, including his own, in states of extremity—death, ill-
ness, madness, decay, sexual arousal, or deformity—and rendered in a
nearly monochromatic palate through delicate, hesitant lines punctuated
by occasional explosions of ink, would come to be the artist’s signa-
ture aesthetic. Unlike the muralists, Cuevas was utterly disinterested in
136 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

indigeneity or cultural identity, and his fascination for marginality, when

tied to Mexican referents, unflinchingly drew attention to unattractive
aspects of the nation.
Even with Cuevas’s success to his credit, Mexico posed tremendous
challenges for Gómez Sicre’s arts programs. In spite of the substantial
cultural ties that developed between Mexico and the United States during
the Good Neighbor period, Mexico had a long-standing tradition of anti-
imperialism dating from the revolution (1910–1920). Many Mexican
intellectuals perceived the PAU’s offer of hemispheric citizenship as an
either/or proposition, one that pitted a U.S.-identified political and eco-
nomic agenda against national sovereignty, and such options appeared
even starker after Mexico’s opposition to U.S. intervention in Guatemala.
By the time Cuevas held his PAU exhibition, muralism was already in
decline, yet it still held a venerable status within the national culture. The
art historian Mary Coffey has observed that murals had been regarded
as a paramount “civilizing” force by Mexican cultural and educational
policymakers in the decades following the revolution.12 Consequently,
Mexican visual artists became powerful public intellectuals from the
1920s on, with their moral and educational weight magnified by the fact
of widespread illiteracy.13 Murals, moreover, were particularly resistant
to the free trade principles that animated Gómez Sicre’s ideas about the
development of a hemispheric art market. They received state patron-
age, formed part of the national public education program, and as site-
specific works they circulated through concepts and reproductions rather
than galleries, collectors, and museums. During the war, MoMA Director
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., had already perceived these qualities to be problem-
atic and sought to reposition muralism’s hegemony in Mexico, when he
cautioned Fernando Gamboa, the “father” of Mexican museology, that if
Mexican artists did not devote more time to easel painting, they would
find it difficult to nurture a domestic art market and cultivate local col-
lectors.14 Even as Barr’s dreams materialized in the private gallery system
that mushroomed in Mexico City following the war, murals were still
being favored with state, and increasingly, commercial commissions.15 In
1946, the fine arts division of Mexico’s Secretaría de Educación Pública
(SEP; Secretariat of Public Education) became autonomous through
the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA; National
Institute of Fine Arts), which supervised the administration of national
arts education, commissions, and competitions.16 Although INBA saw to
it that murals were widely visible in public places, by the postwar period
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 137

muralism was already in its third generation of artists and had ceased to
be aesthetically innovative.17
The cultural nationalist perspectives of the Lázaro Cárdenas admin-
istration (1934–1940) fostered muralism’s transition from its early dy-
namic period, characterized by diverse painterly approaches and uneven
critical reception, to its becoming a codified, official aesthetic. During the
Cárdenas era, the circulation of Mexican art outside of Mexico contrib-
uted to bolster images of national sovereignty following the national-
ization of foreign-owned petroleum companies in Mexico. An exchange
between Nelson A. Rockefeller and Cárdenas from 1939 illustrates this
point. Rockefeller, at the time chairman of Standard Oil’s Venezuelan
subsidiary, Creole Petroleum, traveled to Mexico to meet with Cárdenas,
ostensibly to discuss plans for the large-scale exhibition Twenty Centuries
of Mexican Art that MoMA was to mount in 1940.18 But Rockefeller’s
associates at Standard Oil were also concerned that Venezuela would
soon follow Mexico’s lead in nationalizing foreign holdings.19 Rockefeller
opened his conversation with Cárdenas on the thorny topic of oil, and
Cárdenas expressed his unwillingness to consider any accommodation
for U.S. companies to conduct refining or extraction in Mexico. But when
Rockefeller turned to the subject of the MoMA exhibition, the tenor
of their meeting grew sanguine: “[Cárdenas] was most interested in the
program and promised every assistance on the part of the Government
to facilitate matters.”20 The train of their conversation suggests that for
Cárdenas, cultural exchange buffered the more sensitive issue of eco-
nomic protectionism, for the president distinguished between two types
of patrimony: art, which he gladly circulated, and oil, which was to re-
main off limits to foreigners.
In the post–World War II era, however, Cárdenas’s articulation of cul-
tural patrimony in relation to economic sovereignty began to dissolve.
The presidential administrations of Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946)
and Miguel Alemán (1946–1952) invited foreign capital investment and
enacted labor “counterreforms” that strenuously curtailed the rights of
Mexican workers.21 The results of these measures were visible in the
government’s repressive response to a wave of strikes that took place in
the late 1950s, beginning during the Adolfo Ruiz Cortines administra-
tion (1952–1958) and culminating with the imprisonment of thousands
of members of the railroad workers union movement in 1959 under the
newly inaugurated President Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964).22 Mean-
while, foreign policy and cultural policy remained arenas where assertive
138 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

anti-imperialist and cultural nationalist perspectives still circulated, ef-

fectively deflecting attention away from domestic policies of anticommu-
nism and developmentalism. This breach between domestic and foreign
policies was perhaps most pronounced during the administration of López
Mateos (1958–1964), who recognized Cuba and implemented social wel-
fare programs and yet also imprisoned the Communist muralist Siqueiros
for the crime of “social dissolution” in response to the artist’s support
for the imprisoned railroad workers, all the while maintaining relatively
good diplomatic relations with the United States.23 Because the PAU arts
programs touched on the special status accorded to Mexican cultural and
foreign policies, Gómez Sicre had his work cut out for him as he sought
to establish a PAU presence in the Mexican art world, for this entailed re-
configuring the public profile of the artist; challenging the revered status
of committed art; and recasting visual art as a commercial rather than a
state-sponsored enterprise.
A common feature of the existing criticism about Cuevas’s work, re-
gardless of methodological or ideological perspective, is its preoccupation
with the authenticity of the artist’s Mexican identity. Cuevas’s petulance
toward the Mexican school, epitomized in his repeated attacks on mu-
ralism, have even provoked some critics to position him symbolically
outside of the Mexican nation. Ida Rodríguez Prampolini is not alone in
questioning whether Cuevas’s drawings could have even been inspired by
Mexican realities.24 Cuevas’s opposition to postrevolutionary Mexican
nationalism and state-supported arts led many critics to align him with
a loosely configured tradition of Mexican avant-garde artists, beginning
with Rufino Tamayo, whom Octavio Paz retroactively identified as emis-
saries of “La Ruptura” (The Rupture).25 While Cuevas’s early supporters
praised his drawing for its universality and transcendence, his detractors
criticized it for being ensimismado (self-absorbed) and extranjerizante
(foreign).26 These poles of debate can be loosely associated with the art-
ist’s U.S. and Mexican profiles outlined above; however, the dichotomy
is further complicated by the fact that contemporary debates within the
Mexican intellectual sector also revolved around “universalist” and “na-
tionalist” positions, albeit with a different ideological valence than that
associated with the OAS. Cuevas belonged to a generation of postwar
Mexico City–based intellectuals who, as Deborah Cohn has argued,
crafted a fusion of internationalism, mexicanidad, and left-inflected
pan–Latin Americanism that became hegemonic in the Mexican cul-
tural arena from the late 1940s to the late 1960s by defining itself in
opposition to the cultural nationalism that had prevailed from the post-
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 139

revolutionary decade of the 1920s through the Cárdenas administration.

As a younger member of this generation, Cuevas’s cosmopolitanism was
additionally infused with elements of the 1960s global counterculture
and youth movements. The publication of Octavio Paz’s landmark essay
collection El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) in 1950,
according to Cohn, marked the consecration of the cosmopolitanist dis-
course on Mexican identity and culture.27 For the emergent intelligentsia
loosely coalescing around El laberinto’s easy intercalation of Western and
autochthonous cultural elements, she clarifies, “cosmopolitanism was
never meant as a means of eluding Mexico and its problems,” but rather
it was viewed as a path for Mexico to assume its place as a peer among
nations in the postwar international community.28 On matters of literary
and artistic taste, nevertheless, Mexican cosmopolitans shared Gómez
Sicre’s predilection for experimental modernist aesthetics over didactic or
documentary realism, a mode perceived by both parties to be outmoded
and mannerist.29 Keeping in mind these points of formal convergence and
ideological divergence throughout this chapter, I underscore Cuevas’s flu-
ency in the languages of cold war universalism at the PAU and the urban
cosmopolitanism of his Mexican coterie in order to highlight the way in
which the artist’s distinct profiles expose increasing tensions between two
cold war area designations: the “third world” that fractures the Americas
along a North–South axis, and the united “Western Hemisphere” envi-
sioned by the OAS security framework.30

Gómez Sicre, Cuevas, and Kafka

Although José Luis Cuevas’s youthful exuberance and autodidacticism

at first suggest an unlikely embodiment of Gómez Sicre’s critical values,
Gómez Sicre seemed immediately to grasp the young draftsman’s poten-
tial to serve as an emblem of “el nuevo arte nuestro” (our new art)31 in
Latin America, while Cuevas’s thematic concerns with the human condi-
tion promised marketability in the United States and Europe—in other
words, Cuevas was “exportable.” The “internationalism” of the postwar
era presented a double-bind for Latin American artists, for often they
could not gain entrée to the art market without deracinating their work
and relocating to Europe or the United States.32 Evidently, Cuevas struck
the right chord between assimilation and distinction with his metropoli-
tan critics. In the wake of the 1954 PAU exhibition, his drawings and
lithographs evoked comparisons to classical and contemporary European
masters, especially figures such as Goya, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, Grosz,
140 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

and Picasso; these assessments identified the importance of tradition,

technique, and mastery for the artist’s aesthetic project. At the same time,
Cuevas’s work drew enough associations with Mexican traditional and
popular arts—from Nayarit sculpture to Oaxacan candy skulls and the
broadsides of José Guadalupe Posada—so as not to be labeled derivative.
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Cuevas’s supporters praised his
work for transcending parochial Mexican nationalism and the bipolar
world order; they held up Cuevas’s expressive figuration as a golden mean
between what they characterized as the antiseptic, mannerist abstraction
favored in the United States and the Zhdanovite socialist realism associ-
ated with the Soviet Union.
The mediating figure of the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco is
crucial in positioning Cuevas’s aesthetic as one of feliz mestizaje (happy
mestizaje) between Europe and the Americas and between Moscow and
Washington, D.C.33 In addition to Gómez Sicre making this generational
connection, one of the artist’s first Mexican collectors, Dr. Alvar Carrillo
Gil, along with the French critic Jean Cassou compared Cuevas’s expres-
sive techniques to those of Orozco.34 Cuevas had a conflicted relationship
to the muralists, but his satirical impulse and unflinching gaze at the seamy
side of life, conveyed through grotesquerie and exaggeration, shared affini-
ties with Orozco, even though the latter was more explicit than Cuevas in
condemning the abuse of power.35 In any case, the generational affiliation
served Cuevas well; in 1960 the U.S. critic Selden Rodman dubbed Cuevas
“Orozco’s heir” in his influential book The Insiders, which helped to con-
secrate Cuevas’s reputation in the United States and Mexico.36 Rodman’s
tribute to a new generation of figurative artists—the “Insiders” of the
book’s title—explicitly attacked both abstract expressionism and socialist
realism from the anti-Stalinist left while promoting humanism and expres-
sive figuration as ethically appropriate modes of artistic production in an
era threatened by nuclear apocalypse. Rodman’s fulsome praise for the
immediacy of drawing and the intensity of black-and-white composition
seems to be directly inspired by his encounter with Cuevas’s work.37
Cuevas’s critical reputation was further bolstered by the Argentine-
Colombian critic Marta Traba, who began to write favorably about the
artist in 1960 after viewing some examples of Cuevas’s work at José
Gómez Sicre’s home; like Gómez Sicre, Traba eventually became one of
Cuevas’s most cherished friends.38 Her 1965 study Los cuatro monstruos
cardinales (The Four Cardinal Monsters) also advocated expressive fig-
uration as a third way, but unlike Rodman, who ascribed a messianic
and redemptive mission to this aesthetic, Traba viewed Cuevas as an un-
witting medium, channeling collective horror through his own personal
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 141

solitude.39 These critics’ respective inclusion of Cuevas among a selection

of U.S. and European artists suggests an already existing international
arts community that is only subtly contradicted by the attention that
each devotes to Cuevas’s special status as a Mexican artist. Traba, for
example, maintains that she is blind to distinctions of origin, “Es una
simple casualidad que Dubuffet sea francés, Bacon inglés, o Cuevas mexi-
cano” (It is a mere coincidence that Dubuffet is French, Bacon English,
and Cuevas Mexican),40 but she subsequently undercuts this statement
in her rather abrupt claim that Cuevas’s figuration is a means to redress
Latin American (aesthetic) underdevelopment: “Pero en las provincias
que son nuestros países, en el continente con complejo de provincia que
es América, el proceso está aun lejos de llevarse a cabo” (But in the prov-
inces that are our countries, in the continent with a provincial complex
that is America, this process is still far from complete).41 Rodman, on
the other hand, explicitly portrays Cuevas as a courageous realist in his
national context, poised at the crossroads of fading revolutionary ideals
and a new wave of U.S. imperialist domination: “If Mexico manages to
stand up against the tidal wave of American economic-cultural penetra-
tion which presently threatens her very identity, Cuevas’ art could pro-
vide the natural bridge between the Mexico of Orozco and the Mexico
of a future that accepts its own image.”42 As these competing claims
suggest, critical debates about Cuevas’s national identity often implicitly
turn on the artist’s relationship to realism and his ethical-political stance
toward his subjects. Did Cuevas take Orozco’s expressionism to an ex-
treme that ultimately transcended the muralists’ concern with particular
social and historical processes, as Traba maintains, or is the informal-
ity and grittiness of Cuevas’s work a continuation of muralism by other
means, as Rodman asserts? Although some Mexican critics went so far as
to describe Cuevas as an “abstractionist” in spite of his consistent use of
figuration,43 I maintain that Cuevas’s early work is deeply engaged with
representing and responding to his Mexican context. Through his art and
his writings Cuevas did, however, dramatically reconceptualize the ethical
function and consumption of art in a way that challenged the civilizing
mission that had been ascribed to Mexican muralism in the postrevolu-
tionary period. I explore these issues throughout this chapter, beginning
with Cuevas’s accounts of his early career and influences.
Cuevas’s formation as an artist, starting with his quasi-mythical birth
above the paper factory where his grandfather worked as a manager, be-
came a recurring theme in Cuevas criticism and the artist’s own auto-
biographical writings. For the most part, Cuevas was self-taught. He had
drawn since early childhood, developing his skills during a life-threatening
142 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

bout of rheumatic fever at the age of ten, which put an end to his oc-
casional lessons at Mexico City’s famous art school La Esmeralda. In his
teens, he resumed art lessons briefly under the direction of Lola Cueto at
Mexico City College, an English-language institution, where in the 1950s
a student population of Mexican and U.S. students imbibed a hearty diet
of existentialist philosophy, Beat poetry, and Latin American avant-garde
literature.44 Cuevas’s older brother was a psychiatrist in training at La
Castañeda, a public mental institution in the Mixcoac district of Mexico
City, and as an adolescent Cuevas would accompany his brother to work,
where he would make sketches of the patients as his brother performed
his rounds. Cuevas’s drawings from the early 1950s demonstrate a fas-
cination with Mexico City’s lumpen—its prostitutes, beggars, criminals,
disabled, and mentally ill—whom he first observed from the window of
his family apartment as a child.45
Cuevas debuted his work in 1948 through a small-scale exhibition
at which he sold nothing. His affiliation with the Galería Prisse, where
he exhibited in 1953, put him in contact with a group of experimental
artists, many of them expatriates, including Vlady, José Bartolí, Enrique
Echeverría, and Alberto Gironella, but it was the PAU exhibition that
provided his career breakthrough.46 Felipe Orlando, a Cuban painter re-
siding in Mexico, introduced Cuevas to Gómez Sicre in 1954, which in
turn led to the invitation to exhibit at the PAU.47 Both Gómez Sicre and
Cuevas shared Catalán-Cuban ancestry, and this connection helped to
forge their friendship.48 Cuevas’s mother’s family was Cuban by way of
Mérida, Yucatán, and it appears that for his part, Gómez Sicre brought
memories of his own experiences in Cuba to bear on his interactions with
Cuevas and the Mexican arts establishment. Cuevas’s flair for the sordid
bore a resemblance to that of Gómez Sicre’s old friend Fidelio Ponce de
León, a tubercular, “maudit” painter who cast a jaundiced eye toward the
exuberant neobaroque celebrated by the Grupo Orígenes, Gómez Sicre’s
former intellectual antagonists.49 Like Gómez Sicre, Cuevas also began
as an outsider to the elite art world. Cuevas came from a relatively small
Mexican middle class that was striving for self-definition in an age of ac-
celerated developmentalism; his willingness to hold up a cracked mirror
to the nascent Mexican “economic miracle,” brash irreverence toward the
establishment, and youthful ambition no doubt read as a sort of retribu-
tive narrative to Gómez Sicre.
The PAU exhibition consecrated Cuevas’s self-fashioning as an “alien-
ated visionary” in international press coverage, a persona that he would
selectively display in publicity through the ensuing decades. Clad in an
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 143

overcoat, Cuevas gazed provocatively from photo essays on the pages

of Cosmopolitan and Life en español in which he was shown riding the
subway and leaning out of doorways on the streets of New York. This
photogenic persona was tutored by Gómez Sicre and cued to referents
in Anglo-European aesthetic modernism, existentialist philosophy, and
the Holocaust (Figure 16).50 Already a budding polemicist, Cuevas’s art
became more intimately tied to literature after the PAU exhibition; not
only did he begin to combine literary and visual elements in his com-
positions but he started to write extensively about his influences. The
Time coverage of the PAU exhibition captures Cuevas as a coy poseur
and “enfant terrible,” noting that “he found [Washington, D.C.] too or-
derly and antiseptic for inspiration. But Cuevas managed to escape [the
exhibition], spent some time at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the mentally
ill, sketching.”51 He went to the hospital in search of another modern-
ist hero, Ezra Pound, who was interned there at the time. Cuevas later
recounted bemusedly how much he enjoyed shocking his U.S. readers
through the Time piece, in which he confessed to having discovered his
artistic vocation while sketching a disemboweled rabbit.52
The five years following the PAU exhibition witnessed Cuevas’s me-
teoric rise in the art worlds of Europe and the Americas, culminating
in his winning first prize for drawing at the Fifth São Paulo Bienal in
1959. While the dealer Phillip Bruno oversaw Cuevas’s gallery represen-
tation in New York and Paris, José Gómez Sicre carefully orchestrated
Cuevas’s ambitious grand tour of Latin American capitals.53 During the
years 1958–1959, Cuevas exhibited and lectured in Havana, Caracas,
Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Montevideo, and São Paulo, and
through his travels he became acquainted with the work of other artists
who had PAU connections, including Fernando de Szyszlo (Peru), Alejandro
Otero (Venezuela), Alejandro Obregón (Colombia), and Armando Morales
(Nicaragua). In his public lectures, Cuevas advocated expressive figuration
as an alternative to abstract expressionism, while he denounced Euro-
centrism and unilateralism on the part of Latin American arts institu-
tions. Ever the iconoclast, he also took the opportunity to deprecate the
work of respected social realist and indigenist painters such as Siqueiros,
José Sabogal (Peru), and Osvaldo Guayasamín (Ecuador), which led to
heated exchanges in Lima and Caracas.54
During this five-year interval in which Cuevas was building his Latin
American profile, the next collaborative project between Cuevas and
Gómez Sicre also gestated. The idea for the project, an artist’s book based
on the writings of Franz Kafka, actually stemmed from the 1954 PAU
144 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

Figure 16. José Luis Cuevas and José Gómez Sicre by Georges Braque’s Still Life:
Le Jour (1929), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1957. Photograph
courtesy Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio Paz,” Museo José Luis
Cuevas. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

exhibition. As Cuevas boarded the train in Washington, D.C., bound for

New York following the exhibition’s opening events, Gómez Sicre handed
to Cuevas copies of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial.55
Gómez Sicre had probably become acquainted with psychoanalytical in-
terpretations of Kafka’s work through the essays of Emilio Westphalen,
editor of the Peruvian arts and culture journal Las moradas, which Gómez
Sicre read and recommended to visitors at the Pan American Union.56 For
Cuevas’s part, Kafka’s fiction provided him with a lens through which to
interpret la miseria, the urban poverty of Mexico City that had captivated
his attention since his early youth. Three months after the PAU opening,
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 145

Cuevas wrote to Gómez Sicre that he was already devouring Kafka’s

The Castle.57 The fruit of this encounter between artist and author, The
Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas: An Unsettling Flight to the Fantasy World
of Franz Kafka by the Mexican Artist José Luis Cuevas, was published
in 1959 as a bilingual limited-edition artist’s book by Falcon Press in
Philadelphia, and it debuts a different Cuevas than the one featured in
the 1954 exhibition. As Shifra Goldman observes:
It was in the era following Cuevas’ Pan American Union show that
he began to withdraw from apunte del natural (drawings from life)
and turn increasingly to his imagination, literature, and art for artistic
inspiration. More and more his work featured monsters, grotesques,
freaks, and aberrations—a trend that apparently began with his re-
sponse to Kafka.58

Cuevas executed the artwork for The Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas dur-
ing his two-month residency at the Philadelphia Museum College of
Art in winter 1957–1958. The book’s twenty-four folio pages juxtapose
Cuevas’s drawings to brief excerpts from Kafka’s Amerika and The Trial,
Kafka’s personal letters, and select interpretations of Kafka’s work by the
psychotherapist Rollo May and Kafka’s biographer Max Brod. Rather
than follow Kafka’s narratives closely, Cuevas’s illustrations, such as
Self-Portrait during a Reading of Kafka, reflect the artist’s response to
Kafka’s writing, including the artist’s personal identification with Gregor
Samsa, protagonist of “The Metamorphosis.” Other drawings based on
this story feature monsters composed of insectoid, humanoid, and avian
body parts, inspired in part by Cuevas’s visit to the Smithsonian’s ento-
mology collection. Still other drawings, illustrative of The Trial, depict
sardonic, enshrouded judge figures seated on thrones (Figures 17–18).
Goldman notes that Cuevas’s emphasis on dreaded authority figures, as
in his Studies of Kafka and His Father, resonates with the artist’s troubled
relationship to his own father.59
Gómez Sicre’s introduction to The Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas relates
the artist to the “Czech visionary” through their shared psychic primi-
tivism and archetypal characters:
Both artists . . . satirize and give vent to scorn; both suffer from in-
adaptability to society; both feel crushed by the burden of a humanity
which to them is repulsive. The figures of Cuevas’ drawings, which,
though almost always based on tangible reality, never seek to present
individual characterizations, [and] were already the equivalent of man-
kind as depicted in Kafka’s novels—gross, brutal, subhuman.60
146 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

Like Selden Rodman’s “Insider,” Gómez Sicre’s Kafka is a prophet of the

cold war, that “loneliness, emptiness, and anxiety which would engulf
us in the twentieth century.”61 The selection of texts in The Worlds
of Kafka and Cuevas stresses the human condition and psychoanalytical
interpretations of Kafka’s life and work over the author’s countervailing
social criticism, as well as Cuevas’s personal association of Kafka’s work
with Mexico City.62 In years following, Gómez Sicre continued to pro-
vide similar inspirational material to Cuevas during the latter’s dry spells.
Cuevas recalls, for example, that in 1971 Gómez Sicre sent him photo-
graphs of the Dachau concentration camp and Freud’s Vienna office in
the hope that they would ignite the artist’s creativity, but they did not do
the trick.63
Cuevas’s long-standing fascination with Kafka, commencing with this
project, however, gently resists Gómez Sicre’s universalist framing in favor
of a more specific allegorical interpretation. Cuevas’s mass ingestion of
the emerging canon of Anglo-European high modernism was no doubt a
gambit for placement in the international art market. But it also opened
the door to a polysemic game of references, for in the Mexican con-
text Cuevas’s grotesque renditions of canonical European works could
also be interpreted through the lens of “critical appropriation” prevalent
in many aspects of Latin American expressive culture.64 Just as Sander
Gilman argues that Kafka’s European Jewish readers possessed a cultural
formation that enabled them to perceive a darkly humorous retelling of
the Dreyfus Affair in The Trial, so Cuevas’s prolonged engagement with
Kafka tied the author’s allegorical narratives to a set of Mexican ref-
erents that described his own biography and his position with respect
to cultural nationalism.65 The social Kafka reemerged in Mexico City,
where Cuevas and the Boom author Carlos Fuentes transculturated The
Trial’s boundless, arbitrary bureaucracy through their own derogatory
nickname for Mexico, “Kafkahuamilpa,” which was coined precisely
at a time when the Gustavo Díaz Ordaz administration (1964–1970)
was reviving cultural nationalism as an official discourse.66 Fuentes’s
interpretation of Cuevas’s work, in fact, stresses the artist’s “ex-centric”
reconfiguration of European models and affinities with “Jewish humor”
in a manner suggestive of Kafka’s own oblique ethnic and linguistic posi-
tion with respect to canonical European literature.67 Gómez Sicre’s ap-
propriation of Jewishness as a general code for postwar alienation was
likewise tempered by Cuevas’s emerging consciousness of his Sephardic
heritage on his father’s side, as Cuevas developed connections to promi-
nent Ashkenazim in the Mexican cultural sector and expressed support
Figure 17. José Luis Cuevas (Mexico, b. 1934), detail from The Worlds of Kafka
and Cuevas: An Unsettling Flight to the Fantasy World of Franz Kafka by the
Mexican Artist José Luis Cuevas, 1959. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.
Figure 18. José Luis Cuevas (Mexico, b. 1934), The Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas:
An Unsettling Flight to the Fantasy World of Franz Kafka by the Mexican Artist
José Luis Cuevas, 1959. Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
SOMAAP, Mexico City.
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 149

for Israel in the mid-1960s.68 Later in this chapter, I return to discuss how
diaspora served as Cuevas’s gateway to a form of cultural politics that
permitted him to be politically active in Mexico while claiming a set of
affinities beyond the nation.

Meanwhile, Behind the Cactus Curtain . . .

The image of Cuevas as an alienated, solitary artist roaming the streets of

New York seems incongruous in Mexico City, where he rapidly became
visible among the capital’s beautiful people and identified with la Zona
Rosa, the upscale commercial district that he claims to have named.69
Cuevas was almost always affiliated with some arts group, though his com-
mitments were sometimes fleeting and the break-ups sometimes rancor-
ous, as in the case of his relationship to the socially progressive figurative
artists of Nueva Presencia (New Presence).70 Cuevas moved in and out
of various artistic circles from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, includ-
ing those associated with Galería Prisse, Galería Proteo, Galería Souza,
Los Interioristas (precursors to Nueva Presencia), and Los Hartos (The
Fed-Up). Less fractious were his inter-arts collaborations, from perfor-
mances and publications with the multidisciplinary hipster intellectuals
known as La Mafia to productions with actors and directors associated
with experimental film and theater, such as Alfonso Arau and Alejandro
Jodorovsky.71 Though they differed in significant respects, these figures
shared a common orientation broadly aimed at introducing new aesthetic
currents and creating alternative cultural venues around nightclubs, the-
aters, galleries, magazines, and commercial districts. As Jean Franco has
observed, Cuevas participated in a broad generational campaign waged
against exclusionary cultural policies; those who rebelled were “not for
‘accessibility’ but rather for access.”72
In spite of this wave of antiestablishment cultural activity, the Mexican
press frequently portrayed Cuevas as a “títere del imperialismo” (puppet
of imperialism), while Siqueiros accused Gómez Sicre of “destrozando al
movimiento pictórico mexicano” (destroying the Mexican pictorial move-
ment). In addition, Gómez Sicre and Cuevas were rumored to be lov-
ers.73 Cuevas’s connection to Gómez Sicre and the PAU suggested another
manifestation of U.S. cultural imperialism that threatened the prestige
of Mexican muralism and its attendant values of heroic masculinity and
national sovereignty. Meanwhile, by the late 1950s, Gómez Sicre and the
INBA director Celestino Gorostiza were exchanging their own volley of
insults through the U.S. and Mexican press; Gómez Sicre alleged that his
150 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

INBA counterpart was acting on a communist agenda devised in collu-

sion with Siqueiros and other Mexican artists.74 The overlapping sexual,
ideological, and geopolitical threats posed by Gómez Sicre in Mexico
converge in a caricature by Alberto Beltrán published in March 1960 in
the Mexico City newspaper Excélsior, in which Gómez Sicre appears as a
feminized liberty figure before the U.S. Capitol building, cradling a fetal
Cuevas in the train of his flowing gown. With one gesture, Gómez Sicre
banishes the old regime (including a revolutionary soldier rendered in
social realist fashion) as he ushers in the new (Figure 19).75 In addition to
its homophobic portrayal of Gómez Sicre, Beltrán’s cartoon aptly sum-
marizes Cuevas’s conflicted reputation in Mexico as either a naïve victim
or a minion of Washington, D.C.; it also foreshadows future controver-
sies surrounding the artist’s suspect national allegiance.76
As Cuevas received accolades abroad, he protested that his success
went largely unrecognized in his native country. The press paid relatively
little attention to his 1959 prize at the São Paolo Bienal, which was fur-
ther undermined by an INBA investigation regarding the PAU financing

Figure 19. Caricature of José Gómez Sicre and José Luis Cuevas by the cartoonist
Alberto Beltrán for S. [Sergei] Mozhniagun, “La estética viciosa del abstraccio-
nismo” (The Vicious Aesthetic of Abstractionism), Excélsior, sección dominical,
Sunday, March 27, 1960. Courtesy of Periódico Excélsior S.A. de C.V.
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 151

of Cuevas’s travel to the event.77 Powerful leftist intellectuals in Mexico

opposed Cuevas, such as the formidable art critic Raquel Tibol, al-
though Cuevas did gain admirers among an emerging group of Mexico
City–based journalists who coalesced around the left cosmopolitanist
contingent described previously. This group included the Jewish-Spanish
exile Margarita Nelken, who wrote for the major daily Excélsior; Alaíde
Foppa, an antifascist Guatemalan writer and critic, also exiled in Mexico;
and Fernando Benítez, director of México en la cultura, the Sunday sup-
plement of the Mexico City daily Novedades, to which Cuevas contrib-
uted.78 From the late 1950s through the 1960s Cuevas assiduously de-
fended himself from his detractors through the publication of polemical
“open letters” in the press in which he insisted on his ideological inde-
pendence and protested his exclusion from the national arts establish-
ment. As Cuevas embarked on his grand tour of Latin America in the late
1950s, he forwarded dispatches to the Mexican press about the art scenes
of cities such as Caracas, Santiago, Lima, and Buenos Aires. Cuevas’s
growing international profile facilitated his cultivation of a speaking po-
sition uncorrupted by state clientelism, a purity by virtue of exclusion,
as it were.
We now know that this speaking position was at the very least a co-
production between Gómez Sicre and Cuevas. In a letter to Gómez Sicre
that begins with the line “Rompe esta carta!” (Destroy this letter!), Cuevas
recounts his first conversation with editor Fernando Benítez regarding the
possibility of Cuevas contributing a monthly article for México en la
cultura:
Yesterday I spoke with Benítez and he asked me to collaborate
monthly on his newspaper. This is dangerous, since if I write, one
would be alerted somewhat to a duality of styles. They’d pay me
something (that is, they’d pay you). He told me that a first article
about my travel experiences would be interesting. This is an oppor-
tunity to speak about talented American artists, and at the same time
to take a few whacks at the Mexican painters. He says he likes “my”
deep sense of humor and he would like me to maintain that in all of
“my” writings. It [the article] could narrate my experiences in Caracas,
Lima, etc., which you know as [well as] I. This article doesn’t have to
be extensive (three pages or more). It would have to be turned in next
Wednesday, since this Sunday they’re announcing my participation.
Could you pull something together this Sunday? I repeat, something
brief. If it’s not possible, since I’m not aware of your state of mind or
your commitments, I’d appreciate it if you would tell me immediately
152 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

so I can write it myself. As a second article, I could send the letter to

Fernando Gamboa that I would illustrate with drawings. Could you
send that to me? [ . . . ]
(The article will be written in first person, and still with the author
as the protagonist of the drama . . . or the farce. You could announce
my return as a valiant act in defiance of the threats “of a handful of
people.” You could say [I returned] without the pistols with which
Diego [Rivera] threatened the people for whom he painted, and
without the pistols [paint guns] with which Siqueiros assassinates
his paintings.)79

Cuevas’s informal proposal established the parameters of what subse-

quent letters to Gómez Sicre would refer to as el estilo (the style), a ghost-
writing relationship that appears to have continued through at least the
late 1960s, though it was most consistently employed from the late 1950s
through the early 1960s.80 Cuevas would provide an outline or a crib
sheet to Gómez Sicre, even feeding him one-liners, as he does in the letter
cited above, and offering to provide illustrations for the published work.
Gómez Sicre in turn churned out sassy, irreverent first-person narratives
in a “voice” that came to be recognized as Cuevas’s. Although it is clear
from this excerpt that Cuevas regards Gómez Sicre to be the principal
author of these pieces, it is also obvious that Cuevas was not a passive
party in the composition process. Through the years, in fact, the obsequi-
ous tone of Cuevas’s initial request to Gómez Sicre gives way to a more
businesslike delegation of assignments.
Cuevas’s concern that Benítez would detect a duality of styles if Cuevas
were to write for México en la cultura, and his references to Gómez Sicre’s
previous success with humor and first-person narration, raises questions
about the authorship of perhaps the most famous of Cuevas’s “open let-
ters,” which had appeared in Novedades earlier that year under the head-
line “Cuevas: El niño terrible vs. los monstruos sagrados” (Cuevas: The
Enfant Terrible vs. the Sacred Monsters). This letter was composed while
the artist was in New York following his Philadelphia residency, a period
during which he was in close personal contact with Gómez Sicre. The
essay employs the memorable phrase “la cortina de nopal” (the Cactus
Curtain) to develop an extended analogy between Soviet socialist realism
and Mexican muralism.81 The following year a translation titled “The
Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity in Mexican Art” ap-
peared in the United States in an issue of the Evergreen Review dedicated
to Mexican culture; both versions of the letter circulated widely in the
United States and Mexico.82 Though the letter’s critique of muralism was
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 153

certainly not original by the late 1950s, “The Cactus Curtain” exceeded
common bounds of decorum in terms of its irreverence and thinly veiled
references to prominent Mexican artists and officials. After a brief first-
person introduction, the piece leaps into satirical allegory, as the narrator
introduces the reader to a working-class boy named Juan, whose par-
ents fail to appreciate the monumental portraits of their noble ancestors
displayed prominently in murals about town and are instead moved by
movie stars, radio soap operas, popular singing idols, and other mass-
cultural icons. (Recalling Gómez Sicre’s own class background, vernacu-
lar tastes, and repugnance at Cuba’s stagnant official culture, one can
easily imagine this to be a translation of his own youthful experiences.)
Juan displays artistic inclinations at an early age, and he enters the state
art school where he learns to draw hackneyed social-realist themes that
include
simplified figures—smooth, undulant, curvilinear, with large hands and
feet. . . . The formula works equally well for portraying a man with a
bandanna, an Indian woman selling flowers in the market, a worker in
the oil fields, or one of those proletarian mother-and-child scenes. 83

Juan experiences an epiphany one day when by chance he comes across

some foreign art books and is moved by the powerful work being pro-
duced outside of Mexico. But in order to gain the protection of the na-
tional arts institutions, he suppresses his decadent foreign drawings and
declares himself to be a member of the “Mexican school” on a question-
naire at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. In its Orwellian conclusion,
Juan becomes thoroughly incorporated into the state arts establishment.
At first he believes that he can sell derivative work to tourists while pur-
suing his own agenda, but instead he ends up wealthy and brainwashed,
spouting slogans such as, “El tequila es la mejor bebida del mundo y que
‘Como México no hay dos’ y que el resto del mundo debiera alimentarse
de enchiladas” (Tequila is the best drink in the whole world. There is no
country like Mexico. The rest of the universe ought to eat enchiladas).”84
In the United States, Cuevas’s analogy between Mexico and the Soviet
Union lent this essay to a broad cold war interpretation that extended
beyond aesthetic questions; its author appeared to be a courageous dis-
sident oppressed by a cloaked communist bureaucracy. The 1958 New
International Year Book contains an entry about Cuevas, probably
penned by Gómez Sicre, which describes the artist as having “contributed
several long articles to newspapers, attacking the excessive nationalism
which serves as camouflage in Mexican art for Communist influences and
154 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

as a justification for poor artistic quality”85 “The Cactus Curtain,” with

its focus on rescuing Mexico’s young artists through exposure to non-
Mexican cultural forms, was not only a fitting endorsement of Gómez
Sicre’s arts programs but also consistent with Eisenhower-era perspectives
on containment, which stressed psychological warfare and cultural infil-
tration as a means of providing second- and third-world intellectuals ac-
cess to texts that they could not readily obtain in their native countries.86
An attentive reading of “The Cactus Curtain” alongside Cuevas’s other
projects from this period, however, makes the thrust of the letter’s critique
appear a bit more ambiguous in the Mexican context, given the diver-
gence among foreign, domestic, and cultural policies outlined at the be-
ginning of this chapter. Here, the target of Cuevas’s satire revolves more
broadly around totalitarianism rather than communism. While working
on the Kafka book in Philadelphia, Cuevas was also busy producing a
series of drawings on canvas titled Los funerales de un dictador (The
Funerals of a Dictator, 1958). Often cited as evidence of the artist’s po-
litical commitment, it was this series in part that earned Cuevas the prize
at the São Paulo Bienal. The title does not pertain to any recent event
(though Cuevas invited associations with the Venezuelan dictator Marcos
Pérez Jiménez and also with Spain’s Francisco Franco) but was another
visual prompt on the part of Gómez Sicre, who had shown Cuevas a bi-
zarre postmortem photograph of a nineteenth-century Ecuadorian leader
embalmed, in full dress uniform, and seated on the presidential chair
surrounded by his retinue.87 Just as Cuevas anchored Kafka to Mexican
referents, he performed a complementary allegorical operation through
Los funerales by unmooring “the dictator” from a Latin American con-
text to invite associations with myriad totalitarianisms. Cuevas’s politi-
cal pronouncements from the 1958–1959 interval celebrate “freedom” as
they condemn the abuses of Czarist and Stalinist Russia, McCarthyism,
Nazism, and Francoism, as well as numerous Latin American dictator-
ships from Batista to Trujillo. Cuevas especially highlighted similarities
between Mexico and Argentina in terms of these states’ promotion of
social realism as an official aesthetic; he lamented that Mexican cultural
policy remained suffocatingly rigid, while Argentine artists, in contrast,
had managed to liberate themselves from Perón.88 In a strangely prescient
manner, Cuevas also raises the specter of the Cuban Revolution in “The
Cactus Curtain.” The essay opens, in fact, on Cuevas playfully compar-
ing himself to Fidel Castro as he assures his readers that he is not some
young rebel leader preparing to storm the Palacio de Bellas Artes (i.e., the
Moncada Barracks), thereby inviting them to imagine that is precisely his
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 155

intention: “No pretendo ningún liderato juvenil ni trato de reclutar rebel-

des con que atacar al infecto bastión de Bellas Artes” (I don’t pretend to
be a youth leader, nor do I try to recruit rebels to attack the infected bas-
tion of Fine Arts). The editorial staff of México en la cultura, soon to re-
veal its pro-Castrista sympathies, highlighted this particular line through
large font and bold type in its publication of the letter.89
The appearance of “The Cactus Curtain” in Mexico just prior to the
overthrow of the Batista regime suggested that the Mexican people should
follow the examples of countries like Cuba and Argentina by opposing
Mexico’s undemocratic single-party rule. Indeed, critics sympathetic to
Cuevas interpreted “The Cactus Curtain” not just as a call for the renova-
tion of the arts but of the entire Mexican political system under the ruling
party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The letter’s por-
trayal of Juan’s venal, bribe-taking father, for example, satirizes the every-
day corruption that firmly implanted itself during the Alemán administra-
tion (1946–1952) of the artist’s adolescence. Cuevas’s fellow “mafioso,”
Carlos Monsiváis, likewise finds the artist’s early writings and activities
in Mexico to be a direct assault on certain shibboleths of PRIista political
culture: Cuevas’s egotism confronts the party’s opportunistic populism;
his cosmopolitanism challenges the use of xenophobia as a form of cen-
sorship; and his stridence defies el ninguneo, or imposed invisibility.90
At the same time, however, some aspects of Cuevas’s allegory are elas-
tic enough to be interpreted as endorsing the work of the state rather
than opposing it. The essay’s diatribe against the muralists Siqueiros and
Rivera in particular borders on the McCarthyism that elsewhere its nar-
rator professes to despise.
The subtle contradictions in “The Cactus Curtain” between anti-
communist barbs directed at the muralists and general sympathy to-
ward the Cuban guerrilla movement (at that point not yet identified as
Marxist-Leninist) came to a crux after the Cuban Revolution, which
Cuevas initially supported.91 In 1960 the journalist Elena Poniatowska
put Cuevas on the spot in an interview by inquiring about his views on
Cuba and why he was not doing more in Mexico to support the im-
prisoned railroad union activists, who had been accused by the govern-
ment of being communist agitators. Cuevas turned to Gómez Sicre for
help fielding Poniatowska’s questions, which she had forwarded to him
for his written response:
Elena [Poniatowska] has given me a written interview. I’m afraid to
write and betray the “style” [estilo]. Could you write it? It’s urgent.
Everything’s about my recent references and declarations. . . . As you
156 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

see, the interview is written with venom. Could you answer it quickly?
I need to turn it in by the middle of next week.92

In response to Poniatowska’s question as to whether Cuevas’s frequent

absences from Mexico were a form of abstention from Mexican poli-
tics, Cuevas instructed Gómez Sicre to respond in the following manner:
“Aquí puedes meterte contra México y sus pintores. También es bueno
definir mi postura NO-COMUNISTA (No, anticomunista, desde luego)”
(Here you can direct yourself against Mexico and its painters. Also it is
good to define my NON-COMMUNIST position [No, anticommunist,
of course]).93
The published version of the Poniatowska interview shows a rather
cautious Cuevas issuing statements in support of freedom and humanity,
without delving into specifics. He expresses admiration for the Cuban
Revolution, but he sidesteps entirely the matter of Mexican domestic
labor policies through a self-promoting reference to his series Los fu-
nerales de un dicatador.94 Studiously avoiding the dilemmas of the pres-
ent and of his immediate context, Cuevas’s litany of complaints about a
Cárdenas-era cultural nationalism that he was too young to remember
vividly were beginning to appear to be an obvious evasion, and more
closely linked to Gómez Sicre’s generational preoccupations than his
own.95 Cuevas’s response to events in Mexico was put to the test again
just three months later, when the López Mateos administration arrested
and imprisoned Siqueiros for the crime of “social dissolution” in August
1960. Cuevas related to Gómez Sicre that Cuevas’s name was report-
edly also on a list of suspected subversives, and he traveled to Yucatán
and Guanajuato for an extended period in order to avoid being appre-
hended.96 In contrast to Cuevas’s response to the Poniatowska interview,
at this moment the artist acted decisively, without first seeking Gómez
Sicre’s advice, as a large sector of the Mexican intelligentsia mobilized
in support of Siqueiros. Cuevas signed a letter criticizing the arrest of
Siqueiros, and he gave an interview in the leftist, pro-Cuba magazine
Política. This last gesture evidently earned him a rebuke from Gómez
Sicre, to which Cuevas responded with a request that Gómez Sicre take
a less “official” tone in his letters.97 Cuevas’s autonomous political state-
ments, combined with his 1961 marriage to Bertha Riestra, which Gómez
Sicre strongly opposed, were signs that Cuevas’s relationship to Gómez
Sicre was beginning to strain.
The conclusion of “The Cactus Curtain” features an abrupt shift from
allegory back to first-person narrative, as Cuevas defiantly proclaims his
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 157

ongoing struggle against all of the conformist “Juans” in his life.98 And
yet, to read “The Cactus Curtain” together with subsequent examples of
Cuevas’s life writing from the mid-1960s, one has the vertiginous impres-
sion that the fictional Juan of the “The Cactus Curtain” and the auto-
biographical Cuevas actually share much in common.99 There are indi-
cations that Gómez Sicre also had a hand in these post–Catcus Curtain
autobiographical narratives, which were compiled into an anthology in
1965. Their correspondence from 1960 through 1962 refers to Gómez
Sicre’s work on Cuevas’s “memoir” and “autobiographical sketches.”100
By the mid-1960s, it is also possible that the two had developed a shared
repertoire of conventions and tropes so that each could generate “el es-
tilo” on demand.101 In any case, the corpus of Cuevas’s life writings re-
veals that Juan and Cuevas each have their share of formative experiences
with unsupportive fathers, nude models, and humiliation at the INBA.
Juan, the hack, ends up selling his work to vulgar gringo tourists, while
Cuevas does sell his work in Mexico but “casi siempre a extranjeros”
(almost always to foreigners).102 Cuevas’s internationalism leads him to
struggle against el ninguneo (invisibility), whereas Juan’s nationalism
alienates him from his own creativity. These parallel plotlines suggest
another way of reading “The Cactus Curtain,” one that might be called
transnational, for Cuevas’s early life writings stage a rare encounter be-
tween his U.S. and Mexican personae in testimonials reflecting the PAU
and the INBA as the Scylla and Charybdis of his early career. The momen-
tous passage in “The Cactus Curtain” in which poor Juan must declare
his affiliation before the INBA bureaucrat Víctor Reyes in fact bears a
palimpsestic relation to a similar questionnaire that Gómez Sicre submit-
ted to Cuevas prior to the 1954 PAU exhibition. The PAU questionnaire
inquires, among other things, whether Cuevas is influenced by Orozco’s
expressionism (here Cuevas’s answer is an emphatic “no,” although later
both parties would claim a resounding “yes”) and whether Cuevas is
interested in “el mensaje político en su obra o sólo la expresión humana
y los valores plásticos” (a political message in your work or only human
expression and artistic values), to which Cuevas astutely replies, “No no
me interesa” (No, I am not interested [in a political message]).103 At this
moment in “The Cactus Curtain,” José Gómez Sicre and Cuevas reveal
their sensitivity toward curatorial gatekeeping practices at both the PAU
and INBA. Meanwhile, Juan’s responses at the INBA and Cuevas’s actual
responses to the PAU questionnaire reveal Cuevas to be an able code-
switcher, well aware of the “correct” answers to particular questions at
both institutions. Taken as a corpus, Cuevas’s early writings highlight the
158 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

fact that the PAU and INBA operated according to their own well-defined
and mutually exclusive set of aesthetic parameters, and yet in seeming
detachment from the large-scale policies of containment and economic
developmentalism with which both were institutionally connected.
The grotesquerie of Cuevas’s early art in some sense posed a more
eloquent challenge to Mexican domestic policies than did his written
polemics. The portraits of urban poor featured in Cuevas’s 1954 PAU
exhibition expose the failings of the state’s “civilizing mission” by mak-
ing those marginalized by its modernization initiatives hypervisible in all
their misery. The Mexican press’s initial criticisms of Cuevas’s work for
being overly somber and pessimistic echo the national shame responses
elicited by critical representations of Mexican poverty in Luis Buñuel’s
1950 film Los olvidados (released in English as The Young and the
Damned) and Oscar Lewis’s 1961 ethnography The Children of Sánchez
(published in Mexico in 1964 as Los hijos de Sánchez).104 (The fact that
these examples could be dismissed as the work of foreigners further illu-
minates the critical obsession with Cuevas’s nationality.) Two years after
Cuevas’s 1954 PAU exhibition, in fact, Gómez Sicre found himself issu-
ing a written explanation to the OAS ambassador Luis Quintanilla that
the PAU exhibition of recent work by the Mexican street photographer
Nacho López was not intended to defame Mexico by exposing its pov-
erty and unsavory aspects; one can only imagine that Cuevas’s exhibition
had primed the ambassador to expect the worst from Gómez Sicre.105 In
1958, while Cuevas was in Philadelphia, his name was withdrawn from
consideration for a mural commission at Mexico City’s Centro Médico
(Medical Center) because his art was regarded as too disturbing for an
environment dedicated to healing. Cuevas and Gómez Sicre responded in
a scathing open letter in which Cuevas ridiculed the “recipe” he had been
given for the project, with parameters such as “La salud del pueblo es la
responsibilidad del pueblo mismo” (Public health is the responsibility of
the people themselves) and “La higiene es una forma de vida” (Hygiene is
a way of life).106 Cuevas counters these slogans of a modernizing state by
insisting that the idea of “progress” is illusory: “Vuelvo a decirle que [mi
concepto para el mural] es pesimista porque hasta el momento actual no
puedo ni sé ver la humanidad, sino como un gran estercolero, sin reden-
ción alguna” (I repeat, [my concept for the mural] is pessimistic because
to the present day I cannot nor do I know how to view humanity, except
as a great dung heap, without any redemption at all).107 Cuevas claims
that his aesthetic approach is superior because it is explicitly engaged
with the lived experience of Mexico City’s poor; his work bears witness
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 159

to those aspects of society that elites prefer not to see. Even amid the
urbane essays of México en la cultura, peppered with ads for new middle-
class housing developments located on the periphery of the city, Cuevas
throws down a gauntlet. In a response to the prominent Zapotec writer
Andrés Henestrosa, he writes:
You say that our world is now less somber. It must be that literature
produces great dividends in Mexico for those who pursue it, and you
must lead a secluded life in some villa of Pedregal [location of a new
subdivision south of the city] with a Cadillac that has tinted windows.
The thing is, I walk the neighborhoods of our Distrito Federal, and
I continue to perceive a misery on a par with the one that served to
wage struggle against Don Porfirio [Díaz].108

The street is Cuevas’s locus of artistic self-justification in the exchange

cited above, and it is the site of epiphanic moments in his artistic devel-
opment from childhood to adulthood throughout his life writings. In
perhaps the most frequently cited passage from “The Cactus Curtain,”
the street becomes a cosmopolitan superhighway, a means of escaping
Mexico and its suffocating cultural institutions: “Quiero en el arte de mi
país anchas carreteras que nos lleven al resto del mundo, no pequeños
caminos vecinales que conectan solo aldeas” (What I want in my coun-
try’s art are broad highways leading out to the rest of the world, rather
than narrow trails connecting one adobe village to one another).109 In the
next section, I show how Cuevas’s self-portrait as a “man of the street”
helped to recast the artist’s social role in Mexico and his relation to mass
culture.

Crafting a New Public Art for Mexico

The complaints about public art that Cuevas aired in “The Cactus Cur-
tain” had been circulating for some time in the Mexican press. By the
late 1950s, there was a growing consensus in Mexico that public art no
longer fulfilled its revolutionary charge to serve as a democratic, acces-
sible, and educational resource for Mexicans. In fact, three years before
Cuevas published “The Cactus Curtain” in Mexico, Alberto Beltrán (the
same artist who caricatured Gómez Sicre and Cuevas in 1960), described
this problem as one of access to information in a series of cartoons that
appeared in México en la cultura. Whereas Cuevas approached this prob-
lem in relation to his own exclusion from official institutions, Beltrán
focused his analysis on the broad and pervasive social barriers of race
160 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

and class. His vignettes depict young art students too poor to purchase
the foreign art books that they eye hungrily through shop windows, and
are underscored by the bitterly ironic caption “¿Por qué no leen?” (Why
don’t they read?). In a caricature reminiscent of Juan’s pop aficionado
parents from “The Cactus Curtain,” Beltrán depicts a working-class mes-
tizo couple absorbed in calendar art; he ogles a voluptuous vedette, and
she, a dashing charro. The fact that they appear against the backdrop of
a cobweb-covered Palacio de Bellas Artes (home to INBA and famous
murals) makes Beltrán’s caption all the more pointed: “El arte es para
el pueblo” (Art is for the people). The people, Beltrán suggests, prefer
movie stars to museums; meanwhile, arts education has been woefully
neglected.110
Cuevas’s early writings respond to the crisis of public art by arguing
for the revitalized role of fine art in a society increasingly dominated by
mass culture and striated by socio-economic divisions. A recurring epi-
sode in Cuevas’s autobiographical writings provides a blueprint for art’s
new social function. It revolves around the artist’s adolescent relation-
ship with a “vulgar and slender” model named Mireya; their relation-
ship facilitates Cuevas’s artistic and sexual maturity, and it cements his
connection to “the popular.”111 Cuevas likens Mireya to the redemptive
prostitute Sonia in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; several crit-
ics also have drawn connections between Mireya and Kafka’s Czech lover
Milena. (Here, the analogy between Kafka and Cuevas strains, for al-
though Mireya may represent Mexico’s majority population she does not
enjoy the social status of Kafka’s Milena.) The narration of the Cuevas-
Mireya relationship in Cuevas’s collection of writings Cuevas por Cuevas
(1965) establishes parallel plotlines that trace the artist’s sexual and
artistic journey from adolescence to adulthood; both narrative strands
converge in one transcendent moment in which Cuevas contemplates a
painting by Orozco.
The story begins in failure. Cuevas cannot connect to women in life or
art: he is infantilized and humiliated by an older, working-class woman
whom he tries to pick up on the street, and he flees his life-drawing class
at La Esmeralda on one particularly sweltering day, nauseated and un-
hinged by the repulsion-attraction he feels in response to the smell ema-
nating from the indigenous woman who poses there as a nude model.112
His ensuing flight through the city leads him on a tour of various examples
of public art, through which he attempts to dispel his unease. The monu-
ment dedicated to La Corregidora, heroine of Mexican independence,
only incites his boredom. He then tries to enter a pornographic theater
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 161

but is barred due to his age, and must content himself to fantasize about
the provocative illustrations of women that appear on posters outside the
establishment. As his physical discomfort increases, he passes through
the Parque Alameda, where he observes nude sculptures dating from the
Porfirian belle époque that have been marred by graffiti and the repeated
fondling of passersby. Finally, Cuevas seeks shelter in the cool tranquil-
ity of the Palacio de Bellas Artes (headquarters of the INBA), where he
finds himself drawn toward a fresco by Orozco. The open mouths of
two women figures (most likely the recumbent prostitutes portrayed in
the artist’s aptly titled La katharsis [1934–35]) beckon to him. Cuevas
continues:
Something strange was taking place within me. I suffered anguish.
My mouth was drier than ever, though I was no longer warm. I came
up to the painted wall and leaned my cheek against its cool surface.
A pacifying, but at the same time brutal shock shook my body. My
breath came in short, staccato gasps. As I left the half-deserted build-
ing, in shame I had to hold my portfolios in front of my pants.113

The fact that Gómez-Sicre may have had a hand in crafting this narrative
lends a voyeuristic dimension to the first-person narrator’s exhibitionism,
as though Gómez Sicre were instructing Cuevas by humiliation through
submitting his young pupil to possession by Orozco’s genius in drag. Yet
this climax also marks the culmination of Cuevas’s quest through public
and private spaces, and it offers an aesthetically fulfilling, if not person-
ally embarrassing, experience of art spectatorship after a series of failed
cathexes. Both the public monument and the porn theater deny Cuevas
the release that he seeks; the profaned statues in the Parque Alameda
come closer to foreshadowing the fusion of public and private that marks
Cuevas’s experience in the Palacio, but their lurid defacement demon-
strates irreverence toward the art object, in contrast to Cuevas’s own def-
erential awe before the Orozco. Cuevas’s search culminates in a moment
of total absorption in a public, and quasi-sacred, space. Cuevas’s invol-
untary ejaculation is an abuse of muralism according to the objectives of
postrevolutionary cultural policy, insofar as the young artist has failed to
recognize in Orozco’s whores a critique of moral and social decadence.
Nonetheless, Cuevas’s almost literal internalization of Orozco’s paint-
erly aura, cheek to fresco, renders homage to the sublime, transformative
power of fine art. The potential surge of homosexual panic unleashed by
this passage is abruptly followed by an assurance in the following sen-
tence that Cuevas will successfully resolve his crisis: “Como a los quince
162 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

años conocí a Mireya” (I was about fifteen when I met Mireya).114 And
Mireya, in turn, steps in as the young artist’s next teacher; she guides
Cuevas to restrain and channel his creative and sexual drives as their
artist-model relationship transforms into a love affair.
Like postrevolutionary Mexican cultural policies, Cuevas’s encounter
with Orozco emphasizes the importance of art in forging citizens, but
this story offers a new form of citizenship that is salutary toward Gómez
Sicre’s curatorial values and more welcoming toward the privatization
of cultural consumption. In eschewing muralism’s emphasis on collective
subject formation, Cuevas revels in his appropriation of public space as
a heterodox form of self-realization. His confession of “shame” in this
and other essays targeted at a broad readership is a tantalizing and ulti-
mately self-aggrandizing gesture; through such revelations, Cuevas turns
personality into a civic virtue for a modernizing, postwar consumer soci-
ety.115 The individualist mandate for art consumption makes it possible
for Cuevas to reconcile the seemingly contradictory claims that his work
is “definitivamente planteada en la realidad” (definitely based on reality)
and also wholly unconcerned with social reform.116 It is important to
note that the Mireya narrative still strives for the artist’s connection to
the indigenous and the popular, an impulse that finds satisfaction in the
relationship that Cuevas develops with his model. But instead of relying
on the officialist narrative of mestizaje to forge this bond through the
life-drawing class at the state-run art school La Esmeralda, the narra-
tive turns toward intimate moments in public and in the private sphere
itself (through sex and domestic employment) to articulate an alternative
framework for the construction of cross-class and cross-racial community.
The potential of Cuevas’s celebrity to transcend class and racial divi-
sions while also addressing itself to a mass audience did not go unnoticed
by Cuevas’s promoters in Mexico and the PAU. One of the first cinematic
studies of Cuevas, a short film by the Mexican museologist Fernando
Gamboa titled El pintor del rictus (Painter of the Grimace, 1956), por-
trays the artist perambulating from his home to the Calle del Organo, a
working-class prostitution district featured in Cuevas’s early drawings
and popularized also by Carlos Fuentes in his 1958 novel La región más
transparente (published in English as Where the Air Is Clear).117 For
Cuevas, Fuentes, and other urban intellectuals of their generation, explo-
rations of mexicanidad often revolved around acts of perambulation or
slumming in which an elite “becomes Mexican” through the consumption
of working-class identified food, music, and sex.118 The OAS’s 1978 docu-
mentary short Realidad y alucinación de José Luis Cuevas (Reality and
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 163

Hallucinations: José Luis Cuevas), scripted by Gómez Sicre, telescopes

this urban profile to a larger encounter between Mexico and Europe in
segments juxtaposing Cuevas’s life and work in Mexico to that in Paris,
where the artist resided from 1976 to 1979.119 As in El pintor del rictus,
the Mexican half of Realidad y alucinación follows the artist on a journey
from his studio to several Mexico City locations associated with working-
class entertainment. In this G-rated stroll, accompanied by his wife and
two daughters, Cuevas visits La Lagunilla (a flea market also featured
in Fuentes’s 1954 story “Choc Mool”) and la carpa (a variety theater in
the tradition of an older generation of tent shows), while the strains of
Augustín Lara (a favorite composer of Gómez Sicre) on the soundtrack
evoke cabaret entertainment of a bygone era.120 Contrary to the trajec-
tory of Cuevas’s own artistic production, Realidad y alucinación depicts
Cuevas as never having abandoned life drawing; he casually sketches
the patrons of a cantina—“transforming reality into hallucination,” as
the narrator José Ferrer explains—where he also admires caricatures of
movie stars painted on the establishment’s walls. In a later scene, a street
artist in turn makes an impromptu portrait of Cuevas. As Cuevas poses,
a female fan runs up to kiss him, and Ferrer observes that “el pueblo con-
oce a Cuevas en las calles . . . como si fuese un actor o deportista, requiere
su autógrafo” (the people know Cuevas in the streets . . . as if he were an
actor or sports star, they demand his autograph). As the movie shifts to
Parisian cityscapes where Cuevas wanders in anonymity, the implication
is that he carries a telluric connection to Mexican popular culture with
him wherever he goes, even into the most elite metropolitan venues such
as the Atelier Lacourière et Frélaut, a Montmartre lithography studio
favored by the school of Paris.
As a departure from the moral and educative gravitas of the muralists,
Cuevas’s street presence announces a new social role for the visual artist
as a celebrity-mediator between elite and mass cultures, and in turn, be-
tween Mexico and rest of the world. In this respect, Cuevas is comparable
to his literary contemporaries, the Boom authors, whom Jean Franco has
described as engaged in competition with a residual oral culture on the
one hand, and the emerging figure of the superstar on the other, both of
which they attempted to dissimulate through their multilayered narratives
and telegenic authorial personae.121 The fact that a visual artist working
in traditional media could become a star at all is a unique aspect of this
particular period in the 1950s and 1960s—Cuevas is perhaps Mexico’s
first and last celebrity artist.122 In postwar Mexico City, Cuevas’s celeb-
rity replaces older, state-sponsored models of Mexican national identity
164 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

with newer ones based on mass-mediation in the context of precipitous

modernization. By 1978, when the PAU documentary was produced, the
image of Cuevas as a bohemian, still roaming the streets of Mexico City
as he had in the early 1950s, was positively nostalgic in light of the art-
ist’s posh lifestyle, but it was an image that Gómez Sicre clung to even as
Cuevas began to experiment with new artistic media and methods.
As the decade of the 1960s unfolded, the generation gap took its toll
on the relationship between Gómez Sicre and Cuevas. Continually chas-
tised by Gómez Sicre for his failure to live up to the perversidad (per-
versity) that Cuevas exhibited in the 1950s, an exasperated Cuevas fre-
quently reminded his mentor that he was no longer a twenty-one-year-old
prodigy: “A ti te duelen tus 50 años y a mí los 30. Quisiera ser realmente
un D. [Dorian] Gray que pudiera detener el paso del tiempo sobre mi
persona” (Your 50 years pain you, and my 30 [pain] me. I would really
like to be a D. [Dorian] Gray who could detain the passage of time on my
person).123 In terms of his evolving aesthetic, Cuevas was also at pains
to explain that his intermedia arts projects in Mexico City, including
rock music performances, happenings, and comic publicity stunts, did
not make him a mere “clown,” as Gómez Sicre alleged, but rather were
consistent with a new wave of aesthetic modalities that was sweeping
global art worlds.124 The truth was that Cuevas’s artistic practice was
changing, along with his political views, lifestyle, and intellectual affinity
group—and most of these developments were the unanticipated outcome
of Gómez Sicre’s assiduous labors to establish Cuevas’s visibility in the
Mexican art world.

The Alliance for Progress and Cuevas’s Mural efímero

President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 announcement that the OAS would

have a new mission in administering the Alliance for Progress obliged
the PAU Department of Cultural Affairs to craft a fresh justification for
its existence, in lieu of the realpolitik that had served so well through
the 1950s. As a large-scale development initiative aimed at countering
the allure of communism among Latin American societies, the Alliance
pledged $20 billion in U.S. aid to Latin American countries over a ten-year
period.125 Suddenly the PAU cultural branches’ relatively narrow focus on
elite culture was confronted by the Alliance’s emphasis on literacy, pub-
lic health, and vocational training as preconditions for the creation of a
stable middle class that would embrace liberal democracy. Among the pri-
orities enumerated in the OAS annual reports of the early 1960s were the
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 165

elimination of poverty, disease, slums, and informal settlements in Latin

American societies, as well as the training of professionals to combat these
problems, especially doctors, nurses, sanitary engineers, agronomists, ar-
chitects, city planners, sociologists, and social workers. No longer were
artists and writers on the A-list for cultural exchanges; in 1961 the OAS
Professorship Program sent the U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to
Latin America and brought the urban planner of Brasília, Lúcio Costa,
to the United States.126 In retrofitting his departmental priorities to con-
form to the spirit of the Alliance, PAU Director of Cultural Affairs Rafael
Squirru issued claims about the importance of intellectuals to develop-
ment, as he went to battle with the revolutionary leader Che Guevara
over control of the key phrase “el hombre nuevo” (the new man)—that is,
the subject who would emerge transformed by either revolution or liberal
democracy.127
Judging by the editorial vicissitudes of the Boletín de Artes Visuales,
José Gómez Sicre’s response to both the Cuban Revolution and the Al-
liance was complicated. He continued to cover events in the Cuban art
world through the 1970s, albeit from shifting editorial perspectives; a
1962 blurb alleges that the Cuban government is shipping expropriated
works of Cuban art to the Soviet Union, for example, while a 1966 note
warmly greets the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, and a terse an-
nouncement informs of Fernando de Szyszlo’s 1968 show at La Casa de
las Américas.128 Gómez Sicre maintained a Cuban artistic presence at the
PAU through exhibitions of work by Cubans in exile; he organized an
ambitious group show at the PAU in 1964, which featured, among other
old friends, his cousin the sculptor Juan José Sicre. As for his response to
the Alliance, Gómez Sicre’s early experiments with corporate patronage
for the arts dovetailed well with the developmentalist principles of the ini-
tiative. Before the OAS diplomatic community, Gómez Sicre highlighted
the profits that he had pumped into American economies through sales of
art at his PAU exhibitions (Figure 20).129 A 1962 editorial in the Boletín
praises corporations that have assumed sponsorship for arts events in
various Latin American countries, while two others call for free trade in
the arts.130 Such pronouncements peak around 1963, when Gómez Sicre
celebrates the triumph of quality work by particular Latin American art-
ists at major events in São Paulo, Paris, and Madrid.131 Yet even then, and
increasingly after that date, there are clear signs that Gómez Sicre’s inner
aesthete was chafing at the primacy that the Alliance accorded to eco-
nomic factors. His Boletín contributions pointedly insist, for example, on
characterizing the “growth” of the Visual Arts Section into a full-fledged
166 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

division in 1961 as the result of “biological” maturation rather than an

effect of increased institutional support or resources, and his editorials
continually assert that culture is of equal, if not primary, importance in
relation to the economy.132
Gómez Sicre’s conflicted response to the economic policies of the Al-
liance intersected with his increasing anxiety over Cuevas’s fame. In a
Boletín editorial, he touts Cuevas’s Kafka book and the going prices of

Figure 20. “Estadística del volumen y cuantía de las ventas efectuadas en las
exposiciones (1950–1960)” (Statistics Regarding Volume and Quantity of Sales
Resulting from Exhibitions), 1961. Reproduced with permission of the General
Secretariat of the Organization of American States.
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 167

Cuevas’s drawings in New York as examples of Latin American success

in the international arena, while he simultaneously insists that art should
not be viewed as a commodity and rails against an inflated art market
that has pushed the going prices of European and U.S. masterpieces into
the stratosphere. Only three years earlier Gómez Sicre had called for de-
regulation of the art market, but by 1966 he acknowledged the necessity
of state protection for cultural patrimony and expressed concern about
the ways in which empires had unscrupulously amassed centralized art
collections. Only critical judgment and posterity, he maintained, confer
aesthetic value.133 Could this fretfulness about empire have been trig-
gered by the U.S. art market rather than by the more familiar bêtes noires
of Mexico and the Soviet Union? Gómez Sicre’s anxiety about overly
powerful states resonates ironically with the fact that the decentralized
arts circuit he had famously proclaimed in his 1959 Boletín editorial
had grown uncomfortably to resemble the “Argentine railroad map,” a
diagram utilized by dependency theorists in order to illustrate the depre-
dations of an export-oriented economy. The railroad map depicts diverse
routes from the Argentine interior converging on the port city of Buenos
Aires, while Gómez Sicre’s 1961 map depicting the activities of his divi-
sion, in contrast, shows all routes to Latin America emanating from
Washington, D.C. (Figure 21).134 Even at the end of his career, it is clear
that Gómez Sicre never resolved the conflict between his desire to make
Latin American art broadly accessible and visible throughout the hemi-
sphere while also having it circulate globally according to free-market
principles. “Tan bueno como Cuevas” (as good as Cuevas) remained
Gómez Sicre’s benchmark for aesthetic achievement, while he also con-
ceded that his old adversary the Mexican art critic Raquel Tibol was
right: “[Cuevas] ha malgastado su talento con sus obsesiones del ‘jet-set’ ”
(Cuevas has misspent his talent on his jet-set obsessions).135
The arc of Gómez Sicre’s internal struggle between trade liberalization
and state or supranational regulation of the art market coincided with
Cuevas’s own increasing forays into commercial projects. Cuevas, for his
part, appeared comparatively unconcerned with this shift in his artistic
trajectory. In the 1960s, he began to turn his attention away from the
muralists and toward his competition, namely, an entire generation of
other young Mexican artists who were also gaining recognition in na-
tional and international arenas. Though debates about cosmopolitanism
versus nationalism still raged, the diverse aesthetic modalities now prac-
ticed in Mexico made the old battle lines between abstraction and realism
patently obsolete, and Cuevas sought to differentiate his own aesthetic
168 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

Figure 21. “Ciudades latinoamericanas incluídas en los recorridos” (Latin American

Cities Included in the Travels [of Division Personnel]), 1961. Reproduced with per-
mission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States.

project from those of figurative as well as nonfigurative artists.136 Just

as Cuevas had once criticized the muralists for becoming parodies of
themselves, Cuevas’s critics now ridiculed him for cranking out formulaic
churros: “Loco No. 1, Loco No. 2 . . .” (Crazy Person Number 1, Crazy
Person Number 2 . . . ).137 Determined to distance himself from negative
caricatures based on his early thematics, Cuevas proclaimed his early
fascinations to be mere juvenilia, as his new projects increasingly turned
to mass culture, in addition to literature, for inspiration.138
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 169

Cuevas’s work had never observed a strict division between high and
low culture nor was he preoccupied about art’s commodity status. His
own taste formation, steeped in U.S. and Mexican movies, pulp fiction,
comics, and popular entertainment, was in fact similar to that of Juan’s
parents in “The Cactus Curtain.” Cuevas’s penchant for grotesquerie, ac-
cording to his life writings, owed more to the judás (paper marionette)
figures suspended over his childhood crib and an early diet of comic
books, slapstick comedy, and horror movies than it did to exposure to
the fine arts.139 In 1967, Cuevas directly broached the intersection of
the popular and the commercial in his most celebrated challenge to the
muralists, Mural efímero (Ephemeral Mural), a prefabricated billboard
situated at the busy intersection of Génova and Londres in the Zona
Rosa. The project was a quantum leap for the artist in terms of its ad-
dress to local and international publics, while it also altered the manner
in which he had previously engaged national and hemispheric cultural
policies. “Acabo de provocar el más grande escándalo publicitario” (I’ve
just provoked the greatest publicity scandal), he boasted to Gómez Sicre;
“Este es un verdadero arte popular y es una buena burla a Siqueiros y
compañía” (This is real popular art and a good joke on Siqueiros and
company).140 The most prominent feature of Mural efímero was Cuevas’s
monumental signature flanked by an animated self-portrait of the artist,
thus blurring the line between art and publicity in another gesture of
self-conscious egotism. Described by journalists as Mexico City’s first
“happening,” the public unveiling of Mural efímero was sponsored by
the Galería de Arte Misrachi and accompanied by much revelry on the
street. The press briefing featured a contingent of female Cuevas support-
ers dressed like Playboy bunnies, along with another group sporting mini-
skirts, go-go boots, and Cuevas sweatshirts. Journalistic accounts of the
unveiling describe a crowd of two to four thousand onlookers overseen
by a self-styled “critic’s gallery” where the mafiosi Carlos Monsiváis and
Luis Guillermo Piazza “reviewed” the artwork from a nearby window.
Mural efímero was actually neither an isolated event nor a first, but
rather part of a wave of similar events held in Mexico City in the 1960s
that referenced transnational youth culture and generational conflict.141
Two years earlier Cuevas had participated in a Beatles-inspired caba-
ret act called Los Tepatatles, organized by Alfonso Arau and featuring
the collaboration of other mafiosi. The unveiling of Mural efímero it-
self was tied into a series of promotional plugs for Piazza’s new docu-
mentary novel La mafia (1968), and Juan José Gurrola’s experimental
documentary José Luis Cuevas (1965).142 And, following Mural efímero’s
170 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

creation, several Mafia members received tongue-in-cheek press cover-

age when they convened the first “Extra” of the “Oral Newspaper” and
declared Cuevas a has-been: in a word, “AUT!”143 Just as this event can
be understood as a parody of party insiderism as well as celebrity over-
exposure, Cuevas invited interpretations of Mural efímero’s monumental
signature as a mockery of PRIista electoral campaign practice, in which
public walls suddenly appeared emblazoned with brightly painted party
logos and candidates’ portraits until time and the elements slowly wore
them away. Mural efímero was, perhaps, partly responsible for inspir-
ing Cuevas’s 1970 performance-campaign as a candidate for deputy of
the capital’s first district on an independent ticket that represented the
interests of youth, intellectuals, and artists; he reportedly received four
votes.144
Cuevas’s Mural efímero signaled a turning point in terms of the artist’s
relation to both the PAU and Mexican cultural institutions. Ostensibly,
the work summoned the techniques of pop art for yet another attack
on officialist solemnity.145 Preliminary publicity also made much of the
fact that at a certain point, Cuevas relinquished creative control of the
project to the technicians of the billboard manufacturer Calafell, much
as the more self-effacing Sol LeWitt was known to do in his concep-
tual artworks, which also included ephemeral murals or wall drawings
(Figure 22). But while Mural efímero broadly referenced the New York
art scene and global commercial culture, it also bypassed Gómez Sicre’s
comparatively narrow curatorial interest in painting, drawing, and sculp-
ture. Gómez Sicre in fact loathed pop art and other contemporary art
movements. The former, he maintained, could only have meaning in the
context of rampant U.S. consumerism; it was doomed to mannerist imita-
tion in Latin American countries.146 Cuevas’s declaration that he would
destroy his piece after thirty days to make way for an advertisement
mocked the muralists’ aspirations to posterity but also implicitly chal-
lenged Gómez Sicre’s ideas about aesthetic value.
As in previous projects, Cuevas’s Mural efímero addressed multiple
publics, but in this case its address extended well beyond the hemisphere.
In the upper part of the work, beside the artist’s signature, was to be the
figure of a soccer player in honor of the upcoming Olympic Games in
Mexico City. In light of the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967,
however, Cuevas altered the composition so that the lower half of Mural
efímero featured an aggressive athlete (described in some accounts as
a North American football player) along with an abstract rendering of
nuclear catastrophe on the right. The upper part of the mural, meanwhile,
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 171

Figure 22. José Luis Cuevas (middle at left) at work with his design team on Mural
efímero (Ephemeral Mural), 1967. Photograph courtesy Biblioteca y Centro de
Documentación “Octavio Paz,” Museo José Luis Cuevas. Copyright 2013 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

featured a self-portrait of Cuevas, his hand in motion, alongside the art-

ist’s signature-logo. In interviews following Mural efímero’s unveiling,
Cuevas compared his work to Picasso’s Guernica and announced that
instead of destroying it he was contemplating auctioning pieces of it to
raise money for the Israeli government or donating it to the Tel Aviv
Museum of Art.147
Mural efímero’s dual valence, ludic in the national arena and som-
ber in the diasporic one, arose out of Cuevas’s increasingly close ties to
Mexico City’s Jewish community, including the dealer Alberto Misrachi,
the news anchor Jacobo Zabludovsky, and his long-time supporter in the
press, Margarita Nelken. Mural efímero was also framed by two other
public art projects undertaken by the artist. The previous year Cuevas
created a small-scale collage titled Yo no olvido (I Do Not Forget, 1966)
for Mexico City’s Centro Deportivo Israelita (Jewish Sports Center), which
incorporated into its composition a fragment of barbed wire recovered
172 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

from the Warsaw ghetto by Zabludovsky, who later helped Cuevas to

secure the venue for Mural efímero.148 Like the mural, Yo no olvido
was divided into self-contained sections. Its upper portion featured a
small drawing, Autorretrato en un campo de exterminio (Self-portrait in
a Concentration Camp), which portrayed Cuevas wearing a cap with the
Star of David on it, alongside a brief statement about the artist’s Jewish
heritage. The lower portion featured another self-portrait of the artist
with a gash in his cheek that seemed to illustrate the quote by Bernard
Malamud read by Luis Guillermo Piazza at the work’s unveiling: “Sufrir
es ser judío” (To suffer is to be Jewish).149 And in 1968, Cuevas and
other well-known artists painted a collaborative mural at the campus of
the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous
University of Mexico) in support of the student movement for democra-
tization.150 Cuevas’s exploration of his crypto-Jewishness and his support
for the student movement owed little to Gómez Sicre’s tutoring in univer-
salism; moreover, these projects pursued internationalism on terms other
than those described by OAS policies. They challenged Gómez Sicre’s
persistent characterization of Cuevas as an apolitical artist, as well as
those critics who continued to portray Cuevas as an errant Mexican. In
turning away from traditional class- and party-based activism, Cuevas
and his generation were beginning to define an alternative public sphere
in Mexico City through innovative linkages among transnational mass
culture and identity- and community-based movements.

Conclusion

If Cuevas’s projects of the mid-1960s signal diverging paths between him

and Gómez Sicre, the year 1968 marks a definitive watershed in their
relationship. Although the two remained friends, their institutional con-
nections diminished.151 In the second half of the decade, Gómez Sicre’s
cachet in the hemisphere’s art worlds gradually declined due to several
factors to be explored more fully in the next chapter, ranging from an
increasingly diverse selection of Latin American intellectual perspectives
circulating in the United States to increased competition from other in-
stitutions interested in Latin American art. For Cuevas, 1968 marked
the year of his symbolic “repatriation” with regard to the Mexican state
and his undoubtedly orchestrated public reconciliation with David Alfaro
Siqueiros, the only surviving member of “los tres grandes.” In August of
that year, Jacobo Zabludovsky facilitated a meeting of the two artists at
the Siqueiros exhibition that inaugurated the Galería de la Zona Rosa,
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 173

co-owned by Zabludovsky. Shortly thereafter, Cuevas visited Siqueiros at

his home in Cuernavaca, and finally, in early October, Siqueiros attended
Cuevas’s exhibition Crimen (Crime) just days after the tragic massacre
of hundreds of peaceful student demonstrators by Mexican government
sharpshooters at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in October 1968.152 The
massacre brought an end to the playful antics of the Mafia and effected
an abrupt reconfiguration of the Mexican intellectual sector. “Mafioso”
Carlos Monsiváis registered the massacre’s sobering effect in his crónica
about Cuevas’s Mural efímero, published in 1970. The piece includes an
epilogue, dripping with irony, in which the writer returns to the glam-
orous Zona Rosa and encounters a world where all is as it was before
the massacre, and apparently no one knows anything about the horrific
events of 1968. Monsiváis’s description of Mural efímero stresses its ba-
nality, making it, like the Zona Rosa neighborhood, seem more a sign of
continuity than change.153 The implication of Monsiváis’s crónica is that
Cuevas had finally become a “muralist,” with its negative connotations
of officialist pablum.
In the years following 1968, Cuevas gravitated toward the cultural
policies of President Luis Echeverría that were aimed at capturing center-
left intellectuals. His art appeared on a Mexican postage stamp in 1971,
and he held his first INBA-sponsored exhibition at the Museo de Arte
Moderno de Chapultepec in 1972.154 In some ways, he became the Juan of
his youthful allegory by espousing the virtues not of the Mexican school
but rather of the artists associated with La Ruptura from the state-funded
art museum that today bears his name in Mexico City’s Centro Histórico,
where individual galleries are dedicated to his early supporters, includ-
ing José Gómez Sicre. The stakes that Cuevas laid out in the parallel life
stories of Juan and Cuevas proved eerily prophetic, for as Cuevas has
taken his place in the national arts establishment he has been increasingly
less visible in Latin American art projects spearheaded by a new genera-
tion of curators and critics who share Gómez Sicre’s Latin Americanist
vision but are critical of his political and aesthetic perspectives.155 Given
Gómez Sicre’s attempts to “contain” Mexican muralism in the postwar
years, there is some irony in the fact that Cuevas—who claims to have
inaugurated the Latin American drawing boom in the 1960s and to have
influenced a diverse range of artists throughout the Americas, from the
Otra Figuración group in Argentina to Fernando Botero in Colombia and
Andy Warhol in the United States—has now been so thoroughly relegated
to his birthplace in contemporary scholarship and art criticism.156
The professional relationship between Cuevas and Gómez Sicre grew
174 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S

strained by the mid-1960s, as Cuevas increasingly asserted his autonomy.

But even in its early stages, when Cuevas was most dependent on Gómez
Sicre for guidance and support, I would characterize their relationship
as mutually beneficial rather than exploitative. Through Cuevas, Gómez
Sicre gained an arena for his views in the Mexican press—an ad hoc
arrangement that paralleled the U.S. Information Agency’s coterminous
attempts to infiltrate Mexican newsreel content through Project Pedro,
but with far fewer machinations.157 Cuevas’s journalistic interventions
in turn helped to build a domestic critical consensus to match the artist’s
international profile, which boosted Cuevas’s career in Mexico. Recent
scholarship about the cultural cold war by Penny Von Eschen, Hugh
Wilford, Deborah Cohn, and Seth Fein has stressed the capacity of art-
ists and intellectuals to resist or circumvent the institutional framing of
their work, and the ingenuity of local audiences to decode or appropriate
covertly planted propaganda for their own purposes, in spite of policy-
makers’ objectives.158 The responses by Mexican intellectuals to “The
Cactus Curtain” and Cuevas’s Kafka projects demonstrate that they in-
terpreted the allegorical dimensions of these texts to be a critique of the
Mexican state rather than of communism per se, and that Cuevas him-
self encouraged these interpretations.159 A decade later, Cuevas’s Mural
efímero leapt off the hemispheric grid entirely in its simultaneous refer-
ence to local and global youth movements, the Jewish diaspora, and
Zionism. At the same time that I recognize Cuevas’s savvy maneuvering
and the unanticipated effects of Gómez Sicre’s interventions in Mexico,
however, I am loath to ascribe too much agency to Cuevas’s personal
“resistance,” insofar as his options were still circumscribed by the institu-
tions with which he was associated. Penny Von Eschen has demonstrated
that the African American jazz musicians who were sent on international
tours by the State Department during the cold war resisted the casting of
their music as an example of “American” values by putting pressure on
the U.S. government to redress racism domestically, while simultaneously
forging internationalist and diasporic connections through their travels.
Cuevas, in contrast, enjoyed this sort of bifocal leverage for only a nar-
row interval prior to the 1968 massacre, when his support for the Cuban
Revolution and criticism of Siqueiros’s imprisonment challenged both the
PAU and the Mexican state without precipitating his definitive break with
either. Cuevas did not act alone in those years; rather, he participated in
a large-scale antiauthoritarian mass movement in Mexico City that was
spearheaded by students, intellectuals, and the middle class. On either
side of the 1968 watershed, Cuevas aligned himself with particular in-
 J O S É LU I S C U E VA S 175

stitutions, each associated with its own aesthetic and political logic of
containment.
The continued divergence between ideologically inflected concepts of
hemisphere and nation suggests that the legacy of cold war Pan Ameri-
canism is still palpable in the hemisphere’s art worlds. The narrative of
Cuevas’s and Gómez Sicre’s complex ideological and geographical loca-
tions in the two postwar decades emphasizes the link between aesthetic
existentialism, expressive figuration, and an emerging corporate-centered
neoliberalism that contrasts sharply with Mexican state-centered policies
of containment and cultural nationalism. On the other hand, Cuevas’s
career also reveals striking similarities between the construction of lo
nuestro (that which is ours) on the part of the Pan American Union and
the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. Though these institutions pro-
moted different aesthetics, each constructed a mythical concept of free-
dom based on the activities of elites, and each upheld a culturalism that
stood in marked contrast to the capitalist development initiatives and
suppression of popular movements simultaneously being enacted in other
social arenas.
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 CHAPTER FOUR

The Last Party

HemisFair ’68

When the history of contemporary Latin American art is written,

historians would have to distinguish between two periods: pre-ESSO
and post-ESSO.
—JOSÉ GÓMEZ SICRE , 1965

It is no exaggeration to say that in the future of inter-American

relations in the fields of education, science, and culture, people
will speak of before and after Maracay.
—GUILLERMO DE ZÉNDEGUI , 1968

The terms “Esso” and “Maracay” may be unfamiliar to many scholars

of hemispheric arts and culture, in spite of the historical significance that
José Gómez Sicre and the Américas editor Guillermo de Zéndegui predict
for these events in the statements cited above.1 The Esso (Standard Oil)
Salons of Young Artists were a series of juried competitions organized
by Gómez Sicre in 1964 and 1965 that rewarded artists under the age
of forty working in modernist idioms. After eighteen individual salons
were held in Latin American countries, the national Esso prizewinners
converged on Washington, D.C., for a final juried exhibition held at the
Pan American Union. Maracay refers to the Venezuelan conference site of
the Fifth Meeting of the OAS Inter-American Cultural Council, a meeting
that launched a cultural policy initiative intended to complement the eco-
nomic and social emphases of the Alliance for Progress and redress long-
standing inattention to the cultural field within the Organization. Esso
and Maracay each garnered headlines in their day, but neither became
178 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

a watershed of 1960s cultural history. Nonetheless, I would argue, there

is some substance to Gómez Sicre’s claim to have transformed the peri-
odization of Latin American art—not through the youthful discoveries of
the Esso Salons, per se but through the development of an inter-American
arts network and a transnational corporate paradigm for the presenta-
tion of Latin American visual art that continues to circulate in the con-
temporary era of globalization. Gómez Sicre’s pioneering experiments in
the field of visual art provided one model for the “cultural turn” in global
governance that is heralded in the observation in 1979 by OAS Secretary
General Orfila that “integration through culture must become a watch-
word for the inter-American community. . . . Cultural interconnection is
an imperative for our regional organization.”2
The optimism of Gómez Sicre’s and Zéndegui’s respective declarations
about Esso and Maracay appears symptomatic of the generally declining
power of the OAS to intervene in the hemispheric cultural field as the
decade of the 1960s unfolded. In spite of increased attention to Latin
America on the part of U.S. policymakers in the years following the Cuban
Revolution, the 1960s were challenging times for the Organization of
American States and the PAU Visual Arts Division. The momentum of the
Alliance for Progress began to slow after the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy in 1963, and the OAS’s multilateral credentials were
increasingly called into question following the organization’s expulsion
of Cuba in 1962, its endorsement of Kennedy’s response to the Cuban
Missile Crisis in that same year, and its support for the 1965 U.S. inter-
vention in the Dominican Republic under Kennedy’s successor President
Lyndon B. Johnson.3 As noted in chapter 2, many Latin American gov-
ernments initially endorsed the OAS Charter on the assumption that it
guaranteed them protection from U.S. intervention in exchange for their
participation in collective security efforts.4 The U.S.-organized overthrow
of the Jacobo Arbenz regime in Guatemala in 1954 was an early indi-
cation that the United States was capable of flouting its commitment
to multilateral conflict resolution by circumventing the OAS, but by the
1960s it became increasingly evident that the United States would also
pursue interventionist policy objectives through the OAS, as it sought to
prevent a domino effect of Communist regimes from occurring in the
hemisphere. As Jorge Domínguez observes, “The U.S. intervention in the
Dominican Republic in 1965, later endorsed by the OAS, raised the ques-
tion whether the original bargain on which the OAS was founded had
been broken: Instead of restraining U.S. intervention, the institutional-
ized inter-American system had become a mechanism to legitimate U.S.
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 179

intervention.” And according to the historian Hal Brands, the Dominican

intervention marked a turning point in the history of the Organization of
American States: “Sure enough, the fallout from this episode kick-started
the evolution of the OAS from a tool of U.S. policy to an increasingly
anti-U.S. organization. Johnson’s policies helped wreck the very system
Washington had constructed two decades earlier.”5 As U.S. interventions
in Latin American countries intensified after the Cuban Revolution, many
Latin American intellectuals and political leaders became dissatisfied with
OAS policies and instead gravitated toward Raúl Prebisch’s Economic
Commission for Latin America and other United Nations organizations.6
A host of dependency theories and third-worldist perspectives on global
inequities arose to challenge the ideal of hemispheric solidarity promoted
by the OAS.
During the 1960s, the PAU Visual Arts Division entered a period of
retrenchment and reorganization, as it, too, underwent challenges both
internal and external to the organization. The arts-friendly administra-
tion of President Kennedy (1961–1963) boosted the visibility and fund-
ing for the PAU visual arts programs, but at the same time, many other
U.S.-based cultural institutions were also looking toward Latin America
with renewed interest after the Cuban Revolution. For the first time
since the end of World War II, the PAU Visual Arts Division faced seri-
ous competition from within the United States. Among the new players
were two New York–based institutions, each of which had support from
members of the Rockefeller family. The first was the Center for Inter-
American Relations (today known as the Americas Society), which was
founded in 1965.7 Aptly described by Beverly Adams as “a private Pan
American Union housed in a historic brownstone on Park Avenue with
access to MoMA’s storage,” the center was a multidisciplinary venue for
Latin American research and events.8 The center’s arts programs were in
fact quite similar in orientation to those of the PAU, but the institution
operated from a location more closely associated with the New York art
world than with the U.S. government. At the helm of the center’s arts
programs was Stanton “Tod” Catlin, a scholarly curator of Gómez Sicre’s
generation who had entered the field through the same institutional net-
works as his PAU counterpart, including the Office of Inter-American
Affairs and the Museum of Modern Art under the direction of Alfred H.
Barr, Jr. The other new institution was the Inter-American Foundation
for the Arts, founded in 1962 by Robert M. Wool, editor of Show maga-
zine. With a high-profile and ideologically diverse board of directors in-
cluding Lillian Hellman, Edward Albee, and Gore Vidal, the Foundation
180 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

sponsored a series of symposia to encourage dialogue among artists and

intellectuals of the Americas, much in the tradition of the “roundtable”
cultural diplomacy that had taken place at the PAU during the Concha
Romero James era. In addition to these two newcomers, other venues
in the United States, including Cornell University, Duke University, Yale
University, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, launched high-
profile Latin American arts events during the mid-1960s. Finally, a new
generation of Latin American artists who relocated to New York in order
to flee dictatorships or gain greater support for their work began to air an
increasingly diverse range of intellectual perspectives in U.S. art worlds,
including ones critical of the cold war political and aesthetic affiliations
of the PAU and MoMA, among other institutions. Their criticisms were
further complicated by revelations in 1966 and 1967 about covert CIA
funding for various international cultural initiatives through private front
organizations, which aroused suspicion about the political interests of
the PAU Visual Arts Division under José Gómez Sicre’s leadership.9 The
combined factors of increasing competition in the field and internal re-
organization of the OAS contributed to reshape the orientation and scope
of the PAU arts programs by the end of the 1960s.
This chapter charts the decline of the PAU Visual Arts Division in the
twilight years of the Alliance for Progress, while also tracing the long
afterlife of its paradigms and driving concepts. Through an analysis of
visual culture at HemisFair ’68, a world’s fair held in San Antonio to
commemorate the 250th anniversary of the city’s founding, I reflect on
the policy foundations of the visual arts programs and their impact in
the contemporary period. If, as Jeffrey Taffet has observed, free trade
was the “last big idea” of the Alliance for Progress, then HemisFair was
the Alliance’s “last big party,” in which trade integration and development
were made spectacular on many levels as the future of inter-American re-
lations.10 José Gómez Sicre and his supervisor, PAU Director of Cultural
Affairs Rafael Squirru, served as consultants for HemisFair during the
event’s initial planning phases, from 1964 to 1967. Their influence is evi-
dent in the ideological roles ascribed to visual art at the event, as well as
in the organization and layout of the fair’s OAS Pavilion. The presence
of the PAU cultural branches at HemisFair ’68 forms another link in
the policy genealogy that I trace in this study, which extends from the
public arts initiatives of the Mexican Revolution to NAFTA-era cultural
developmentalism.
HemisFair convened a dizzying number of local, national, corporate,
and thematic pavilions, food, rides, music, performance, movies, art, and
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 181

marvels that were common to the recent world’s fairs held in Seattle,
Montréal, and New York. However, it was HemisFair’s culturalist ori-
entation that distinguished it from its science and technology oriented
peers.11 The HemisFair theme, “The Confluence of Civilization in the
Americas,” emphasized the cultural fusion resulting from the “peaceable”
interactions among indigenous, European, and African “migrations,”
while the event site showcased local color, architectural preservation,
and archaeological excavation alongside futuristic emblems of moder-
nity, such as the Tower of the Americas, the monorail, and dazzling water-
works (Plate 5). The fair’s prominent placement of visual art, through
indoor exhibitions, large-scale sculpture, and commissioned murals,
provided a visual repertoire that interwove the fair’s racial, develop-
mentalist, and anticommunist discourses while also symbolically link-
ing Latin America to Vietnam, and the Alliance for Progress to Presi-
dent Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs. HemisFair provided
a model of state–private sector collaboration in the cultural arena that
elaborated upon the PAU Visual Arts Division’s long-standing formula
to combine universality with regional (and often indigenous) cultural
specificity. In the turbulent 1960s, visual art at HemisFair also served
as a buffer between the ideal of universal liberal democratic citizenship
and the harsh reality of increasing totalitarianism and socio-economic
inequality in the Americas.12 At the same time that art took on such a
weighty representational burden, however, it also appeared at HemisFair
alongside numerous other attractions, including Bob Hope, Herb Alpert,
the Bolshoi Ballet, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Many fairgoers
preferred HemisFair’s popular and middlebrow offerings to its fine art,
which in turn underscored the limitations of long-standing efforts on
the part of the PAU visual arts programs to inculcate cultural citizenship
through exposure to elite cultural models. Furthermore, large sectors of
San Antonio’s Mexican American population, which nominally inspired
the event theme, boycotted or avoided the fair altogether.
HemisFair ’68 brings this study full circle, as it returns to the PAU
Visual Arts Division’s early inspiration in postrevolutionary Mexican art
and cultural policy. The fair’s thematic emphasis, in fact, more closely re-
sembled Mexican contributions to previous world’s fairs than it did those
from the United States. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo in his study of Mexican
exhibits at late nineteenth- and twentieth-century world’s fairs has found
that Mexican elites’ construction of an idealized nation for foreign spec-
tators helped to forge an enduring model of Mexican nationalism that
took root domestically as well. Similar to the strategies of the PAU Visual
182 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

Arts Division, displays of Mexican nationalism at world’s fairs claimed

both modernity and uniqueness within the cosmopolitan framework of
Western international relations. Tenorio Trillo summarizes the key ingre-
dients of this formula:
The development of a Mexican national image in modern times
included a historical cornerstone (the Indian past and epic-mythical
foundation structure), racial definition (either criollo or mestizo),
natural appropriation (the beauty of the land and its productivity),
economic position (protection of a national bourgeoisie, search for
foreign investment, immigration, and economic recognition), and the
pursuit of cosmopolitan culture.13

Given its binational setting, HemisFair’s articulation of futurity through

mestizaje, or “confluence” in the language of the fair organizers, did not
aim to consolidate national identity as such but rather to adapt Mexican
nationalist models for the urban and hemispheric spatial registers. The
HemisFair grounds were a microcosmic landscape that mapped a mod-
ern and idealized San Antonio and Western hemisphere in relation to
other global locations, while also asserting their parity with them. The
fair’s relocation of the Mexican national paradigm to South Texas, how-
ever, did involve a necessary rescripting of protagonists and setting. It
immediately designated Mexican Americans, and the U.S.–Mexico bor-
der region more broadly, as new cultural policy frontiers and threw into
relief the inadequacy of older conceptualizations of the border as a cul-
tural trench separating the Saxon and Latin Americas, a legacy of late
nineteenth-century latinoamericanismo that still held currency within the
PAU cultural branches. For Gómez Sicre, as for other Latin American
cultural workers at the PAU, the leap from Latin American to Latino
was vast. Nonetheless, given the stark realities of U.S.–Cuban relations
in the 1960s, Gómez Sicre, no longer an idiosyncratic expatriate but now
a member of a substantial Cuban exile community in the United States,
could not but begin to engage latinidad on some level that understood
the United States to be more than a mere host nation for art and visi-
tors from the South. Gómez Sicre’s involvement with the fair apparently
did not awaken any fraternal stirrings toward tejanos or norteños on
his part, but his proposals for HemisFair did cast greater Mexico as a
point of departure for the event planners’ vision of a borderless continent
achieved through trade liberalization.14 HemisFair took up the connec-
tion between art and cultural citizenship associated with the PAU cultural
branches, but it also promised to sublate the contradiction between their
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 183

Latin Americanism and U.S. locus of enunciation by foregrounding U.S.

Latinos as ideal hemispheric American citizens whose hybrid identity was
forged through intercultural contact at the border. Thus, the presenta-
tion of visual art at HemisFair represented a significant expansion of the
Latin Americanist imaginary that Gómez Sicre had cultivated during the
previous decade. But before turning to HemisFair, I will briefly chart
Gómez Sicre’s activities within the volatile institutional terrain of the Or-
ganization of American States during the 1960s.

The PAU Visual Arts Division in the 1960s

As noted in chapter 3, Gómez Sicre responded ambivalently to the Alli-

ance for Progress. He embraced the initiative insofar as it enabled him to
capitalize on his cultivation of corporate patrons and tout his division’s
role as an ad hoc broker of Latin American art, but he objected to what
he perceived as the Alliance’s overemphasis on infrastructural and indus-
trial development at the expense of cultural priorities. This unease did
not prevent him from pursuing ever more ambitious forms of corporate
sponsorship throughout the 1960s. During the decade, he served as a
consultant to PepsiCo for an art competition, to Broyhill Furniture for an
exhibition in connection with its Brasília-inspired line, to the Container
Corporation of America for an advertising campaign, to International
Petroleum for an exhibition of Central American art at the New York
World’s Fair, and to Hilton Hotels for the selection of art for its new Lima
property.15 Gómez Sicre also served on the juries of the 1962 and 1964
Bienales Americanas de Arte in Córdoba, Argentina; these ambitious
competitions were sponsored by the Argentine subsidiary of the Oakland,
California–based Kaiser Industries. Gómez Sicre regarded the Córdoba
events as superior to the São Paulo Bienales, which he lamented were
open to participation from the Soviet bloc nations.16 The Esso Salons also
impacted the arts institutional landscape of several Latin American coun-
tries. In the wake of the Colombian Esso Salon, for example, Gómez Sicre
supported the foundation of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and
the Instituto de Arte Moderno de Cartagena, with financial support from
International Petroleum, Colombia’s Standard Oil affiliate.17 A Visual
Arts Division press release praised such projects as “corporate citizen-
ship,” a practice that is more frequently referred to today as “corporate
social responsibility.” In this usage, the good corporate citizen is one that
assumes cultural policy functions by organizing cultural activities for
184 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

the residents of the communities in which it conducts business.18 Cor-

porations thus both act as citizens and work to create them.
Nevertheless irritated by the failure of the Alliance for Progress to
prioritize cultural initiatives, José Gómez Sicre maintained a defensive,
essentialist posture that conjured old latinoamericanista binaries to com-
bat all forms of crude economism, be they of the liberal or second inter-
national variety. In this, he had the support of his new supervisor, Rafael
Squirru, founder of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires in 1956,
and the first PAU director of Cultural Affairs to share Gómez Sicre’s
passion for the field of contemporary Latin American art. Like Gómez
Sicre, Squirru had studiously admired New York’s Museum of Modern
Art and had sought to establish an institution of comparable stature in
Buenos Aires. Squirru arrived in Washington, D.C., with a certain luster
and youthful energy due in part to the rising star of Argentine contem-
porary art, which was gaining exposure in international arenas through
the Córdoba Bienal and innovative aesthetic projects associated with the
Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires.19 Squirru joined the PAU staff
in April 1963, the same year that Gómez Sicre’s compatriot and former
associate at El Lyceum in Havana, Guillermo de Zéndegui, became PAU
adjunct director for Cultural Affairs.20 Together, the trio of Gómez Sicre,
Squirru, and Zéndegui touted the PAU Department of Cultural Affairs
as the domain of espíritu (spirit), the crucial ingredient that was missing
from both liberal developmentalism and stagist Marxism.
Broad disciplinary reconfigurations within the Organization of Ameri-
can States contributed to the trio’s reanimation of a latinoamericanista
rhetoric that was reminiscent of the Good Neighbor Policy era. At a 1963
meeting, the ministers of culture of the OAS member states created a new
office of Cultural, Scientific, and Informational Affairs at the PAU that
was to be under the aegis of the Secretary General. As a consequence
of this reorganization, Squirru’s Department of Cultural Affairs became
dedicated exclusively to projects in the arts and letters. Within the new
structure, the magazine edited by Zéndegui, Américas, which had been
published at the PAU since 1949, acquired greater visibility as a glossy
hemispheric counterpart to National Geographic targeted at a broad
international readership that promoted eye-catching photojournalistic
pieces and generated revenue for the OAS.21 Parallel to the administrative
changes at the PAU, the Maracay conference adopted a comprehensive
regional policy on education, science, and culture for the OAS, a proposal
that had been on the table since the 1950s. Though welcomed by cultural
administrators as a belated acknowledgment of the importance of their
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 185

work to the success of the Alliance for Progress, even as the Alliance it-
self was fading, Maracay was a double-edged sword for the PAU Visual
Arts Division. Without the Mexican-communist conspiracy that Gómez
Sicre dreaded ever coming to pass, Maracay threatened to decentralize
the networks that he had built over the previous two decades through its
endorsement of site-specific projects and investment in new fields such as
architectural restoration, archaeology, and handcraft.
Accustomed to being the prime mover of Latin American art in the
United States, José Gómez Sicre did not adapt gracefully to an increas-
ingly diverse and decentralized field. His impulse to take charge hindered
his participation in collaborative projects during the 1960s and 1970s,
and personality conflicts led to his withdrawal or exclusion from several
major Latin American art initiatives. Perhaps the most pronounced rift
was with Robert Wool, director of the Inter-American Foundation for the
Arts, whom Gómez Sicre publicly denounced to a Washington, D.C., gos-
sip columnist for having unscrupulously profited from the contributions
of the PAU to the field of Latin American art.22 At the time, Wool was
helping to coordinate the third Córdoba Bienal (1966). Not surprisingly,
Gómez Sicre, who had served on the jury of the previous two, did not
take part in this final and most significant one. It appeared that Gómez
Sicre was gradually losing his curatorial edge; even supporters like Barr,
who served on both the Esso and Córdoba juries, remarked confiden-
tially to René d’Harnoncourt that the third Córdoba Bienal, in which
Gómez Sicre did not participate, was “the best organized of the 3 L.A.
[Latin American] biennials—Sao Paulo, Esso and Córdoba—and the best
in quality in Latin American art.”23 Confronted with the dashing Squirru
squiring Jacqueline Kennedy through an exhibition of new Argentine art
at the PAU, the seismic shift taking place in the Organization’s cultural
branches, and competition from new institutions and curators, the 1960s
witnessed Gómez Sicre channeling his energy toward new interests, from
pre-Colombian art to documentary filmmaking, large-scale exhibitions
of Latin American art in Europe, and efforts to found a museum of Latin
American art at the PAU (Figure 23).24 This marked a new phase of his
career, in which his ground-level involvement and influence in the local
art scenes of Latin American countries began to diminish.
Rafael Squirru embraced emerging aesthetic modes that Gómez Sicre
found distasteful, including pop and conceptual art. Squirru’s critical writ-
ings from the early 1960s drew inspiration from the challenges posed by
these new aesthetics in order to militate against a distinction between
original and copy, which often consigned art from Latin America to being
186 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

Figure 23. Jacqueline Kennedy and Rafael Squirru (right) at the Pan American
Union gallery, standing before Raquel Forner (Argentina, 1902–1988), Los que
vieron la luna, I y II (Those Who Saw the Moon, I and II), 1962. Reproduced with
permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States and
the Fundación Forner-Bigatti.

derivative of Anglo-European trends.25 Squirru’s enthusiasm for new art

movements aside, his ideological values often converged with those of
Gómez Sicre. In a 1964 essay collection titled The Challenge of the New
Man, Squirru claimed “el hombre nuevo” (the new man)—a key phrase
of the Cuban Revolution—for the cause of liberal democracy. In contrast
to the Cuban Revolutionary “new man,” Squirru’s protagonist is reform-
ist, humanist, and sometimes specifically marked as a Latin American
intellectual and social leader.26 Squirru’s essays position freedom and
progress as antithetical to communism and argue that the artist should
be responsible to all of humanity rather than to a particular creed or
dogma, just as Gómez Sicre was wont to assert telegraphically in his own
Boletín de Artes Visuales editorials and critical writings.27 The Jesuit-
trained Squirru went farther than Gómez Sicre, however, in his avowal
of Christian humanism as the antidote to communism. Implicitly casting
Alliance for Progress aid as a form of Christian fellowship, Squirru’s es-
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 187

says advocate charity “understood as love” as a basis for social welfare,

while aligning communism with pre-Christian idolatry.28
Although Squirru’s assessment that “Latin America is underdeveloped
economically and socially but Latin America is not underdeveloped cul-
turally” is consistent with the Good Neighbor cultural initiatives sur-
veyed earlier in this study, his innovative contribution to this legacy is
his retooling of the keyword of the orphaned OAS Cultural Charter,
mestizaje, to describe a new form of hemispheric interaction.29 A con-
cept once mobilized by some late nineteenth-century latinoamericanista
intellectuals to differentiate Latin America from its Saxon counterpart, in
Squirru’s writings mestizaje is no longer a defining trait of Latin Ameri-
can societies but rather a means to transcend cultural differences between
the Americas, North and South. In crafting a futurist romance out of
narrative remnants of the Conquest, Squirru’s essays project a second
wave of mestizaje infused with the economic theory of comparative ad-
vantage, in which the Latin partner offers espíritu as his seductive charm
while the United States contributes technology, investment capital, and
infrastructure. Squirru’s genetic inflection of mestizaje anticipates an act
of homosocial procreation in which the North impregnates the South by
physical contact rather than by distant injections of foreign aid, or in the
language of his unfortunate metaphor, semen: “We Latins do not want
artificial insemination. We are out to have a real love affair. I believe
that through love, whose course never did run smooth, we will meet in
the new man.”30 Squirru’s advocacy of the emergence of a hybrid hemi-
spheric American subject parallels his retort to allegations of derivative-
ness in the Latin American visual arts, in that he depicts intercultural
contact eventually culminating in a radically new society in which the
quest for purity of origins, aesthetic or otherwise, becomes irrelevant.
Squirru and his colleagues at the PAU chose to stage their erotic as-
signation in the former Spanish and Mexican territories of the South
and Southwestern United States, where at least on a vernacular level
cultural mestizaje existed and could serve as a model for future inter-
American relations. During the 1960s the OAS displayed a newfound
fascination with U.S. Latino cities; in the same year that The Challenge
of the New Man appeared, Squirru served as a consultant for the fourth
centenary celebration of St. Augustine, Florida.31 And the opening date
of HemisFair ’68 coincided neatly with the Maracay conference so as
to offer up San Antonio as an exemplar of the new OAS cultural policy
ideals. In an editorial titled “San Antonio’s Example,” Américas edi-
tor Guillermo de Zéndegui singles out Miami, home to the largest U.S.
188 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

Cuban exile population, and San Antonio, trade nexus along the Pan
American Highway, as “strategic points in the Hemisphere” for reasons
that obviously have to do with their political and commercial aspects, as
well as cultural heritage:
The great sociological experiment to which we allude has become es-
pecially noticeable at the mixing-points of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon
cultures. True crossroads of modern destiny, Miami and San Antonio
occupy strategic points in the Hemisphere. San Antonio, so linked by
history and tradition to the roots of Hispano-American culture, has
recently become the center of attraction in the Hemisphere through its
magnificent fair.32

The theme of mestizaje at HemisFair offered a cultural solution to the

political and economic dilemmas that plagued U.S. relations with Latin
American countries during the 1960s. Much in the way that Concha
Romero James broke with early twentieth-century perspectives on culture
as the lingua franca of diplomacy, HemisFair, too, cast culture as a thick
field of “differences” that had to be worked through in order to achieve
consensus on political and economic matters.

HemisFair ’68 at the Urban and Hemispheric Spatial Registers

The predominantly Anglo business leaders from old-line families who

spearheaded HemisFair ’68 promoted the event as a win-win-win-win
proposition for the city of San Antonio, the state of Texas, the United
States of America, and the nations of the hemisphere. The immediate ob-
jective of HemisFair in the view of its first president, the banker William
Sinkin, was to boost urban “growth and development” in San Antonio.33
Whether the fair accomplished this goal is still debated—however, it did
leave its mark on the city in numerous ways. It helped to forge the careers
of a new generation of state and local politicians, including Representative
Henry B. González and a young city manager’s office intern named Henry
Cisneros. Further, it transformed the built environment around what is
today HemisFair Park, leaving in its wake a convention center, a court-
house and federal building, the Institute of Texan Cultures, the Tower of
the Americas, and a substantial heritage tourism district linking the fair-
grounds to popular attractions such as the Alamo, La Villita, the Paseo
del Río, and other historical sites (Figure 24). Financed through corporate
and private donations, as well as municipal, state, and Johnson-era urban
renewal funds, HemisFair razed a ninety-two-acre low-income, ethnically
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 189

diverse neighborhood in downtown San Antonio. The construction work

drew protests from some local residents who resisted buyouts of their
homes and the disappearance of beloved neighborhood establishments.
Preservation activists were also displeased, for this district was home to
hundreds of structures associated with historic waves of Irish, Polish,
German, Canadian, and Spanish settlement in the area, of which only
about two dozen buildings were spared and renovated as fair facilities.
Texan chroniclers of the event have noted that almost every aspect of
the fair’s planning and execution, from site selection to the bidding of
construction contracts and decisions about preservation, was implicated
in state and local politics, often involving power struggles between the
liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party.34 The former had
its San Antonio power base in the new money suburbs to the north, while
the conservative old-line families retained financial interests downtown.35
The HemisFair leadership came mostly from the latter group, and as it

Figure 24. Aerial photograph of HemisFair ’68 site. San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records,
1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
Reproduced with permission of the General Secretariat of the Organization of
American States.
190 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

drafted plans for the fair the constitution of this group’s home district
was changing rapidly. Precisely because of suburbanization, downtown
San Antonio was becoming increasingly impoverished and also less Anglo
at the same time that Mexican Americans became the city’s majority de-
mographic and the Chicano and black civil rights movements were trans-
forming local politics.
In the end, HemisFair lost millions of dollars, attracting only 6.4 mil-
lion visitors versus the 7 to 13 million originally projected.36 Some local
residents with whom I spoke were quick to note that the fair also failed
to effect urban renewal insofar as the fairgrounds replaced a vibrant
neighborhood with a complex of buildings and vacant lots that the city
maintained poorly until the site underwent renovation as a public park in
1988.37 The only adjacent district that saw a rise in socio-economic status
following the event was the gentrified King William Street neighborhood.
Though it inspired the fair theme, the tejano population of Bexar County,
in which San Antonio is located, largely avoided the event, which in part
contributed to HemisFair’s financial losses.38 Timothy James Palmer
speculates that among the reasons for this was that the cost of admission
was prohibitive for working-class families, and that black and tejano San
Antonians perceived the fair to be a diversion from more pressing issues
such as minimum-wage legislation and infrastructural improvements to
low-income neighborhoods.39 One black community leader criticized the
fact that HemisFair did not have an entrance oriented toward the city’s
predominantly black East Side as symptomatic of the project’s overall ne-
glect of San Antonio’s African American community.40 Similarly, La Raza
Unida and Mexican American leaders organized a boycott of HemisFair,
citing its failure to hire substantially from the tejano community.41
In spite of these criticisms, the fair is still commemorated in San
Antonio as a happy event that avoided the turbulence of the civil rights
era by peacefully ushering in a new wave of coalition politics featur-
ing a generation of young, community-based leaders. The old guard that
comprised the HemisFair leadership perceived itself to be facilitating this
transition by couching its project in terms of racial and economic uplift
for San Antonio’s inner city and an end to divisiveness in city politics.42
In the words of Timothy James Palmer, “The fair would raise the city’s
international profile and restore a measure of self-confidence, but more
important, it might mobilize disparate factions—Mexican-Americans as
well as whites, North Siders and West Siders, liberals and conservatives,
toward a common goal.”43 In 1960 HemisFair President Sinkin’s bank
became the first in Texas to open a branch on the southeast side and hire
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 191

black tellers, and fair organizers also attempted to recruit employees from
historically black colleges, hoping to avoid the sit-ins that had occurred
at the recent Montréal and New York World’s Fairs.44 At the latter event
in 1964, civil rights activists had heckled President Johnson while he
presided over the opening of the United States Pavilion.45
In light of the climate of civil unrest in the United States, HemisFair’s
own United States Pavilion, organized by the State Department, is note-
worthy for its open acknowledgment of domestic problems such as pollu-
tion, poverty, and racism. Edith Halpert, owner of New York’s Downtown
Gallery and an early defender of committed art against cold war censor-
ship by the U.S. government, served as an initial advisor to HemisFair
administrators for the United States Pavilion installation, which included
photo panels about U.S. racial and ethnic diversity and progressive social
movements and a poster exhibit from MoMA.46 In a separate building
of the United States Pavilion, the Confluence Theater screened a docu-
mentary narrated by W. H. Auden that identified poverty as one of the
greatest problems confronting the nation.47 The turn toward social realist
aesthetics at the United States Pavilion underscores the manner in which
the Great Society programs and the Alliance for Progress both drew inspi-
ration from liberal social projects undertaken during the Progressive Era.
In spite of the United States Pavilion’s thematic emphasis on social
reform, violence and poverty were never far from HemisFair. Surrounded
on all sides by what George Mariscal has called the “unholy alliance”
between Johnson’s War on Poverty and the Pentagon, which sent dis-
proportionate numbers of working-class tejanos to die in Vietnam, the
fair atmosphere seemed oblivious to sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the
general ethos of 1960s counterculture—as though determined to hold
back a tide of grief and anger beyond the fairground perimeters through
the cultivation an insistent, redemptive cheerfulness.48 Even so, global
events continually threatened to break the mood; the fair was bracketed
by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., two days before its open-
ing in April and the massacre of student demonstrators at Tlatelolco four
days before its closing in October, while the assassination of Robert  F.
Kennedy, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Prague
Spring, and France’s May 1968 all occurred over the course of its run.49
HemisFair was not merely a local event intended to transform San
Antonio’s politics and economy; rather, fair organizers interwove state,
national, and international agendas into the event planning, theme, and
logistics. In terms of its regional objectives, HemisFair highlighted San
Antonio’s Spanish and Mexican history, bilingualism, and business sector’s
192 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

self-fashioning as the “Gateway to Latin America” as a means of culti-

vating a privileged trade and tourism relationship with Mexico. Fair orga-
nizers hoped to capture a potential ten million tourists residing within a
750-mile radius of San Antonio, a region encompassing seventeen Mexican
states and eleven U.S. states.50 Mexico was the first Latin American nation
to announce its participation in the fair. In an effort to marshal broad
Latin American support for the event, HemisFair established a Latin
American branch office in Mexico City in 1965, and Texas Governor
John Connally and fair officials made tours of Latin American countries
in 1966.51
Mexican officials hoped that visitors to HemisFair would later travel
to Mexico City in order to attend the 1968 Olympic Games that winter.
For the purpose of encouraging binational tourism, the two cities became
linked sites in the fair’s promotional literature and visual culture. Spe-
cial maps were printed featuring San Antonio on one side and Mexico
City on the other, and the Federal Aviation Administration approved new
air routes connecting the two cities.52 The spacious Mexico Pavilion at
HemisFair was a tribute to President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s modernization
and beautification projects, which had transformed the urban environment
of Mexico City in anticipation of the Olympic Games. Under the direc-
tion of the renowned museologist Fernando Gamboa, the Mexico Pavilion
featured an exhibition of pre-Columbian and modern art, a nightclub, and
a restaurant, an easy mélange of the ancient and the contemporary that
was consistent with HemisFair’s overall focus on the driving concepts of
modernization theory, tradition and modernity (Figure 25).53 Elsewhere in
the fairgrounds as well, Mexico City and San Antonio were symbolically
connected. The large Juan O’Gorman mosaic commissioned especially
for HemisFair’s Theater for Performing Arts recalled the artist’s colos-
sal 1951 mosaic at the library of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico), underscoring
another aspiration of fair organizers to establish an inter-American edu-
cational institution in San Antonio in the wake of HemisFair. (Indeed,
although no new institution was founded, the Universidad Nacional did
open a satellite campus at HemisFair Plaza that is still in operation.) Ad-
ditionally, the fair’s extensive use of large-scale contemporary sculpture
was an echo of the grandiose public sculptural initiative known as the
Ruta de la Amistad (Route of Friendship), which was installed along the
southern stretch of Mexico City’s Anillo Periférico (beltway) in anticipa-
tion of the Olympics.
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 193

Figure 25. Mexico Pavilion, HemisFair ’68. San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records,
1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.

A bold developmentalist stance further reinforced the shared visual

culture repertoire linking HemisFair to the Mexico City Olympic Games.
The arts and cultural programming surrounding both events emphasized
a linear conceptualization of tradition in relation to modernity that desig-
nated even some contemporary cultural practices as quaint and folkloric,
as though event planners were eager to classify phenomena that could
potentially be interpreted as signs of underdevelopment under the rubric
of heritage. Eric Zolov has observed that Mexican public discourse about
the Olympiad revolved around Mexico asserting its “appropriateness” to
serve as an Olympic host site, in spite of its being a third-world country.
In his analysis of the government-sponsored promotional events leading
up to the Mexican Olympic Games, known as the Cultural Olympiad,
Zolov notes an autoethnographic and exoticizing impulse toward vernacu-
lar and regional cultural practices that Mauricio Tenorio Trillo also de-
tects in Mexican exhibits at world’s fairs. Zolov writes that the emphasis
of the Cultural Olympiad events “on display contributed to a reification
of the ‘traditional’ as something utterly distinct from the ‘modern,’ an
exotic other to be admired for its ‘authenticity’ at a moment when the
tide of capitalist modernization was transforming the planet.”54 The same
194 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

could be said of HemisFair’s presentation of indigenous and vernacular

performance, folk art, handcraft, and archaeological sites (Plate 6). In
the nomenclature of Rostovian modernization theory, HemisFair and the
Cultural Olympiad portrayed South Texas and Mexico, respectively, as
being in the “take-off phase” of development—that is, welcoming of cul-
tural interaction and now poised to achieve economic prosperity on a par
with that of first-world nations.55
Mexico’s presence at HemisFair was perhaps most important in terms
of its role as a franchisor of the political uses of mestizaje. Texas Governor
Connally in fact was so impressed by Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de
Antropología e Historia (National Museum of Anthropology and His-
tory), which he visited on one of his promotional tours for the fair, that
he requested that the State of Texas installation at HemisFair, known as
the Institute of Texan Cultures, be modeled after the prestigious Mexican
institution.56 Home to the Aztec calendar stone and thousands of examples
of pre-Colombian and contemporary indigenous material culture, this
most famous of Mexico City museums underwent numerous renovations
and relocations throughout its long history, including a 1944 reinstallation
of its galleries supervised by none other than Fernando Gamboa, curator
of HemisFair’s Mexico Pavilion. The Museo Nacional was reborn again
in 1964, when it moved into a new complex in Chapultepec Park that
included a library, research facilities, auditorium, theater, restaurant, and
laboratory. This state-of-the-art facility captivated Governor Connally,
and one can easily imagine what attracted the governor in this museum
that Néstor García Canclini has described as the most “representative of
Mexicanness”:
Not only . . . does the museum represent the unification established by
political nationalism in contemporary Mexico, but also . . . it brings
together original pieces from all regions of the country in the city that
is the seat of power . . . The bringing together of thousands of testi-
monies from all over Mexico attests to the triumph of the centralist
project, announcing that here the intercultural synthesis is produced.57

Like its Mexico City counterpart, the Institute of Texan Cultures at

HemisFair conferred a new status upon one of the state’s poorer, second-
tier cities, San Antonio, as the heart of Texan “cultural confluence” or
mestizaje. At the same time, the institute presented the region’s tejano ma-
jority as but one thread in a Texan tapestry that also included numerous
other groups of European, African, Asian, and Native American descent.
According to Américas, the institute replaces the popular U.S. stereotype
of the Anglo Texan with a multicultural cast:
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 195

[The Institute of Texan Cultures] tells the story of Texas through the
twenty-six cultural groups who merged there to create it—Poles and
Mexicans, Swedes and Negroes—in separate exhibits coordinated with
a 360° movie projection on the central dome. It successfully demol-
ishes the myth that “pictures the typical Texan as a loud-mouthed
wheeler-dealer in blue jeans and big hat, who fell into a barrel of oil
and came up smelling like a millionaire.”58

The Institute of Texan Cultures offered a model of centralized pluralism

for the state of Texas that complemented the type of social cohesion that
fair organizers wished to achieve at the urban level.
In addition to the immediate prospects for urban development, state
and local unity, and capturing the binational tourist trade, HemisFair
organizers also hoped to establish an image of San Antonio as a “funnel”
between North and South America, geographically poised “midway be-
tween New York and Caracas” to reap the benefits of an impending wave
of hemispheric trade liberalization.59 This was the primary objective of
fair affiliate H. B. Zachry, a San Antonio–based construction magnate,
who even hoped to entice the OAS and other hemispheric institutions to
relocate their headquarters to San Antonio.60 The city could in fact stake
a claim to being at the forefront of the free trade movement, for the U.S.
and Mexican governments had recently completed negotiations for the
Border Industrialization Program in 1965, a trade agreement intended to
absorb the flow of laborers returning to Mexico following the official dis-
mantling of the Bracero Program.61 The Border Industrialization Program
became the framework for what are today known as the maquiladora
industries, and eventually, for the North American Free Trade Agreement
(1994). In some measure, San Antonio could also call itself the birthplace
of the Alliance for Progress, for it was in that city that President John F.
Kennedy first pronounced the phrase in Spanish “alianza para el pro-
greso” in a 1960 speech.62 After the assassination of Kennedy, however,
and amid widespread criticisms of the Alliance’s failure to meet basic
objectives, President Lyndon B. Johnson soon distanced himself from the
program, as he quipped in exasperation that the OAS “couldn’t pour
piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.”63 As the
war in Vietnam increasingly consumed Johnson’s attention, and his Great
Society programs foundered domestically, Johnson abandoned the ini-
tial social welfare orientation of the Alliance in favor of a more stream-
lined program of corporate investment and military assistance for Latin
American countries, including tacit support for authoritarian regimes, a
perspective that some historians have argued continued into the Richard
196 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

Nixon administration.64 HemisFair occurred in the context of this sec-

ond phase of the Alliance, as the United States worked to establish a
Latin American Free Trade Association and a Central American Common
Market at the 1967 Punta del Este Summit. In light of these movements,
HemisFair’s roster of corporate exhibitors is foreboding; many with ex-
tensive interests in Latin American countries would soon assume sinister
roles as beneficiaries of the dictatorships that gripped the Southern Cone
countries in the 1960s and 1970s.65
The new coordinates of the Alliance were made manifest during the
fair’s planning stages, when the Johnson administration invited the Latin
American and OAS ambassadorial corps to tour the construction site
of HemisFair Plaza and enjoy a barbecue at the LBJ ranch two weeks
prior to the April 1967 Punta del Este Summit meeting. Also among the
invited guests were Lincoln Gordon, assistant secretary of state for inter-
American affairs, and W. W. Rostow, modernization theorist and archi-
tect of the Alliance for Progress, who was at the time deeply involved
in Vietnam policy as Johnson’s national security advisor.66 On the final
day of the ambassadors’ visit, President Johnson and the First Lady were
surprise attendants at a special Mass held in honor of the ambassadors at
San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral (Figure 26). Archbishop Lucey’s
sermon on that occasion began with a meditation about neighborly rela-
tions in the Western Hemisphere: “The coming conference at Punta del
Este is another step forward in the great human quest for peace and
understanding.” But an evolving parallel between the threat of commu-
nism in the Americas and the one looming in Vietnam gradually became
explicit as Lucey cautioned, “If history has any lesson for us it is this:
unprovoked aggression imposed by force has seldom been stopped by
meekness,” and “neutrality in the face of international crime is itself a
crime when perpetrated by a major nation.” In his conclusion, Lucey
explicitly charted a foreign policy trajectory that linked the imperative
for security and unity in the Americas to hemispheric American support
for the war in Vietnam:
So as far as the morality of our war in Vietnam is concerned I have
already quoted the principles proclaimed by Pope Pius XII. Unjust
aggression must be halted by the nations as a whole. Such interven-
tion is not merely allowed and lawful; it is a sad and heavy obliga-
tion imposed by the mandate of love. Our beloved country belongs
to the family of nations and all of us belong to the human race. We
must defend the blessings of our Creator so that peace and freedom
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 197

may survive. So long as the Americas are great and strong liberty and
justice shall live.67

The sermon served as an act of ventriloquism for Johnson’s foreign pol-

icy, and it was another sign of the growing diplomatic sensitivity toward
cultural difference insofar as the messenger was a nonstate actor to which
the OAS ambassadors were supposed to respond intuitively. Lucey’s in-
vocation of the Vatican as an alternative to the U.S. presidency, however,
may have backfired. The San Antonio newspaper reported that the am-
bassadors appeared to be offended by the sermon.68
HemisFair’s intertwined objectives (developmentalist, anticommunist,
and consensus-building) and its spatial registers (urban, state, regional,
hemispheric, and global) entered into the symbolic visual and spatial en-
vironment of the fairgrounds, which invited fairgoers to traverse with
great fluidity the boundaries among local-, national-, and international-
identified pavilions, as well as commercial-, nonprofit-, religious, and

Figure 26. Archbishop Lucey with President Johnson and family after Mass at
San Fernando Cathedral, Sunday, April 2, 1967. San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records,
1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
198 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

government-sponsored sites. Imagine the path of a hypothetical fair visi-

tor: she descends to the scenic River Walk from her modular prefabri-
cated hotel room in the brand new Hilton Palacio del Río. She catches
a picturesque barge that ferries tourists along a newly constructed two-
mile extension of the San Antonio River, floating past arched bridges and
cypress trees en route to the fairgrounds (Plate 7). Near the HemisFair
entrance, she catches a show of “Les Poupées de Paris,” a risqué mari-
onette act put on by San Antonio’s own Krofft brothers, and then she
takes in a Bible lesson accompanied by special effects at the Moody Bible
Institute’s “Sermons from Science” theater next door. At an outdoor
plaza, she observes the Frito Lay–PepsiCo presentation of the indigenous
Mexican acrobats Los Voladores de Papantla. Later, while nibbling on a
buñuelo (deep-fried sweet dough), she strolls past examples of contem-
porary abstract sculpture and marvels at the archaeological excavation
of a Spanish aqueduct that once served the Alamo, which had been for-
tuitously unearthed by fair construction crews. At the IBM Pavilion, she
programs a computer to weave a piece of customized damask fabric; she
rides the Ferris wheel, ascends to the top of the Tower of the Americas,
grabs lunch at an Indonesian restaurant in the food court, and views fine
art, photos, and other exhibits at the Women’s Pavilion, the Humble Oil
Company Pavilion, and the pavilions of Bolivia, France, and the OAS.
To wind up her day at the fair, she watches a Czech movie at the Kino-
Automat, at which spectators push buttons to vote on their preferred
ending and she takes a monorail ride around the park and purchases a
souvenir piñata (Figure 27).
Though the fairgrounds tended to cluster “international” pavilions
at one end of the site, and “national” and “industrial” pavilions at the
other, there was often little distinction among these categories in terms
of the type of attractions they featured. Moreover, interspersed through-
out these two general areas of the fairgrounds were other types of fa-
cilities associated with entertainment, nonprofit organizations, and fair
administration. My hypothetical fairgoer not only encountered mixed
national, ethnic, and commercial phenomena within individual exhibits,
but she was likely also unaware of the complex web of state-private con-
nections that brought these attractions to San Antonio in the first place.
For example, the Czech cinema and most of the national-themed res-
taurants and boutiques were private enterprises, the Argentine sculpture
that she admired in the France Pavilion was on loan from the New York
branch of a Buenos Aires gallery at the request of a local collector, and the
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 199

Figure 27. Piñata booth at HemisFair ’68. San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records,
1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.

OAS Pavilion was constructed with funds from a San Antonio Republican

banker’s private philanthropic foundation.
The fair’s mixed-provenance attractions might be conceived as a sym-
bolic landscape consisting of broad image fields that corresponded to the
event’s overarching spatio-temporal themes—tradition and modernity,
and local and global. HemisFair’s built environment honored heritage
through preservation and archaeology while also celebrating futurity
through numerous tropes—including light, speed, height, scale, and aero-
dynamics. Visual art at the fair mediated the contrasts between these two
temporal registers by foregrounding their respective aesthetic qualities.
For example, Alexander Calder’s painted steel stabile, The Crab (1962)
and François and Bernard Baschet’s sound sculpture A Musical Fountain
(1974) creatively incorporated twentieth-century industrial construc-
tion materials, aerodynamics, acoustic technology, and hydraulics, while
the Celanese Corporation’s eighteenth-century colonial Spanish fountain
200 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

and the Mexico Pavilion’s monumental Olmec head, both described as

“sculptures” in fair publications, did the same for the fair’s archaeologi-
cal and preservation projects. Over one hundred pieces of large-scale con-
temporary sculpture became a sort of lingua franca of the fair’s common
areas and lobbies, constituting a design element and landscape mnemon-
ics linking diverse areas of the fairgrounds.69
The HemisFair pavilions were also temporary home to an astound-
ing collection of visual art, from pre-Columbian sculpture to Spanish
baroque painting, seventeenth-century French lithographs, folk art of
the Americas, and large-scale works by artists of the Americas, including
Louis Archambault, Juan O’Gorman, Carlos Mérida, Fred Samuelson,
Rufino Tamayo, and Gego, among others. Several commissioned art-
works offered didactic interpretations of the event theme: Carlos Mérida’s
mosaic mural The Confluence of Civilizations in the Americas was an
abstract interpretation of the Iberian and U.S. “cultures” converging in
the Americas, orchestrated through intersecting geometric shapes ren-
dered in hot and cool palettes, while Juan O’Gorman’s figurative mosaic
mural of the same title depicted a symmetrical encounter between indige-
nous Americans and the Greek and Roman civilizations, with Adam
and Eve serving as its central figures (Figure 28). Like Squirru’s essays
on North–South intercourse, O’Gorman’s mural aligns the masculine,
Greco-Roman partner with science and technology, while an indigenous
American Eve appears flanked by icons pertaining to nature, biodiversity,
and myth. An Apollo rocket positioned to Adam’s side awaits its journey
across the mural’s center axis to Eve’s moon, fancifully overlaid with the
silhouette of a rabbit that many indigenous Mexicans perceive in the
lunar surface. These commissioned works of art at HemisFair offered
sensually appealing scenarios of “cultural confluence” that would, fair
organizers hoped, precipitate other forms of cross-border interaction re-
sulting from the marriage of culture to corporate industry.
The strategies for the placement of art at HemisFair reveal the imagi-
nations of Rafael Squirru and José Gómez Sicre, who began to work
as consultants for the fair in 1964. The two were part of a delegation
of PAU Cultural Affairs personnel that flew to San Antonio in March
1966 for a series of planning conferences about arts and education at
HemisFair, and they continued advising fair organizers on various mat-
ters through the run of the event.70 Squirru’s and Gómez Sicre’s propos-
als tended toward the grandiose and expensive, including assembling a
permanent collection of hemispheric American art that would be installed
in a future museum to be located in the basement of the Tower of the
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 201

Figure 28. Juan O’Gorman (Mexico, 1905–1982), The Confluence of Civilizations

in the Americas, 1968. Mosaic façade of the Theater for Performing Arts of the
Convention Center Complex, HemisFair ’68. Zintgraff Collection, University of
Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections. Copright 2013 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City.

Americas.71 Yet many of their ideas did end up being carried out on a
more modest scale; for example, their proposal to mount an “open-air
sculpture exhibition, partly to consist of commissioned works and partly
a competitive exhibition with a number of people participating.”72 In
the end, the San Antonio attorney and connoisseur Gilbert M. Denman
curated HemisFair’s ambitious sculpture exhibition with a more modest
price tag than the one projected by Gómez Sicre and Squirru, largely due
to his reliance on temporary loans.73 Rafael Squirru also proposed invit-
ing the Argentine avant-garde artist Marta Minujín to the fair to design
an installation or stage a happening. That idea morphed into “Project
Y” under the direction of Jeanine Wagner, a local professor who special-
ized in contemporary interactive pedagogical theory. Project Y’s multi-
cultural gathering space at the fair was billed as “a kind of six-month
happening” where young people could meet one another, listen to and
202 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

play popular music from around the world, create graffiti, and engage in
sports, debate, and other activities.74
The presumption of deep pockets and demand for absolute autonomy
seem to have gradually alienated Gómez Sicre from the HemisFair leader-
ship, after an initial burst of enthusiasm on his part. Squirru, meanwhile,
maintained cordial relations with his fair contacts, though as the opening
date drew near he increasingly directed his energy toward the installation
of the OAS Pavilion. Several of the artists whom Squirru recommended
to fair organizers for possible site-specific commissions, such as Carlos
Mérida and Rufino Tamayo (also favorites of Gómez Sicre), did end up
executing projects for the event.75 Gómez Sicre, meanwhile, offered his
services as a fair representative before Latin American artists and galler-
ies, but he repeatedly pressed for authorization to make deals without ob-
taining prior approval from his HemisFair contacts. “The smaller number
of opinions, the better,” Gómez Sicre advised.76 Gómez Sicre complained
that limitations on his decision-making authority hindered his ability to
interact with Latin American artists according to accepted custom. In
1966 his three-week tour of South America in order to line up arts proj-
ects for the fair was postponed and ultimately canceled by fair officials,
with one complaining, “This is an ordinary blank check that no man in
his right mind would sign.”77
As the opening day of HemisFair drew closer, vice president for cul-
tural participation Robert Tobin hired a local businessman, Arnold “Pic”
Swartz, to oversee the fair’s “high end” exhibitions and performances.
Swartz traveled to Washington, D.C., in May 1967 to reestablish contact
with Squirru and Gómez Sicre; at that point, Gómez Sicre was still work-
ing on proposals for various fair exhibits and performances, and he was
still requesting authority to negotiate deals on behalf of the fair.78 Swartz,
now facing an extremely tight schedule, announced that his goal was to
program “exhibitions that are valid, exciting, and, we hope, a hell of a
lot of fun.”79 “Fun,” a term somewhat alien to José Gómez Sicre’s critical
vocabulary, was not so off-putting for Rafael Squirru, who found himself
personally drawn toward the interactive dimensions and unanticipated
outcomes of conceptual art and happenings. In the 1966 HemisFair plan-
ning conference, Squirru reassured fair organizers concerned about how
art would be received by children and other untutored constituencies by
arguing that in the best works of art, “education and fun can go together;
[the] work of an artist can be a source of involvement . . . I am not
thinking of things that are exclusive. . . . One should not be ‘puritan.’ ”80
Just as Squirru’s erotic metaphors for North–South interaction were ex-
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 203

tending the boundaries of PAU visual arts programming, by throwing

“fun” into the PAU’s Kantian cultural mix, Squirru was venturing into
comparatively uncharted terrain, introducing an ingredient traditionally
denigrated by liberal cultural policymakers as the métier of a commercial
entertainment sector catering to libidinal, antirational appetites. Squirru’s
easy blend of cultural policy opposites, clearly an attempt to stake a claim
before the HemisFair leadership for fine art’s relevance to average fair-
goers, was a further step in the PAU Visual Arts Division’s experimenta-
tion with various types of collaboration between the commercial and
the aesthetic sectors since World War II. While Gómez Sicre had worked
on corporate-aesthetic collaborations from the perspective of patronage,
Squirru was now prepared to explore their potential interactions in the
realm of spectatorship.
And so, art took its place at HemisFair alongside the Ferris wheel,
miniature cars, and waterskiing exhibitions, and though El Greco and
Carol Burnett may seem an odd couple by museological standards, this
mixed cultural repertoire was consistent with the broad range of at-
tractions featured throughout the age of world’s fairs. As Tony Bennett
explains, in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, the educational gravitas of
the museum, typically located in the heart of the city, was perceived as
the antithesis of the unregulated, boisterous atmosphere of the itinerant
fair located on the city outskirts, but these two topoi converged in the
late nineteenth-century United States, where fixed-site world’s fairs, and
later, amusement parks, provided regulated zones that combined popular
amusement and civic edification.81 It is not clear, however, that individ-
ual fairgoers partook evenly of HemisFair’s broad cultural offerings, as
Squirru had theorized. Arnold “Pic” Swartz, for example, recalls that
one of the most stressful moments during his tenure with HemisFair was
the inadvertent booking of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and the
Bolshoi Ballet on the same day, but in the end each performance attracted
very different publics and both acts were well attended.82
So far, I have rehearsed the interests that various social actors brought
to HemisFair, including San Antonio elites, multinational corporations,
the Johnson and Díaz Ordaz administrations, and PAU cultural admin-
istrators; but two stakeholders central to the event theme were crucially
underrepresented among its sponsors and participants, that is, most of
the countries of Latin America and Mexican American San Antonio. With
respect to these sectors, the array of visual art and popular culture at
the fair created the appearance of broad participation in the event. At
the same time, though, the fair’s placement of art often revealed fissures
204 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

between political and cultural movements, and it signaled general prob-

lems involved in linking aesthetic objects to political representation. In the
mid-1960s, many Latin American countries were undergoing economic
or political instability and could not commit funds toward HemisFair;
these included the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Paraguay, Panama, and
Bolivia, while Brazil and Argentina, among others, were under military
dictatorship. In spite of intense promotional campaigns abroad on the
part of fair organizers, only four Latin American countries had com-
mitted pavilions on the eve of the event opening; at this juncture, local
patrons stepped in to finance the multinational Central America and OAS
Pavilions, the latter touted as a venue for all of the countries of the hemi-
sphere.83 Through such creative forms of sponsorship, the fair managed
to open with nine pavilions from OAS member states, as well as one from
Canada and nine from European and Asian countries.84
Charged with representing most of the hemisphere’s nations, not to
mention the Alliance for Progress, the midcentury modern design of the
OAS Pavilion was so overwhelmed by signage and photo panels that its
installation approximated that of a nineteenth-century academic art ex-
hibition, a stark departure from the architect’s original conception for the
space (Figure 29). In a building the size of a fast-food restaurant, visitors
took in a book exhibit and sales kiosk, large-scale facsimiles of key OAS
documents and the Américas magazine, text panels about the Alliance for
Progress provided by the U.S. Information Agency, and photo panels de-
picting Latin American landscapes and PAU buildings.85 The flags of the
American Republics hung from the ceiling, and the walls and floors were
filled with paintings, sculptures, and drawings from the Pan American
Union’s permanent art collection, which had been selected by José Gómez
Sicre and Rafael Squirru. Juan Tuyá, the Chilean contractor who staffed
the OAS Pavilion, reported to his PAU supervisor that the resulting visual
effect was busy: “Los paneles de la Alianza para el Progreso quedaron
instalados. Se destruyó un tanto la estética del Pabellón, ¿pero, qué se
le va a hacer?” (The Alliance for Progress panels have been installed;
they destroyed the aesthetic of the Pavilion a bit, but what are you going
to do?).86 By the time that the OAS Pavilion was up and running, José
Gómez Sicre appeared too disaffected with HemisFair even to comply
with staffer Juan Tuyá’s repeated requests for a gallery guide and basic
information about the artists whose work was displayed at the Pavilion.87
The installation of the OAS Pavilion was such a departure from Gómez
Sicre’s own modernist exhibitionary perspectives that he was probably
loath to claim credit for it.
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 205

Figure 29. Architect’s rendition of the OAS Pavilion interior. San Antonio Fair, Inc.
Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special
Collections.

The art on display at the OAS Pavilion featured a range of aesthetics,

themes, and historical periods by artists from the twenty-one member
states of the OAS.88 More importantly, it did not demur from the great-
est crisis of geopolitical representation surrounding the fair—Cuba. The
Pavilion displayed the Cuban flag, and visitors were greeted at the en-
trance by Preso político (Political Prisoner), a sculpture by the Cuban
artist Roberto Estopiñán; elsewhere in the Pavilion, a painting by the
Cuban painter Cundo Bermúdez was on display. For Gómez Sicre these
two works had a deeply personal significance. Both of these artists had
recently entered exile and were tied to the left-progressive cultural scene
of Gómez Sicre’s youth. Estopiñán was a former pupil of Gómez Sicre’s
cousin, Juan José Sicre, and Bermúdez was Gómez Sicre’s former law
school classmate and an old comrade of the vanguardia.89 But in terms of
the didactic framing of art at the OAS Pavilion, the exhibition of Cuban
works had other connotations. It asserted Cuba’s technical status as an
OAS member state, even though the country had been expelled from the
206 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

Organization on the basis of its current Marxist-Leninist state orienta-

tion. The OAS representation of Cuba through Estopiñán’s figure of a tor-
tured and bound prisoner suggested recognition of an authentic nation-
form in chains, a gesture that resonated with contemporary U.S. policy
toward the two Vietnams.
In contrast to the congested OAS Pavilion, the sculpture exhibition held
in outdoor and common areas of the fairgrounds more closely approxi-
mated Gómez Sicre’s early proposals for HemisFair. The sculpture selec-
tion integrated a substantial number of works by Latin American artists,
including five prizewinners from Gómez Sicre’s recent Esso Salons, along
with those of local and international artists (Figure 30). There too, never-
theless, visual art filled gaps in the international community. Consisting
preponderantly of abstract works from the postwar period, the logic of
the outdoor and common area sculpture selection seemed to reflect the
fair’s radiating geographic imaginary: about 20 percent of the pieces were
by Texan artists, 20 percent by Latin American artists, and the remaining
60 percent by major figures of U.S. and European twentieth-century art,
including Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, David Smith, Henry Moore,
George Segal, Louise Nevelson, Alexander Liberman, Barbara Hepworth,
Ruben Nakian, and Jacques Lipchitz.90 As in the OAS Pavilion’s pre-
sentation of Cuban art, the sculpture selection sometimes finessed the
representation of nations for which there was no corresponding pavilion;
in other cases, conversely, it created a provisional national affiliation for
artists working in exile. Thus, though Great Britain did not commit a
pavilion, the fair created an “English sculpture garden,” and though there
was no Argentina pavilion, a veritable diaspora of Argentine sculpture
was scattered about the park.91 The France Pavilion, in fact, became a
de facto exhibition space for Argentine and Brazilian artists working in
exile, including Sergio de Camargo, Julio Le Parc, Luis Tomasello, and
Hugo de Marco.
The contrasting strategies for exhibiting Latin American art in the
OAS Pavilion and the common areas of the fairgrounds are a further
elaboration of the diverging postwar perspectives about Latin American
art outlined in chapter 1 of this study. The exhibition at the OAS Pavilion
displayed Concha Romero James’s preference for regional coverage and
didactic contextualization. The sculpture exhibition, on the other hand,
more closely approximated Alfred  H. Barr, Jr.’s desire to integrate se-
lect examples of Latin American art into the history of Western aesthet-
ics within a modernist exhibitionary framework. As Mary Schneider
Enríquez has argued, these two approaches continue to inform the field
in problematic ways. Contemporary artists from Latin America who gain
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 207

Figure 30. Juan Egenau (Chile, 1927–1987), Ancestro (Ancestor), bronze. General
Photograph Collection, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special
Collections.

critical reception in global arenas—those whom Gómez Sicre might once

have celebrated as “exportable”—are often judged to be “international,”
while the adjective “Latin American” in global art worlds continues to
reinforce notions of difference, peripheral status, and resistant localism.92
The scenario of numerous cosmopolitan “art centers” arising to dissolve
the distinction between the “Latin American” and the “international” did
not occur in the manner that Gómez Sicre projected in his famous 1959
editorial.
Tejano expressive cultures, meanwhile, entered into the symbolic land-
scape of HemisFair through the “lesser” arts, namely vernacular architec-
ture, cuisine, handcraft, and musical forms such as mariachi and conjunto.
208 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

The coevalness of North American latinidad was beyond the bound-

aries of José Gómez Sicre’s cognitive map; one of his greatest concerns
about cultural planning for HemisFair, in fact, was the specter of brutish
norteño (Northern Mexican) tourists crossing the border to attend the
fair. In his view, the possibility of their attendance necessitated the recruit-
ment of first-class performers from the Southern Cone in order to expose
fronterizos to “the best” of Latin American culture.93 Among the sizeable
number of Texan artists included in the sculpture selection, only one,
Octavio Medellín, born in San Luis Potosí and working in Dallas, could
be described as Mexican American. The fair’s division of cultural labor
between Latinos and Latin Americans, along vernacular and elite axes,
has been eloquently criticized by Chon Noriega as a pernicious practice
on the part of mainstream arts institutions in the United States, which
often tend to elide Latino artists in their conception of transamerican
aesthetics.94
The question remains, however, as to whether fairgoers apprehended
these subtle machinations to harmonize geopolitical, ethnic, and aes-
thetic representation. Juan Tuyá’s dispatches to his supervisors at the Pan
American Union suggest that most of the one million visitors to the OAS
Pavilion gravitated toward facile entertainment and raucous behavior.95
Staffing the Pavilion thirteen hours a day for nearly seven months with-
out a day off, Tuyá’s narratives relate a somewhat different story about
“education and fun” than the one projected by Rafael Squirru.96 As Tuyá
battled fatigue, faulty air conditioning, and insufficient per diems, his
reports became increasingly histrionic throughout the run of the fair.
He particularly begged for respite from vulgar fairgoers who tried his
patience with inane questions such as “Where can we find the Mona
Lisa?” and their profane conduct around Raúl Valdivieso’s La serpiente
enplumada (The Plumed Serpent, Figure 31). The threatening orifice of
Valdivieso’s interpretation of the Nahuatl deity Quetzalcoatl evoked the
surrealist fascination with the vagina dentata. The hip, op-art signage
outside the OAS Pavilion, Tuyá lamented, was lost on most visitors to
the Pavilion, who often understood “OAS” to be another corporate ac-
ronym like IBM or GM, or assumed that it was an Italian word, given
the Pavilion’s proximity to the Italy Pavilion (Figure 32).97 In sum, Tuyá
reported that “los entendidos en el arte” (people who understand art),
meaning ambassadors, dignitaries, patrons, artists, and collectors—the
sort of “cultural leaders” that Rafael Squirru identified to HemisFair or-
ganizers for their VIP guest lists, just as his PAU predecessors had been
doing since the 1940s—appreciated the selection of art featured in the
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 209

OAS Pavilion, but average fairgoers, consisting primarily of middle-class

tourists, did not.98 The latter group consumed art as another fun, interac-
tive spectacle, and their interactions with it were often destructive and
irreverent.99
Julio Ramos’s formulation of Latin Americanism as “the precarious
balance among the cultural formations of international capital and ver-
nacular cultures,” cited in the introduction, invites further consideration
regarding how social class and cultural capital entered into HemisFair’s
presentation of popular and elite cultural forms.100 Between the ubiqui-
tous crispy cinnamon-sugar treat known as the HemisFair buñuelo and

Figure 31. Raúl Valdivieso (Chile, b. 1931), La serpiente enplumada (The

Plumed Serpent), bronze. Installation photograph from OAS Pavilion, HemisFair
’68. General Photograph Collection, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries
Special Collections.
210 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

Figure 32. Exterior of OAS Pavilion. San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995,
MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.

monumental abstract sculpture, the fair created a “progress effect” that

reconverted select examples of tejano and Mexican culture as signposts
of heritage and local color, while utilizing fine art as a beacon of cos-
mopolitanism and internationalism. In a reversal of typical North-to-
South developmentalist trajectories, HemisFair situated tradition and the
vernacular in the U.S. Southwest, while holding out the work of con-
temporary Latin American artists, among an international selection, as
representative of global community. HemisFair’s plotting of modernity
and tradition through the aesthetic and sensual registers offers a valuable
insight to Americanists seeking to relate race and ethnicity to economic
development. As Arturo Escobar has argued, developmentalism’s em-
phasis on hygiene, sanitation, and public health was itself a post–World
War II permutation of racist taxonomies of empire forged throughout the
Western Hemisphere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.101
HemisFair directed the developmentalist lens that had been turned on
Latin America for the past two decades toward the urban and regional
levels in the United States; in fact, the criteria brought to bear in hav-
ing the HemisFair neighborhood declared “blighted” for the purpose
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 211

of qualifying for urban renewal funding resembled the criteria for the
Alliance’s slum remediation projects in Latin American countries (dirt
floors, lack of indoor plumbing, electrification, and so on). And many
of the same actors who were involved in domestic urban renewal in the
United States were also pioneers of corporate cultural citizenship in Latin
America. For example, Edgar F. Kaiser, grandson of the founder of Kaiser
Industries, sat on President Johnson’s Urban Task Force. Until the 1966
coup in Argentina made it too difficult for Kaiser Industries to continue
operating its plant in Córdoba, the company was also a major promoter
of contemporary art in Argentina through the Córdoba biennials.102 In
connecting U.S. policies of urban renewal to foreign development by
means of a shared cultural repertoire, HemisFair emphasized that what
was good for Latin America was good for the barrios of South Texas.103
Theorists of cultural citizenship emphasize spatiality and visibility as
key tactics through which minority and subaltern groups stake claims
for rights and full enfranchisement as citizens before liberal democratic
states.104 This definition captures cultural citizenship’s role as an anticipa-
tory strategy, one that is simultaneously centripetal, in that it is insistent
on the retention of group identity rather than assimilation, and centrifu-
gal, in that it aims at the transformation of society as a consequence
of group inclusion in public arenas. For William Flores, the concept of
“claiming space,” central to cultural citizenship, refers not only to Latinos
establishing a physical presence in parks, neighborhoods, and other pub-
lic locations, but also to pursuing “opportunities for creative expression,
self-representation, and engagement.”105 HemisFair presents an ironic
twist on these strategies, for at the same time that a neighborhood and
the majority demographic of San Antonio were rendered invisible or folk-
loric by the fair, fair organizers employed a rhetoric of emergent visibility,
claiming space, and community building in order to advance their own
version of cultural citizenship. Cultural citizenship is usually approached
by scholars as a tactic of nonelites, but Flores’s description also reso-
nates with the Pan American Union Visual Arts Division’s comparatively
elite strategies for placing works by Latin American artists within larger
international venues such as HemisFair and the São Paulo, Venice, and
Córdoba biennials. These efforts sought to interpellate diverse national
subjects as citizens of greater America by emphasizing their shared cul-
tural values and rendering them visible before dominant groups in order
to gain recognition and access to international arenas. For Gómez Sicre,
Squirru, and HemisFair organizers, one path toward cultural citizen-
ship was through the trickle-down benefits to middle-class publics pre-
cipitated by corporate funding for the arts, while another was through
212 T H E L A S T PA R T Y

challenging nationalist visual repertoires to encourage the emergence of

what Néstor García Canclini has termed the consumer-citizen, that con-
temporary subject whose identity is forged at the intersection of pub-
lic and private, local and global, and for whom a viable concept of the
national-popular is no longer tenable nor desirable.106
The fact that Gómez Sicre and progressive Latino scholars identify
similar strategies for advancing collective enfranchisement begs the ques-
tion as to how much of a challenge such strategies pose to the constitutive
exclusions of liberalism. These currents of cultural citizenship appear to
be inspired by the ideal of a diverse and contentious public sphere or civil
society as a counterbalance to liberalism’s juridical and political empha-
sis on sovereign individuals. The placement of art and visual culture at
HemisFair illustrates the limitations of concepts of cultural citizenship
that take claiming liberal citizenship rights as their objective.107 Projects
such as the Institute of Texan Cultures, with its thematic focus on group
identity, cultural mestizaje, and place-making, in fact, reveal the shared
precepts of postrevolutionary Mexican corporatism and E Pluribus Unum
as models of unity in diversity. When cultural citizenship is invoked in
relation to developmentalist initiatives, as it was at HemisFair, moreover,
it runs the risk of serving as a supplementary or anticipatory strategy for
claiming economic and political rights that never materialize and perhaps
are never expected to do so. In such contexts, asserting cultural citizen-
ship appears to be more of a compensation for rights than a step toward
enfranchisement. This impasse has led some scholars of citizenship to
abandon European-derived concepts of liberal representation and the
public sphere entirely in favor of exploring ways in which performative
acts of claiming citizenship provide a means to theorize and redefine “the
public” in relation to indigenous and other social practices.108
Visual art has the capacity to engage diverse audiences while also
constituting a material and experiential archive of social movements,
communities, and historical events. Even at HemisFair, the disjunction
between the aesthetic and geopolitical domains subtly challenged visual
art’s supposedly harmonious relationship to tourism, free trade, and the
ideal of a borderless continent. In order to heighten art’s contestatory
possibilities, however, it is necessary to decouple the aesthetic from its
prescribed role as a barometer of development, and to revive the concept
of an avant-garde linked to rupture and critique, including institutional
critique. Such were the avant-garde movements, borne out of disjuncture
and crisis, which captivated Concha Romero James and José Gómez Sicre
early in their careers.
 T H E L A S T PA R T Y 213

The cultural policy configuration that contributed to the placement

of visual art at HemisFair is not the only one linking postrevolution-
ary Mexico to other parts of the Americas. San Antonio has served as a
hub for many different concepts of transamerican citizenship, from the
anarchist journalism of the Flores Magón brothers during the Mexican
Revolution to the socialist labor organizing of Emma Tenayuca in the
1930s.109 Alan Eladio Gómez has traced several currents of radical
cross-border activism taking place in San Antonio at the same time as
HemisFair, which connected the Chicano Movement to third-world lib-
eration struggles.110 Eric Zolov’s distinction between elite and popular
panamericanism is useful for analyzing a diverse range of cross-border
interactions, such as those examined by Gómez.111 While HemisFair pro-
vided a venue for civic leaders and government officials to promote of-
ficial Pan Americanism, the movement’s popular counterpart flourished
through informal cultural practices in places such as plazas, bars, and
churches, which were not frequented by diplomats and policymakers.
For example, Mario Cantú, one of the San Antonio activists whom Alan
Eladio Gómez profiles, became politicized while serving a prison sentence
in Leavenworth Penitentiary. There he interacted with Puerto Rican in-
dependentistas and developed an appreciation as to how the Chicano
Movement was connected to struggles for rights and social justice occur-
ring in other parts of the world. Cantú learned about the Flores Magón
brothers from another tejano prison inmate, Ramón Chacón, who was
later captured, tortured, and imprisoned in Monterrey, having been ac-
cused of running guns to Mexican guerrilla movements. Upon being re-
leased from prison, Cantú became a chef and turned his family’s San
Antonio restaurant into a center of political organizing, from which he
funded projects ranging from local community centers to the Chilean
solidarity movement.112 Such cross-border initiatives explicitly criticized
the developmentalist discourse promoted by HemisFair, and they prob-
lematized the visual-spatial emphases of cultural citizenship by taking ad-
vantage of the relative tactical benefits of camouflage, invisibility, and the
grey market. To provide another example of popular panamericanism,
when I asked a tejana docent at the Institute for Texan Cultures about her
favorite memory of HemisFair, she unhesitatingly replied “the HemisFair
buñuelo.” These treats are still produced by the same local bakery that
provided them to the fair, and the docent with whom I spoke still sends
buñuelo care packages to her adult children residing in other parts of the
United States. In the end, it appears, HemisFair’s North–South love affair
engendered many different forms of hemispheric citizenship.
This page intentionally left blank
 AFTERWORD

The Afterlife of the

Pan American Union
Visual Arts Programs

HemisFair ’68 may have been out of tune with the ethos of 1960s counter-
cultures and the utopian visions of left avant-garde movements in the
Americas, but in many ways the event is eerily predictive of cultural con-
figurations in the post-NAFTA era. The confluence of anticommunism
and free trade economics at HemisFair challenges the common claim
that neoliberalism was what came after the cold war, and that neoliberal
antistatism represents a definitive break with modernization theory, a
perspective that informs contemporary historiography as well as cultural
studies.1 Developmentalist theories circulating in the hemisphere during
the cold war instead created the conditions for contemporary neoliberal-
ism to flourish, and HemisFair provided a spatial and visual model for the
type of economic restructuring that was to sweep Latin American coun-
tries during the 1980s. HemisFair floated a set of propositions in the late
1960s that would only be taken up again by U.S. foreign policymakers
during the “lost decade” of the 1980s: from the Border Industrialization
Program to NAFTA, from the denouement of the Alliance for Progress
to Chicago school austerity measures, from the liberal citizen to the
consumer-citizen. Between the watershed of 1968 and contemporary
neoliberalism, a gulf of state violence and U.S. interventions marked the
protracted end of the cold war in the Americas. The theories of cultural
citizenship that arose in Latin/o American social sciences in the 1990s
were as much an attempt to theorize progressive politics beyond cold
war binaries following the grim two-decade interval between the 1960s
and the 1980s as they were an effort to assemble comparative analyses
between U.S. and Latin American societies.
216 AF TERWORD

The fact that HemisFair planners happened upon infrastructural relics

of the Spanish colonial past as they sought to construct a city of the future
provides a fitting image on which to conclude. Likewise, the HemisFair
cultural landscape exposes the sedimented policy formations that I have
traced in this study. This genealogy proceeds from postrevolutionary
Mexican initiatives in the visual arts organized by José Vasconcelos under
the auspices of the Secretaría de Educación Pública, founded in 1921,
to the panamericanization of these policies during the tenure of Concha
Romero James at the PAU during the Good Neighbor Policy, and finally,
to their semiprivatization under the subsequent administrations of José
Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru during the cold war. The art historian
Anna Indych-López has observed that Mexico plays an overdetermined
role in shaping popular U.S. conceptions of Latin American art, stem-
ming from the heydey of inter-American cultural exchanges orchestrated
by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, the Museum of Modern Art,
and other institutions during the 1930s and 1940s.2 I would add that
Mexico has contributed more than visual content to constructions of
“Latin American art” in the United States; it has also provided a policy
framework that upholds art as a civilizing force, an emblem of collective
cultural identity, and a means of fostering transamerican solidarity while
casting artists as public intellectuals and social leaders. Although José
Gómez Sicre distanced himself from the content of muralism and social
realism and introduced a plurality of visual aesthetics into the PAU visual
arts programs, he also embraced aspects of postrevolutionary Mexican
cultural policy and tailored them to postwar values and aesthetics as-
sociated with liberalism. While the art and artists promoted by the PAU
Visual Arts Division during the early cold war sometimes became un-
moored from institutional policy objectives, it is also the case that cul-
tural policies themselves underwent unanticipated permutations as they
crossed borders and generations.
The legacy of Pan American cultural policy continues to express itself
in various ways in contemporary hemispheric American art worlds. At
the urban level, a new wave of “cultural developmentalist” theories, such
as Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, has argued for the
centrality of creative professionals to contemporary U.S. development and
prosperity. Florida identifies this emergent class-in-itself but not yet-for-
itself as composed of architects, artists, engineers, urban planners, educa-
tors, and other professionals who work flexible hours, generate wealth,
and gravitate toward vibrant, diverse, and multidimensional urban envi-
ronments. Florida describes the rise of the creative class as the culmina-
 AF TERWORD 217

tion of several evolutionary modes of production leading from agrarian

to trade-based, industrial, information, and organizational economies.
Those cities that do not want to be left behind, he argues, need to effec-
tively recruit and retain a creative class in order to reap the benefits of
the creative age. Were one to substitute José Vasconcelos’s five races for
Florida’s five economic ages, one has an approximate reconstruction of
Vasconcelos’s cultural developmentalist scenario of multiracial mestizaje
leading to an impending age of plenitude and beauty, the utopian vision
projected in his 1925 manifesto La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), not
to mention a more embellished and seductive take on W. W. Rostow’s
five stages of development leading to modernization.3 Like so many other
“post-industrial, post-information economy” cities in the United States
that never really experienced these phases (including my own home of
Iowa City), San Antonio has recently embarked on a post-HemisFair
campaign to nurture its creative class. The initiative elaborates upon
the tradition and modernity formula, including the muscular promotion
of heritage tourism and a new public sculpture program that belatedly
recognizes work by tejano artists who were excluded from HemisFair
(Plate 8).4
Blockbuster exhibitions of the NAFTA era such as Mexico: Splendors
of Thirty Centuries (1990) and The Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art
(2001–2003) took corporate and cultural citizenship to new heights as
accompaniments to trade liberalization and elite tourism. Mary Coffey
in her study of the latter exhibition notes that corporate citizenship, once
characterized as an altruistic gesture of “giving back” to a community, has
now become a revenue generator for large corporations. Coffey’s analysis
of the NAFTA blockbusters describes how the newly merged Citigroup
and Banamex corporations, which sponsored The Great Masters exhibi-
tion, employed “cause-related marketing” to transform Mexican artisans
into entrepreneurs. Citigroup and Banamex provided seed money to the
artisans whose work was featured in the exhibition so that they could
invest in apprenticeship training and expansion of their production, while
the exhibition itself served to introduce their work to potential buyers.5
As corporate citizenship becomes profitable, Toby Miller observes that
corporations themselves “have become bigger sources of global aid than
states,” and these infusions of aid are occurring as multinationals move
into new sectors traditionally managed by states, such as “water, power,
telecommunications, incarceration, the military, and so on.”6
After HemisFair and Maracay, the OAS intensified its investment in
U.S. Latino populations and began to fund a broader range of cultural
218 AF TERWORD

projects at a hemispheric level. The OAS Secretary General Alejandro

Orfila (1975–1984), a supporter of the PAU Visual Arts Division, es-
poused a capacious, anthropological view of culture that encompassed
expressive, symbolic, and material systems. He expanded OAS cultural
programs targeted at the development of Latin American tourism dis-
tricts, preservation of historical monuments, handcraft, and libraries
and archives, and he encouraged regional and collaborative research
on culture.7 By 1975, the OAS started to sponsor training workshops
for cultural administrators, creating a new generation of Gómez Sicres
prepared for work in diverse institutional contexts.8 Just as the Good
Neighbor cultural exchange programs were prototypes for cold war cul-
tural diplomacy, the PAU Visual Arts Division was a laboratory for the
cultural turn in the OAS and for the broader trends in global governance
that George Yúdice has characterized as an emerging form of “cultural
regulation,” departing from Foucauldian bioregulation.9 Gómez Sicre’s
Boletín de Artes Visuales editorials of the 1950s yearned for such a turn
of events; however, the expansion and dispersal of his working models
across the hemisphere also had the effect of diminishing the centrality of
his office. One might look to the Inter-American Development Bank in
Washington, D.C., the wealthier cousin of the Pan American Union, to
glimpse the contemporary contours of these developments as they have
played out in inter-American organizations. The Bank’s Cultural Center
currently issues “cultural development” grants for site-specific projects
throughout the Americas, and it is home to a fine arts gallery directed by
the Colombian curator and critic Félix Angel who once worked under
Gómez Sicre in the PAU Visual Arts Division. This gallery features rotat-
ing exhibitions of painting, drawing, and sculpture, intended to make
the Washington, D.C., community aware of the diverse range of Latin
American visual art, a function that approximates the original charge of
the PAU exhibitions.
In different ways, Concha Romero James, José Gómez Sicre, and
Rafael Squirru each strove to harmonize regional cultural distinction
with universal aesthetic values through their work as arts administra-
tors at the PAU. Their Latin Americanist perspectives, with roots in the
nineteenth century, continue to influence contemporary intellectuals, even
as they recognize Latin Americanism to be an antiquated and insuffi-
cient discourse. Today, critiques of “Latin American art” as a reductive
or essentialist category have led to repeated calls to rethink the field on
the part of artists and arts professionals. These debates occur within a
larger framework of alternately melancholic and sanguine pronounce-
 AF TERWORD 219

ments about the dissolution of Latin Americanism and the consequently

troubled status of “Latin America” as a coherent regional and historical
designation, such as those issued by prominent critics including Néstor
García Canclini, Walter Mignolo, and Julio Ramos.10 Ramos astutely
characterizes these debates as a response to the “crisis of the liberal no-
tion of representativity.” This crisis, I would add, is marked by the demise
of a certain intellectual profile, whose longevity, visibility, and claim to
authority the Pan American Union visual arts programs helped to per-
petuate.11 In shifting the focus of debate away from area designations
and the protagonism of intellectuals, these discussions might now turn
to consider other aspects of the crisis identified by Ramos in order to
address the ongoing challenges faced by many figures surveyed in this
study, namely the perils of theorizing culture through the prism of econo-
mism and at the same time the urgency of prioritizing culture in public
life, forms of governance, and the articulation of needs. As citizens of the
Americas continue to generate new forms of transnational collectivity
and narratives about the cultural cold war, they are obliged not only to
“find a way of grasping hold of the quality and density of the present,” as
García Canclini observes, but also to confront the long twentieth-century
institutional and cultural configurations that bind Latin Americanism to
its hemispheric other, Pan Americanism.12
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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people contributed to this book, and I am deeply grateful for the
support of friends, family, colleagues, and students who offered their as-
sistance or simply were with me while I worked on it. I also thank the
institutions and rights holders that granted permission to reproduce il-
lustrations and to cite from archival sources in this study. At Stanford
University, several cohorts of students who enrolled in my seminars on
Pan American movements helped me to refine my interest in the insti-
tutional bases of postwar visual culture. My chair Mary Louise Pratt
supported my funding request for a preliminary archival visit to the Pan
American Union, where Stella Villagran and Beverly Wharton-Lake at the
Columbus Memorial Library, and Maria Leyva and later Adriana Ospina
at the Archives of the AMA  | Art Museum of the Americas, provided
warm hospitality and an auspicious start to my work on this project. On
that first visit to the PAU, Stella brought toys for my young son to play
with while I read files in the library; a few return visits later, we were both
amazed that my toddler had so rapidly become a teenager. Several schol-
ars and cultural workers formerly connected to the Pan American Union
graciously shared their reflections about the Visual Arts Division. I thank
Félix Angel, Leslie Judd Ahlander, and Annick Sanjurjo for interviews
that provided excellent guidance and leads during my early research.
Alejandro Anreus generously shared the transcript of his interviews with
Gómez Sicre, which are an indispensable primary source for this study,
as well as his extensive knowledge about the PAU visual arts programs.
Through the years, our correspondence has been a source of intellectual
support and companionship as I worked on this project.
At the University of Iowa, a Faculty Scholar Award from the Office of the
222 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Executive Vice President and Provost made it possible for me to conduct

the remaining research necessary to complete this book. I thank my chairs
in English, Jonathan Wilcox and Claire Sponsler, for their support dur-
ing this period of intense work. The Rockefeller Archive Center awarded
two grants-in-aid to support my research trips to Sleepy Hollow, New
York, which helped to lay the groundwork for the introduction and first
chapter of this book. Each endnote in this study (and there are many)
recalls a librarian, archivist, or colleague without whom I would have
been at sea. I thank Michele Hiltzik at the Rockefeller Archive Center;
Michelle Harvey and Elisabeth Dillon at the MoMA Archives; Chris-
tian Kelleher and Michael Hironymous at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin
American Collection of the University of Texas Libraries; Eduardo Ca-
brera Núñez at the Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio Paz”
of the Museo José Luis Cuevas; Nikki Lynn Thomas, Patrick Lemelle, and
Tom Shelton of the University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special
Collections; and the crack detectives at the University of Iowa Main
Library Interlibrary Loan Department for connecting me with primary
documents. I thank James Siekmeier, David K. Johnson, and Seth Fein,
who responded to my requests for help navigating the formidable NARA
Record Groups 59, 229, and Freedom of Information Act requests; the
NARA archivists and staff who processed numerous rush requests for de-
classification during my research visits; and Peter Gough, comrade of the
NARA reading room, who generously shared his expertise about Charles
Seeger. As a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, I interacted
with an amazing group of scholars and staff during the “Networks and
Boundaries” theme year and through the Clark–Getty Workshop. I espe-
cially thank Esra Akcan, Jorge Coronado, Talinn Grigor, Andrew Schulz,
and Avinoam Shalem for stimulating conversations about our respective
fields and projects. While I was in residence at the Getty, Rebecca Zamora
was a wonderful research assistant and interlocutor about Siqueiros, and
my conversations with Annette Leddy and Rita Gonzalez inspired the
preface to the book, leading me to the work of Pablo Helguera.
I am grateful for the encouragement and enthusiasm of University
of Minnesota Press executive editor Richard Morrison, managing edi-
tor Laura Westlund, and editorial assistant Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus,
who responded patiently and expertly to frequent inquiries as I pre-
pared the manuscript, to the two readers who offered thoughtful and
useful suggestions for improving the text, and to Jean Brady for her
excellent copy editing. I extend my thanks to colleagues near and far
who read portions of the manuscript or contributed their disciplinary
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 223

expertise. Bluford Adams, Patricia Andrew de Zurlinden, Amit Baishya,

Daniel Balderston, Efraín Barradas, Aimee Carrillo-Rowe, Denise Filios,
Esther Gabara, Andrea Giunta, Alyosha Goldstein, Brian Gollnick, Laura
Gutiérrez, Elizabeth Horan, Patrick Iber, Anna Indych-López, John King,
Pedro Lasch, Kathy Lavezzo, Emily Maguire, Sophia McClennen, Kathleen
Newman, Chon Noriega, José Quiroga, Lauren Rabinovitz, Laura Rigal,
Rebecca Schreiber, Amy Spellacy, Harry Stecopoulos, Cynthia Steele, Lara
Trubowitz, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Doris Witt,
George Yúdice, and Eric Zolov offered thoughtful advice, feedback, and
support. My colleagues and students in the departments of English,
Spanish and Portuguese, and the Latin American Studies Program at
the University of Iowa enriched my work as well as my daily life in Iowa
City. Justin Denman of the English Department assisted with many inter-
national communications related to this research. I am especially grateful
to my colleagues in the transnational/postcolonial area of the English de-
partment: Mary Lou Emery, Marie Krüger, and Priya Kumar, from whom
I have learned so much. I also thank Deborah Cohn, Claudia Sadowski-
Smith, and Roberto Tejada Montoya, for friendships in which the intel-
lectual and the personal are intertwined. I presented portions of this study
at annual meetings of the American Studies Association, Latin American
Studies Association, American Historical Association, and the Trinational
Historians Conference, as well as at Arizona State University, Duke
University, Indiana University, Northwestern University, the University
of Illinois, Chicago, the University of New Mexico, and the University of
Texas at Austin. I am grateful to colleagues and students at those events
and institutions for their thoughtful comments and reception of my work.
Finally, thanks are in order to a more distant but no less formative set
of influences. Thank you to Dean for offering me a job as your assistant
when I desperately needed it, and to Leigh and Gerry for the opportunities
to learn on the job. Thank you to Serge Guilbaut, whose book I devoured
on lunch breaks many years ago and who provided me with a solid re-
search model and set of enduring questions. Thank you to Charles A.
Hale, with whom I first studied liberalism in the Americas. And thank you
to Germaine and Mabel, Peter, and my family, especially my father, with
whom I wish I could share this book.
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 NOTES

Preface

1. Pablo Helguera (Mexico, b. 1971) is a transdisciplinary artist and arts educator

currently working in New York. Helguera moved from Mexico City to Chicago at the
age of eighteen, where he attended the School of the Art Institute. He has exhibited
his work internationally at prominent venues and has extensive career experience
as a museum educator, as head of public programs at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York (1998–2005), and most recently as director of adult and
academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007–). The primary
sponsor of the School of Panamerican Unrest was Creative Capital Foundation
(creative-capital.org), a private nonprofit organization; local arts and cultural insti-
tutions also sponsored the project. Though the journey took five months, the dates of
the SPU project (2001–2011) reflect its planning and post-trip phases, culminating
in the recent publication of a set of documents and testimonials about the road trip.
The divergence between the English and Spanish translations of the School of Pan-
american Unrest is deliberate on Helguera’s part; in Spanish, the adjective “Panameri-
cana” modifies “Escuela” (school) rather than “Desasosiego” (unrest). I thank Pablo
Helguera for discussing his work and sharing important project documents with
me, and also Rita Gonzalez for introducing me to Helguera’s work. Pablo Helguera,
The School of Panamerican Unrest/La escuela panamericana del desasosiego: An
Anthology of Documents/antología documentada (New York: Jorge Pinto Books,
2011). The quotes describing the project are taken from a press release by the School
of Panamerican Unrest, accessed 4 September 2011, http://www.panamericanismo
.org/texts/SPUPRESSRELEASE.pdf; “The School of Panamerican Unrest: A Proj-
ect by Pablo Helguera,” accessed 4 September 2011, www.universes-in-universe.de/
specials/2005/epd/english.htm; and Adetty Pérez de Miles, “Revolution/Institution,
Public Art, and Answerability: The Transnational Dialogic Encounters of The School
of Panamerican Unrest,” in The School of Panamerican Unrest, 61.
226 N OT E S F O R P R E FAC E

2. Local hosts consulted with school staff to organize events on a wide range
of topics, including immigration, real estate, cuisine, and bilingualism. The trans-
disciplinary expanse of the project platform is indebted to Helguera’s engagement
with relational aesthetics, an interactive modality in which the artist and work
proposes to engage the whole of social relations. However, Helguera also sought
to intervene in practices of relational aesthetics by imposing a flexible structure
on the SPU activities.
3. Pablo Helguera, “Una nueva belleza venezolana—A New Venezuelan Beauty,
August 25, 2006,” accessed 4 September 2011, www.panamericanismo.org.
4. Today’s 29,800-mile highway route was initially conceived as a railroad line.
5. This iconography was purposively selected by Helguera, who cites the
bell as an important symbol of the U.S., Mexican, and Salvadoran independence
movements, and notes the eye’s association with freemasonry, likewise influential
in independence movements. Helguera, moreover, recovers the historical connec-
tions between the SPU icons and utopian religious sects in the Americas, for ex-
ample, by reconstructing the Quaker history of the Liberty Bell and the prairie
schoolhouses of the Shakers and using them as inspirations for the SPU. Pablo
Helguera, personal communication, 24 August 2011; Pablo Helguera, “La cam-
pana de Filadelfia/The Bell of Philadelphia (2006),” accessed 9 September 2011,
pablohelguera.net.
6. Pérez de Miles, 64.
7. Pablo Helguera, “Inauguration and Unveiling, May 7, 2006,” accessed
4 September 2011, www.panamericanismo.org.
8. See the SPU blog, accessed 4 September 2011, www.panamericanismo.org;
and e-mail posts, accessed 4 September 2011, http://espanol.groups.yahoo.com/
group/forovirtualpanamericano/.
9. Pablo Helguera, “Heartbreaks and Literary Stops, June 15, 2006,” ac-
cessed 4 September 2011, www.panamericanismo.org.
10. Pablo Helguera, “Reporte de Santiago: Un performance panamericano,
September 10, 2006,” accessed 4 September 2011, www.panamericanismo.org.
11. The famous quote, attributed to Bolívar and sometimes represented in
Spanish as “He arado en el mar y he sembrado en el viento” (I have plowed the sea
and sown in the wind), has appeared in English texts as “America is ungovernable;
those who served the revolution have plowed the sea”). See, for example, Sheldon
B. Liss and Peggy K. Liss, Man, State, and Society in Latin American History (New
York: Praeger, 1972), 133.
12. Cited in “Inaugural Dialogue/Diálogo inaugural at the Americas Society,
May 7, 2006,” accessed 4 September 2011, www.panamericanismo.org.
13. As Sara Castro-Klarén explains, Bolívar hoped that a Spanish-American
federation would serve as a “wall of containment to the United States” in order to
prevent U.S. military and economic domination of Latin America. Castro-Klarén,
 N OT E S F O R P R E FAC E 227

“Framing Pan-Americanism: Simón Bolívar’s Findings,” CR: The New Centennial

Review 3.1 (2003): 47.
14. Brickhouse explains that one of the U.S. delegates died en route, and the
other did not attend due to concerns about his health. Brickhouse, Transamerican
Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004), 1–14.
15. Castro-Klarén, 26, 45. Martí famously denounced the late nineteenth-
century Pan American Conferences in his capacity as a foreign correspondent and
consul for several Latin American governments. Contemporary scholars who have
claimed Martí for hemispheric American studies point to his radical democratic
ideals and insistence on racial equality, which are apparent in his writings and
activism for Cuban independence and his sympathetic treatment of blacks and Na-
tive Americans in his crónicas (chronicles) about life in the United States. See, for
example, José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural
Critique, and Literary Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); and Jeffrey
Belnap and Raúl Fernández, eds., José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to
Hemispheric Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
16. The stated purpose of this sightseeing trip was to promote mutual under-
standing. J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplo-
macy, 1936–1948, Cultural Relations Programs of the U.S. Department of State:
Historical Studies, no. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Educational and Cultural
Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 1976), 9–13.
17. Joseph Smith, “The First Conference of American States (1889–1890) and
the Early Pan American Policy of the United States,” in Beyond the Ideal: Pan
Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, ed. David Sheinin (Westport: Greenwood,
2000), 24–25.
18. Their characterization of intellectuals was consistent with the metaphysical
“mentalist” model of the transmission of ideas that prevailed in early twentieth-
century liberal international organizations. This antimaterialist perspective held
that ideas passed from person to person and that intellectuals were at the top of
the “idea chain.” Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy
and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 5.
19. Cited in Espinosa, 141; see also Frederick B. Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor
Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1995), 59–75.
20. Gustavo Durán to Kenneth Holland, 4 June 1942, Office of Inter-American
Affairs, R.G. 229, General Records, Central Files, box 373, folder “Education
Misc.,” National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
21. My use of the masculine gender is intentional. Nils Gilman, “Moderni-
zation Theory, the Highest Stage of American Intellectual History,” in Staging
228 N OT E S F O R P R E FAC E

Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David C.
Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 51; Seth Fein, “New Empire into Old:
Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way,” Diplomatic History 28.5 (No-
vember 2004): 711.
22. Andrea Giunta’s work on Argentine art of the 1960s provides an interest-
ing contrast to Mexican and U.S. cultural diplomatic practices of the casting of
artists as intellectuals: “La conversión del artista de vanguardia en intelectual y
en artista/intelectual comprometido es un proceso cuyas primeras señales pueden
ubicarse a mediados de la década y que se consuma aceleradamente en 1968”
(The conversion of the avant-garde artist into intellectual and into committed
artist/intellectual is a process whose first traces appeared by the mid-1960s and
soon culminated in 1968). Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo, y política:
Arte argentino en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2001), 339, English
edition: Avant-garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the 1960s,
trans. Peter Kahn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 247. For more on Latin
American intellectuals, see Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover: Ediciones
del Norte, 1984), English edition: The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Julio Ramos, Desencuentros de la mod-
ernidad en América Latina: Literatura y política en el siglo XIX (Mexico: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1989), English edition: Divergent Modernities: Culture
and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2001); Nicola Miller: In the Shadow of the State:
Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish
America (London: Verso, 1999).
23. Although MoMA dedicated major exhibitions to Venezuelan, Brazil-
ian, and Cuban art and architecture during this period, Mexican art received
the broadest coverage in museums and mainstream U.S. media. Two of “los tres
grandes” (the three great ones), Rivera and Siqueiros, were members of the Mexi-
can Communist Party in the 1920s, which fostered their internationalist perspec-
tive. For more on the hemispheric impact of muralism, see Alejandro Anreus,
Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds., The Social and the Real: Political
Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2006); Shifra M. Goldman, “Mexican Muralism: Its Influence in
Latin America and the United States,” Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social
Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 101–17; and Anna Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera,
Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009). See also Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things
Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 229

24. Cited in Mónica Castillo, “Visit of the SPU to the Yucatán Peninsula,” in
The School of Panamerican Unrest, 29. The seven stops in the United States and
five in Mexico comprised almost half of the school’s travel itinerary.
25. Pablo Helguera, “Entre El Salvador y México, July 20, 2006,” accessed
4 September 2011, www.panamericanismo.org.
26. “Actividades de la Sección de Cooperación Intelectual de la Unión Pan-
americana durante el año 1931–1932” (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union,
Division of Intellectual Cooperation, 1932), 3. Prior to this the Pan American
movement and visual art were linked through national pavilions at the world’s
fairs, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the Pan-American Ex-
position of 1901, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904.
27. Pablo Helguera, “On Plowing the Sea (an introduction turned epilogue),”
in The School of Panamerican Unrest, 10. See also Jean Franco, The Decline and
Fall of the Lettered City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 234–59.

Introduction

The original text of the epigraph reads: “Pienso que antes de Gómez Sicre había
arte argentino o mexicano, peruano o venzolano, es él quien tuvo la visión de que
todas esas manifestaciones, de alguna manera oscura e inefable, tenían denomi-
nadores comunes debido al hecho de ser productos de individuos que venían de
pueblos que nacieron vinculados por una tradición, por una herencia, por una
circunstancia y por un destino. No solamente la palabra arte latinoamericano
le pertencece a Gómez Sicre sino la idea contenida en esa expresión.” Fernando
de Szyszlo, Miradas furtivas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996),
250. See also Fernando de Szyszlo, “José Gómez Sicre: Pequeño homenaje” (edited
manuscript dated 29 November 1989), box 7, folder 6, José Gómez Sicre Papers,
1916–1991 (JGS), Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, University of Texas Libraries. All translations are mine unless other-
wise noted.
1. The First International Conference of American States was held in 1890; it
resulted in the foundation of the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics.
The office was renamed the International Office of American Republics in 1902.
The office changed names again to the International Union of American Republics
following the 1910 International Conference of American States; in this same year
Carnegie established funds for the construction of the building known as the Pan
American Union.
2. Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cul-
tural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 8–9,
12. The phrase “International Mind” is attributed to Nicholas Murray Butler, sec-
ond director of the Carnegie Endowment.
230 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

3. In addition to its impressive main building, the PAU complex includes an

administrative building and the secretary general’s residence (today the AMA  |
Art Museum of the Americas). The parrots were finally banished under Secretary
General Alejandro Orfila (1975–1984). See Jo Ann Lewis, “Washington’s Lost
Latin American Art,” Washington Post, 8 July 1980, B9.
4. Ninkovich, 12–13.
5. Charles G. Fenwick, The Organization of American States: The Inter-
American Regional System, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Kaufman, 1963), 497.
6. Michael Marcellino C., “Conversation with José Gómez Sicre,” C., Latin
American Art 3 (1991): 26.
7. For more on Rowe-era Pan Americanism, see David Barton Castle, “Leo
Stanton Rowe and the Meaning of Pan Americanism,” Beyond the Ideal: Pan
Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, ed. David Sheinin (Westport: Greenwood,
2000), 33–44; Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Making of a Hemispheric Intellectual-
Statesman: Leo S. Rowe in Argentina (1906–1919),” Journal of Transnational
American Studies 2.1 (2010), accessed 12 August 2011, http://escholarship.org/
uc/item/92m7b409.
8. The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (1947, also known as
the Rio Treaty) solidified the hemispheric defense network that had been outlined
in the Act of Chapultepec (1945). In 1948 the Treaty on Pacific Settlement was
ratified at the Ninth Inter-American Conference in Bogotá. At that same event,
the Bogotá Charter was approved, bringing the Organization of American States
(OAS) into existence. The Visual Arts Section underwent several name changes
throughout its history; it became the Visual Arts Division in 1961. For the sake of
simplicity, I refer to the Visual Arts Section throughout this introduction.
9. According to Gilbert Joseph, “The United States had quickly made it clear
that there would be no Marshall Plan for its ‘good neighbors’: compared with
the $19 billion in foreign aid sent to Western Europe from 1945 to 1950, only
$400 million flowed to Latin America—less than 2 percent of total U.S. aid.”
Joseph, “What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More
Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in In from the Cold: Latin America’s New
Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2008), 22. And Mark T. Berger observes that “the
relative importance of Latin America to US globalism after 1945 is reflected in
the fact that between 1945 and 1955 Latin America as a whole only received 3%
of all non-military US aid distributed while Western Europe received 65%, the
Asia-Pacific almost 20% with South Korea receiving more than all the countries
of Latin America put together.” Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American
Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 67.
10. José Gómez Sicre was chief of the Visual Arts Section of the PAU Depart-
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 231

ment of Cultural Affairs (formerly the PAU Division of Intellectual Cooperation)

from 1946 to 1982. After he stepped down from his position, his contract was
extended until 1983 so that he could serve as a consultant in the search for his suc-
cessor as director of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America (today known
as the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas).
11. José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales (BAV) 4 (Oc-
tober 1958–April 1959): 4. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of
Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 4.
12. Maria Leyva, “The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America: A Guide to
Its Resources,” in Artistic Representations of Latin American Diversity: Sources
and Collections, Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materi-
als XXXIV, ed. Barbara Robinson (Albuquerque: SALALM Secretariat, General
Library, University of New Mexico, 1993), 424.
13. The original Spanish text reads as follows: “El artista joven de América
sabe que van naciendo centros internacionales de arte en su propio continente y
tiene ya como puntos obligados de recepción, a Nueva York y a Buenos Aires, a
Rio de Janeiro y a Lima, a Ciudad de México y a São Paulo, a Caracas y a Wash-
ington. . . . Paris ha dejado de ser ‘el centro’ para convertirse en ‘un centro’ más.”
Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 5 (May–December 1959): 2.
14. Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 9 (January–June 1962): 1.
15. Henry R. Luce, The American Century (New York: Farrar and Rinehart,
1941). Luce coined this phrase in an eponymous editorial that appeared in the
February 1941 issue of Life magazine.
16. Ricardo D. Salvatore, “Library Accumulation and the Emergence of Latin
American Studies,” Comparative American Studies 3.4 (2005): 415–36. See also
Berger; and Helen Delpar, Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist
Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2008).
17. Martí’s crónicas of the Pan American Conferences are compiled in José
Martí, Obras completas, vol. 6, Nuestra América (Havana: Editorial de Nacio-
nal de Cuba, 1975). A translated selection of “The Monetary Conference of the
American Republics” is included in José Martí, Selected Writings, ed. and trans.
Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002), 304–10.
18. Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-
Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham: Duke University Press,
2001), 156; original edition: Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina:
Literatura y política en el siglo XIX (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989).
The passage cited refers to Francisco Bilbao, whom Ramos describes as a precur-
sor to latinoamericanista thought. In addition to Ramos’s study, U.S. and Latin
American currents of Latin Americanism are explored in Román de la Campa,
Latin Americanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and
232 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American

Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
19. Historians note that the Good Neighbor Policy was never a programmatic
policy as such but rather an orientation on the part of the U.S. government toward
the countries of Latin America that spanned the tail end of the Herbert Hoover
administration and the whole of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and then entered into decline sometime between the end of World War II and the
early cold war. The scholarship about the period is extensive; see, for example,
Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin
America, 1933–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Freder-
ick B. Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); and Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of
the Good Neighbor Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).
20. See J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplo-
macy, 1936–1948, Cultural Relations Programs of the U.S. Department of State:
Historical Studies, no. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Educational and Cultural
Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 1976), 281–300. During the Good Neighbor
Policy years, cultural exchanges became part of a state-private network in which
the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations were also active. Among the art-
ists and arts professionals who came to the United States in the early 1940s are
the following well-known figures: Horacio Butler, Julio Payró, and Martín Noel
(Argentina); Osvaldo Guayasamín (Educador); José Sabogal and Enrique Camino
Brent (Peru); and Luis Zorrilla de San Martín (Uruguay).
21. Gabriela Mistral served as Chilean consul in Los Angeles (1946–1948) and
as Chilean delegate to the United Nations (1953–1954); she also advised Mexican
Minister of Education José Vasconcelos regarding the establishment of a rural
education program in postrevolutionary Mexico (1922–1924). She was a State
Department grant recipient, an honored guest at the PAU on three occasions, and
a personal friend of PAU Director General Leo S. Rowe and Chief of Intellectual
Cooperation Concha Romero James. See Jonathan Cohen, “Toward a Common
Destiny on the American Continent: The Pan Americanism of Gabriela Mistral,”
in Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler, ed. Marjorie Agosín (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2003), 1–18. For an insightful discussion of the Mistral-Martí
textual relationship, see Laura Lomas, “Redefining the American Revolutionary:
Gabriela Mistral on José Martí,” Comparative American Studies 6.3 (Septem-
ber 2008): 241–64. For general discussions of Mistral’s work in cultural policy
and relation to Pan Americanism, see Elizabeth Horan and Doris Meyer, eds.
and trans., This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria
Ocampo (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); and Licia Fiol Matta, Queer
Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002).
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 233

22. Anna Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siquei-
ros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2009); Anna Indych-López, “Between the National and Transnational: Aspects
of Exhibiting Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art in the Americas Society,”
in A Principality of Its Own: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society,
ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2006),
84–99. See also Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural
Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa: Uni-
versity of Alabama Press, 1992).
23. Daniel Catton Rich, “Report to the Committee for Inter-American Artis-
tic and Intellectual Relations,” 12 October 1943, René d’Harnoncourt Papers
(RdH) II.36, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (MoMA). The
Committee to which Rich made this report included the directors of the Gug-
genheim, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office
of Inter-American Affairs gave $100,000 to the Committee to organize exchanges
in the field of art; after the entry of the United States into the war, the Committee
activities were transferred to the Department of State. See Office of the Coordina-
tor of Inter-American Affairs, History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-
American Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), 94.
24. José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000 [1900]).
25. Julio Ramos, “Hemispheric Domains: 1898 and the Origins of Latin-
Americanism,” in The Globalization of U.S.–Latin American Relations: Democ-
racy, Intervention, and Human Rights, ed. Virginia M. Bouvier (Westport: Praeger,
2002), 57.
26. A. Glinkin, El latinoamericanismo contra el panamericanismo: Desde Simón
Bolívar hasta nuestros días (Moscow: Progreso, 1984 [1961]).
27. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 396; also cited in Daniela Spenser, “Standing Conventional Cold
War History on Its Head,” in In from the Cold, 381.
28. Carlos Otto Stoetzer, The Organization of American States, 2nd ed. (West-
port: Praeger, 1993), 71.
29. José Martí’s 1891 essay “Nuestra América” opens on the figure of an alle-
gorical national subject who comes to consciousness of his common interest with
other Latin Americans in light of the U.S. imperialist threat (Obras completas,
vol. 6, 15–22). My inflection of the term “work” is inspired by the Foucauldian
approach of Ann Laura Stoler in “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Compari-
son in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American
History 88.3 (December 2001): 829–65.
30. These qualities are surveyed by Ramos in Divergent Modernities.
31. Mary Louise Pratt, “Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Re-
lational Analysis,” Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the
234 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

Challenge of Globalization, ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (Albany: State Univer-

sity of New York Press, 2002), 21–47.
32. The phrase is from José Luis Cuevas, Cuevario (Mexico City: Grijalbo,
1973), 57.
33. I take this insight from Frances Stonor Saunders, who argues that elites
who held positions of power in multiple, overlapping arenas rather than any co-
vert contract reinforced associations between particular aesthetic and political
projects during the cold war. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the
World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), 252–78. Toby Miller and
George Yúdice explain that cultural policy is frequently improvised “on the run”
in their study Cultural Policy (London: Sage, 2002), 2.
34. As in the case of the Good Neighbor Policy, the end date of the Alliance for
Progress is somewhat fuzzy. The Alliance was inaugurated at the 1961 Punta del
Este conference and was officially disbanded by the OAS in 1973. However, most
scholars concur that the Alliance lost its momentum much earlier, by the mid-
1960s, as the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations shifted
the Alliance’s emphases away from reformist economic measures toward military
support and interventions. The scholarship about this initiative is extensive; see,
for example, Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís, The Alliance That Lost Its Way:
A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970); Mi-
chael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Na-
tion Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000); Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Ken-
nedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign
Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007).
35. Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds., The U.S. Government, Citizen
Groups and the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2006).
36. The most thorough accounts of the Visual Arts Section have been written
by people formerly affiliated with it. The art historian Alejandro Anreus has taken
the lead in calling for a critical revision of Gómez Sicre’s curatorial project. See
Alejandro Anreus, “José Gómez Sicre and the ‘Idea’ of Latin American Art,” Art
Journal 64 (2005): 83–84; Alejandro Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José
Gómez Sicre,” ArteFacto 18 (canícula [summer] 2000): n.p. See also Félix Angel,
“The Latin American Presence,” in The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in
the United States, 1920–1970, ed. Luis R. Cancel (New York: The Bronx Museum
of the Arts; Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 184–221; Annick Sanjurjo, ed., Contempo-
rary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of American States.
Vol. 1: 1941–1964 (Lanham Md.: Scarecrow, 1997); Vol. 2: 1965–1985 (Lanham,
Md.: Scarecrow, 1993). See also Michael Wellen, “Pan American Dreams: How
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 235

the OAS Displayed and Defined Modern Art from Latin America, 1948–1976,”
PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, in progress.
37. Eva Cockcroft, “The United States and Socially Concerned Latin American
Art, 1920–1970,” in The Latin American Spirit, 194.
38. Carlos Granada, “Entrevista,” Revista común presencia 13 (2006), ac-
cessed 22 August 2011, http://comunpresenciaentrevistas.blogspot.com/2006/12/
carlos-granada-entrevista.html. It is worth noting that Granada had his first solo
exhibition in the United States at the PAU in April 1962.
39. On the Pan American Union and U.S. empire, see Berger; and Ricardo D.
Salvatore, Imágenes de un imperio: Estados Unidos y las formas de representación
de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2006); and Orlando Suárez Suárez,
La jaula invisible: Neocolonialismo y plástica latinoamericana (Havana: Editorial
de Ciencias Sociales, 1986), 77.
40. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
41. Examples of recent scholarship that moves in this direction include Michele
Greet, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in
Andean Art, 1920–1960 (College Station: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2009); Indych-López, Muralism without Walls; and Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Un-
Drawing Boundaries: A Curatorial Perspective,” in Re-Aligning Vision: Alterna-
tive Currents in South American Drawing, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (Austin:
Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, 1997), 18–25.
42. For examples of recent work on curators, critics, and institutions, see Fran-
cisco Alambert and Polyana Canhête, Bienais de São Paulo: Da era do museu a
era dos Curadores (São Paolo: Boltempo, 2004); José Luis Falconi and Gabriela
Rangel, eds., A Principality of Its Own: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas
Society (New York: Americas Society, in conjunction with the Fundación Cisne-
ros and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies of Harvard
University, 2006); Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo, y política:
Arte argentino en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2001), English edition:
Avant-garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the 1960s, trans.
Peter Kahn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); John King, El Di Tella y el
desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta (Buenos Aires: Asunto Im-
preso Editores and Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 2007). See also Florencia Bazzano-
Nelson, “Theory in Context: Marta Traba’s Art-Critical Writings and Colombia,
1945–1959,” PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2000; and Aleca LeBlanc,
“Tropical Modernisms: Art and Architecture in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s,”
PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2011. Concurrently, several insti-
tutions are undertaking large-scale projects to make available key art historical
and critical documents from the midcentury. Among them are MoMA’s Primary
Documents series; the Documents of Twentieth-Century Latin American and La-
tino Art, a multinational digital archive and publications project directed by Mari
236 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

Carmen Ramírez of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Getty Research Institute’s ongoing project
“Surrealism in Latin America,” directed by Rita Eder.
43. Anreus, “José Gómez Sicre,” 84.
44. Juan A. Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Paint-
ers, 1927–1950 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).
45. Cuba was expelled from the OAS in 1962; among other Cubans affiliated
with the PAU Cultural Affairs Division after that date were Guillermo de Zénde-
gui, Roberto Esquenazi Mayo, Ramón Osuna, and José Y. Bermúdez.
46. See Anreus, “José Gomez Sicre,” for a discussion of Puerto Rican art at the
PAU. Throughout his career Gómez Sicre also demonstrated an ongoing interest in
cinema and vernacular art, especially the work of Afro-Caribbean artists.
47. Giunta’s Avant-garde, Internationalism, and Politics, for example, thor-
oughly explores these values in relation to Jorge Romero Brest’s curatorial project.
48. On the postwar institutional infrastructure for Latin American arts, see
Jacqueline Barnitz, “New Museums, the São Paulo Biennial, and Abstract Art,”
in Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2001), 143–65.
49. José Gómez Sicre (JGS) to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (AHB), 8 October 1945, Al-
fred H. Barr, Jr. Papers [AAA: 2193;1408], MoMA Archives, NY.
50. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 11.
51. Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” Art-
forum 12.10 (June 1974): 39–41. See also Erica Doss, “The Art of Cultural Poli-
tics: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism,” Recasting America: Culture
and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
195–220; William Hauptman, “The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade,”
Artforum 12.2 (October 1973): 48–52; Max Kozloff, “American Painting during
the Cold War,” Artforum 11.9 (May 1973): 43–54; Jane de Hart Mathews, “Art
and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81.4 (October
1976): 762–87; Saunders; and David and Cecile Shapiro, “Abstract Expression-
ism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cul-
tural Studies 3 (1977): 175–214.
52. Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in
the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2.
53. Eric Zolov, comments in response to the panel Culture and Society in Cold
War Mexico, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, 8 Janu-
ary 2010.
54. At the workshop Surrealism in Latin America, held at the Getty Research
Institute in March 2009, Rita Eder and Daniel Garza Usabiaga developed con-
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 237

nections between the arrival of European émigrés and archaeological and anthro-
pological investigations into indigenous cultures in their respective presentations
about the work of Günther Gerzso and Wolfgang Paalen. Among the connections
linking the Pan American Union visual arts programs to surrealist art and artists,
the Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo, who worked under Gómez Sicre as edi-
tor of the Boletín de Artes Visuales from 1958 to 1960, was the artistic director
of the surrealist-influenced journal Las moradas. Gómez Sicre’s close friend, the
Cuban vanguardia painter Mario Carreño, published an important essay in a
1949 issue of Las moradas on the topic of American art. While passing through
Lima en route to Chile, Carreño advised young Szyszlo to turn toward indigenous
Peruvian cultures for aesthetic inspiration, much as the Cuban vanguardia had
looked to Afrocuban influences. Mario Carreño, “El ‘arte americano,’ ” Las mo-
radas 3.7–8 (January–July 1949): 136–40; Mario Carreño to JGS, 20 April 1948,
box 6, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
55. Gilbert Joseph offers a lucid synthesis of recent scholarship on the “demo-
cratic spring” in his introductory essay to In from the Cold (20–22); see also
Daniela Spenser’s concluding essay in the same volume (382). Among the countries
that play an important role in this study, the “democratic spring” in Mexico corre-
sponds to the national populism of the Lázaro Cárdenas presidency (1934–1940).
The case of Cuba is a bit more complicated. The brief reformist presidency of the
Auténtico Party leader Ramón Grau San Martín (1933–1934) was succeeded by
what Robert Whitney, citing Alan Knight, has described as the “slippery popu-
lism” of Fulgencio Batista, who entered into a strategic alliance with the Com-
munist Party. Batista dominated politics during the following decade, and he re-
turned to the presidency once again after the next interval of Auténtico Party
rule (1944–1952). Robert Whitney, “The Architect of the Cuban State: Fulgencio
Batista and Populism in Cuba, 1937–1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies
32 (2000): 458. See also Louis A. Pérez, “Cuba c. 1930–1959,” in The Cambridge
History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 7, Latin America Since 1930:
Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 419–56.
56. In the case of Brazil and Mexico, these initiatives were accompanied by
large-scale “national-popular” cultural policies that promoted aesthetics often at
odds with José Gómez Sicre’s preferences.
57. Miller and Yúdice, 130.
58. Joseph, 22.
59. Working with critical insights from T. J. Clark, David Craven develops this
idea in his essay “A Legacy for the Latin American Left: Abstract Expressionism as
Anti-Imperialist Art,” in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context, ed.
Joan Marter (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 67–81.
238 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

60. I would like to thank Alejandro Anreus for pointing out to me that Gómez
Sicre’s 1949 interview with Picasso also placed him in Paris in the same year as
the Cominform-organized Partisans of Peace Conference. There, Gómez Sicre
socialized with several old friends and acquaintances who were invited guests of
the conference, including Pablo Neruda and Nicolás Guillén. As for his contacts
on the U.S. left, in addition to Meyer Schapiro, Gómez Sicre became friends
with his colleague at the PAU, Charles Seeger, and the Smith College art histo-
rian Oliver Larkin, both of whom were called to testify during the McCarthy
era. For more on these figures, see Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones”; Ann M.
Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 173–206; and Alan Wallach, “Oliver Larkin’s ‘Art and
Life in America’: Between the Popular Front and the Cold War,” American Art
15.3 (autumn 2001): 80–89. On the Partisans for Peace Conference, see Franco,
30; and Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Free-
dom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press,
1989), 85.
61. Exemplary of this new scholarship are Joseph and Spenser, In from the
Cold, and Westad, The Global Cold War.
62. Though this project is not an ethnography, I am struck by the heterotopic
dimensions of the PAU as a sort of cross between a secular convent and a uni-
versity as well as relatively detached from any particular national or urban scene.
The figures who passed through the union and various OAS offices during and
after the war included many artists, writers, and cultural policymakers whose
early careers were forged in diverse national contexts, including Gabriela Mistral
(Chile), Jaime Torres Bodet (Mexico), Luis Quintanilla (Mexico), Gilberto Freyre
(Brazil), Jorge Basadre (Peru), Erico Veríssmo (Brazil), Alceu Amoroso Lima (Bra-
zil), Rafael Squirru (Argentina), Angel Palerm (Spain-Mexico), Ernesto Galarza
(Mexico-U.S.); and even José María Arguedas (Peru) worked in a minor capacity
for a branch of the OAS in Peru.
63. See, for example, José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 3 (June–September
1958): 3. Gómez Sicre shared his appreciation for “exportability” with the MoMA
administrators Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Lincoln Kirstein.
64. Eric Zolov, comments in response to the panel Culture and Society in Cold
War Mexico, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, 8 Janu-
ary 2010.
65. The text was published posthumously, and the museum has since been
renamed the AMA  | Art Museum of the Americas. Marta Traba, Art of Latin
America, 1900–1980 (Baltimore: Inter-American Development Bank and Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994).
66. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ut Pictora Theoria: Abstract Painting and Language,”
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 239

Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1995), 213–39.
67. The following are but a few of the important studies from various stages
of PAU and OAS history: Mary Margaret Ball, The Problem of Inter-American
Organizations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1947); Mary Margaret Ball,
The OAS in Transition (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969); Gordon Connell-
Smith, The Inter-American System (London: Royal Institute of International
Affairs, Oxford University Press, 1966); John C. Dreier, The Organization of
American States and the Hemisphere Crisis (New York: Harper and Row, 1962);
John Edwin Fagg, Pan-Americanism: Its Meaning and History (Malabar: Krieger,
1982); Fenwick; Félix G. Fernández-Shaw, La Organización de Estados America-
nos (OEA), 2nd ed. (Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1963); Ruth Karen, Neighbors
in a New World: The Organization of American States (Cleveland: World Publish-
ing, 1966); William Manger, Pan America in Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Public Af-
fairs Press, 1961); J. Lloyd Meacham, The United States and Inter-American Secu-
rity, 1889–1960 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961); Stoetzer; and Arthur P.
Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1954).
68. I would like to thank Doris Witt for calling my attention to the ways in
which Gómez Sicre’s flexible institutional network resembles the model of con-
temporary global governance outlined by Anne Marie Slaughter in her study A
New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). This connection
is another suggestion of the way in which Gómez Sicre’s working methods antici-
pate contemporary global institutional configurations.
69. Miller and Yúdice, 3.
70. Though I do not discuss other aspects of Gómez Sicre’s tenure at the PAU
in this study, his career suggests many topics for further investigation, including
his later work as a documentary filmmaker; his intellectual profile and curatorial
projects in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and the United States; his relation to
Cuban intellectuals, galleries, collectors, and dealers; his interactions with Marta
Traba and other critics; and his efforts to found the Museum of Modern Art of
Latin America.
71. Miller and Yúdice, 7.
72. Toby Miller develops the concept of “ethical incompleteness” in his study
The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Miller and Yúdice return to this
idea in their Cultural Policy (12–15).
73. Michael Denning refers to this conjunction between the aesthetic and
the anthropological as the “European modernist theory of culture” in relation
to nineteenth-century British nationalism. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three
Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 77.
240 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

74. As Ninkovich explains: “Although cultural relations are a minor form of

diplomacy, at the same time the entire foreign policy process is itself subordinate
to larger cultural dynamics. Cultural relations can be viewed as no less than the
totality of relations between cultures . . . To study one form of cultural relations
is inevitably to confront the other” (2, 4). For recent work on “cultural policy”
and the “culture of policy” in relation to international organizations, see Bret
Benjamin, Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Amitava Kumar, ed., World Bank Litera-
ture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Joseph R. Slaughter,
Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
75. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
76. Foucault notes in particular the importance of concepts elaborated by Im-
manuel Kant for laying the cornerstones of both cultural policy and international
relations during the European Enlightenment. For Kant, these two fields could be
productively combined, in that the innate human capacity for aesthetic judgment
formed the basis of a secular faith that could be cultivated within and among
citizens of nations in the interests of maintaining a “perpetual peace.” On Fou-
cault’s interpretation of Kant, see The Birth of Biopolitics, 51–74. I am grateful to
Thierry de Duve for discussing Kantian aesthetics with me.
77. Bello’s words appear in the OAS Charter (1948).
78. Miller and Yúdice, 10–11.
79. Cited in Fenwick, 478.
80. Annals of the Organization of American States 4.2 (1952): 148–76.
81. Miller and Yúdice trace similar disconnections between empirical and ju-
ridical citizens in postcolonial societies (24–28).
82. The Cuban War for Independence became the Spanish-Cuban-American
War in 1898 when the United States intervened following the USS Maine incident.
83. Through this legacy of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the United States
reserved the right to intervene in Cuban governmental affairs and establish the
Guantánamo military base on the island.
84. The latinoamericanista aspects of his thinking are manifest at both ends of
his career in the volume Pintura cubana de hoy, trans. Harold T. Riddle (Havana:
María Luisa Gómez Mena, 1944) and in the interviews conducted by Alejandro
Anreus in “Ultimas conversaciones.”
85. On Martí’s role as a cultural translator, see Laura Lomas, Translating Em-
pire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008).
86. Martí’s Escenas norteamericanas and other writings about life in the United
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 241

States are found in his Obras completas, vols. 9–13; some appear in English transla-
tion in Selected Writings, 89–244 and 288–329.
87. William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor, “Constructing Cultural Citizen-
ship,” in Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, ed.
William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 15.
88. Miller and Yúdice, 25.
89. One of the initial motives for establishing the OAS, in fact, was to redress
the slight that no Latin American government had been invited to participate in
the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks conference, where the future United Nations structure
for global governance was outlined.
90. See, for example, the press release by Salon Esso de Artistas Jóvenes,
10 March 1965, AHB [AAA: 2193;826] MoMA Archives, NY. Dirk Matten and
Andrew Crane note that by the 1980s processes of economic globalization were
provoking the increasing deterritorialization of social, political, and economic
interaction, and thereby leading to “a growing number of social activities tak-
ing place beyond the power of the nation state.” Matten and Crane, “Corporate
Citizenship: Towards an Extended Theoretical Conceptualization,” International
Center for Corporate Responsibility Research Paper Series no. 04–2003 (Not-
tingham: Nottingham University Business School, 2003), 9.
91. Ibid., 11.
92. David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and
Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008).
93. Cristina Klein, “Musicals and Modernization: Rodgers and Hammer-
stein’s The King and I,” in Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and
the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and
Michael E. Latham (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 129–62.
94. Greg Grandin provides a useful outline of what he calls the Kantian and
Hobbesian perspectives on liberalism and argues that they definitively merged in
the context of U.S. interventions in Central America in the 1980s; in contrast,
I perceive their confluence at various moments throughout the cold war in the
Americas. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and
the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Holt, 2007).
95. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture
15.1 (2003): 11–40.
96. Ibid., 16, 23.
97. From the perspective of U.S. policymakers, even visual art straddled the
blurred boundaries between peace and violence: while figures such as Archibald
MacLeish touted art museums as a means of cultivating “citizens in a new and
dangerous world,” others identified art as a powerful “weapon” of the cold war,
an apt metaphor in the context of the Eisenhower administration’s emphasis on
242 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION

psychological warfare. MacLeish, cited in Thomas Krenn, Fall-out Shelters for

the Human Spirit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 52, 88.
98. Joseph, 17, 21. For a discussion of these trends in relation to broader cold
war history, see Laville and Wilford.
99. As the bienal curator Christian Sörenson, working under the newly in-
stalled Onganía dictatorship, wrote to Marta Traba (who was in Bogotá at the
time): “No dejé de sentirme solidario ante los vidrios rotos, especialmente en estos
momentos en que vivimos en Córdoba un clima lleno de policías, tumultos, bom-
bas de gas y otras precosidades” (I can’t stop feeling solidarity [with you] about
the broken glass, especially in these moments when we in Córdoba are living in
a climate full of police, tumult, [tear]gas bombs, and other precocities). Christian
Sörenson to Marta Traba, 13 September 1966, Papers documenting the Bienal
Americana de Arte in Córdoba, Argentina, box 9, folder 2, Research Library, The
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (970074).
100. Michel Gobat made this observation in response to the paper by John H.
Coatsworth, “Liberalism and Big Sticks: The Politics of U.S. Interventions in Latin
America, 1898–2004,” presented at the conference Liberalism and Its Legacies,
University of Iowa, 3–4 March 2006. See also Ninkovich, who notes the growing
divergence of second-wave liberal objectives as a product of United States–Latin
American cultural diplomacy of World War II: “The war produced a schizo-
phrenic Latin American program. . . . There resulted a sharp clash of principles
between the aggressive national security arguments of the coordinator [Nelson A.
Rockefeller of the Office of Inter-American Affairs] and the traditionally informal
approach to cultural relations favored by State Department internationalists and
national interest advocates alike” (49).
101. Coatsworth, “Liberalism and Big Sticks,” 11, 15. See also John Coatsworth,
“United States Interventions: What For?” ReVista 4.2 (spring/summer 2005): 6–9.
102. See, for example, Grandin; and Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American
Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008).
103. On these twinned phenomena, see Fein, “New Empire into Old: Mak-
ing Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way,” Diplomatic History 28.5 (November
2004): 703–48; Grandin; Miller and Yúdice, 44; and Pérez.
104. Gordon Connell-Smith, The Inter-American System (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1966), 329.
105. C. Neale Ronning, Law and Politics in Inter-American Diplomacy (New
York: Wiley, 1963), 158, cited in Connell-Smith, 322.
106. Spenser, 394–95.
107. Among the recent scholarship on the cold war and American literature,
see Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City; Deborah Cohn, The Latin
American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (Nashville:
 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION 243

Vanderbilt University Press, 2012); Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, The Censor-

ship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco’s Spain (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2007); María Eugenia Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo: Cultura
y guerra fría en la década del 60 (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1997); and Diana
Sorenson, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American
Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
108. Szyszlo was a strong supporter of Vargas Llosa in the latter’s failed bid
for the presidency of Peru in 1990.
109. Deborah Cohn, “U.S.–Latin American Cultural Diplomacy and the 1966
PEN Club Congress,” in Hemispheric American Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander
and Robert S. Levine (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 206–22.
110. On the Boom and modernism, see Neil Larsen, Reading North by South:
On Latin American Literature, Culture and Politics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995); and Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth:
Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989).
111. Cited in Néstor García Canclini, “Aesthetic Moments of Latin Ameri-
canism,” Radical History Review 89 (spring 2004), special issue “Our Americas:
Political and Cultural Imaginings,” ed. Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, 16.
112. Ramos, “Hemispheric Domains,” 60.
113. For a discussion of these two journals’ perspectives, see Franco, The De-
cline and Fall of the Lettered City, 21–56; Cohn, The Latin American Literary
Boom; and Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo.
114. This perspective is predominant among the social and cultural historians
whose work is included in anthologies edited by Laville and Wilford, and Joseph
and Spenser; in his introduction to In from the Cold, Joseph surveys the promising
new research that is emerging from state archives in postdictatorship countries,
while he also notes that the quest for the covert, especially as it pertains to the
U.S.–Soviet rivalry, may actually hinder the emergence of new interpretations of
the period (14).
115. Christian Sörenson to Clara Diament de Sujo, 28 July 1966, Papers docu-
menting the Bienal Americana de Arte in Córdoba, Argentina, box 10, binder 3,
Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (970074).
These facets of Gómez Sicre’s personality also emerge in Anreus, “José Gómez
Sicre and the ‘Idea’ of Latin American Art”; Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con
José Gómez Sicre”; and Gómez Sicre’s 1985 recorded interview with Giulio V.
Blanc, box 4, Giulio V. Blanc papers, 1920–1995, Smithsonian Institution, Ar-
chives of American Art.
116. Gómez Sicre’s personal papers, housed in the archives of the Nettie Lee
Benson Latin American Library at the University of Texas at Austin were made
available to the public in 2008, but they shed little light on these lacunae because
they do not encompass the full range of his correspondence and career.
244 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

117. José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica/The Cosmic Race: a Bilingual Edition,

ed. and trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997
[1925]); Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It’s Trans-
forming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books,
2002); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking
of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

1. Art Enters the Union

The epigraph comes from Concha Romero James (CRJ) to Irving A. Leonard,
30 October 1939, folder 3161, box 265, Series 200R, Record Group 1.1, Rocke-
feller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York
(RAC).
1. Herbert L. Spencer to Leslie Switzer (LJS), 15 December 1945, Organi-
zation of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas,
Latin American Art in the U.S. files. Leslie Judd Switzer later used the married
names of Portner and Ahlander; I designate her as LJP and LJA when appropriate.
2. LJS to CRJ, 14 December 1945, Organization of American States, Ar-
chives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Latin American Art in the U.S.
files.
3. Arlene Dávila, Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
4. Octavio Paz, “The World after NAFTA, according to Paz,” New Yorker
69.44 (27 December 1993): 57–58.
5. Noel F. Busch, “Nelson A. Rockefeller,” Life 12.17 (27 April 1942): 80.
The OIAA was created by order of the Council of National Defense on 16 August
1940 and it was terminated by executive order on 10 April 1946. The OIAA under-
went three title changes in its six years of existence. It began as the Office for Coor-
dination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics.
It was renamed the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in July
1941, and in March 1945 it became the Office of Inter-American Affairs. I use
the National Archives record group acronym in my references to the office. For a
useful overview of the OIAA, see Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, “Nelson A.
Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940–1946) and Record Group
229,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86:4 (2006): 785.
6. See Office of Inter-American Affairs, History of the Office of the Coor-
dinator of Inter-American Affairs (Washington, D.C.: United States Government
Printing Office, 1947), for an overview of OIAA operations.
7. Lincoln Kirstein (LK) to AHB, 15 August 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;862],
MoMA Archives, NY. Kirstein’s proposal to Barr in this letter continues, “Then
we can do the big retrospective on Bolivian and Paraguayan Art since 1943—Ten
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 245

Golden Years.” Another aim of Kirstein’s joke rests in the fact that MoMA had
demonstrated little or no interest in the art of either Bolivia or Paraguay.
8. “Reorganization at Museum of Modern Art. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Retires as
Director” (press release), 28 October 1943, box 7, folder 2, José Gómez Sicre Pa-
pers, 1916–1991 (JGS), Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books
and Manuscripts, University of Texas Libraries. Barr biographer Sybil Gordon
Kantor states that Barr was actually fired, but he retained a small office at the
museum. He was rehired as director of collections in 1947. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr,
Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2002), 359–63.
9. Martin Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (New York: Knopf,
2007).
10. After several years in the private sector, Rockefeller returned to public
service in 1951 as head of the International Development Advisory Board under
President Truman. Thereafter, he held several posts that were relevant to foreign
affairs and international security, but his political career tended toward increasing
involvement in domestic affairs and elected offices. His service as undersecretary
of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Eisenhower (1953–1954) was
followed by a successful New York gubernatorial bid (1959–1973), several failed
Republican presidential nominations, and the vice presidency under Gerald Ford
(1974–1977).
11. As World War II neared its end, the PAU appeared slated for extinction,
soon to be superseded by the United Nations (UN). At the 1945 UN Conference in
San Francisco, Rockefeller and several Latin American diplomats worked behind
the scenes to modify the UN Charter so as to allow for a collective Latin American
presence in the new global organization. Their machinations had far-reaching ef-
fects. Article 51 of the Charter, for which Rockefeller had pushed, reinvented the
inter-American system as a regional security pact, and it quickly inspired several
similar entities, including NATO, SEATO, and the Warsaw Pact. In spite of Rocke-
feller’s influence at the San Francisco UN Conference, he was not the official U.S.
delegate to the event. Even prior to the conference, Rockefeller maneuvered be-
hind the scenes to ensure that Argentina received an invitation to the conference.
Many perceived this as controversial, given the Perón regime’s fascist sympathies
and the fact that the Soviets were still U.S. allies. Rockefeller’s biographer, Cary
Reich, questions whether Rockefeller conjured the image of a communist threat
in the Americas disingenuously in order to continue receiving U.S. government
funding for his inter-American programs at a time when he sensed that policy
priorities were changing; in any case, he grew to embrace anticommunism as a
rationale for the continued existence of the inter-American system of governance.
Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908–1958 (New
York: Doubleday, 1996), 321–54.
246 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

12. The name change to Intellectual Cooperation reflected the office’s relation
to its newly established counterpart at the League of Nations, where the Chilean
intellectual Gabriela Mistral served as a representative of Latin America from
1925 to 1933. The PAU Division of Intellectual Cooperation was intended to serve
as the future secretariat for an Inter-American Institute of Intellectual Coopera-
tion to be headquartered elsewhere in the hemisphere, but as in the case of other
schemes to decentralize inter-American cultural activities, this never came to pass
and the PAU in Washington, D.C., remained the hub of activities in the field. The
PAU office coordinated communication among twelve committees of Intellectual
Cooperation located in various American countries. Though its activities were
fairly modest during these early years, PAU Director General Rowe was success-
ful in partnering with private funding sources, such as the Carnegie Corporation
and the Guggenheim Foundation, in order to support Latin American studies
initiatives and cultural exchange programs at various U.S. academic institutions.
J.  Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplomacy
(Washington, D.C.: Department of State; U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976),
50–59; Pan American Union, Division of Intellectual Cooperation, “Fifty Years of
Intellectual Progress in the Americas” (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union,
Division of Intellectual Cooperation, April 1940), 17.
13. There is some discrepancy about Romero James’s life dates. The Pomona
College Registrar’s office gives her birth year as 1897, while her obituary lists
1900. It is possible that Romero James falsified her birthdate in order to ma-
triculate early at Pomona while the revolution swept through northern Mexico.
“Concha James, Mexican Embassy Official, Dies,” Washington Post, 8 February
1987, D12.
14. I have pieced together details of Romero James’s life from several sources,
including archives at Pomona College, Columbia University, and Harvard Uni-
versity, as well as her obituary. The Washington Post obituary states that Romero
James attended graduate school at Columbia University. I was unable to verify that
she ever received a diploma from that institution, though it appears that in 1920
and 1921 she took courses in history, public law, social legislation, and sociology
with no degree awarded, and she had some affiliation with the Teacher’s College
of Columbia University. At some point in the early 1920s, Romero James married
the Chilean economist Earle K. James, who later taught at the New School; the
couple may have met at Columbia where he also did graduate study. The marriage
ended in divorce. Concha Romero left the OAS in 1952; she then went to work
under Lewis Hanke at the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress; and from
1963 to 1970 she served as assistant cultural attaché at the Mexican Embassy in
Washington, D.C. Jennifer Comins, Project Archivist, Columbia University, per-
sonal communication, 12 June 2008; Steve Comba, Assistant Director/Registrar,
Pomona College Museum of Art, personal communication, 5 June 2008; CRJ
to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 13 July 1922, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers,
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 247

1846–1961, series 3, folder 143, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard

University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
15. In addition to the PAU publications discussed in this chapter, Romero
James contributed essays on art, education, and poetry to the Handbook of Latin
American Studies (1936–) and to the OAS magazine Américas, and she authored
several annotated bibliographies.
16. María Rosa Oliver, Mi fe es el hombre (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional,
2008), 194.
17. Ibid., 194–95, 384.
18. Alicia Azuela notes that “muralism in Mexico, but above all those wall
paintings that were made by the Mexican artists between 1929 and 1934, became
the model for artistic production within the New Deal, in much the same way that
the thought of the Mexican muralists on the subject became an obligatory point of
reference.” Azuela, “Public Art, Meyer Schapiro, and Mexican Muralism,” Oxford
Art Journal, special issue on Meyer Schapiro, ed. David Craven, 17.1 (1994): 55.
19. Pan American Union, “Report on Activities of the Pan American Union,
1933–1938,” folder 3163, box 265, Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation
Archives, RAC.
20. The dates of Concha Romero James’s tenure at the PAU are based on her
obituary and on reports and publications signed by her, but I suspect that she may
have had a presence at the PAU as early as 1931. By 1932, she was publishing on
Latin American cultural topics for U.S. magazines, and her interests are reflected
in a few unsigned PAU reports, dated 1931–1933, which refer to exhibitions of
Mexican and Argentine prints and paintings. Pan American Union, Division of
Intellectual Cooperation, “Actividades de la Sección de Cooperación Intelectual
de la Union Panamericana durante el año 1931–1932” (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, Division of Intellectual Cooperation, 1932); Pan American Union,
Division of Intellectual Cooperation, “Actividades de la Sección de Cooperación
Intelectual durante el año 1932–1933” (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union,
Division of Intellectual Cooperation, 1933).
21. Concha Romero James, “La Cooperación Intelectual en América, 1933–1936”
(Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, Division of Intellectual Cooperation,
1936), 3.
22. Martí’s essay begins with the famous lines, “Cree el aldeano vanidoso que
el mundo entero es su aldea, y con tal que él quede de alcalde, o le mortifique al
rival que le quitó la novia, o le crezcan en la alcancía los ahorros, y da por bueno
el orden universal, sin saber de los gigantes que llevan siete leguas en las botas y
le pueden poner la bota encima, ni de la pelea de los cometas en el Cielo, que van
por el aire dormidos engullendo mundos. Lo que quede de aldea en América ha de
despertar. . . . Los pueblos que no se conocen han de darse prisa para conocerse,
como quienes van a pelear juntos” (The prideful villager thinks his hometown
contains the whole world, and as long as he can stay on as mayor or humiliate the
248 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

rival who stole his sweetheart or watch his nest egg accumulating in its strongbox
he believes the universe to be in good order, unaware of the giants in seven-league
boots who can crush him underfoot or the battling comets in the heavens that
go through the air devouring the sleeping worlds. Whatever is left of that sleepy
hometown in America must awaken. . . . Hometowns that are still strangers to one
another must hurry to become acquainted, like men who are about to do battle
together). Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Obras completas, vol. 6: Nuestra América
(Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1975), 15; Martí, Selected Writings, ed. and
trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002), 288.
23. Romero James, “La Cooperación Intelectual en América, 1933–1936,” 2.
24. Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form,
and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Romero
James, “La Cooperación Intelectual en América, 1933–1936,” 2.
25. Charles Seeger was a professor of music at the University of California,
Berkeley, and he also taught at Julliard and the New School for Social Research
in New York before embarking on a career in public service. He was the father of
folk musician Pete Seeger.
26. Helen Rees, “ ‘Temporary Bypaths?’ Seeger and Folk Music Research,” in
Understanding Charles Seeger: Pioneer in American Music, ed. Bell Yung and
Helen Rees (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 93.
27. The recommendation for establishing the Inter-American Music Center came
out of the Committee of the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field
of Music, called by the Department of State in 1939. The Carnegie Corporation
provided $15,000 per year start-up funding over a three-year period. The first-year
funds were administered by the OIAA, and the OIAA continued to fund seventeen
of the Center’s nineteen projects through grants-in-aid during the Center’s first two
years of existence; subsequent support for the PAU music programs came from
the Rockefeller Foundation in the form of a $6,500 grant. See Charles Seeger,
Reminiscences of an American Musicologist (Los Angeles: Oral History Program,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1972), 295; “Pan American Union: New
Projects to Be Submitted to the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” Office of
Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 437, folder
“Pan American Union,” National Archives and Records Administration, College
Park, Maryland (NARA); “Cultural Relations Division, Office of the Coordinator
of Inter-American Affairs, Program and Plans, 15 September 1941,” OIAA, R.G.
229, entry 1, Central Files, box 435, folder “Cultural Division,” NARA; William
Berrien interview with Charles Seeger, 9 November 1943, folder 3168, box 265,
Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
28. Charles Seeger, “Review of Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music,
1940–1943” (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1943), 1.
29. Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 179; Frank A. Ninkovich, The Diplomacy
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 249

of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1981), 88.
30. Seeger, Reminiscences, 302.
31. To Seeger’s dismay, the dominance of European policymakers in UNESCO’s
music programs curbed the Americanist momentum he had worked to build at
the PAU during the war. His postwar plans for a multilateral International Music
Council consisting of representatives from the world’s regional councils went for-
ward, but in a different form than he had originally conceived. Seeger’s plans for
an Inter-American Music Council departed even more from his original design,
and the project was taken over by one of his coworkers after his abrupt de-
parture from the union (discussed in chapter 2). Seeger, Reminiscences, 324–53;
Pescatello, 175.
32. Pescatello, 165–66, 200–1; Nimrod Baranovitch, “Anthropology and Mu-
sicology: Seeger’s Writings from 1933–1953,” in Understanding Charles Seeger,
Yung and Rees, eds., 152.
33. “Cultural Relations Division, Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs, Program and Plans, 15 September 1941,” OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Cen-
tral Files, box 435, folder “Cultural Division,” NARA; Charles Seeger, “Inter-
American Relations in the Field of Music,” OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files,
box, 489, folder “Pan American Union, 31 December 1941,” NARA.
34. Ten issues of Points of View appeared between 1941 and 1947. The journal
was funded from a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $12,000 for general operat-
ing expenses of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation. Archival sources refer to
translations of the periodical into Spanish and Portuguese for distribution in Latin
American countries. I have been unable to locate full print runs in these languages;
however, Romero James’s grant reporting to the Rockefeller Foundation charts
the impact of her publication in terms of the number of Latin American news-
papers that reprinted items from Points of View, in turn generating further debates
and responses. Romero James, Editorial, Points of View 4 (Washington, D.C.:
Pan American Union, Division of Intellectual Cooperation, June 1941): 1; CRJ to
David H. Stevens, 4 March 1943, folder 3162, box 265, series 200R, R.G. 1.1,
Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; “Report of the Division of Intellectual
Cooperation of the Pan American Union on the Work Carried Out in Accordance
with the Provisions of a Three-Year Grant of the Division of Humanities of the
Rockefeller Foundation (February 28, 1940–February 28, 1943),” folder 3162,
box 265, series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
35. Cited in James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Liter-
ary Radicalism in America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968), 226. MacLeish
delivered versions of this speech in 1941 while working for the State Department.
For information regarding its impact on the U.S. left, see Gilbert, 226–31.
36. “Mr. MacLeish, We Are Not Irresponsible,” Points of View 6 (Washington:
D.C.: Pan American Union, Division of Intellectual Cooperation, April 1943),
250 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

1–30; Edmundo O’Gorman, “Do the Americas Have a Common History?” trans.
Angel Flores, Points of View 3 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, Division
of Intellectual Cooperation, December 1941), 4–12; Fernando Ortiz, “On the Re-
lations between Blacks and Whites,” trans. Ben Frederick Carruthers, Points of
View 7 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, Division of Intellectual Coop-
eration, Pan American Union, October 1943), 1–12.
37. Vera Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban National-
ism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 145.
38. Concha Romero James, “Points of View,” Points of View 1 (Washington,
D.C.: Division of Intellectual Cooperation, Pan American Union, December 1940),
i–iii.
39. In a rejected funding request to the OIAA following the entry by the United
States into the war, Romero James made an impassioned plea for more South-to-
North transmissions of ideas and for the latinoamericanista essay. CRJ to Forest J.
Hall, 4 September 1942, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 489, folder
“Pan American Union, January 1, 1942–May 31, 1942,” NARA; Forest J. Hall to
CRJ, 12 September 1942, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 489, folder
“Pan American Union, January 1, 1942–May 31, 1942,” NARA.
40. “Is America a Continent?” Points of View 2 (Washington, D.C.: Pan Ameri-
can Union, Division of Intellectual Cooperation, October 1941), 12–13.
41. Ninkovich, 42.
42. OIAA, History of the Office, 181; Reich, 174–209.
43. For studies of OIAA funded film projects, see Catherine L. Benamou, It’s
All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2007); Seth Fein, “Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in
Golden Age Mexican Cinema,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Cul-
ture in Mexico since 1940, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 159–98; and Seth Fein, “Everyday Forms
of Transnational Collaboration: U.S. Film Propaganda in Cold War Mexico,” in
Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American
Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 400–50.
44. Cramer and Prutsch, 787.
45. In 1947, the total expenditures of the Office from its inception to disso-
lution were estimated to be $140,000,000. See OIAA, History of the Office, 8;
Espinosa, 162; Cramer and Prutsch, 787; and Irwin F. Gellman, Good Neighbor
Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America, 1933–1945 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1979), 149.
46. These moments included a showdown between Commissioner Rockefeller
and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles that led to the creation in June 1941
of a Joint Committee on Cultural Relations, in which delegates from the American
Council of Learned Societies also participated. For more on the relationship be-
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 251

tween the State Department and the OIAA, see OIAA History of the Office,
181–94; Gellman, 142–55; Ninkovich, 38; and Reich, 189–261.
47. Reich speculates that Rockefeller envisioned the OIAA as a means to over-
haul the State Department from without. The four planks of the mission statement
of the OIAA Cultural Relations Division stress hemispheric defense, economics,
and politics, with only one alluding to cultural exchange for its own sake. Reich,
189–261; “Program and Initial Enterprises of the Cultural Division,” OIAA, R.G.
229, entry 1, Central Files, box 435, folder “Cultural Relations,” NARA; Ninkov-
ich, 36, 49.
48. The first head of the OIAA Cultural Relations Division was Robert G.
Caldwell, who had been dean of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology; his successor was the renowned architect and longtime Rockefeller
associate Wallace K. Harrison. After the entry by the United States in the war,
Harrison moved up the ladder to the Office of Assistant Coordinator in charge of
Information (also known as Propaganda or Psychological Warfare), and Cultural
Relations was reorganized as the Division of Basic Economy. Science and Educa-
tion was a subdivision of Information under the directorship of Kenneth Holland.
The dramatic shift in OIAA priorities is evident through an examination of the
OIAA organizational charts before and after Pearl Harbor. Note, for example, the
prominence of the Cultural Relations Division in “Organization Chart as of Au-
gust 27, 1941,” OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 435, folder “Cultural
Relations,” NARA, versus the downsized cultural activities in “Functional Chart,
September 1, 1942,” OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 435, folder
“Cultural Relations,” NARA. There were numerous reorganizations of OIAA di-
visions; I stress the cultural programs in this analysis. For a detailed account of the
organizational structure of the OIAA, see OIAA, History of the Office, 147–65.
49. In 1939 the Division of Cultural Relations of the State Department es-
tablished four inter-American committees in the fields of philosophy and letters,
fine art, music, and education. The committees convened conferences where rep-
resentatives of major private and governmental institutions generated recommen-
dations for future international cultural exchanges. Romero James and Seeger
participated in these conferences; they courted support from the State Department
and the OIAA, and, as noted previously, Seeger’s music center grew out of a policy
recommendation from the Committee of the Conference on Inter-American Rela-
tions in the Field of Music. Seeger also sat on the OIAA music advisory committee.
Given Rockefeller’s personal involvement with MoMA, the OIAA tended to favor
MoMA and other museums with contracts in the field of art, while it supported
the PAU in other areas. The OIAA Art Committee’s first director, John Abbott,
was on MoMA’s board of trustees; his successor, René d’Harnoncourt, had guest
curated a show at MoMA in 1939 and went on to join the MoMA staff in 1944,
eventually becoming museum director. MoMA carried out eleven projects under
OIAA contracts during the war years, including an ambitious jointly sponsored
252 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

traveling exhibition of U.S. art to Latin America with a budget of approximately

$200,000. The museum also undertook many high-profile Latin American proj-
ects without government funding during this period, including major exhibitions
dedicated to Brazilian and Mexican art and architecture. Espinosa states that the
plans to transfer the OIAA Cultural Relations programs to the State Department
were made in 1942. The State Department continued to provide modest support
for art programs, but these focused primarily on circulating U.S. art abroad; fol-
lowing the entry by the United States into the war, a few inter-American arts
activities were also assumed by the PAU. The State Department allocated $75,000
for art in 1944, a fraction of its overall budget for cultural affairs, and a small
sum comparison to the amounts that the OIAA and MoMA had been spending
on arts projects. By 1947, as Michael Krenn notes, the State Department took
a brief hiatus from its overseas art program altogether, due to the controversy
surrounding the Advancing American Art exhibition. For more information on
the transfer of individual programs and projects, see Seeger, Reminiscences, 305;
Espinosa, 210–11; Nelson A. Rockefeller (NAR) to All Department and Division
Heads, 28 April 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 490, folder
“Pan American Union, March 1, 1943-–April 30, 1943,” NARA; Camille M. Ross
to CRJ, 12 October 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 490, folder
“Pan American Union, March 1, 1943–April 30, 1943,” NARA; “OCIAA Con-
ference of Directors of Inter-American Centers, Washington, D.C., 28, 29, and
30  June 1943,” box 1, folder 5, R.G. 4 Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers (NAR),
D.C. files, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC; “Activities of the Museum in Rela-
tion to Latin America Which Have Been Carried Out Under Its Own Program,”
n.d. [9 April 1943], Early Museum History (EMH): Administrative Records II.11,
MoMA Archives, NY; “Government Sponsored Activities of the Museum in Rela-
tion to Latin America,” n.d. [9 April 1943], EMH II.11, MoMA Archives, NY; and
Michael L. Krenn, Fall-out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the
Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 9–49.
50. NAR to Leo S. Rowe, 11 February 1942, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central
Files, box 489, folder “Pan American Union, January 1, 1942–May 31, 1942,”
NARA.
51. Education Section to Whom It May Concern, 30 March 1942, OIAA, R.G.
229, entry 1, Central Files, box 489, folder “Pan American Union, January 1,
1942–May 31, 1942,” NARA; Harold E. Davis to files, 16 June 1944, OIAA,
R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 490, folder “Pan American Union, March 1,
1943–April 30, 1943,” NARA.
52. Seeger, Reminiscences, 300; “Pan American Union: New Projects to Be Sub-
mitted to the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1,
Central Files, box 437, folder “Pan American Union,” NARA.
53. I have pieced together the movements of Leslie Judd Switzer (aka Port-
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 253

ner, Ahlander) from institutional archival records. No dates are featured in the
résumé that is included in the Leslie Judd Ahlander Papers, 1945–1985, Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
54. This estimate is based on my tally from reviewing the OIAA index card
catalog. OIAA, R.G. 229, entries 5–7, Index to Projects and Register of Projects,
NARA; see also “Summary of Educational Activities to January 1, 1942, Office of
Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files,
box 373, folder “Education, Misc.,” NARA.
55. Leo S. Rowe cited in Carl B. Spaeth to Carlton Sprague Smith, 1 March
1941, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 368, folder “Music,” NARA.
56. John C. Dreier to Wallace K. Harrison, 17 December 1942, OIAA, R.G.
229, entry 1, Central Files, box 437, folder “Pan American Union,” NARA.
57. Wallace K. Harrison to Laurence Duggan, 15 January 1943, OIAA, R.G.
229, entry 1, Central Files, box 437, folder “Pan American Union,” NARA.
58. Warren Kelchner to Laurence Duggan, 5 March 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229,
entry 1, Central Files, box 437, folder “Pan American Union,” NARA.
59. “1945 Budget of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” 12 January
1944, box 4, folder 29, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, D.C. files, Rockefeller Family Ar-
chives, RAC; Confidential memorandum, 12 January 1944, box 5, folder 35, R.G.
4 NAR Papers, D.C. files, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
60. The Rockefeller Foundation awarded $30,500 to the Pan American Union
between 1937 and 1943: $12,000 for short-wave radio broadcasts, $12,000
for general operating expenses of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation, and
$6,500 for the music programs. The grant under discussion awarded $20,000
in October 1944 for preparation of a Latin American art archive and assistance
with processing the PAU’s Latin American newspaper collection. In Fiscal Year
1940–1941 and Fiscal Year 1942–1943 Rockefeller Foundation funding covered
a fifth of Intellectual Cooperation’s operating expenses. Rockefeller Foundation
grant award notification, 22 October 1943, folder 3169, box 266, Series 200,
R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; “Two Rockefeller Foundation
Grants,” Panorama 23 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, Division of In-
tellectual Cooperation, January 1944), 26; Norma S. Thompson to Leo S. Rowe,
15 March 1940, folder 3161, box 265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foun-
dation Archives, RAC.
61. Romero James had been floating this idea to the foundation since at least
1939 (see epigraph at the opening of this chapter). To follow the grant process
from proposal to final reporting, see Rockefeller Foundation grant award notifica-
tion, 22 October 1943, folder 3169, box 266, Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller
Foundation Archives, RAC; Leo S. Rowe to William Berrien, 27 April 1943, folder
3162, box 265, Series 200R, R.G 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC;
“Exhibit Material Division of Intellectual Cooperation,” folder 3164, box 265,
254 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; Robert C. Smith to
CRJ, 29 November 1943, folder 3162, box 265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rocke-
feller Foundation Archives, RAC; Leo S. Rowe to David H. Stevens, 16 Febru-
ary 1945, folder 3162, box 265, Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation
Archives, RAC; “Grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Pan American
Union, Statement of Expenditures and Estimated 1945 Requirements” [1944],
folder 3162, box 265, Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives,
RAC; “Preparation of Latin American Newspapers and Art Materials,” folder
3169, box 266, Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; CRJ
to David H. Stevens, 19 February 1946, folder 3169, box 266, Series 200, R.G.
1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; Jorge Basadre to David H. Stevens,
6 October 1948, folder 3169, box 266, Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Founda-
tion Archives, RAC.
62. AHB to LK, 22 April 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;890], MoMA Archives, NY.
63. Robert C. Smith and Archibald MacLeish at the Library of Congress were
also involved in discussions with the Rockefeller Foundation regarding a Latin
American art materials collection, but this project did not overlap substantially
with that of the other two institutions, as it was focused on the pre-Colombian
and colonial periods. For more on the Library of Congress project, see Robert C.
Smith to John Marshall, 10 May 1943, folder 3162, box 265, Series 200R, R.G.
1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; Archibald MacLeish to CRJ, 24 April
1943, folder 3162, box 265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Ar-
chives, RAC; CRJ to Archibald MacLeish, 29 April 1943, folder 3162, box 265,
Series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. To follow the
grant process from MoMA’s perspective, see David H. Stephens to Leo S. Rowe,
25 May 1943, folder 3162, box 265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Founda-
tion Archives, RAC; JWS to David H. Stevens, 25 May 1945, folder 3162, box
265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1 Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; CRJ to René
d’Harnoncourt (RdH), 11 March 1944, EMH II.13, MoMA Archives, NY; Leslie
Judd Switzer (LJS) to RdH, 25 October 1944, EMH II.13, MoMA Archives, NY;
Luis de Zulueta to AHB, 19 May 1943, EMH II.1, MoMA Archives, NY; Luis
de Zulueta to AHB et al., 15 June 1943, EMH II.1, MoMA Archives, NY; LJS to
AHB, 11 December 1945, AHB [AAA: 2176;621], MoMA Archives NY; AHB to
LJS, 11 December 1944, AHB [AAA: 2176;623], MoMA Archives, NY; LJS
to AHB, 8 December 1944, AHB [AAA: 2176;624], MoMA Archives, NY.
64. In any case, a year and a half later, Switzer reported to Barr that she and
Luis de Zulueta had been pooling information from their respective files, a further
sign of institutional cross-pollination at the lower levels of office organization.
JWS to John Marshall, 15 June 1943, folder 3162, box 265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1,
Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; LJS to AHB, 15 December 1944, AHB
[AAA: 3264;708], MoMA Archives, NY.
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 255

65. William Berrien, inter-office memorandum, 28 May 1943, folder 3162, box
265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. Was Berrien
predisposed to favor the PAU? María Rosa Oliver recalls that he was a guest at
Romero James’s Sunday afternoon gatherings in Washington, D.C., during the
years 1944–1946; however, I cannot confirm whether their social relationship
predated the grant competition. Oliver, 196.
66. AHB to John Abbott, 25 May 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;1137], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; Agnes Rindge to John Abbott, 12 October 1943, EMH II.1, MoMA
Archives, NY.
67. CRJ to John Marshall, 25 June 1943, folder 3162, box 265, Series 200R,
R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; Luis de Zulueta to AHB and
John Abbott, 16 September 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;1106], MoMA Archives, NY;
Agnes Rindge to John Abbott, 12 October 1943, EMH II.1, MoMA Archives, NY.
68. The Austrian-born René d’Harnoncourt had been an art dealer in Mexico
prior to coming to the United States to work at the Indian Arts and Crafts Board
of the Department of the Interior (1936–1944). He became acting director of the
Art Division of the OIAA in January 1943 until the division’s close in June 1943.
Then he became vice president in charge of international activities and direc-
tor of the Department of Manual Industries at MoMA (1944–1945), and held a
brief diplomatic appointment with UNESCO (1946) prior to becoming director
of the Curatorial Department and chairman of the Coordinating Committee of
MoMA in 1947 and director of the museum in 1949 (the position once held by
Barr). Grace McCann Morley was founder of the San Francisco Museum of Art
and served as its director from 1934 to 1958. For an account of Switzer’s work
on the grant, see CRJ to David H. Stevens, 19 February 1946, folder 3169, box
266, Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC; for Switzer’s
grant-connected solicitations of information from personnel at MoMA and the
Library of Congress, see LJS to RdH, 25 October 1944, EMH II.13, MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; LJS to AHB, 8 December 1944, AHB [AAA: 2176;624], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY;  AHB to LJS, 11 December 1944, AHB [AAA: 2176; 623], MoMA
Archives, NY; LJS to AHB, 11 December 1945, AHB [AAA: 2176;621–622],
MoMA Archives, NY; CRJ to Robert C. Smith, 29 November 1943, folder 3162,
box 265, Series 200R, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
69. AHB to LJS, 8 May 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264;693], MoMA Archives, NY;
LJS to AHB, 2 May 1945, AHB [AAA: 3464;694–695], MoMA Archives, NY; AHB
to LJS, 19 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264;700], MoMA Archives, NY; AHB
to LJS, 15 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264;701], MoMA Archives, NY; LJS to
AHB, 10 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264;702–703], MoMA Archives, NY; LJS
to AHB, 7 May 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264:724], MoMA Archives, NY.
70. LJS to AHB, 28 May 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264;723], MoMA Archives, NY;
LJS to AHB, 7 May 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264:724], MoMA Archives, NY.
256 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

71. Alfred  H. Barr, Jr., “Problems of Research and Documentation in Con-

temporary Art,” Studies in Latin American Art, ed. Elizabeth Wilder (New York:
American Council of Learned Societies, 1945), 42. There are several fascinating
revisions from Barr’s rough draft to the published version of this conference state-
ment; for example, the length of his stay in Cuba increases from five days to eight.
Regarding the potentially offensive comment to Leslie Judd Switzer, see AHB to
RdH, 16 November 1945, AHB [AAA: 2174;1076], MoMA Archives, NY; for
an early version of the statement, see draft conference statement, AHB [AAA:
3264;151–162], MoMA Archives, NY.
72. Miriam Basilio notes that Barr’s 1945 installation of the MoMA perma-
nent collection gave prominence to the museum’s Latin American holdings, often
integrating them into international aesthetic movements. The trend toward deinte-
grating them intensified in the 1950s. Miriam Basilio, “Reflecting on a History of
Collecting and Exhibiting Work by Artists from Latin America,” Latin American
and Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo, ed. Miriam Basilio et al. (New York: El
Museo del Barrio and MoMA, 2004), 56; see also Kantor, 365–77.
73. I have been unable to determine the outcome of the monograph on
Siqueiros, for which Lincoln Kirstein had agreed to write the critical essay. For the
evolving lists of artists and critics and quantity of monographs proposed for the
series, see Monroe Wheeler to AHB et al., 14 June 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;1135],
MoMA Archives, NY; LJS to AHB, 2 May 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264;694], MoMA
Archives, NY; “Artists for Monograph Series Figured on Percentage Basis,” n.d.,
AHB [AAA: 3264;697], MoMA Archives, NY; LJS to AHB, 15 February 1945,
AHB [AAA: 3264;704], MoMA Archives, NY; LJS to AHB, 5 January 1945, AHB
[AAA: 3264;705–706], MoMA Archives, NY; LSJ to AHB, 15 December 1944,
AHB [AAA: 3264;707], MoMA Archives, NY; LJS to AHB, 9 January 1945, AHB
[AAA: 3264;709], MoMA Archives, NY; AHB to LJS, 28 November 1944, AHB
[AAA: 3264;712], MoMA Archives, NY.
74. Jorge Basadre to David H. Stevens, 6 October 1948, folder 3169, box 266,
Series 200, R.G. 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.
75. La Unión Panamericana al servicio de las artes visuales en América (Wash-
ington, D.C.: División de Artes Visuales, Departamento de Asuntos Culturales,
Unión Panamericana), n.d. [1961], n.p. [14].
76. Barr was accompanied by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., then a curator and later
director of MoMA’s Industrial Design Department. The two had been allocated
$500 from Rockefeller’s Inter-American Fund for the purchase of Cuban art. Pre-
vious stops on their itinerary included Mexico City and Yucatán. Alice Goldfarb
Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Chicago: Contemporary
Books, 1989), 190–92.
77. The insinuation of a lack of professionalism among Latin American crit-
ics is clear in Barr’s letters of recommendation for Gómez Sicre and in his 1945
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 257

conference remarks. AHB to Stanton Robbins, 23 January 1943, AHB [AAA:

2169;253], MoMA Archives, NY; Barr, “Problems of Research,” 42.
78. AHB to José Gómez Sicre (JGS), 18 August 1942, AHB [AAA: 2169;299],
MoMA Archives, NY.
79. AHB to RdH, 29 June 1945, AHB [AAA: 2169:237–240], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; AHB to NAR, 2 February 1948, AHB [AAA: 2176:18–19], MoMA
Archives, NY.
80. On the occasion of Barr’s retirement, Gómez Sicre dedicated his column
in the Boletín de Artes Visuales to discussing Barr’s achievements. Later in 1974
Gómez Sicre wrote to Barr, “I have often spoken of you as my mentor and shall
always appreciate the kindnesses you have shown me through these many years.”
José Gómez Sicre, “Al lector,” Boletín de Artes Visuales (BAV) 16 (January–June
1967): 3; JGS to AHB, 28 February 1974, AHB [AAA: 2193;1369], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY.
81. José Gómez Sicre diplomas, box 16, folder 4, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; Alejandro An-
reus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” ArteFacto 18 (canícula
[summer] 2000): n.p.
82. Juan A. Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Paint-
ers, 1927–1950 (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 40. I am indebted
to Martínez’s study for my general understanding of this period, especially his first
two chapters (1–49).
83. Machado was elected president in 1925 and then appointed himself presi-
dent for a second term in 1928; his two terms spanned 1925–1933.
84. De Soto also recommended Gómez Sicre for the New York scholarship. De
Soto to the Dean of the School of Arts and Science , 14 July 1943, box 15, folder 4,
JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
UT Libraries; P. H. Graham to de Soto, 4 August 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;213],
MoMA Archives, NY; see also Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
85. Alejandro Anreus discusses José Gómez Sicre’s newspaper work in his un-
published paper “José Gómez Sicre: Guerra fría e internacionalismo en la OEA,”
presented at the seminar “La crítica del arte latinoamericana y chicana desde los
años cuarenta: Entre la modernidad y la globalización,” Bellagio, Italy, 24–28
November 2003. For a list of Gómez Sicre’s early published articles, see “Articles
on Fine Arts Published,” box 16, folder 1, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
86. Francine Masiello observes that while the modernist intellectuals of Gómez
Sicre’s generation looked to José Martí as a distant inspiration, they looked to
the ethnographer Fernando Ortiz as a “spiritual father.” “Rethinking Neocolonial
Esthetics: Literature, Politics, and Intellectual Community in Cuba’s Revista de
Avance,” Latin American Research Review 28.2 (1993):12. Kutzinski offers the
258 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

following summary of cubanía as defined by Ortiz: “Fernando Ortiz’s term for

what he understood as a spiritual condition, cubanía, unlike the more passive
national identification expressed by the concept of cubanidad, signifies an active
desire to be Cuban, and its various articulations in literature, the arts, and the
social sciences were to provide indigenous ideological antidotes to the economic,
social, and political crises induced by United States interventionism” (142).
87. José Gómez Sicre scrapbook, box 14, folder 4, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
88. “José R. Gómez Sicre” (résumé), box 16, folder 1, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; “José R.
Gómez Sicre” (résumé), AHB [AAA: 2169;231–234], MoMA Archives, NY;
“José R. Gómez Sicre” (résumé), AHB [AAA: 2169:246–248], MoMA Archives,
NY; see also Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
89. El Lyceum (El Lyceum y Lawn Tennis Club de la Habana) was a wom-
en’s club that developed as an extra-academic cultural and educational institu-
tion during the Machado dictatorship. In addition to its substantial art activi-
ties, it offered courses, literary prizes, and scholarships. For more on its history,
see Rosario Rexach, “El Lyceum de la Habana como institución cultural,” Actas
de los Congresos de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas IX (1986); ac-
cessed 1  September 2011, http:/cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/aih/. While nationalist
and anti-imperialist in orientation, Masiello notes that Ortiz and the intellectuals
associated with the Institución Hispano-Cubana also cultivated connections with
“dissident writers in the United States and Spain who might voice opposition to
colonialist expansion and therefore strike an alliance with Cuba” (17).
90. This art entered Cuba by way of the gallerists Pierre Loeb and Amelia Perls
(wife of Klaus Perls), who were fleeing the Nazis.
91. See Anreus, “José Gómez Sicre: Guerra fría e internacionalismo en la
OEA,” for a discussion of Gómez Sicre’s early curatorial projects; see also Mar-
tínez, 1–49.
92. Cuban Painting Today ran from 12 March to 7 May 1944. Then, from
October 1944 through May 1945, the show traveled to arts institutions in Utica,
New York; Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; and Minneapolis and St. Paul,
Minnesota. At the same time MoMA also circulated a smaller exhibition of
Cuban watercolors and drawings to institutions in Springfield, Illinois; Greens-
boro, North Carolina; and New Orleans, Louisiana. Elaine Ordman to JGS, 22 Sep-
tember 1944, box 7, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare
Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
93. Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde,
1923–1982 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 81–82. For Gómez Sicre’s
opinions regarding Lam, see AHB to JGS, 2 March 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;22],
MoMA Archives, NY; JGS to AHB, 22 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;23–24],
MoMA Archives, NY; AHB to JGS, 16 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;29–30],
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 259

MoMA Archives, NY; JGS to AHB, 30 November 1944, AHB [AAA: 2194;36],
MoMA Archives, NY; AHB to JGS, 12 December 1944, box 7, folder 2, JGS
Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Li-
braries. Even decades later, Gómez Sicre took a swipe at Lam in a brief memoir
about his 1949 meeting with Picasso: “An Afternoon with Picasso,” Américas
25.11–12 (November–December 1973): 6. It is worth noting as well Gómez Sicre’s
personal difficulties with Antonio Gattorno, another major vanguardia painter
who worked in social realism. See Sean M. Poole, Gattorno: A Cuban Painter for
the World (Miami: Arte al Día International, 2004), 28.
94. JGS to AHB, 22 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;23–24], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY.
95. JGS to AHB, 15 September 1944, AHB [AAA: 2194;41], MoMA Archives,
NY.
96. As Barr wrote to Gómez Sicre, “Aside from the catalog of the exhibition at
the University some years ago, I know of no work that surveys the whole field, or
in fact, any part of it. What do you think of the possibilities of writing such a work
yourself, or at least writing a short critical history of recent Cuban painting and
sculpture of the last ten or twenty-five years? Could such a work be financed in
Cuba?” AHB to JGS, 5 February 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;244], MoMA Archives,
NY; see also JGS to AHB, 17 January 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;285–286], MoMA
Archives, NY. The volume was ultimately financed by arts patron María Luisa
Gómez Mena. José Gómez Sicre, Pintura cubana de hoy, trans. Harold T. Riddle
(Havana: María Luisa Gómez Mena, [January] 1944).
97. That exhibition had been sponsored by the Revista de avance (1927–1930),
a magazine spearheaded by several alumni of the Grupo Minorista.
98. Cited in Alfred Barr, Jr., “Pintura cubana en Nueva York,” n.d., AHB
[AAA:3262.271–272], MoMA Archives, NY. It is important to note that within
the Academia San Alejandro, however, Gómez Sicre highlights the important role
of Professor Leopoldo Romañach in introducing new aesthetic currents from
Europe to the Cuban visual arts. Several members of the vanguardia, including
Abela, Gattorno, Manuel, and Peláez, graduated from San Alejandro, while Lam,
Ponce, and Fernández attended for brief periods (Martínez, 3). In his detailed
commentary about Gómez Sicre’s periodization of contemporary Cuban art, Ale-
jandro Anreus notes that Pintura cubana de hoy implicitly challenges the claims
and predilections of his contemporary, the Cuban art critic Guy Pérez Cisneros.
“Guy Pérez Cisneros versus José Gómez Sicre: ‘Lo cubano en las artes plásticas,’ ”
Arts and Culture in Contemporary Cuba (New York: Cuba Project, Bildner Cen-
ter for Western Hemisphere Studies, Graduate Center, City University of New
York, 2011): 233–48.
99. The vanguardia painters’ coloration was a common emphasis of Barr and
the New York press. See Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Pintura cubana en Nueva York,” n.d.,
AHB [AAA:3262.271–272], MoMA Archives, NY; “Art Notes: Contemporary
260 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

Cuban Art,” Panorama 23 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, Division of

Intellectual Cooperation, January 1944), 17; see also Martínez for an overview of
vanguardia thematics and context.
100. See Duberman for a vivid evocation of that atmosphere.
101. Gómez Sicre was in the United States from mid-January through mid-
June 1944. His fellowship covered the cost of tuition only, while María Luisa
Gómez Mena covered the cost of his living and travel expenses. Gómez Sicre was
unable to sit for his semester exams because a visa problem obliged him to return
to Cuba a bit earlier than he had hoped. It is unclear exactly what the problem
was—perhaps he was limited to a rigid six-month stay by U.S. authorities, or else
his military service responsibilities in Cuba obliged him to return. Shortly after
accepting the scholarship, Gómez Sicre wrote to Barr as follows, “I am subject to
some resolutions on my war duties.” Meanwhile, Gómez Mena, who in addition
to supporting Gómez Sicre’s visit underwrote the production of his monograph
and MoMA exhibition costs, was unable to attend the opening of the exhibition
because her first husband’s Francoist connections prevented her from obtaining a
U.S. visa. JGS to AHB, 18 September 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;204], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; AHB to JGS, 15 December 1943, AHB [AAA: 2170;813], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; JGS to AHB, 27 November 1943, AHB [AAA: 2170;814], MoMA
Archives, NY; Monroe Wheeler to Aurelio Fernández Concheso, 30 November
1943, Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the
Americas, Latin American Art in the U.S. files; Harry H. Pierson to RdH, 5 June
1944, EMH II.13, MoMA Archives, NY; RdH to Harry H. Pierson, 6 June 1944,
EMH II.13, MoMA Archives, NY.
102. AHB to JGS, 22 December 1943, AHB [AAA: 2170;817], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY.
103. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
104. Robert Motherwell, cited in John Russell, “Meyer Schapiro, 91, Is Dead:
His Work Wove Art and Life,” New York Times, 4 March 1996; accessed 1 Sep-
tember 2011, http://www.nytimes.com. Trained as a medievalist, Meyer Schapiro
(United States, b. Lithuania, 1904–1996) also worked on the contemporary pe-
riod, and since the 1930s he had been an influential member of the New York
Intellectuals and a prominent art critic in the leftist press. By 1944, however, Scha-
piro’s opposition to the war led to his occupying an increasingly independent posi-
tion with regard to established Marxist groups. Schapiro opposed the Comintern’s
Popular Front strategy that encouraged Communist parties to enter into wartime
coalitions with liberals and progressives in order to defeat fascism (1935–1939);
he generally embraced a position similar to the Trotskyists’ “revolutionary defeat-
ism,” which regarded World War II as a conflict between two capitalist classes
that did not advance the international proletariat’s struggle to wage “permanent
revolution.” Schapiro’s antiwar stance was preceded by vocal criticism of Soviet
policies ranging from the Moscow Show Trials (1935) to the Hitler-Stalin Pact
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 261

(1939) and invasion of Finland (1939). His disillusionment with the Soviet Union
in turn informed his perspectives on art. He gradually shifted from advocating an
agit-prop role for the artist, along the lines developed under Lenin in the years
immediately following the Russian Revolution, to a position more closely associ-
ated with that of Trotsky, who validated “intellectual work” itself as a useful tactic
in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. I would like to thank Lara Trubowitz
for discussing Schapiro’s work with me; my sense of Schapiro’s political and aes-
thetic orientation is further indebted to the articles featured in the special issue
of Oxford Art Journal 17.1 (1994) dedicated to Meyer Schapiro, particularly
the contributions of Andrew Hemingway, Patricia Williams, and David Craven.
Erwin Panofsky (Germany, 1892–1968), whose course in art criticism Gómez
Sicre audited at New York University, was an equally important figure in the field
of art history, in which he was known for his pioneering work on iconography of
the early modern period. See Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations
of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
105. Kantor explores the underlying humanist commitments shared by Barr
and Schapiro (328–31).
106. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
107. David Craven, “Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch, and the Emergence of
Critical Theory,” Oxford Art Journal, special issue on Meyer Schapiro, ed. David
Craven, 17.1 (1994): 45.
108. Schapiro, cited in ibid., 51.
109. Craven and Azuela explore these two ideas in depth.
110. Azuela, 59.
111. Olga María Rodríguez Bolufé, “El arte de México en Cuba durante el
surgimiento de la vanguardia plástica de los años 20,” Siqueiros en el extranjero,
accessed 19 March 2011, http://www.siqueiros.inba.gob.mx/; see also Martínez.
The virtual exhibition Siqueiros en el extranjero was organized in 2006 by the
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, an affiliate of the Instituto Nacional
de Bellas Artes (INBA).
112. Duberman, 380–81. The Chillán murals, titled Muerte al invasor (Death
to the Invader, 1942–43), stress historical parallels between the independence
struggles of Chile and Mexico. The compositions are expansive, dynamic, and
vividly polychromatic.
113. The Latin American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art was on ex-
hibit at MoMA from March 31 to June 6, 1943. Barr had expressed an interest to
Kirstein in mounting a Siqueiros exhibition in 1944, and the MoMA Exhibitions
Committee discussed plans for Siqueiros exhibitions in 1942 and again in 1948.
AHB to LK, 15 September 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;857–858], MoMA Archives,
NY; Basilio, 65; Campbell to Braden, 23 May 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Box
367, folder “Paintings Misc.,” NARA.
114. John Akin to NAR, 27 May 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files,
262 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

box 367, folder “Paintings Misc.,” NARA; see also Duberman, 383. Siqueiros
had served five months’ jail time in Mexico for his alleged involvement in the first
assassination attempt against Trotsky. A second, successful attempt was made in
August 1940.
115. David Alfaro Siqueiros to Spruille Braden, 26 May 1943, OIAA, R.G.
229, entry 1, Central Files, box 367, folder “Paintings Misc.,” NARA.
116. NAR to Spruille Braden, 4 June 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central
Files, box 367, folder “Paintings Misc.,” NARA; John Akin to NAR; 27 May
1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 367, folder “Paintings Misc.,”
NARA.
117. See Siqueiros en el extranjero, accessed 19 March 2011, http://www
.siqueiros.inba.gob.mx/.
118. NAR to Braden, 26 May 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files,
box 367, folder “Paintings Misc.,” NARA; Kenneth D. Campbell to Spruille Braden,
23 May 1943, OIAA, R.G. 229, entry 1, Central Files, box 367, folder “Paintings
Misc.,” NARA.
119. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
120. Gómez Sicre’s speech took place at the Institución Hispano-Cubana on 22
January 1943; it was published as “El cartel considerado como arte,” Ultra 13.79
(March 1943): 230–21; box 14, folder 6, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Col-
lection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries. No doubt Gómez Sicre was re-
sponding to the ubiquity of wartime posters in Latin America, including the recent
hemispheric poster competition administered by MoMA for the OIAA. See “The
Art Program of the C.I.A.A., ” 30 June 1943, RdH II.26, MoMA Archives, NY.
121. Siqueiros’s lecture took place on 16 April 1943 in the Anfiteatro Munici-
pal de la Habana and was sponsored by the Cuban Ministry of Defense; Siqueiros
en el extranjero, accessed 19 March 2011, http://www.siqueiros.inba.gob.mx/.
122. JGS to AHB, 19 June 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;229–230], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY.
123. Ibid. I do not correct Gómez Sicre’s grammatical inconsistencies in English.
His English-language prose becomes increasingly standardized through the years.
124. AHB to LK, AHB [AAA: 2169;877], MoMA Archives, NY; AHB to JGS,
24 June 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;228], MoMA Archives, NY.
125. This is Gómez Sicre’s recollection (Anreus, “Ultimas Conversaciones”),
but according to Siqueiros en el extranjero, Siqueiros paid his bill in part with the
painting El nuevo día de las democracias (The New Day of Democracies, 1943);
accessed 19 March 2011, http://www.siqueiros.inba.gob.mx/.
126. María Luisa Gómez Mena reportedly greeted Barr and Kaufmann wear-
ing a wreath made of laurel leaves and elaborate makeup (Marquis, 191–92).
Jorge Losada, Cuban editor of the New York–based magazine, Norte, to which
Gómez Sicre was a contributor, arranged their meeting.
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 263

127. JGS to AHB, 25 November 1942, AHB [AAA: 2169;291], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; JGS to AHB, 15 December 1942, AHB [AAA: 2169;245], MoMA
Archives, NY. Mario Carreño states that the Cuban painting show at MoMA
ironically brought about the closure of the Galería del Prado. Gómez Mena was
devastated at being denied a visa to attend the MoMA exhibition opening. As
a result, according to Carreño, her health was adversely affected and she was
unable to operate the gallery. Carreño, Mario Carreño: Cronología del recuerdo
(Santiago de Chile: Antártica, 1991), 56.
128. The work is illustrated in Siqueiros en el extranjero, accessed 19 March
2011, http://www.siqueiros.inba.gob.mx/.
129. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
130. According to Siqueiros en el extranjero, the lower part of the mural
was concave and the upper part was flat; accessed 19 March 2011, http://www
.siqueiros.inba.gob.mx/.
131. JGS to AHB, 26 November 1943, AHB [AAA: 2170;814], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; María Luisa Gómez Mena to AHB, 26 November 1943, AHB [AAA:
2170;641], MoMA Archives, NY.
132. JGS to AHB, 26 November 1943, AHB [AAA: 2170;814], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY.
133. See, for example, Siqueiros’s Ejercicio plástico (Plastic Exercise, 1933),
executed in Buenos Aires.
134. Siqueiros en el extranjero; accessed 19 March 2011, http://www.siqueiros
.inba.gob.mx/.
135. Cited in Siqueiros en el extranjero; see also Rodríguez Bolufé. The original
reference comes from “El boletín del comité continental de arte para la victoria”
(Bulletin of the Continental Art Committee for Victory), Siqueiros en el extran-
jero, accessed 19 March 2011, http://www.siqueiros.inba.gob.mx/.
136. Siqueiros en el extranjero, accessed 19 March 2011, http://www.siqueiros
.inba.gob.mx/.
137. See, for example, JGS to AHB, n.d., AHB [AAA: 2169;296], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY.
138. In a letter to Barr, Gómez Sicre included ñañigo (Afrocuban religious
leader) drawings that had been collected by Alejo Carpentier, and he sent an embó
(fetish) to René d’Harnoncourt. Gómez Sicre also featured ñañigo drawings as the
frontispiece to Pintura cubana de hoy. Alejo Carpentier originally collected these
drawings and circulated them to Picasso. JGS to AHB, 5 September 1943, AHB
[AAA: 2169;208–209], MoMA Archives, NY; JGS to RdH, 17 December 1944,
RdH II.37, MoMA Archives, NY. José Antonio Baujín and Luz Marino argue
that these gestures from Cuba to metropolitan art centers should be viewed as
an attempt on the part of third-world intellectuals to reverse the usual trajectory
of European modernism, in which the unselfconscious primitive provides raw
264 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

material to metropolitan intellectuals. José Antonio Baujín and Luz Marino, “El
peregrinaje carpenteriano por las rutas de la plástica española”; accessed 1 Sep-
tember 2011, http://www.luxflux.net/n23/Baujín.pdf.
139. Luis-Brown, 185.
140. This mythical figure is famously associated with Orozco, for example, in
his mural Prometheus (1930) at Pomona College.
141. Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala, 32nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Record,
1992 [1933]); The Masters and the Slaves, trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd ed. (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1986). This work stems from Freyre’s doctoral
thesis, written at Columbia University in 1922.
142. Zita Nunes, Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in Literature
of the Americas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 73.
143. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Madrid:
Cátedra, 2002 [1940]); Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet
de Onís (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). For a commentary on Ortiz’s
work, see Elizabeth Christine Russ, The Plantation in the Postslavery Imagination
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3–20.
144. Kutzinski, 163–98.
145. Ibid., 165.
146. Sims, 34–70.
147. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
148. In later interviews, Gómez Sicre traces his problems with the Mexi-
can school to this incident. Here are two examples: “Siqueiros? larga historia.
Siqueiros fue para La Habana cuando el problema que tuvo con la presunta
muerte de Trosky . . . Era un personaje tan equívoco, tan falso. Ay, que mala
persona, un personaje vil . . . Sr. David Alfaro Siqueiros, un pedante egocéntrico
que hablaba del muralismo como una creación personal. El odio que yo cultivé en
Mexico, un odio muy bien cultivado pues venía de esa época.” (Siqueiros? Long
story. Siqueiros went to Havana when he had that problem with the alleged at-
tempt against Trotsky . . . He was such an equivocal person, so false. Oh, what an
evil person, a vile character . . . Mr. David Alfaro Siqueiros, an egocentric pedant
who talked about muralism as though it were his personal creation. The hatred
that I cultivated in Mexico, a very well cultivated hatred, well, it comes from this
period.) José Gómez Sicre interview with “EK” (Elena Kimberly?), unpublished
manuscript, box 16, folder 1, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare
Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries. “David Alfaro Siqueiros was an s.o.b. He
went to Havana to get out of problems that came up after Trotsky’s murder. What
a character! Two faced, evil-minded, egocentric, pretentious, giving you to under-
stand that Mexican mural painting was his own personal invention. You know
that both Rivera and Siqueiros painted bouquets of flowers to sell to tourists and
did portraits of society ladies.” Michael Marcellino C., “Conversation with José
Gómez Sicre,” Latin American Art 3 (1991): 26. Anreus’s interview is noteworthy
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 265

in contrast to the two cited above, because in it Gómez Sicre expresses admiration
for Siqueiros’s painterly techniques (“Ultimas conversaciones”).
149. Marcellino, 26. It should be noted that these criticisms were voiced among
artists on the left within Mexico as well (see Azuela), and by Barr (“Problems of
Research”), but with widely divergent conclusions.
150. See, for example, David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-Revolutionary
Road,” New Masses 11.9 (29 May 1934): 16–19.
151. Laurance Hurlbert, “David Alfaro Siqueiros’s ‘Portrait of the Bourgeoisie,’”
Artforum 15.6 (February 1977): 44.
152. After her marriage to Carreño ended, Gómez Mena married the Spanish
poet Manuel Altoaguirre, then in exile in Mexico, and she produced Luis Buñuel’s
Mexican film Subida al cielo (Mexican Bus Ride, 1952). Gómez Mena died in a
car accident in Spain in 1959.
153. See Martínez; and Rodríguez Bolufé.
154. Barr and Kaufmann purchased some two hundred paintings on this
trip, primarily in Mexico (Marquis, 191–92). From MoMA records, it appears
that they spent $400 of their Cuba budget for works by Mario Carreño, René
Portocarrero, Wifredo Lam, Mariano Rodríguez, Cundo Bermúdez, and Amelia
Peláez. “Memo to Miss Ulrich,” n.d., AHB [AAA: 2169;61], MoMA Archives, NY.
155. As David Craven points out, Barr did not leap to the defense of U.S.
leftist artists who were being attacked by right-wing politicians, such as George
Dondero (“Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Ap-
proach to ‘American Art’ ” Oxford Art Journal 14.1 [1991], 47). On the other
hand, Barr was also less vocally critical of Communist artists than was José
Gómez Sicre. During the cold war, Barr opposed U.S. government agencies black-
listing or “greylisting” artists with suspected leftist ties. Both Barr and Gómez
Sicre opposed censorship of the 1946 exhibition Advancing American Art. Krenn
57–58; José Gómez Sicre, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 20 January 1946,
box 5, folder 1, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
156. José Gómez Sicre, “Rusia y la pintura cubana,” El mundo, 16 March
1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;19], MoMA Archives, NY. Barr responded to Gómez
Sicre’s piece with equanimity: “It is important to let the Russian government know
that the outside world disapproves of its official philistine suppression of the free-
dom of the arts”; and, “I’m afraid I don’t agree with you about the Soviet posters.
It seems to me that they have been extremely effective and quite fine as works of
art, especially those of Lebedev and Marshak. Posters, after all, especially in a
war should be dramatically effective, first of all, and good designs secondly. These
two designers, at least, achieve both.” AHB to JGS, 6 April 1945, box 7, folder 2,
JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT
Libraries. For other correspondence regarding the Cuban vanguardia exhibition
in the Soviet Union, see JGS to AHB, 20 April 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;15–16],
266 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

MoMA Archives, NY; JGS to AHB, 19 March 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194.18],
MoMA Archives, NY.
157. José Gómez Sicre, “Mi credo,” El nacional (Caracas), 5 May 1946, 9.
158. José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 5 (May–December 1959), 3.
159. Regarding Gómez Sicre’s involvement in the Ecuadorian art world, see
Michele Greet, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist
Strategy in Andean Art, 1920–1960 (College Station: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 2009).
160. Marta Traba, Art of Latin America, 1900–1980 (Washington, D.C.: Inter-
American Development Bank, 1994), 108.
161. For example, consider the following from Gómez Sicre to a Borges scholar
at the University of Texas at Austin: “Hay, sin embargo, en todo ello, un extraño
factor de complejo de inferioridad del intellectual mexicano. El hecho de que
Borges sea argentino es razón para ese encono se revestíase con el manto del iz-
quierdismo mas trasnochado. El nacionalismo es un arma de débilies e inseguros”
(There is nevertheless in all of this the strange factor of the Mexican intellectual
inferiority complex. The fact that Borges is Argentine is the reason why this rancor
is being recloaked in the mantle of outdated leftism). JGS to Miguel Enguídanos,
20 August, 1962, box 5, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection,
Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
162. Consider, for example, this statement that Gómez Sicre sent to Jorge
Faget Figari (nephew of the famous Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari) in order
to account for negative remarks that had been made about the PAU Visual Arts
Division by a pro-Cuban Peruvian diplomat: “Es de todos sabido que México,
con su vanidad y su supuesta prepotencia de líder de América, desde hace tiempo
ambiciona, por mandato del Kremlin, a quienes ellos obedecen, llevar a su país
el Departamento Cultural de la OEA para dirigir la cultura del continente que
sería, primero, mexicanizarla, para halagar su nacionalismo enfermizo y, al mismo
tiempo, comunizarla para servir a la potencia moscovita que les manda a arrodi-
llarse” (It is well known by everyone that Mexico, with its vanity and arrogance as
supposed leader of America, has for some time had the ambition, upon a mandate
from the Kremlin that it obeys, to move the Cultural Affairs Department of the
OAS to that country, in order to direct the continent’s culture, which would mean
first Mexicanizing it in order to flatter its sickly nationalism, and at the same
time communizing it to serve the Muscovite power before which it kneels). And:
“Todo el cuerpo de la operación lo dirige el delegado de México, quien ya tiene
las instrucciones y se las da a sus subordinados (los dos más notorios abandera-
dos en el ataque, el ecuatoriano y el peruano)” (The whole body of the operation
is directed by the Mexican delegate, who already has his instructions and gives
them to his subordinates [the two most notorious standard-bearers in the attack,
the Ecuadorian and the Peruvian]). JGS to Jorge Faget Figari, 17 October 1973,
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE 267

box 5, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
163. JGS to Ronald Reagan, 3 June 1983, box 7, folder 7, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
164. Mario Carreño to JGS, 7 January 1979, box 6, folder 3, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
In his memoir, Carreño is evasive about his views on political art of the 1960s,
suggesting that he, like Gómez Sicre, preferred to consider art and politics as
separate realms; yet, he concludes with loving homages to his friends, Salvador Al-
lende and Pablo Neruda, as well as an account of his repeated harassment during
the Pinochet regime, culminating with his receiving the order of expulsion under
Pinochet. Carreño’s critics also point to the somber turn and evocation of violence
that appear in his paintings during the dictatorship (98, 122–33).
165. Carreño’s biographer maintains that his continued association with
Gómez Sicre hurt the artist’s career. Marilú Ortiz de Rozas, Historia de un sueño
fragmentado: Biografía de Mario Carreño (Santiago: El Mercurio, 2007).
166. The original text reads: “Por cierto que me sorprendió leer en una entre-
vista que le hicieron a Siqueiros en ‘Lunes de Revolución,’ sus declaraciones sobre
el fracaso de la pintura mexicana, de sus teorías, etc. En otras palabras decía: ‘que
la revolución mexicana había fracasado y con ella la pintura.’ . . . ‘se necesitan
otros medios, otro enfoque.’ Coño! Y pensar que este demagogo ha estado enga-
ñando a tantos infelices con su lema de ‘no hay mas ruta que la nuestra’ o sea el
‘realismo socialista.’ Es un político miserable. Supe también que en Caracas metió
la pata con los abstractos y lo mandaron a la mierda. Poco a poco se va desacredi-
tando el cretino. Pero no obstante hay mucha gente que lo tiene todavía como un
gran ‘maestro,’ sobre todo los ‘revolucionarios’ de Cuba.
Me parece muy bien tu campaña en contra de esa gente, me refiero a los
muralistas como Siqueiros y compañía, pero ten cuidado, no le des mucha impor-
tancia, pues esa gente es todavía muy ponzoñosa. Hay que tratar el problema con
mucha habilidad y política. De lo contrario te pueden hacer la vida muy incómoda,
y en realidad tu no tienes necesidad de esas ‘incomodidades.’ ” Mario Carreño to
JGS, 7 March 1960, box 6, folder 3, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collec-
tion, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
167. Robert Whitney explains that the Cuban Communist Party’s alliance with
Batista did not technically constitute a Popular Front, because the Cuban Com-
munists were unable to draw other groups into a broad coalition, though the mo-
tive for the alliance followed the Popular Frontist logic. Although Batista and the
Communists made strange bedfellows, Whitney points out that the alliance was
mutually beneficial, as Batista sought to capitalize on the reformist spirit of the
short-lived Grau administration by adding a popular component to his traditional
base of support in the army and police during this period. “The Architect of the
268 NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

Cuban State: Fulgencio Batista and Populism in Cuba, 1937–1940,” Journal of

Latin American Studies 32 (2000): 450.
168. JGS to AHB, 3 July 1944, AHB [AAA: 2170;806], MoMA Archives, NY;
JGS to AHB, 8 October 1945, AHB [AAA: 2193;1408], MoMA Archives, NY;
JGS to AHB, 18 July 1945, AHB [AAA: 2193;1411], MoMA Archives, NY; José
Gómez Sicre, “La pintura cubana en Haití,” Carteles, 11 February 1945, AHB
[AAA: 2194;21]; MoMA Archives, NY.
169. JGS to AHB, 18 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;31], MoMA Archives,
NY.
170. JGS to AHB, 15 December 1942, AHB [AAA: 2169;245–248], MoMA
Archives, NY; AHB to RdH, 29 June 1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;237–240], MoMA
Archives, NY.
171. JGS to AHB, 8 October 1945, AHB [AAA: 2193;1408], MoMA Archives,
NY.
172. RdH to Luis de Zulueta, 12 March 1945, RdH II.18, MoMA Archives,
NY. Buñuel resigned under duress following negative publicity about his Marxist
inclinations. His biographer states that the defamation campaign was motivated
by the Hollywood motion picture industry’s resentment of MoMA’s role with
respect to wartime film dubbing and archiving. John Baxter, Buñuel (London:
Fourth Estate, 1994), 185–90.
173. Mario Carreño to AHB, 19 March 1945, AHB [AAA: 2172;77], MoMA
Archives, NY.
174. JGS to AHB, 20 April 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;15], MoMA Archives, NY.
175. LJS to AHB, 11 December 1945, AHB [AAA: 2176:621–622], MoMA
Archives, NY.
176. L. S. Rowe to JGS, 22 December 1945, box 7, folder 6, JGS Papers, Ben-
son Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JGS
to DeWitt Peters, 18 January 1946, box 7, folder 1, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JGS to DeWitt
Peters, 11 April 1946, box 7, folder 1, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Col-
lection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
177. LJS to AHB, 10 February 1945, AHB [AAA: 3264;702–703]; MoMA
Archives, NY.
178. Gómez Sicre met Henry Moore, Henri Matisse, Marino Marini, and
Pablo Picasso, among others on this trip. See JGS to AHB, 4 October 1949, AHB
[AAA: 2173;802], MoMA Archives, NY; and Barr’s letters of introduction for
JGS, all dated 25 July 1949, AHB [AAA: 2193;1392–1400], MoMA Archives, NY.
179. Gómez Sicre was responsible for recommending works by José Luis Cuevas,
Roberto Burle-Marx, Edgar Negret, and Alejandro Obregón for the MoMA perma-
nent collection. See AHB to Mrs. Cohen, 9 February 1956, AHB [AAA: 2193;1379],
MoMA Archives, NY. Though MoMA’s Latin American activities slowed down
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO 269

considerably in the 1950s, Gómez Sicre was contracted by MoMA’s International

Publications Program in the mid-1950s to rewrite Lincoln Kirstein’s 1943 volume
The Latin American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: MoMA,
1943) as an updated, general survey of Latin American art. The project was un-
derway from 1953 to 1956, and although MoMA did not publish Gómez Sicre’s
volume, it appears that Gómez Sicre published some of his research in La guía de
colecciones públicas de arte en la América Latina (Washington, D.C.: Pan American
Union Visual Arts Section, 1956). Monroe Wheeler to NAR, 3 July 1953, box 143,
folder 1414, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives,
RAC; NAR to AHB, 13 July 1953, box 125, folder 1227, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Per-
sonal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC; AHB to NAR, 13 July 1953, box
142, folder 1400, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Ar-
chives, RAC; Dorothy Miller to LJP, 24 September 1956, AHB [AAA: 2182;1172],
MoMA Archives, NY.
180. LJP to AHB, 1 November 1951, AHB [AAA: 2182;1209–10], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; AHB to Aubrey Graves, 6 November 1951, AHB [AAA: 2182;1211],
MoMA Archives, NY; LJP to AHB, 20 November 1951, AHB [AAA: 2182;1199],
MoMA Archives, NY.
181. Washington Post announcement of Leslie Judd Portner’s “Art in Wash-
ington” column, 3 February 1952, AHB [AAA: 2182;1206], MoMA Archives,
NY. The Boletín de Música y Artes Visuales became the Boletín de Artes Visuales
in 1957.
182. Gómez Sicre and Leslie Judd Ahlander maintained a cooperative rela-
tionship until a terrible falling out in 1979 over their respective roles at a juried
exhibition of Cuban American art prompted her resignation from the Acquisitions
Committee and marked the end of their relationship. LJA to JGS, 20 March 1979,
box 8, folder 1, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, UT Libraries.

2. El Arte Que Progresa

The original text of the epigraph reads: “En fin, si nuestro ruego puede ahora con-
vertirse en sugerencia, aconsejaríamos que los catálogos, los artículos, las notas
periodísticas, las simples gacetillas informativas no se tomen como una mera ma-
nifestación de limitado alcance local, sino como actos que para todos, en todo un
continente, tienen trascendencia. Así nos conoceremos mejor. Así un destino más
ventajoso tendrá nuestra cultura . . . De este modo, esperamos continuar con esta
función de diseminar, expandir nombres, movimientos, hechos que son parte de la
historia cultural de América.” JGS, “Al lector,” BAV 1 (June 1956–June 1957): 2.
1. Alberto Lleras Camargo to NAR, 20 August 1946, folder 188, box 24,
R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Country Files, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC; Alberto
270 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO

Lleras Camargo to NAR, 12 December 1946, folder 188, box 24, R.G. 4 NAR
Papers, Country Files, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
2. Alberto Lleras Camargo to NAR, 27 March 1947, folder 188, box 24,
R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Country Files, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
3. The announcement of the Truman Doctrine and Lleras’s election occurred
on 12 March 1947. NAR to Alberto Lleras Camargo, 13 March 1947, folder 188,
box 24, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Country Files, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
4. Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954), 168.
5. The Ninth Inter-American Conference in Bogotá coincided with assassina-
tion of the Liberal Party presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on 9 April
1948. The event unleashed a period of widespread political violence in Colombia,
known as la violencia, which haunted Lleras’s time in office at the PAU, obliging
him to step down from the secretary generalship abruptly in April 1954.
6. I adhere to this nomenclature in this study. Whitaker points out that the
foundation of the OAS was quickly upstaged by that of NATO in the following
year (174).
7. Cited in Whitaker, 168.
8. Whitaker, 3.
9. Bret Benjamin, Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 1–24.
10. Since the Chapultepec and Rio Conferences, aid for development projects
had been on the agenda of Latin American governments, but their petitions were
rebuffed by the United States, which at the time demonstrated greater interest in
hemispheric security than foreign aid. Latin American leaders again requested aid
at the Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas in 1954, and again they were
rebuffed by the Eisenhower administration. Only in 1958, after U.S. Vice President
Richard Nixon’s hostile reception in Caracas and Lima, was Brazilian President
Juscelino Kubitschek’s proposal for Operation Pan-America, a precursor proposal
to the Alliance for Progress, well received by U.S. officials. By 1960, President
Eisenhower came to accept foreign aid as a strategy for preempting communism,
and under the John F. Kennedy administration, discussions of “growth” became
more explicitly described as “modernization.” J. Lloyd Meacham, The United
States and Inter-American Security, 1889–1960 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1961), 285; Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Sci-
ence and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000), 21–68.
11. Alberto Lleras to NAR, 20 November 1952, folder 1951, box 195, R.G. 4
NAR Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
12. The glacier analogy is Whitaker’s (155). Beginning with Lleras Camargo,
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO 271

all OAS secretaries general have been Latin American, while the assistant secretary
general position is customarily held by a U.S. citizen.
13. Michael Shifter, “The United States, the Organization of American States,
and the Origins of the Inter-American System,” The Globalization of U.S.-Latin
American Relations: Democracy, Intervention, and Human Rights, ed. Virginia M.
Bouvier (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 88.
14. JGS, “Nota editorial,” BAV 2 (July 1957–June 1958): 1; Nils Gilman, Man-
darins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 1.
15. Informe de la Comisión Especial del Consejo Directivo sobre Organización
Interna de la Unión Panamericana, 21 de julio de 1947, folder 188, box 24, R.G.
4 NAR Papers, Country Files, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
16. The inauguration of the IACC standing committee, known as the Commit-
tee for Cultural Action, took place on 3 March 1952. Its members consisted of
appointed cultural leaders from the countries of Brazil, the United States, Mexico,
Haiti, and Uruguay. Annals of the Organization of American States 4.3 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1952), 248–56; Organization of American
States, Informe anual del Secretario General, 1951–1952 (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, 1952), 32.
17. Annals of the Organization of American States 4.2 (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, 1952), 152; Annals of the Organization of American States 5.3
(Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1953), 177–83; Report on the Tenth
Inter-American Conference (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1954), 31–34,
47–63; Annals of the Organization of American States 4.4 (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, 1954), 50.
18. The Cultural Charter was scheduled for ratification at the Tenth Inter-
American Conference in Caracas in 1954, but then it fell off the agenda, perhaps
due to the Guatemala crisis. Discussion of it was then postponed until the Elev-
enth Inter-American Conference, which was also canceled. For the reasons behind
the cancellation of the Eleventh Inter-American Conference, see Mary Jeanne Reid
Martz, “Ecuador and the Eleventh Inter-American Conference,” Journal of Inter-
American Studies 10.2 (April 1968): 306–27.
19. “Draft Cultural Charter of America,” Organization of American States,
Second Meeting of the Inter-American Cultural Council Lima, Perú, May 3–12,
1956 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1956), 66.
20. Ibid., 65–67.
21. La OEA y la cultura: El Departamento de Asuntos Culturales (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1962).
22. NAR to Alberto Lleras Camargo 10 October 1947, folder 1951, box
195, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC;
Alberto Lleras Camargo to NAR, 30 October 1947, folder 1951, box 195, R.G. 4
272 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO

NAR Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC; Alberto Lleras
Camargo to NAR, 26 September 1947, folder 1951, box 195, R.G. 4 NAR Pa-
pers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC; Susan [Cable] to NAR,
1  October 1947, folder 1951, box 195, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Projects,
Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
23. J. Manuel Espinosa, Inter-American Beginnings of U.S. Cultural Diplo-
macy, 1936–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Department of State; U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1976), 295; biographical profile of Jorge Basadre, folder 1943,
box 194, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
24. Jorge Basadre to JGS, 3 November 1951, box 8, folder 23, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries;
Alejandro Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” ArteFacto 18
(canícula [summer] 2000): n.p. Unfortunately for Gómez Sicre, the flock would
only be removed in the 1970s (see introduction, note 3).
25. Jorge Basadre to NAR, 12 July 1948, folder 1943, box 194, R.G. 4 NAR
Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
26. Jorge Basadre to RdH, 7 July 1948, RdH Papers, II.1, MoMA Archives,
NY.
27. Charles Seeger, Reminiscences of an American Musicologist (Los Angeles:
Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1972), 346.
28. Ibid., 345. See also Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American
Music (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 208–9.
29. I am indebted to David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare for my con-
densed narrative. Johnson explains that the antihomosexuality campaigns were
justified on the basis that homosexuality made one vulnerable to blackmail, and
thus homosexual government employees posed a threat to national security. John-
son, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the
Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
30. Ibid., 38–39.
31. John W. Ford to Monsma, “Pan American Union—Investigations under
Executive Order 10422,” 21 August 1953; Monsma to Hoffman, “Investigation
of Employees,” 26 June 1953; “Personnel Security of Inter-American Organiza-
tions,” 28 April 1953; “Security Questions Affecting the OAS,” 9 February 1953;
Department of State, Records of the United Nations System Recruitment Back-
ground and History Records Relating to E.O. 10422 on UN Personnel Affairs,
1946–1975, Lot 88D3, box 6, file “Negotiations (PAU Secretariat and Employ-
ees),” R.G. 59, NARA. I would like to thank David K. Johnson for his assistance
in helping me to locate these records. For more on loyalty oaths in international
organizations, see Johnson, 131–32.
32. “Personnel Security of Inter-American Organizations,” 28 April 1953, De-
partment of State, Records of the United Nations System Recruitment Background
and History Records Relating to E.O. 10422 on UN Personnel Affairs, 1946–1975,
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO 273

Lot 88D3, box 6, file “Negotiations (PAU Secretariat and Employees),” R.G. 59,
NARA.
33. Arbenz was president of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954. Monsma to John W.
Ford, 21 August 1953; Hoffman to Monsma, 26 June 1953; Memorandum of
Conversation, Department of State, Executive Order 10422: U.S. Citizen Employ-
ees and Prospective Employees, 16 March 1953; Memorandum of Conversation,
Security Questions Affecting the OAS, Department of State, 9 February 1953,
Department of State, Records of the United Nations System Recruitment Back-
ground and History Records Relating to E.O. 10422 on UN Personnel Affairs,
1946–1975, Lot 88D3, box 6, file “Negotiations (PAU Secretariat and Employ-
ees),” R.G. 59, NARA.
34. Seeger, 343–45; Pescatello, 206–9.
35. Mario Carreño to JGS, 28 June 1948, box 6, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; Jorge
Basadre to JGS, 3 November 1951, box 8, folder 23, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
36. CRJ to Gabriela Mistral, 6 March 1951, reel 38, folder “Romero James,
Concha,” series IV, Gabriela Mistral Papers (microfilm), Organization of American
States, Columbus Memorial Library. I would like to thank Elizabeth Horan for
indicating this source to me.
37. CRJ to JGS, 24 August 1946, box 5, folder 7, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
38. JGS to FBI, 1 December 1951, FBI documents released pursuant to Free-
dom of Information Act request (FOIPA 1117635–000).
39. The FBI documents are heavily redacted; a FOIA request to the CIA turned
up no documents, though the FBI documents reveal interagency collaboration
with the CIA; a FOIA request to the Department of State yielded unremarkable
documents dating from this period. SAC, WFO to Director FBI, 28 December
1951; SAC, WFO to Director FBI re: Anonin Marek, 15 November 1950; James O.
Newpher, report on Antonin Marek, 14 February 1951; James O. Newpher, FBI
report on Marek, 29 January 1953, FBI documents released pursuant to Freedom
of Information Act request (FOIPA 1117635–000).
40. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
41. Mario Carreño, Mario Carreño: Cronología del recuerdo (Santiago de
Chile: Antártica, 1991), 56.
42. The ongoing FBI investigation prompted surveillance of Gómez Sicre’s move-
ments and associations during the German lecture tour. SAC, WFO to Director FBI,
2 July 1951, FBI documents released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act re-
quest (FOIPA 1117635–000); Headquarters European Command Intelligence Di-
vision to Assistant Chief of Staff, Army Intelligence, 24 March 1952; Department
of the Army, United States Army Intelligence and Security Command, documents
released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act request (FOIPA 1117635–000).
274 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO

See also JGS to AHB, 18 September 1951, AHB [AAA: 2193;1390], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; Organization of American States, Informe anual del Secretario
General, 1951–1952 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 15 November
1952), 63.
43. According to Johnson, even hasty marriages were viewed as suspicious
(65–77). JGS marriage certificate, 7 September 1951, box 16, folder 2, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries;
JGS divorce certificate, 30 March 1972, box 16, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JGS to
Jorge Basadre, 7 May 1951, box 8, folder 23, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; LJP to AHB, 1 November
1951, AHB [AAA:2182;1209], MoMA Archives, NY. According to legal docu-
ments the couple married in September 1951; Leslie Judd Portner’s letter states
that by November 1951, Gómez Sicre’s wife still had not joined him in the United
States.
44. JGS to Raúl Revilla A., 24 February 1956, box 15, folder 5, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries;
JGS to Raúl Revilla A., 6 October 1959, box 15, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
45. Threat letters, 1978–1988, box 15, folder 9, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; Anreaus, “Ulti-
mas conversaciones.” At the Latin American Studies Association 2004 conference,
a colleague introduced herself to me as an acquaintance of the gynecologist who
treated Gómez Sicre’s alleged victim. The fact that the photocopied clipping about
the alleged molestation was on occasion accompanied by references to the art-
ists José Luis Cuevas and Carlos Poveda, both of whom were closely associated
with Gómez Sicre, reinforces the letter writer’s association of homosexuality with
pedophilia.
46. The JGS Papers at UT Austin contain some indication of erotic relation-
ships with young men in Colombia during the 1970s, and Gómez Sicre’s passions
for screen divas, vintage boleros, and Luchino Visconti movies (notably Death in
Venice) suggest an encoded taste formation. See, for example, William Palacios
to JGS, 9 February 1977, box 15, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JGS to Luchino Visconti,
6  May 1953, box 15, folder 2, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection,
Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
47. See, for example, the interview with the Colombian artist Carlos Granada:
“En ese mismo viaje durante mi exposición en la Galería de la Unión Panameri-
cana en Washington, vi a David Manzur con su pintoresco promotor: el crítico
cubano Gómez Sicre, quien orquestaba una secta de artistas homosexuales latino-
americanos” (On this same trip during my exhibition at the Gallery of the
PAU in Washington, I saw David Manzur with his picturesque promoter: the
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO 275

Cuban critic Gómez Sicre, who orchestrated a sect of homosexual Latin American
artists). Revista Común Presencia website, accessed 15 September 2011, http://
comunpresenciaentrevistas.blogspot.com.
48. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: Transamerican Origins of
Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
49. As Gruesz explains, “To be an ambassador of culture involves reporting
and representing, but not enforcing, the authority of that idealized realm of pres-
tige knowledge in a place where it does not rule—whether in the hinterlands
or in a cosmopolitan space where many value systems come together in chaotic
plurality, as they did in American cities. The rhetoric of ambassadorship insists on
literature’s place within a public sphere, where definitions of citizenship, identity,
and policy are debated” (18).
50. The original text reads: “Yo tengo a mi favor, para estas experiencias que
me sucedieron dos veces en un término de tres años, la ventaja de tener mi país a
cinco horas. Cada vez que me siento ansias de volver y rehacer mi vida allí, vulevo
y así me vacuno contra el inconsciente que me provoca esos deseos. . . . En verdad
todo lo que me dice Ud. sobre Perú sucede por igual en mi país, con distinas va-
riantes o categorías. Todo es la herencia de una España desgobernada que no supo
legar sino taras en las postrimerías de su mandato en América.” Basadre confided
to Gómez Sicre, “He encontrado a un Perú desmoralizado, practicista, casi cínico.
El resultado de la experiencia del 45 al 48 es un desprestigio general de las formas
auténticas de la democracia, que pueden ser fácilmente profanadas por los astutos
y los simuladores y hundidas por los débiles” (I’ve encountered a demoralized,
anti-intellectual [practicista], almost cynical Peru. The result of the experience
from 1945 to 1948 is a generally diminished prestige for all authentic forms of
democracy, which can be easily profaned by the astute and the pretenders [simu-
ladores], and sunk by the weak). JGS to Jorge Basadre, 7 May 1951, box 8, folder
23, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
UT Libraries; Jorge Basadre to JGS, 12 March 1951, box 8, folder 23, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
51. JGS to Jorge Basadre, 7 May 1951, box 8, folder 23, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
52. Quiroga employs the term “tourism” self-consciously, on the one hand, to
acknowledge the class privilege of the authors under consideration in his study,
but on the other, to point out the false binarism that separates sexual “tourism”
from cultural “work.” José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer
Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
53. Quiroga, 46–47 (his translations). Original quotes by José Rodríguez Feo
appear in Mi correspondencia con Lezama Lima (Havana: Ediciones Unión,
1989), 67.
54. See, for example, Mario Carreño to JGS, 18 January 1948, box 6, folder
2, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
276 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO

UT Libraries; Mario Carreño to JGS, 20 April 1948, box 6, folder 2, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
55. JGS, “Nota editorial,” BAV 2 (July 1957–June 1958): 1.
56. Cited in JGS, “Nota editorial,” BAV 2 (July 1957–June 1958): 3.
57. See, for example, JGS, “Nota editorial,” BAV 4 (October 1958–April
1959): 3–4; JGS, “Nota editorial,” BAV 5 (May–December 1959): 1–3.
58. JGS to AHB, 30 November 1944, AHB [AAA: 2194;36], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; JGS to AHB, 18 February 1946, AHB [AAA: 2194;31], MoMA Ar-
chives, NY.
59. JGS to AHB, 8 October 1945, AHB [AAA: 2193;1408], MoMA Archives,
NY; JGS to AHB, 20 April 1945, AHB [AAA: 2194;15], MoMA Archives, NY.
60. See, for example, Constancia Calderón to JGS, 25 February 1965, Orga-
nization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records
Management Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1965.
61. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in
Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 123.
62. Gallegos’s best-known novel is Doña Bárbara (1929), a twentieth-century
elaboration of the civilization versus barbarism plot, set in Venezuela.
63. Coronil, 121–65.
64. For more on Rockefeller’s foreign aid proposals for Latin America, see
Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908–1958
(New York: Doubleday, 1996), 445–65; Gilman, Mandarins, 20.
65. Coronil, 141.
66. The Exposición Interamericana took place in Caracas on 16–28 February
1948. Organization of American States, Informe anual del Secretario General, 1
de julio de 1947–30 de junio 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 3
November 1948), 53–58; Organization of American States, Informe anual del
Secretario General, 1 de julio de 1948–30 de junio 1949 (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, 16 November 1949), 62–73; photograph of Nelson A. Rocke-
feller at the inaugural events from El gráfico (17 February 1948), box 1581, folder
145, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Activities, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
67. “Tentative Program of Mr. Nelson A. Rockefeller,” February 1948, box
1581, folder 145, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Activities, Rockefeller Family
Archives, RAC.
68. Lincoln Kirstein, The Latin American Collection of the Museum of Mod-
ern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943); for more on Rockefeller’s
personal contributions to the Inter-American Fund from 1944 to 1966, see box
142, folder 1400, R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Personal Projects, Rockefeller Family Ar-
chives, RAC.
69. The show’s other U.S. work was an urban landscape by the Chicago-based
abstractionist Arthur Osver. For a list of works included in the Exposición Inter-
americana, see AHB to NAR, 2 February 1948, AHB [AAA: 2176;18–19], MoMA
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO 277

Archives, NY; regarding other MoMA works exhibited in Venezuela, see Dorothy
Miller to JGS, 11 October 1948, RdH Papers, II.38, MoMA Archives, NY.
70. Annals of the Organization of American States 1.2 (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, 1949), 183; Informe Anual del Secretario General, 1 de julio de
1947–30 de junio 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 3 November
1948), 53–58.
71. Rómulo Gallegos to MoMA Trustees, 30 March 1948, AHB [AAA:2175;
1137–1138], MoMA Archives, NY.
72. Gómez Sicre gave a tour of MoMA to Raúl Nass, Gallegos’s private secre-
tary, and his minister of presidency, Dr. Gonzalo Barrios. Dorothy Miller to AHB,
13 July 1948, RdH Papers, II.38, MoMA Archives, NY.
73. JGS, “Mi credo,” El nacional (5 May 1946): 9.
74. Ibid.
75. Marguerite Mayhall, “Modernist but Not Exceptional: The Debate over
Modern Art and Identity in 1950s Venezuela,” Latin American Perspectives 32.2
(March 2005): 128.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 128–29.
78. Yolanda Pantin, A la altura del tiempo: Cafeteras de Alejandro Otero (Ca-
racas: Fundación Banco Mercantil, 2002), 21.
79. Otero was also a founding member of Los Disidentes (the Dissidents),
a modernist group formed in 1950 by Venezuelan artists residing in Paris; this
group published an eponymous journal. Among the artists of El Taller and Los
Disidentes, Mateo Manaure (b. 1926) was also included in a group exhibition of
five Venezuelan painters at the PAU in 1954, and Pascual Navarro (1923–1986)
participated in a Venezuelan architecture exhibition in 1957. Annick Sanjurjo,
ed., Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of
American States. Vol. 1: 1941–1964 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1997), 65–66,
165–66, 258–66; JGS, “Notas de arte” (Carta abierta a los amigos del Taller), El
nacional, 15 August 1948, box 4, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JGS, “Pintores venezo-
lanos en París” (article from unidentified magazine), n.d., n.p., box 14, folder 3,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
80. JGS, “Alejandro Otero en el Salón de las Américas de la Unión Panameri-
cana,” El nacional, 16 January 1949, box 4, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
81. Ibid.
82. Reich, 432; Mayhall, 125.
83. Mayhall, 133–37.
84. JGS to E. S. Whitman, 24 May 1949, Organization of American States,
Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services, R.G.
Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1948.
278 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO

85. Dorothy Miller to JGS, 11 October 1948, RdH Papers, II.38, MoMA Ar-
chives, NY; Dorothy Miller to Monroe Wheeler, 6 November 1948, RdH Papers,
II.1, MoMA Archives, NY; Dorothy Miller to JGS, 19 November 1948, RdH
Papers, II.38, MoMA Archives, NY; Dorothy Miller to JGS, 7 December 1948,
RdH Papers, II.38, MoMA Archives, NY.
86. Informe anual del Secretario General de la OEA, 1 julio 1948–30 junio
1949 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 16 November 1949), 71.
87. Although original plans for the exhibition called for stops in Buenos Aires
and Montevideo, Gómez Sicre explained his choice of exhibition venues in the
following manner: “La idea de usar primero los servicios de la Grace Line y
ahora de la United Fruit Company se debe al deseo de mostrar la exposición en
países cuya posición geográfica o situación económica no les permite un mayor
intercambio cultural con los Estados Unidos o Europa y donde existe una mayor
avidez, especialmente en las jóvenes generaciones, por imponerse directamente
de las corrientes artísticas predominantes.” (The idea of first using the services of
the Grace Line and now those of United Fruit Company are due to the desire to
show the exhibition in countries that have a geographic or economic position that
does not permit them greater cultural exchange with the United States or Europe,
and where there is greater eagerness, especially among the younger generations,
to assert themselves within the predominant artistic currents.) Informe anual del
Secretario General de la OEA, 1 julio 1948–30 junio 1949 (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, 16 November 1949), 71.
88. “Tres becas de la Compañía Grace,” in Correo (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, Office of Intellectual Cooperation, May 1937), 15; see also Es-
pinosa, 150, 178–79.
89. One precedent for 32 Artistas was the major traveling exhibition, Ex-
posición de Pintura Contemporánea Norteamericana (Contemporary Painting
of North America), which toured eight Latin American countries from May to
December 1941. The exhibition was funded by the OIAA and was organized
jointly by MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, and the American Museum of Natural His-
tory. In its own installations of Latin American art, MoMA documents stress that
“[a]rrangement strictly by countries has been avoided,” while published materials
about exhibitions and collections were organized according to country groupings,
and lectures about Latin American art were organized according to subregions:
the East Coast, the West Coast, Central America, and the Americas, North and
South. See, for example, “Latin American Art in the Museum’s Collection,” n.d.
[1943] AHB [AAA: 2169;1157]; LK to Monroe Wheeler, 26 January 1943, AHB
[AAA: 2169;1161], MoMA Archives, NY; LK to Stephen C. Clark, 18 January
1943, AHB [AAA: 2169;1182], MoMA Archives, NY.
90. Informe anual del Secretario General de la OEA, 1 julio 1948–30 junio
1949 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 16 November 1949), 71.
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO 279

91. LJS to AHB, 24 August 1944, AHB [AAA: 3264;718], MoMA Archives, NY.
92. JGS to AHB, 8 October 1945, AHB [AAA: 2193;1408], MoMA Archives,
NY.
93. JGS, “Nota editorial,” BAV 3 (June–September 1958): 3–4.
94. Entry and exit visas in Gómez Sicre’s FBI file indicate that he was pres-
ent in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador from 3 February to 7 March
1948, and Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina from
27 March to 10 April 1949. FBI documents released pursuant to Freedom of In-
formation Act request (FOIPA 1117635–000).
95. Luis Alfredo Cáceres to JGS, 13 November 1949, Organization of
American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Manage-
ment Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1948.
96. For more on the history of MoMA installation practices, see Mary Anne
Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the
Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
97. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New
York: Routledge, 1995), 171.
98. Jane Watson Crane, “Art Takes to the Road,” Américas 2.3 (March 1950):
10.
99. Ibid., 11.
100. Crane, 7–11.
101. This text appears in the introduction to each of the 32 Artistas exhibi-
tion programs. Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library,
Archives and Records Management Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1948.
102. Crane, 8.
103. In his post-tour thank-you letter to MoMA Director René d’Harnoncourt,
OAS Secretary General Alberto Lleras Camargo confirmed this objective: “It was
particularly useful for the young artists of each country to have the opportunity
of seeing the work of some of the masters of the hemisphere.” Alberto Lleras
Camargo to RdH, 28 March 1950, Organization of American States, Colum-
bus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services, R.G. Visual
Arts–Exhibitions, 1948.
104. JGS to Luis Alfredo Cáceres, 17 November 1949, Organization of
American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Manage-
ment Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1948.
105. Luis Alfredo Cáceres to JGS, 22 December 1949, Organization of Ameri-
can States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Ser-
vices, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1948.
106. Ibid.
107. JGS to Alejandro Obregón, 2 September 1954, Organization of American
States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services,
R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1954.
280 NOTES FOR CHAPTER T WO

108. Organization of American States, Informe anual del Secretario General,

1951–1952 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 15 November 1952), 62.
109. The BMAV was founded by Charles Seeger in 1950. Issues 1–76 were
produced from 1950 to 1956; then, separated from the Music Section and de-
voted exclusively to art, BAV issues 1–23 were produced from 1957 to 1973.
The Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo was Gómez Sicre’s editorial assistant
on numbers 1–4 of BAV; after that, Gómez Sicre attempted to hire his old friend
Mario Carreño, as well as Alejandro Otero and Marta Traba, to work on the
journal, but he was prevented from doing so. See Pescatello, 179; Organization of
American States, Annual Report, 1956–1957 (Washington, D.C.: Pan American
Union, December 1957), 96; JGS to Juan Marín, Organization of American States,
Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services, 28 De-
cember 1962, R.G. Office of the Director, 1948–1966, Visual Arts–Memoranda.
110. Among the early editorials, those in issues 3–5 are particularly substantive.
111. See his homage to Carlos Mérida: JGS, “Al lector,” BAV 8 (July–December
1961): 3–4; to Emilio Pettoruti, JGS, “Al lector,” BAV 10 (July–December 1962):
3–5; to Giorgio Morandi, JGS, “Al lector,” BAV 12 (January–December 1964):
3–6; and to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Al lector,” BAV 16 (January–June 1967): 3–6.
112. BAV 2 (July 1957–June 1958): 40.
113. BAV 5 (May–December 1959): 52.
114. Gilman, Mandarins.
115. Ibid., 16.
116. Latham, 59.
117. Gilman, Mandarins, 3; see also Latham, 21–68.
118. Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory
in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xiii–xiv
(cited in Gilman, Mandarins, 7).
119. Latham, 34.
120. Gilbert M. Joseph, “What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing
Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in In from the Cold:
Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and
Daniela Spenser (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 6.
121. Gómez Sicre’s perspectives approximate early 1950s articulations of
modernization theory in their soft line on tradition and abhorrence of authoritari-
anism. Later formulations, such as those of W. W. Rostow in the 1960s, advocated
dictatorship and military intervention in Latin America and elsewhere. Gilman,
Mandarins, 18.
122. The original text reads: “Algunos técnicos comienzan a admitir, además,
que poca o ninguna ventaja podrá registrarse en el orden económico, en la incipi-
ente industrialización de nuestras riquezas continentales si no se llega antes a una
plenitud de conciencia cultural. También se admite que hay pocos instrumentos
de cultura más directos, más efectivos, menos alterables que las artes plásticas. . . .
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 281

Creo que la América llega hoy a un grado de madurez en su arte que no requiere
la merced de otros continetes para que se le otorgue un lugar bajo el sol en el con-
cierto universal del pensamiento creador. Nuestro puesto debe ser obtenido por
nosotros mismos, comenzando dentro de nuestra propia demarcación geográfica.”
JGS, “Nota editorial,” BAV 5 (May–December 1959): 1.
123. Pablo Neruda, Canto general [1950] (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1968 [1950]),
215; Pablo Neruda, Canto general, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), 179.

3. José Luis Cuevas, Panamerican Celebrity

The original text of the epigraphs read: “Si Franz Kafka fuera mexicano, habría
sido costumbrista”; and “Cuevas es como el Quijote, muchos hablan de él, pero
pocos los que lo han leído.” In the first epigraph, costumbrista refers to a writer
of realist genre fiction, often stereotypical or folkloric in nature. The implication
is that Kafka’s work appears to be realist and quotidian by Mexican standards.
Zabludovsky is cited in Esperanza Zetina de Brault, “Un grito de protesta,” El sol
de México (30 September 1966): C8.
1. The exhibition of Cuevas’s drawings ran from 14 July to 16 August 1954.
Annick Sanjurjo, ed., Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the
Organization of American States. Vol. 1: 1941–1964 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow,
1997), 170.
2. José Luis Cuevas (JLC) exhibition file, Organization of American States,
Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services, R.G.
Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1954. See also “Entrevista con José Luis Cuevas,” Punto
de partida 1.2 (January–February 1967): 61, Organization of American States, Ar-
chives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
3. JLC exhibition file, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial
Library, Archives and Records Management Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions,
1954.
4. Cuevas, Gato macho (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994),
81.
5. Michael Marcellino C., “Conversation with José Gómez Sicre,” Latin
American Art 3 (1991): 26.
6. Prior to the exhibition, Gómez Sicre wrote a letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr.,
advising him that “[Cuevas] represents the very latest generation of artists, who are
not interested in political messages and, at the same time, do not break with the
expressionistic tradition of the Mexican school.” Barr instructed Gómez Sicre to set
aside some of Cuevas’s work for possible acquisition by MoMA, and the museum
ultimately acquired Madman (1954) and Madwoman (1954). José Gómez Sicre
(JGS) to Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (AHB), 28 July 1954, and JGS to AHB, 13 July 1954,
Cuevas, General information file, Drawing Study Center, MoMA, NY.
282 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

7. Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American

Relations, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 137.
8. Erico Veríssimo (Brazil, 1905–1975) was PAU director of Cultural Affairs
from 1953 to 1956. He was also a founding member of the Associação Brasileira
do Congresso pela Liberdade da Cultura (the Brazilian branch of the Congress
for Cultural Freedom, which was funded by the CIA), along with fellow Brazil-
ian Alecu Amoroso Lima, his predecessor in the PAU director of Cultural Affairs
position from 1951 to 1953. Best known as an author of novels, short stories,
and nonfiction, Veríssimo spent the war years in the United States, lecturing on
Brazilian literature at the University of California. He was also the recipient of
a State Department grant that brought a number of future OAS functionaries to
the United States. For more on Veríssimo and the Latin American activities of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, see Patrick Iber, “The Imperialism of Liberty:
Intellectuals and the Politics of Culture in Cold War Latin America,” PhD diss.,
University of Chicago, 2011. Luis Quintanilla del Valle (Mexico, 1900–1980),
the son of a Mexican diplomat, was born in Paris. Throughout the 1920s, he
published poetry and organized theater productions under the pseudonym Kyn
Taniya and in affiliation with the Estridentistas (Stridentists), a multidisciplinary
revolutionary avant-garde movement in Mexico. For more on Quintanilla’s cul-
tural activities, see Elissa J. Rashkin, The Stridentist Movement in Mexico: The
Avant-Garde and Cultural Change in the 1920s (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books,
2009).
9. Among the extensive body of criticism about the artist and his work,
Shifra M. Goldman explores Cuevas’s expressive figuration in relation to that of
his contemporaries in the Nueva Presencia group; Ida Rodríguez Prampolini dis-
cusses Cuevas’s work in relation to the Western tradition of drawing; and Selden
Rodman and Marta Traba each relate Cuevas’s figuration to trends in post–World
War II European and American figurative art. Shifra M. Goldman, Contemporary
Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981);
Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Ensayo sobre José Luis Cuevas y el dibujo (Mexico
City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988); Selden Rodman, The
Insiders: Rejection and Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of Our Time (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 3; Marta Traba, Los cuatro monstruos
cardinales (Mexico City: Era, 1965).
10. Enrique Krauze has described Cuevas’s writings as belonging to “un género
inédito: la autobiografía de una autobiografía” (an unprecedented genre: the auto-
biography of autobiography). Due to this mise en abyme of self-citation, treating
Cuevas’s crónicas as documentary evidence can quickly become a fact-checker’s
nightmare, as Raquel Tibol has noted in her humorous attempt to reconcile incon-
sistencies in the artist’s biography. While stressing the literary qualities of Cuevas’s
writings, I have also attempted to cross-check the dates referenced in this chapter.
When in doubt, I have consulted the chronology compiled by the Museo José Luis
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 283

Cuevas librarian Eduardo César Cabrera Nuñez’s José Luis Cuevas: Una vida en
imágenes (San Angel: XXIX Festival Internacional Cervantino, 2001). See also
Enrique Krauze, “Narciso criollo,” Vuelta 186 (May 1992): 56; and Raquel Tibol,
“Las cuevas de Cuevas,” La vida literaria 1.8 (1970): 8–10.
11. Goldman charts the transition from muralism to easel painting in relation
to the rise of a middle-class art market and gallery system in post–World War II
Mexico in Contemporary Mexican Painting (15–26).
12. Mary K. Coffey, “The ‘Mexican Problem’: Nation and ‘Native’ in Mexican
Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of
the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and
Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006),
43–70.
13. Carlos Monsiváis, “Prólogo: Cuevas polemista,” in Cuevario by José Luis
Cuevas (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1973), 10.
14. “Fernando Gamboa en Tiempo,” in Fernando Gamboa, embajador del
arte mexicano (San Angel: CONACULTA, 1991), 21–24. (Originally published as
“El arte mexicano en peligro,” Tiempo [14 August 1942].) I would like to thank
Gabriela Aceves for referring me to this interview. The art historian Anna Indych-
López has demonstrated that work by the Mexican muralists assumed diverse and
portable forms in the United States, from panel frescos to lithographs. However,
these did not assuage Barr’s concerns about cultivating native collectors, for as
we saw in chapter 1, he found Mexican art for export lacking in quality and U.S.
buyers lacking in discernment. Indych-López, Muralism without Walls: Rivera,
Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
15. According to Goldman, “a sharp increase in the number of private com-
missions occurred in 1940, and the quantity continued to rise unevenly until its
highest point in 1958, when 36 of the 63 murals painted during the year were for
the private sector” (15).
16. Deborah Cohn, “The Mexican Intelligentsia, 1950–1968: Cosmopolitan-
ism, National Identity, and the State,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 21.1
(winter 2005): 150.
17. Goldman, 15–26.
18. Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art/Veinte siglos de arte mexicano, exhibi-
tion catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940).
19. R. C. Wells to T. R. Armstrong, 16 March 1939, box 144, folder 1571,
R.G. 4 NAR Papers, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC.
20. “[The President] said he felt the campaign of propaganda waged by the
companies in the United States had been unfair and unfortunate, that it had
hurt the relations between the two countries and had a serious effect on Mexi-
can trade.” Memorandum of Conversation between General Lázaro Cárdenas,
president of Mexico, and Mr. Nelson A. Rockefeller, in the presence of Mr.
284 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

Walter Douglas, and Mr. Louis Blanchard, Secretary to Mr. Douglas, Jiquilpán,
Michoacán, Mexico, October 14th and 15th, 1939, box 145, folder 1576, R.G. 4
NAR Papers, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC; see also Cary Reich, The Life of
Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908–1958 (New York: Doubleday,
1996), 170–71.
21. Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 188, cited in Rebecca M. Schreiber,
Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 181, 249. On the points of
divergence and convergence between Mexican and U.S. containment objectives,
see Seth Fein, “Dicen que soy comunista: Nationalist Anticommunism in Mexican
Cinema of the 1950s,” Nuevo texto crítico 11.21–22 (January–December 1998):
155–72; and Seth Fein, “New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the
Cold War Way,” Diplomatic History 28.5 (November 2004): 703–48.
22. Peter Smith, “Mexico since 1946: Dynamics of an Authoritarian Regime,”
In Mexico since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1991), 350.
23. On these aspects of the López Mateos administration, see Cohn, 169; Fein,
“New Empire into Old,” 737; Goldman, 37; and Schreiber, 179, 192–93. For
Siqueiros’s personal response, see his Historia de una insidia (Mexico City: Arte
Público, 1960). Recent work in diplomatic history sheds light on Mexico’s rela-
tions with Cuba and the United States during this period. As Hal Brands notes,
“When in 1964, the Mexican government learned that Cuban agents were in
contact with anti-PRI elements, Mexico secretly joined the anti-Castro coalition,
imposing unpublicized travel restrictions on the island and sharing information
on Cuban affairs with the United States.” Brands, Latin America’s Cold War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 51.
24. Rodríguez Prampolini, 48.
25. Octavio Paz, “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana,” Panorama 1 (1952): 49–59.
Tamayo’s anticommunism also made him an attractive foundational figure from
Gómez Sicre’s perspective, as noted in chapter 2.
26. For examples of early reviews critical of Cuevas’s work, see Jorge Juan
Crespo de la Serna, “Artes plásticas,” Revista de la Universidad de México (July
1954): 20; Raquel Tibol, “1956 en las artes plásticas,” México en la cultura 406
(31  December 1956): 6; and Andrés Henestrosa, “Reflexiones sobre una ex-
posición,” México en la cultura 465 (9 February 1958): 6. Cohn offers a useful
gloss on the connotations surrounding the term extranjerizante in this period (166).
27. Cohn, 150–52.
28. Ibid., 153.
29. Ibid., 156.
30. The López Mateos administration entertained affiliations with both hemi-
spheric and third-world regional designations. In 1962, for example, it hosted
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 285

state visits for Indonesian President Ahmed Sukarno and U.S. President John F.
Kennedy. For a lucid overview of the sexenio, see Eric Zolov, “¡Cuba sí, Yanquis
no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano in Morelia,
Michoacán, 1961,” in In From the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with
the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 214–52; for a general overview of third-world intellectual
movements during this period, see Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three
Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004).
31. Cuevas, Cuevario (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1973), 57.
32. Eva Cockcroft, “The United States and Socially Concerned Latin American
Art: 1920–1970,” in Luis R. Cancel et al., The Latin American Spirit: Art and Art-
ists in the United States, 1920–1970 (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts and
Harry N. Abrams, 1988), 199.
33. José Gómez Sicre, “José Luis Cuevas: Una década en su carrera,” La nación
(24 June 1965): 42.
34. The artist and critic Dr. Alvar Carrillo Gil became Cuevas’s first major col-
lector in Mexico. Alvar Carrillo Gil, “Exposición de J. L. Cuevas,” exhibition cata-
logue (Hotel Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico, March 1954), Organization of American
States, Archives of the AMA  | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists
files, Cuevas; José Gómez Sicre, “José Luis Cuevas,” exhibition catalogue (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Pan American Union, July 1954), José Luis Cuevas (JLC) exhibition
file, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and
Records Management Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1954. The French
critic Jean Cassou was director of the Musée d’Arte Moderne in Paris and an
early supporter of Cuevas. Jean Cassou, Phillippe Soupault, and Horacio Flores-
Sánchez, Artistes de çe temps: José Luis Cuevas (Paris: Michel Brien, 1955).
35. Goldman, 53.
36. Rodman, The Insiders, 100.
37. Ibid., 62. The 1959 MoMA exhibition New Images of Man also gave ex-
posure to a new wave of figurative work.
38. Daisy Ascher, Revelando a José Luis Cuevas (Mexico City: Daisy Ascher,
1979), 8.
39. The “monstrous” is a sobriquet that Traba confers on Cuevas and three
European-born artists, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and Jean Dubuffet.
For a discussion of the reception of Traba’s and Rodman’s books in Mexico, see
Goldman, 41–44, 111–12.
40. Traba, 81.
41. Ibid., 83.
42. Rodman, The Insiders, 103.
43. Phillipe Soupault, for example, describes Cuevas as “realista para París,
abstracto para México” (realist for Paris, abstract for Mexico) in his article “El
niño terrible contra ‘Los monstruos sagrados,’ ” Elite (Caracas, 1958): 66–70,
286 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA  | Art Museum of the

Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
44. Goldman, xxiii–xxxiv.
45. Cuevas, Cuevas por Cuevas, trans. Ralph Dimmick, Lysander Kemp, and
Asa Zatz (Mexico: Era, 1965), 15–23, 183–92. This is a bilingual text, and further
citations list pages for the Spanish and English passages.
46. For information on Cuevas’s early exhibitions in Mexico, see Cabrera
Nuñez, 13–19; and Goldman, 110.
47. Gómez Sicre first became aware of Cuevas’s work in 1953 through photo-
graphs that Orlando had sent for inclusion in BAV. Cuevas, Gato macho (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 71–72.
48. The Mexican and Cuban art worlds were already substantially inter-
connected, as discussed in chapter 1. Additionally, a close friend of Gómez Sicre,
Cundo Bermúdez, studied art in Mexico (Alejandro Anreus, “Ultimas conver-
saciones con José Gómez Sicre,” ArteFacto 18 [canícula (summer) 2000]: n.p.).
Cuevas met the Cuban artists Felipe Orlando and Jorge Camacho in Mexico
(Cuevas, Gato macho, 111–17). And Cuevas later became acquainted with other
Cuban artists when he exhibited in Havana in December 1956 and again in sum-
mer 1959.
49. See Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.” For more on Grupo Orígenes, see
chapter 1.
50. “Cuevas y los neoyorkinos,” Life en español (June 1957): 52–53. Organi-
zation of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas,
Individual Artists files, Cuevas; “Young Mexican Artist,” Cosmopolitan (Febru-
ary 1959): 57–58, Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art
Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
51. “A Vision of Life,” Time 64.7 (16 August 1954): 58.
52. Cuevas, Gato macho, 80–81, 236–38. Cuevas’s awareness of the early con-
struction of his persona for the foreign press is evident in a letter to Gómez Sicre,
dated 1965, in which the artist insists “no tengo nada de clase media ni de con-
formista” (I have nothing of the middle-class nor the conformist): “Precisamente,
ayer, recién llegado de Mérida, me hicieron una extensa entrevista para el ‘San
Francisco Chronicle’ de San Francisco, Calif., y expresé mi repugnancia a todo
lo que sea adocenamiento, lugar común, y ‘sentimentalismo.’ Ahora, si tuviera 10
años menos, mi comportamiento ‘externo’ sería diferente. Soy conciente del paso
del tiempo y esto me angustia. A los 30 años se puede escupir a la humanidad,
pero ya no se es ‘enfant terrible.’ Se es tan solo amargado o neurótico” (Yester-
day in fact, just back from Mérida, I gave an interview for the San Francisco
Chronicle, of San Francisco, Calif., and I expressed my repugnance toward all that
is mediocre, middlebrow, and sentimental. Now, if I were ten years younger, my
outward behavior would be different. I’m conscious of the passage of time, and
it causes me anguish. At thirty years of age, one can spit at humanity, but that is
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 287

no longer “enfant terrible”; that is only bitter or neurotic). JLC to JGS, 4 January
1965, box 6, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books
and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
53. Bruno worked at the time for the Grace Borgenicht gallery in New York
but referred Cuevas to fellow gallerist André Emmerich, who was well connected
to French arts institutions. Letter from Phillip A. Bruno to JGS, 11 August 1954,
Cuevas exhibition file, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Li-
brary, Archives and Records Management Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions,
1954. On Gómez Sicre’s role in organizing the Latin American tour, see Cuevas,
Gato macho, 97–98.
54. Alaíde Foppa, Confesiones de José Luis Cuevas (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1975), 141–53; Xavier Baca-Corzo, “Polémica,” in [n.t.] (Lima, n.d.)
n.p., Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the
Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas; Anita Kipp, “José Luis Cuevas,” Cul-
tura peruana 125 (November 1958): n.p., Organization of American States, Ar-
chives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas;
“Siqueiros ha sido un absoluto fracaso,” El nacional (Caracas, 16 mayo 1958),
n.p., Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the
Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
55. Cuevas, Cuevario, 188.
56. Fernando G. Campoamor to Emilio Adolpho Westphalen, 14 January
1949, Emilio Adolpho Westphalen papers regarding surrealism in Latin America,
1938–1995, series I, box 1, folder 17, Research Library, The Getty Research Insti-
tute, Los Angeles (2001.M.21).
57. JLC to JGS, 29 September 1954, box 6, folder 9, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
58. Goldman, 113.
59. Ibid., 109.
60. Louis R. Glessman and Eugene Feldman, eds., The Worlds of Kafka and
Cuevas: An Unsettling Flight to the Fantasy World of Franz Kafka by the Mexican
Artist José Luis Cuevas (Philadelphia: Falcon Press, 1959), 4.
61. Ibid., 9.
62. Rodríguez Prampolini, 73.
63. Cuevas, Gato macho, 267–68.
64. Toby Miller and George Yúdice, Cultural Policy (London: Sage, 2002),
25–26.
65. Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge,
1995), 101–68. Cuevas’s life writings constantly draw comparisons with Kafka’s
biography; among the artist’s other Kafka-inspired projects was a ballet in Mexico
City titled “Informe a la Academia” (Report to the Academy). “Kafka y Cuevas en
Ballet,” Boletín de Artes Visuales (BAV) 8 (July–December 1961): 73.
66. The portmanteau is a pun on “Cacahuamilpa,” a tourist destination near
288 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

Acapulco, and on “caca,” or “shit.” Cuevas, “Cuevas dice: Me voy asqueado de

Kafkahuamilpa,” Siempre! (20 April 1966) n.p., Organization of American States,
Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cue-
vas; Carlos Fuentes, “Versiones,” La cultura en México (23 March 1966), 2, cited
in Cohn, 177. For more on the close relation between Cuevas’s art and Fuentes’s
writing, see Carlos Fuentes, El mundo de José Luis Cuevas (Mexico: Galería de
Arte Misrachi, 1969), 28–29; Carlos Fuentes, “Cuevas por Fuentes,” La cultura
en México 399 (1 October 1969): 1–8; and Margarita D’Amico, “Cuevas: Mi
equivalente en la literatura es Carlos Fuentes,” El nacional (29 septiembre 1974),
n.p., Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the
Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
67. Fuentes, El mundo de José Luis Cuevas, 41.
68. In June 1965, Cuevas delivered a talk about his connection to Kafka at the
Instituto Cultural Mexicano Israeli in Mexico City. The Kafka project appears to
have facilitated Cuevas’s involvement with Mexico City’s Jewish community in
the mid-1960s.
69. The writer Salvador Novo also claimed this distinction.
70. Cuevas’s affiliation with Nueva Presencia is chronicled in Goldman (46–63).
71. The alleged members of “the Mafia” (also “Maffia”) vary according to
the source. Cohn’s study stresses the leadership of senior intellectuals such as
Octavio Paz, Fernando Benítez, and Jaime García Terres and the centripetal force
of periodicals and literary establishments on a group of young writers and artists
“who were . . . born in the 1920s and early 1930s and who began participating in
national culture in the 1950s” (142–43). These include Inés Arredondo, Huberto
Batis, Emmanuel Carballo, Emilio Carballido, Rosario Castellanos, José de la
Colina, Amparo Dávila, Salvador Elizondo, Margit Frenk, Carlos Fuentes, Juan
García Ponce, Margo Glantz, Juan José Gurrola, Juan Ibañez, Jorge Ibargüengoi-
tia, Vicente Leñero, Juan Vicente Melo, Carlos Monsiváis, Luis Guillermo Piazza,
Sergio Pitol, Tomás Segovia, Carlos Valdés, and Gabriel Zaid. Cuevas’s own ono-
mastic lists include his circle in Mexico City (Benítez, Fuentes, Gurrola, Monsiváis,
Piazza, and Ponce), but significantly, they also internationalize the group to extend
honorary membership to the Boom authors and Marta Traba. Margo Glantz,
“Entrevista con José Luis Cuevas,” Punto de partida 1 (January–February 1967):
60; Mercedes Durand, “De la Mafia, la pintura, un certamen y otras cosas,” Dia-
rio latino (25 November 1967): 5; Armando Rojas Arévalo, “Habla la Maffia,”
Mañana 1247 (15 July 1967): 28–35; Luis Camnitzer, “José Luis Cuevas en Nueva
York,” Marcha (8 September 1967): n.p., Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación
“Octavio Paz,” Museo José Luis Cuevas.
72. Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in
the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 43.
73. Carlos Monsiváis, Días de guardar (Mexico City: Era, 1970), 79; David
Alfaro Siqueiros, Me llamaban el Coronelazo (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1977), 493;
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 289

Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.” Cuevas’s sexuality, a recurring theme of his

art, writing, and critical reception, merits a study in its own right. Rumors about
Cuevas and Gómez Sicre’s relationship were no doubt impacted by the Mexican
intellectual debates about sexuality and national identity that had been ongoing
since the 1920s. By the 1940s and 1950s, as Robert McKee Irwin notes, the Mexi-
can cultural scene demonstrated a widespread anxiety about repressed homo-
sexuality, fueled in part by psychoanalytic studies about the national character
by Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz that sharply distinguished between active and
passive roles in the sex act and the broader implication of these roles in Mexi-
can public culture (Mexican Masculinities [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003], 187–224). In criticism about Cuevas, the epithet maricón (faggot)
circulates liberally, usually in reference to his “decadent” art. Diego Rivera dis-
misses Cuevas’s work as art for maricones, for example, and Cuevas protests his
portrayal as a maricón by hostile critics, while he employs the same language to
describe other artists, insisting all the while that he has nothing against homo-
sexuals. Rivera cited in Selden Rodman, Mexican Journal (Carbondale: South-
ern Illinois University Press, 1958), 60. See also Elena Poniatowska, “La man-
dragora,” México en la cultura (21 August 1960): 6, Organization of American
States, Archives of the AMA  | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists
files, Cuevas; Cuevas, “José Luis Cuevas Protesta,” Siempre! (24 February 1965),
n.p., Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the
Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas; and Cuevas, Gato macho, 84.
74. In December 1959, Gómez Sicre wrote to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., that “for the
last two years I have been under constant attack by Siqueiros and the Mexican
communist artists with sporadic sour comments from associates in different parts
of Latin America. Now all this has taken the form of an official barrage coming
from the Director of Fine Arts of the Government of Mexico.” JGS to Alfred H.
Barr, Jr. (AHB), 24 December 1959, Alfred  H. Barr, Jr. Papers (AHB) [AAA:
2193;1375], The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York (MoMA); see also
AHB to JGS, 14 January 1960, AHB [AAA: 2193;1374], MoMA Archives, NY;
“Gómez Sicre Denies He Criticized Mexican Art,” Washington Post (23 December
1959), n.p., AHB [AAA: 2193;1376], MoMA Archives, NY. For Mexican press
coverage, see Henry Raymont, “Dice Sicre que ha ayudado al arte mexicano,”
21 December 1959, [n.t.], n.p., Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio
Paz,” Museo José Luis Cuevas; Nikito Nipongo (Raúl Prieto), “Perlas japonesas,”
23 December 1959, [n.t.], n.p., Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio
Paz,” Museo José Luis Cuevas.
75. Alberto Beltrán (Mexico, 1923–2002), who is mentioned again later in this
chapter, was a prolific illustrator, caricaturist, and graphic interpreter of Mexican
history and current events. His affiliation with the committed realist printmaking
collective El Taller de Gráfica Popular placed him in opposition to Cuevas.
76. Cuevas and many other Mexican artists refused to participate in the
290 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

Segunda Bienal Interamericana in protest of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s imprison-

ment in August 1960 for the crime of “social dissolution” (Goldman, 37). Again
in 1965, Cuevas found himself at the center of a fracas that broke out at Gómez
Sicre’s Mexican Esso Salon over allegations that the jury was biased in favor of ab-
straction. For Cuevas’s statement on the subject, see “Bienal, Opinan: Gorostiza,
Chávez Morado, Salas Anzures, Cuevas, Justino Fernández, Alvar Carrillo Gil”
(26 September 1960), n.p., Organization of American States, Archives of the
AMA  | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas. Cuevas,
however, had been arguing publicly with the Bienal organizer Miguel Salas An-
zures for months prior to the event over whether his artwork must be submit-
ted to a preliminary jury prior to being accepted for the Bienal. See “Intenta el
INBA rebatir los cargos del pintor Cuevas, con largas explicaciones,” [n.t.] (3 June
1960), Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of
the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas. At the Mexican Esso Salon, the two
top prizes for painting were awarded to the abstractionists Lilia Carrillo and Fer-
nando García Ponce. One of the judges, Juan García Ponce, was the brother of the
winning painter. Fifteen artists signed a letter of protest to INBA citing concern,
among other things, regarding the PAU role in organizing the event. For accounts
of the Esso Salon controversy, see Goldman 33–35; and Orlando Suárez Suárez,
La jaula invisible: Neocolonialismo y plástica latinoamericana (Havana: Editorial
de Ciencias Sociales, 1986), 102–3.
77. Cuevas, Gato macho, 145–46.
78. Raquel Tibol left her native Argentina for Mexico in order to accept a posi-
tion as Diego Rivera’s private secretary in the early 1950s; she went on to become
a chronicler of the muralist movement and a preeminent art critic in Mexico. She
was also a regular contributor to Benítez’s México en la cultura, which featured
spirited debates between her and Cuevas in the 1950s. Margarita Nelken was a
distinguished writer and socialist (later Communist) activist in Spain prior to her
exile in Mexico following the Spanish Civil War, where she continued a career
in journalism, especially art criticism. Alaíde Foppa fled Guatemala for Mexico
following the 1954 coup; in addition to her creative writing and art criticism, she
was an activist in feminist and human rights movements until she was disappeared
in Guatemala in 1980. Fernando Benítez edited the influential México en la cul-
tura from 1949 to 1961; he was dismissed due to his pro-Castrista views and,
followed by his loyal staff, went on to edit the supplement, renamed La cultura
en México, for the newspaper Siempre! (see Cohn, 158–59).
79. The original text reads: “Ayer hablé con Benítez, y me pidió colaborara
mensualmente en su periódico. Esto es peligroso, pues de escribir yo algo se ad-
vertiría una dualidad de estilos. Me pagarían algo (es decir, a ti). Me dijo que sería
interesante el primer artículo sobre mis experiencias de viaje. Esto es una opor-
tunidad para hablar de los artistas americanos de talento y al mismo tiempo se
darían unos cuantos palos a los pintores mexicanos. Dice que admira ‘mi’ hondo
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 291

sentido del humor y que le gustaría lo conservara en todos ‘mis’ escritos. Podría
narrar mis experiencias en Caracas, Lima, etc., que tú conoces como yo. Este
artículo no tendría que ser muy extenso (de tres cuartillas en adelante). Tendría
que entregarlo el miércoles próximo, pues este domingo ya se anunciará mi parti-
cipación. ¿Podrías confeccionar algo este domingo? Te repito, algo breve. Si no te
fuera posible, pues ignoro tu estado de ánimo o tus compromisos, te agradecería
me lo dijeras inmediatamente para escribirlo yo mismo. Como segundo artículo
podría enviar la carta a Fernando Gamboa que ilustraría con dibujos. ¿Podrías
enviármela? [ . . . ]
(El artículo estará escrito en primera persona, y siempre el autor como pro-
tagonista del drama . . . o la farsa. Se podría anunciar mi retorno como un acto
de valentía al desoír la amenaza ‘de unos cuantos.’ Se puede decir: sin las pistolas
conque Diego amenazaba al pueblo para el que pintaba y sin las pistolas conque
Siqueiros asesina sus cuadros.)” JLC to JGS, 18 December 1958, box 6, folder 9,
JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT
Libraries.
80. The Cuevas-Gómez Sicre correspondence in the Benson Library contains
several letters from Cuevas to contacts in the Mexican press that were sent from
Gómez Sicre’s Washington, D.C., home, suggesting that Cuevas’s trips to the
United States provided an opportunity for him and Gómez Sicre to work to-
gether on Cuevas’s writing; on other occasions, it appears that they relied on
erratic mail service or the diplomatic pouch for delivery of articles. For corre-
spondence about Cuevas’s pieces in México en la cultura and Excélsior, see JLC
to Fernando Benítez, 16 February 1959, box 6, folder 11, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JLC to
Fernando Benítez, 16 April 1959, box 6, folder 11, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JLC to Gastón
García Cantú, 15 May 1959, box 6, folder 11, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JLC to Horacio Flores,
3  June 1959; box 6, folder 11, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection,
Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries. Regarding mail service, see JLC to
JGS, 4 January 1958 [1959], box 6, folder 4, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries. The Cuevas correspon-
dence files in the JGS Papers contain numerous references to “el estilo,” as well as
discussions of the pair’s specific journalistic interventions, including open letters to
Fernando Gamboa and Miguel Salas Anzures, Cuevas’s travel accounts, Cuevas’s
interview with Elena Poniatowska, and Cuevas’s statement against Nueva Presen-
cia, in which he instructed Gómez Sicre: “Derrama todo tu bilis en el artículo. Yo
lo publicaré bajo mi firma. ¡Rompe esta carta!” (Spill all of your bile in the article.
I will publish it under my signature. Destroy this letter!). See, for example, JLC
to JGS, n.d. [late 1960], box 6, folder 9, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Col-
lection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JLC to JGS, 9 June [1960];
292 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

box 6, folder 9, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JLC to JGS, 14 December 1962, box 6, folder 5, JGS
Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Li-
braries; JLC to JGS, 7 March 1969, box 6, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
81. There is a substantial discrepancy among sources as to when Cuevas coined
the phrase “la cortina de nopal.” Carlos Monsiváis, Shifra M. Goldman, and En-
rique Krauze give 1956 as the date. In various sources, Cuevas dates the phrase to
1957 (Cuevario, 132) and 1953 (Gato macho, 429). Cabrera Nuñez cites the first
published appearance of the phrase in 1958 (Cabrera Nuñez, 29); from that point
on, Cuevas employs it repeatedly in published documents.
82. Cuevas, “Cuevas, el niño terrible vs. los monstruos sagrados,” México en
la cultura 473 (4 April 1958): 7 (the letter is dated 20 March 1958); English
translation: “The Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity in Mexican
Art,” Evergreen Review (winter 1959): 111–20. For the sake of simplicity, I refer
to this letter as “The Cactus Curtain” and cite from the bilingual version that is
reproduced in Cuevas por Cuevas.
83. The original text reads: “las figuras simplificadas, con grandes ‘manotas y
piernotas,’ curvilíneas, ondulosas, planas. . . . Con tal fórmula se resuelve todo:
lo mismo un hombre con paliacate que una india con flores en el mercado, que
un trabajador del petróleo, que una de esas maternidades proletarias.” Cuevas,
Cuevas por Cuevas, 40, 198.
84. Ibid., 46, 202.
85. New International Year Book (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1959), 261.
For additional coverage of Cuevas’s letter, see Stanley Meisler, “Letter from Mex-
ico,” Nation (19 December 1959): 473.
86. Michael L. Krenn, Fall-out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art
and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 88.
87. Cuevas, Cuevario, 34, 92; Cuevas, Gato macho, 125.
88. Cuevas, Cuevario, 59.
89. As if to deliberately heighten the contradictions, México en la cultura pub-
lished Cuevas’s letter on the same page as an advertisement for a contest to award
the best work of art on the theme of “La Madre” (The Mother), sponsored by
INBA and an obstetricians’ organization; Cuevas, Cuevas por Cuevas, 37, 196.
90. The PRI dominated twentieth-century Mexican politics for almost seven
decades. Monsiváis, “Prólogo: Cuevas polemista,” Cuevario, 9–35.
91. “¡Estoy feliz y brindé con coca-cola (pensando mucho en ustedes) por la
caída de Batista. Siento mucho no haber estado con ustedes y así el brindis hubiera
sido con Champaña. Felicita mucho a Doña Gullermina y a Tati. Los cubanos
exiliados en este país, armando alboroto en la embajada y ansiosos de salir para
Cuba” (I’m happy and I toasted the fall of Batista with coca-cola [thinking of you
a lot]. I’m sorry not to be with you; then the toast would have been with Cham-
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 293

pagne. Congratulate Doña Guillermina and Tati. The exiled Cubans in this coun-
try, raising a commotion in the embassy and anxious to leave for Cuba). JLC to
JGS, 4 January 1958 [1959], box 6, folder 4, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American
Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
92. The original text reads: “Elena [Poniatowska] me ha hecho por escrito
una entrevista. Temo escribirla y traicionar el ‘estilo.’ ¿Podrías escribirla? Urge.
Todo es sobre mis referencias y declaraciones recientes. . . . Como ves la entrevista
está hecha con veneno. ¿Podrías contestarla con rapidez? Necesito entregarla a
mediados de la semana próxima.” JLC to JGS, 9 June [1960], box 6, folder 9,
JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts,
UT Libraries.
93. Ibid.
94. “Por lo tanto, querida Elenita, nada tienes que reprocharme de absten-
ción. Ni desde el extranjero, ni desde aquí me mantengo quieto o callado, y lucho
contra todo aquello que quiera aplastar el derecho de ser libre al ser humano, ya
sea en el arte o en la política. Creo que mi serie de Funerales de un dictador, es
lo suficientemente elocuente en cuanto a precisar la posición de quien lo hizo”
(My dear Elenita, you have no reason to reproach me for abstention. Neither
here nor abroad do I remain silent or quiet, and I struggle against all that threat-
ens to stifle the human being’s right to freedom, be it in art or politics. I believe
that my series The Funerals of a Dictator is sufficiently eloquent with respect to
the positions of its creator) (Poniatowska, “La mandragora,” 6). After his initial
enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution, Cuevas later refused to exhibit his work
in Cuba, and in 1971 he signed a petition in support of the imprisoned Cuban
poet Heberto Padilla (Cuevas, Cuevario, 133; “José Luis Cuevas y dos artistas
famosos en Costa Rica,” La república [14 September 1971]: 15). Like Gómez
Sicre, Cuevas remained quite vocal, however, in his criticism of the Batista regime
(Foppa, 142–43).
95. See, for example, Cuevas, “Una queja nueva y algunos recuerdos viejos,”
México en la cultura 568 (1 February 1960): 7.
96. JLC to JGS, box 6, folder 8, n.d. [August 1961], JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
97. Ibid. See also JLC to JGS, 1 June [1960], box 6, folder 8, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
98. Cuevas, Cuevas por Cuevas, 47, 203.
99. Cuevas’s first bilingual essay collection, Cuevas por Cuevas (1965), fea-
tures “The Cactus Curtain” along with several autobiographical writings from
the period.
100. JLC to JGS, n.d. [August 1961], box 6, folder 8, JGS Papers, Benson
Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries; JLC to
JGS, 14 June 1962, box 6, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin American Collec-
tion, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries. I believe that these refer to the
294 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

texts that accompanied another artist’s book, Cuevas on Cuevas: Recollections of

Childhood (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Kanthos Press, 1962), and were later compiled
in Cuevas por Cuevas.
101. JLC to JGS, 14 June 1962, box 6, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
102. Cuevas, Cuevas por Cuevas, 62, 215.
103. JGS to JLC, 11 June 1954, JLC exhibition file, Organization of American
States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services,
R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1954; JLC to JGS, 13 June 1954, JLC exhibition
file, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and
Records Management Services, R.G. Visual Arts–Exhibitions, 1954. The rest of
Cuevas’s response to the second question is worth citing in full for its reflection
on the detachment the artist feels toward his subject: “Los estados subjectivos se
reflejan en símbolos convencionales que dependen del núcleo cultural en que el
individuo se ha desenvuelto. Estos símbolos son el lenguaje callado del gesto y
de la mímica. Las formas esquemáticas de esta simbolización, captadas fríamente
y expresadas en forma plástica consitutyen el volumen de mi obra” (Subjective
states are reflected in conventional symbols that depend on the cultural nucleus
in which the individual develops. These symbols are the silent language of gesture
and mimicry. Schematic forms of this symbolism, coldly captured and expressed
in aesthetic form, constitute the volume of my work). It appears that the responses
to these two questions were used for an article that appeared in a 1954 issue of
Américas, in which Cuevas states: “Although I admire Orozco and Tamayo, no
artist has influenced me, only Mayan and Tarascan sculpture”; and “Our main
ideal is to avoid political implications and to serve no political interests.” Clip-
ping file, Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio Paz,” Museo José Luis
Cuevas.
104. For more on the reception of The Children of Sanchez in Mexico, see
Cohn, 176–77; for the controversy surrounding Los olvidados, see Ernesto R.
Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 57–79. The fact that both of these unflatter-
ing treatments of Mexican poverty were the work of foreigners sheds light on the
debates surrounding Cuevas’s conflicted national identity.
105. JGS to Luis Quintanilla, 11 February 1956, box 7, folder 6, JGS Papers,
Benson Latin American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
106. Cuevas, Cuevario, 76.
107. Ibid., 83.
108. The original text reads: “Dice Ud. que nuestro mundo es ahora menos
sombrío. Debe ser que la literatura en México produce pingües dividendos a
quienes la cultivan y Ud. debe hacer vida de reclusión en alguna villa de Pedregal
con un Cadillac de vidrios ahumados. El caso es que yo sigo caminando los bar-
rios de nuestro Distrito Federal y continúo percibiendo una miseria igual a la que
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 295

sirvió para luchar contra Don Porfirio.” The Mexican Revolution brought an end
to the nearly three-decade-long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Cuevas, “Cuevas
ataca el realismo superficial y regalón de la Escuela Mexicana,” México en la cul-
tura 468 (1 March 1958): 6.
109. Cuevas, Cuevas por Cuevas, 49, 204; the translator’s choice of words is in-
teresting (“adobe village”) and resonates with a subsequent passage in which Cue-
vas likens Mexico to a despotic, precapitalist Tibet, hostile to outside influences.
110. For more on the thriving visual culture associated with the avant-garde
and commercial mass media leading up to this period, see Esther L. Gabara, Er-
rant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008); and Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and
Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 1998).
111. Cuevas, Cuevas por Cuevas, 30, 192 (translation mine).
112. Cuevas’s racially charged language in this passage is worth citing in full,
for it heightens the extent of his “redemption” through Mireya: “Aquella india
que posaba quieta, como un pedazo de piedra, olía a grasa de coco, a mole, no sé
a qué clase de olor, entre cocina y corral” (That Indian girl, who posed so quietly,
like a block of stone, smelled of coconut oil, of chile sauce, of something sugges-
tive both of the kitchen and the barnyard). Cuevas por Cuevas, 28, 190.
113. The original text reads: “Algo extraño se revolvía dentro de mí. Sentí an-
gustia y la boca más seca que nunca, a pesar de que ya no había calor. Me acerqué
a la pared pintada y pegué mi mejilla contra el muro, que se sentía fresco. Un golpe
plácido y, al mismo tiempo brutal, hizo vibrar todo mi cuerpo. Mi respiración se
hizo corta, en un breve staccato. Al salir del edificio medio solitario, por vergüenza
tuve que cubrir el frente de mis pantalones con los cuadernos del dibujo.” Cuevas
por Cuevas, 29–30, 191.
114. Ibid., 30, 192.
115. For more on this phenomenon, see Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights,
Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 2007).
116. Cuevas, Cuevario, 50; “Cuevas: Un pintor combativo,” El nacional (22 May
1958): 7.
117. Cuevas, Gato macho, 105; “El pintor del rictus” (shooting script, 20 Feb-
ruary 1956), Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio Paz,” Museo José
Luis Cuevas.
118. For more on this aspect of Fuentes’s work, see Claire F. Fox, ““Pornog-
raphy and ‘the Popular’ in Postrevolutionary Mexico: El Club Tívoli from Luis
Spota to Alberto Isaac,” in Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video,
ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 143–73.
119. A brief but pivotal archival photomontage in between the Mexican and
European sections of the film describes the crucial role played by the PAU in
296 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

Cuevas’s career. Angel Hurtado, dir., Realidad y alucinación de José Luis Cuevas
(Reality and Hallucinations: José Luis Cuevas), script José Gómez Sicre, narrator
José Ferrer, prod. Visual Arts Division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, Or-
ganization of American States, Washington, D.C., 23 minutes, 1978.
120. It is significant that prior to Cuevas’s walk through the city, the movie
features a scene of the artist in his studio making arrangements over the telephone
to meet his friend “Elena” (Poniatowska?) at the trendy Zona Rosa restaurant, La
Konditorei. Although their date is never depicted in the movie, the scene serves to
link Cuevas not just to working-class culture but also to his cosmopolitan intel-
lectual milieu in Mexico.
121. Jean Franco, “Narrator, Author, Superstar: Latin American Narrative in
the Age of Mass Culture,” in Critical Passions, ed. Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen
Newman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 147–68.
122. I would like to thank Pedro Lasch for this insight about Cuevas. In inter-
views, Cuevas was often at pains to distance himself from comparisons to Salva-
dor Dalí, based on the insinuation that both were publicity-hungry charlatans (see
Cuevas, Gato macho, 514–17).
123. JLC to JGS, 15 January 1965, box 6, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries.
124. Ibid.
125. Michael Shifter, “The United States, the Organization of American States,
and the Origins of the Inter-American System,” in The Globalization of U.S.–
Latin American Relations: Democracy, Intervention, and Human Rights, ed. Vir-
ginia M. Bouvier (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 91.
126. Organization of American States, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: Pan
American Union, 1960), 6.
127. Rafael Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to
the Latin American Scene (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1964).
128. BAV 9 (January–June 1962): 43; BAV 12 (January–December 1964):
54–56; BAV 14 (January–June 1966): 38; BAV 18 (1968): 72.
129. Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 7 (January–June 1961): 3; La Unión
Panamericana al servicio de las artes visuales en América, (Washington, D.C.:
División de Artes Visuales, Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, Unión Pan-
americana), n.d. [1961], n.p. [19].
130. Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 9 (January–June 1962): 1–4; Gómez
Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 4 (October–April 1959): 3–4; Gómez Sicre, “Nota
editorial,” BAV 5 (May–December 1959): 1–3.
131. Gómez Sicre, “Al lector,” BAV 11 (January–December 1963): 3–4.
132. References to his office’s crecimiento biológico (biological growth) and
madurez (maturity) are sprinkled throughout the Boletín de Artes Visuales and
La Unión Panamericana al servicio de las artes visuales. The exuberance about
growth accompanies the Visual Arts Section’s metamorphosis into the Visual
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 297

Arts Division in 1961. Gómez Sicre’s reservations about economism, in contrast,

emerge in the following BAV editorial: “Dejar a la cultura en un segundo escalón
y dotar a lo económico de todas las prioridades puede ser también propósito
doloso y malsano de quien quiere mandar al hombre sólo por medio de sus nece-
sidades más perentorias, lo cual lo hace más esclavo y no le permite jamás es-
grimir la razón, el conocimiento; en una palabra, la cultura, para defender sus
intereses, su economía desarrollada, su ‘progreso’ ” (Leaving culture on a second
tier and granting all priority to the economic may be the deceitful and unhealthy
proposition of one who wishes to control man only according to his most urgent
needs; this makes man more of a slave and never permits him to use reason,
knowledge—in a word, culture—to defend his interests, his developed economy,
his “progress”). “Nota editorial,” BAV 9 (January–June 1962): 1.
133. Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 14 (January–June 1966): 1–4.
134. I would like to thank Walter Mignolo for making this visual association.
135. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.”
136. Cuevas’s writings from the early 1960s delve increasingly into art criti-
cism. In 1962 he broke definitively with Nueva Presencia, a group of figurative
artists whose work, as Goldman notes in Contemporary Mexican Painting, re-
flected an ongoing interest in humanist and political issues. See Cuevas, “José
Luis Cuevas contra los Interioristas,” Excélsior (20 January 1963): n.p., Organi-
zation of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas,
Individual Artists files, Cuevas. As for nonfigurative artists, Cuevas made fun of
informalism and criticized the work of prominent Mexican abstractionists, such
as Lilia Carrillo and Manuel Felguérez, whom he characterized as imitative of this
movement. On the other hand, he praised the work of other abstractionists work-
ing in Mexico, such as Mathias Goeritz, Carlos Mérida, and Gunther Gerszo.
137. A churro is a long sweetbread that is “cranked out” prior to being fried—
the metaphor is most often used in relation to genre films. Raúl Anguiano, “Re-
spuesta de Raúl Anguiano,” Novedades (24 January 1965): n.p., Organization of
American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual
Artists files, Cuevas. See also Elena Poniatowska, “Rafael Coronel vs. Cuevas,”
México en la cultura 538 (6 July 1959): 12.
138. Cuevas, “Declaración de José Luis Cuevas,” Excélsior, “Diorama de la
cultura” (27 mayo 1962): 2; Cuevas, Cuevario, 91.
139. Cuevas’s father had once been a professional boxer, under the name Al-
bert Cavelli, when the sport was on the rise in Mexico City; before young José
Luis became ill, his father had hopes that Cuevas would follow in his footsteps.
Among other popular-culture influences Cuevas cites repeatedly in interviews
and life writings are the comedies of Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton, and Fatty
Arbuckle, and the horror movies of James Whale and Tod Browning. In 1964 he
held an exhibition titled Horror Theater at the Silvan Simone Gallery in West Los
Angeles, which was dedicated to the latter two directors.
298 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

140. JLC to JGS, 10 June 1967, box 6, folder 5, JGS Papers, Benson Latin
American Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, UT Libraries. Archival news
footage of the Mural’s unveiling is available at http://www.youtube.com under the
title “José Luis Cuevas MURAL EFIMERO 1967.”
141. For a history of Mexico’s rich nonobjective art scene, see Antonio Prieto S.,
“Pánico, performance y política: Cuatro décadas de acción no-objectual en
México,” Conjunto 121 (April–June 2001), accessed 16 September 2011, http://
hemi.nyu.edu/. I would like to thank Esther Gabara for this reference. See also
Olivier Debroise, ed., La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en Mex-
ico, 1968–1997 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and
Turner, 2007).
142. Luis Guillermo Piazza, La mafia (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1968);
Juan José Gurrola, dir., José Luis Cuevas (1965), 27 minutes.
143. Manuel Arviu, “Piazza y Monsiváis enjuician a Cuevas,” La prensa
(7 July 1967): 12; E. Deschamps, “La ‘Maffia’ Declara ‘out’ a J. L. Cuevas,” Ex-
célsior (7  July 1967): 14; “Estuvo tensa la polémica sobre la obra de Cuevas,”
Novedades (7 July 1967): n.p., Organization of American States, Archives of the
AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
144. Durand, 5; Gabriel Parra, “Cuevas inicia su campaña,” Ovaciones
(20 April 1970): n.p., Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art
Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas; “Cuevas pinta a León
Michel,” Iniciativa (11–17 April 1970): n.p., Organization of American States, Ar-
chives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas;
and Cuevas, “No es León Michel, es el sistema y lo que representa con su PRI,”
Siempre! (24 June 1970): 12.
145. Carlos Monsiváis, Días de guardar, 82. Breaking “solemnity” is an op-
erative concept for the Mural and similar projects of the period. On a personal
note written on a program for the satirical rock group Los Tepatatles that Cuevas
forwarded to Gómez Sicre, Cuevas described the project as “una actitud contra la
solemnidad y la comemierda” (an attitude against solemnity and shit-eating), Or-
ganization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Ameri-
cas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
146. Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 13 (January–December 1965): 2.
147. E. Deschamps, “Cuevas en la ‘Zona Rosa,’ ” Excélsior (9 June 1967), 17A;
“Hechos y gente,” Visión (7 July 1967), Organization of American States, Ar-
chives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
Ultimately, the Mural was neither sold nor destroyed but instead put into storage
(Cuevas, Gato macho, 398).
148. Víctor Sefchovich, “ ‘Yo no olvido,’ cuadro de Cuevas en el C.D.I.,” El
peródico dominical (September 1966), Organization of American States, Archives
of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas. Jacobo
Zabludovsky, whom Seth Fein describes as “the face of Mexican TV news,” had
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE 299

his own extensive connections to cold war panamerican movements, including

Project Pedro, the U.S. Information Agency’s covert project to control Mexican
newsreel content (Fein, “New Empire into Old,” 731).
149. Luis Guillermo Piazza, “Cuevas y los judíos,” Excélsior (18 September
1966), Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación “Octavio Paz,” Museo José Luis
Cuevas. It should be noted that Cuevas did not begin to observe Jewish religious
practices; his writings after this period continue to refer to his ongoing struggles
with Catholicism. He did, however, have ample exposure to the work of artists in
Mexico and abroad who were also exploring Holocaust-related themes. The co-
founder of Nueva Presencia, Arnold Belkin, had exhibited a large mural canvas ti-
tled Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at the Centro Deportivo Israelita in 1962 (Goldman,
72). The work of the U.S. artist Rico Lebrun was discussed in Rodman’s The
Insiders, and his works on Dachau and Buchenwald were featured in the “New
Images of Man” show held at MoMA in 1959. And the printmaker Mauricio
Lasansky, who received the Posada prize at the First Interamerican Bienal held in
1959 in Mexico City, likewise executed works about the Holocaust and Nazism.
150. “Cronología biográfica” (Mexico City: Museo José Luis Cuevas, n.d.
[1997]), 20.
151. After Cuevas’s 1954 debut, the Visual Arts Division of the PAU held three
more solo exhibitions of his, in 1963, 1978, and 1982, respectively. Gómez Sicre’s
catalogue essays for these later exhibitions tend to focus on the artist’s early for-
mation through the late 1960s. Among the fifty-six works included in the 1978
retrospective A Backward Glance at Cuevas only five date from the 1970s. Gómez
Sicre, A Backward Glance at Cuevas (Washington, D.C.: Museum of Modern Art
of Latin America, 1978), n.p.
152. The two artists were also connected through their mutual relationship to
the Galería Misrachi and to Dr. Alvar Carrillo Gil. Esperanza Zetina de Brault,
“Exposición de José Luis Cuevas,” El sol de México (5 October 1968); Agustín
Salmón, “Por la Olimpiada, Siqueiros y Cuevas firmaron ayer una ‘paz transi-
toria,’ ” Excélsior (30 August 1968); and Jacobo Zabludovsky, “Cuevas visita a
Siqueiros,” Siempre! (7 August 1968), 56, Organization of American States, Ar-
chives of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas, Individual Artists files, Cuevas.
153. Monsiváis also evokes this mood in his description of the mural’s unveil-
ing: “Los curiosos se desconciertan, se decepcionan. Nunca se les hubiese ocurrido
que un mural efímero fuese simplemente un mural” (The curious become discon-
certed and disappointed. It never occurred to them that an ephemeral mural was
simply a mural). Monsiváis, Días de guardar, 82.
154. Cuevas, “Expongo en el INBA para no vender,” Mañana 29.1515 (9 Sep-
tember 1972): 40–41. Prior to that Cuevas had appeared at events sponsored by
the party; see “Conferencia de Cuevas,” BAV 9 (January–June 1962): 71.
155. For example, Cuevas’s work was not included in the U.S.-based exhibi-
tions Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (1997)
300 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

and Inverted Utopias: Avant-garde Art in Latin America (2004). The Museo José
Luis Cuevas organized its own large-scale Latin American drawing exhibition in
1999, titled Homenaje al lápiz = Homage to the Pencil, and the lack of overlap
among the artists represented in the latter show and Re-Aligning Vision is strik-
ing. Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed., Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South
American Drawing (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Gallery, University of Texas,
Austin, 1997); Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-
garde Art in Latin America (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004); Cuevas and Carlos Fuentes, Homenaje al lápiz (Mexico
City: CONACULTA/INBA, 1999).
156. On Cuevas and Otra Figuración (which Cuevas refers to as Nueva Figu-
ración), see “El objeto y lo plástico temporal,” Hispano (17 July 1967): 54; Cam-
nitzer, n.p.; and Foppa, 148. On Cuevas and Botero, see Cuevas, Gato macho,
108; and Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones.” On Cuevas and Warhol, see Cuevas,
Gato macho, 193.
157. On Project Pedro, see Fein, “New Wine into Old.”
158. Deborah Cohn, The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. National-
ism during the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012); Fein,
“New Wine into Old”; Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz
Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2008).
159. I would like to thank Avinoam Shalem for commenting to me about the
popularity of Kafka’s work among intellectuals in post-1945 Cairo and in con-
temporary Baghdad; these examples resonate with the Mexican case, in the sense
that they register critical local responses to precipitous, top-down discourses of
modernization.

4. The Last Party

The original text of the first epigraph reads: “Cuando se escriba la historia del
arte contemporáneo latinoamericano los historiadores tendrían que distinguir dos
períodos: pre-ESSO y pos-ESSO.” Cited in Raquel Tibol, “La OEA nos actualiza,”
Política 5.3 (15 February 1965): 50. The second epigraph comes from Guillermo
de Zéndegui, “Meeting at Maracay,” Américas 20.5 (May 1968): 4.
1. Guillermo de Zéndegui became adjunct director of the Department of
Cultural Affairs at the PAU in 1963, and shortly thereafter he was named chief of
the Cultural Relations Division of Cultural Affairs. Later, he moved to the newly
created Department of Information and Public Affairs.
2. Alejandro Orfila, “The Cultural Foundations of Development in the
Americas,” Revista/Review Interamericana 9.2 (summer 1979): 167. For more
on cultural developmentalism and international organizations, see Bret Benjamin,
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 301

Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007); Amitava Kumar, ed., World Bank Literature (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and George Yúdice, The Expediency
of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003).
3. As in the case of the Caracas Declaration to censure the Jacobo Arbenz
regime in Guatemala in 1954, these decisions were not met with unanimity on
the part of the OAS member states. In the 1962 vote to expel Cuba from the Or-
ganization, for example, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador
abstained. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Sci-
ence and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000), 88.
4. Michael Shifter, “The United States, the Organization of American States,
and the Origins of the Inter-American System,” in The Globalization of U.S.-Latin
American Relations: Democracy, Intervention, and Human Rights, ed. Virginia M.
Bouvier (Westport: Praeger, 2002), 88.
5. Cited in Shifter, 93; Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2010), 67.
6. John C. Dreier, The Organization of American States and the Hemisphere
Crisis (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 81.
7. The first Inter-American Foundation for the Arts symposium took place
in November 1962. Robert M. Wool founded the Inter-American Committee in
early 1963, soon after the symposium, and the Committee was renamed the Inter-
American Foundation for the Arts in 1964. I would like to thank Deborah Cohn
for her assistance with these dates.
8. Beverly Adams, “Latin American Art at the Americas Society: A Principal-
ity of Its Own,” in A Principality of Its Own: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the
Americas Society, ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Ameri-
cas Society, 2006), 25. Like the PAU, the Visual Art Department of the Center
for Inter-American Relations underwent its own challenges in the 1960s. Stan-
ton Catlin’s curatorial emphases on modernity, hemispherism, and U.S.–Latin
American exchange drew criticisms that the art programs were narrowly linked
to business and political interests, and that his curatorial tastes were ideologically
tendentious. Catlin resigned in 1966, although the Art Department continued to
be the target of criticism through the 1970s. For more on this period, see Luis
Camnitzer, “The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA,” in A Principality of Its
Own, 216–29. It should be noted also that throughout this period MoMA con-
tinued to circulate art exhibitions abroad through its International Program of
Circulating Exhibitions, founded in 1952 with funds from the Rockefeller Broth-
ers Foundation.
9. On the CIA scandals, see Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Con-
gress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New
302 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

York: Free Press, 1989); and Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War:
The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001). On
the decline of the PAU programs, see Félix Angel, “The Latin American Presence,”
in The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970,
ed. Luis R. Cancel et al. (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts and Harry N.
Abrams, 1988), 222–83; and Alejandro Anreus, “José Gómez Sicre and the ‘Idea’
of Latin American Art,” Art Journal 64.4 (winter 2005): 83–84.
10. I would like to thank Andrea Giunta for her impromptu comment, which
inspired the title of this chapter, that HemisFair was the “last big party” of the
Alliance. For more on free trade as the “last big idea” of the Alliance, see Jeffrey F.
Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 181–89.
11. The 1962 Seattle Century 21 Exposition introduced the theme of Latin
American trade in a minor way. See Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and
Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 113.
12. Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and
Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 70.
13. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern
Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 241.
14. José Gómez Sicre had already got his feet wet with major arts events in
Texas by the time HemisFair ’68 occurred; he served as a consultant for the Gulf-
Caribbean Art Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1956, as well
as the South American Fortnight at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1959.
15. Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, Informe trimestral, abril–junio 1962;
Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, Informe trimestral, julio–septiembre 1962;
Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, Informe trimestral, enero–marzo 1964; De-
partamento de Asuntos Culturales, undécima reunión, 3 septiembre 1963, Orga-
nization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records
Management Services, R.G. Cultural Affairs, Office of the Director, 1948–1966.
16. Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo, y política: Arte argentino
en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2001), 288; English edition: Avant-
garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the 1960s, trans. Peter
Kahn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 200.
17. Undécima reunión, 3 de sept de 1963, folder: “Reuniones-Jefes Division,
Dpto de Asuntos Culturales,” Organization of American States, Columbus Memo-
rial Library, Archives and Records Management Services, R.G. Cultural Affairs,
Office of the Director, 1948–1966.
18. See, for example, Salon Esso de Artistas Jóvenes press release, 10 March
1965, AHB [AAA: 2193;826] MoMA Archives, NY. For more on contemporary
practices of corporate social responsibility, see Miller, Cultural Citizenship.
19. Squirru was born in 1925 in Buenos Aires. Like Gómez Sicre, prior to
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 303

becoming an arts administrator he pursued a law degree, graduating from the

University of Edinburgh in 1948. Andrea Giunta chronicles the events surround-
ing Squirru’s foundation of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires and his
interactions with U.S. institutions in Vanguardia, internacionalismo, y política,
100–3, 153–57; English edition, 68–70, 108–12.
20. The PAU Visual Arts Section became a Division in 1961, prior to the
1963 reorganization of the PAU cultural branches. For more information, see
José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 7 (January–June 1961): 3; La Unión
Panamericana al servicio de las artes visuales en América, (Washington, D.C.:
División de Artes Visuales, Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, Unión Pan-
americana), n.d. [1961]; Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, Informe trimestral,
julio–septiembre 1961, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Li-
brary, Archives and Records Management Services, R.G. Cultural Affairs, Office
of the Director, 1948–1966.
21. The initiatives approved at the first Inter-American Meeting of Ministers
of Culture in 1963 and at Maracay in 1968 brought culture under the aegis of a
newly formed OAS Council for Education, Science, and Culture on the model of
UNESCO, which was to be coequal with the OAS Economic and Social Council.
In addition, Maracay established a $25 million Multilateral Fund of the Inter-
American Cultural Council. At the same time that these measures were to redress
ongoing inattention to cultural matters on the part of the OAS and the Alliance for
Progress, it was hoped they would also prompt Latin American governments to
establish stronger cultural programs. For more information, see “Primera Reunión
Interamericana de Directores de Cultura” (Washington, D.C.: Pan American
Union, 1963); and Guillermo de Zéndegui, “Meeting at Maracay,” Américas 20.5
(May 1968): 1–4.
22. Betty Beale, “Discord in Cultural World,” Evening Star (8 December 1965),
n.p. Papers documenting the Bienal Americana de Arte in Córdoba, Argentina,
box 11, binder 4, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
California (970074).
23. AHB to RdH, 4 August 1965, AHB [AAA:2193;356] MoMA Archives,
NY. Giunta discusses this letter in relation to the Córdoba Bienal (285; English,
222).
24. Gómez Sicre’s activities during this period are an indication of his shifting
orientation toward the United States and Europe and away from Latin America,
with the exception of large-scale events such as the Esso Salons and São Paulo
and Córdoba Bienals. His office assisted with the planning of a major exhibition
of Colombian art in 1960, titled 3,500 Years of Colombian Art, sponsored by
International Petroleum Corporation of Colombia and organized by the Lowe Art
Gallery of the University of Miami in Coral Gables. The show traveled from Coral
Gables to the Pan American Union, and then Gómez Sicre personally curated a
smaller selection of the exhibition for travel to four European venues in 1961. As
304 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

Florencia Bazzano-Nelson points out in “Cold War Pan American Operations:

Oil, Coffee, and 3500 Years of Colombian Art,” the Colombian exhibition, which
took place as the Alliance for Progress was being formulated, coordinated a simi-
lar set of discourses and social actors to those of HemisFair ’68. Gómez Sicre
also served as an advisor to curator Thomas Messer on two major U.S. exhibi-
tions of Latin American art: Latin America, New Departures at the Institute for
Contemporary Art, Boston (1961) and The Emergent Decade at the Guggenheim
Museum (1966). He also served as a consultant for the Cornell University Latin
American Year (1965–1966) and the exhibition Naïve Art of the World held in
Baden-Baden (1961). In 1960 the PAU allocated space for a permanent gallery
on the lower floor of the main Pan American Union building, while the rotating
exhibitions continued to take place in a gallery space on the main floor, adjacent
to the meeting room of the OAS Council. The following year, the OAS approved
funding for the purchase of a permanent art collection and the establishment of
an acquisitions committee, to be chaired by Gómez Sicre. Through the 1960s,
the OAS permanent collection grew significantly, eventually becoming the core
collection of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America (today the AMA  |
Art Museum of the Americas) at the PAU, founded by Gómez Sicre in 1976. For
more information, see José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” BAV 7 (January–June
1961): 3; La Unión Panamericana al servicio de las artes visuales en América
(Washington, D.C.: División de Artes Visuales, Departamento de Asuntos Cul-
turales, Unión Panamericana), n.d. [1961]; and Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, “Cold
War Pan American Operations: Oil, Coffee, and 3500 Years of Colombian Art,”
Hispanic Research Journal 12.5 (October 2011): 438–66.
25. See, for example, Rafael Squirru, La filosofía del arte abstracto (Buenos
Aires: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 1961).
26. Rafael Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to
the Latin American Scene (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1964) 9, 16.
27. Ibid., 49.
28. Ibid., 19.
29. Ibid., 16.
30. Ibid.
31. Departamento de Asuntos Culturales, Informe trimestral, enero–marzo
1964, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives
and Records Management Services, R.G. Cultural Affairs, Office of the Director,
1948–1966.
32. Guillermo de Zéndegui, “San Antonio’s Example,” Américas 20.5 (May
1968): i.
33. Cited in Sterlin Holmesly, HemisFair ’68 and the Transformation of San
Antonio (San Antonio: Maverick, 2003), 1.
34. For more on party politics as they relate to HemisFair, see Timothy James
Palmer, “HemisFair ’68: The Confluence of Politics in San Antonio,” M.A. thesis,
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 305

University of Texas, Austin, 1990. For other chronicles of the fair, see Sue Bit-
ners Vickers, “HemisFair 1968,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1968;
Holmesly; and the HemisFair ’68 website, University of Texas at San Antonio
Libraries Special Collections, accessed 21 July 2011, http://libguides.utsa.edu/.
35. Palmer, 40.
36. HemisFair ’68 website; Palmer, 50.
37. Palmer, 71.
38. Ibid., 62.
39. Ibid., 53–54, 62.
40. According to the San Antonio pastor and former city councilman Claude W.
Black, Jr., “even though it abutted on the East Side, there was no spillover, jobs
or money. And for that reason we opposed HemisFair. On top of that, they built
HemisFair with no back door to the East Side. You had to go all the way around
Alamo Street to get into HemisFair. It was a message to us that this is not for
the East Side” (cited in Holmesly, 106).
41. Rydell et al., 115. Holmesly maintains that the fair has been an economic
boon to the city in the long run, especially in terms of generating jobs and revenue
through tourism and professional sports. For more on the beneficial legacy of
HemisFair, see “The Legacy of HemisFair Fact Sheet—25th Anniversary” (1993);
and Marshall Steves, “Speech delivered at HemisFair luncheon commemorating
the 20th Anniversary of HemisFair ’68” (1988), The Portal to Texas History, ac-
cessed 21 July 2011, http://texas history.unt.edu. While there is a modest bibliog-
raphy about HemisFair’s impact on local politics and the economy, it seems that
the event has yet to produce a sensitive scholarly treatment that describes the im-
pact of this reorganization of urban space on popular memory, especially among
those residents displaced by the fairgrounds construction. Vida Mía García’s re-
search about heritage tourism in South Texas is a promising step in this direction.
42. Holmesly; Palmer, 4.
43. Palmer, 4, 32.
44. Rosemary Barnes, “Profile: A Pioneer in a Bow Tie. Bill Sinkin Changed the
Face of San Antonio with HemisFair,” San Antonio Express-News (22 May 2004):
6H. A representative of the Urban League of Greater Dallas wrote to HemisFair
chief executive Jim Gaines as follows: “Our goal is to eliminate racial segregation
in American Life; and to give guidance and help to Negroes and other economi-
cally disadvantaged groups so that they may share equally the responsibilities
and rewards of full citizenship. . . . We would not want to see Hemisfair have the
boycotts and ‘sit ins’ that the New York Worlds Fair and the Fair in Montreal,
Canada had.” Felton S. Alexander to Jim Gaines, 16 January 1968, San Antonio
Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Librar-
ies Special Collections. And a fair official replied, “We here in San Antonio are
proud of the relations between the races, and we here at the fair strongly feel that,
if good faith, actions, affirmative fair practice employment policies, good will and
306 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

effort carry any weight in the balance of things, we will indeed avoid a boycott
and ‘sit-ins’ which as you pointed out occurred at the New York and Montreal
Fairs.” John A. Watson to Felton Alexander, 19 February 1968, San Antonio Fair,
Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries
Special Collections.
45. Rydell et al., 110.
46. Taylor D. Littleton and Maltby Sykes, Advancing American Art: Painting,
Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 1999), 58. In addition to representing important twentieth-
century modernists such as Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, and Abraham
Rattner, Edith Gregor Halpert was a major folk art dealer who counted Abby
Aldrich Rockefeller, founder of MoMA, among her early clients. The Downtown
Gallery also lent works by U.S. artists to the 32 Artistas exhibition discussed in
chapter 2.
47. “Visual Arts Program,” San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS
31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
48. George Mariscal, ed., Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Expe-
riences of the War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 19. One of
the most compelling narratives compiled in Mariscal’s anthology suggests further
connections between housing discrimination, or redlining, in San Antonio and
the poverty draft, which is interesting in light of the banking industry’s promi-
nence among the HemisFair leadership. “Somewhere Outside Duc Pho,” by Daniel
Cano, is a story about the disappearance of Jesse Peña, a Chicano GI rumored
to have joined the Viet Cong. The soldiers in Peña’s unit frequently discuss what
might have caused Peña to go AWOL so shortly before his tour was over, and they
reach a breakthrough one night when one says, “I heard that Peña lives in San
Antonio, in some rat hole that he can’t afford to buy because the bank won’t lend
him the money. I heard that in the summer, when it hits a hundred, him and his
neighbors fry like goddamn chickens because they can’t afford air conditioning.
So now they send him here to fight for his country! What a joke, man” (95). See
also Palmer, 70.
49. In addition to these events, fair construction was bedeviled by misfortunes,
delays, and inclement weather (Palmer, 58). Former exhibitions director Arnold
“Pic” Swartz recalls the image of a prominent society matron who was “touching
up” an Alexander Calder sculpture near the fair entrance with a can of spray paint
and a little brush just moments before the fair’s grand opening. Arnold Swartz,
personal interview, 29 July 2010.
50. “Theme Presentation for the International Exposition of 1968,” 6–8, San
Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Anto-
nio Libraries Special Collections.
51. Vickers, 35–36.
52. Street Map of San Antonio (San Jose, Calif.: H. M. Gousha Co., 1967);
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 307

Flight Guide to the HemisFair and Mexico (Austin: Texas Aeronautics Commis-
sion, 1968); see also Vickers, 36.
53. Fernando Gamboa had just finished serving as commissioner general of the
Mexico Pavilion at Montréal’s EXPO 1967. “Report to the Executive Committee
re: South American Trip, June 19th to July 8th, 1967,” 11 July 1967, San Antonio
Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Librar-
ies Special Collections.
54. Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the Mexico of Tomorrow: Mexico and the 1968
Olympics,” Americas 61.2 (October 2004): 175.
55. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Mani-
festo, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lincoln Gordon, a
Kennedy-era Latin America and Alliance for Progress advisor who had previously
worked on the Marshall Plan, felt that Latin America’s (partial) Western cultural
orientation contributed to modernization theorists’ belief that the larger countries
of the region were poised for “take-off.” Gordon remarked that Latin America
presented “institutional and social obstacles, but not cultural ones such as Orien-
tal fatalism, sacred cows, or caste systems.” Cited in Latham, 80.
56. Palmer, 32.
57. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leav-
ing Modernity, trans. Renato Rosaldo, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995), 120, 123.
58. Arbon Jack Lowe, “HemisFair,” Américas 20.5 (May 1968): 7.
59. “The Case for HemisFair 1968: A Report Prepared for the State of Texas
59th Legislature, March 1965” (San Antonio, 1965); Frank Brady to Jim Gaines,
2 February 1967, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University
of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
60. Palmer, 26.
61. The Bracero Program was a temporary guestworker program that recruited
Mexican laborers to work in the United States, particularly in the agricultural and
railroad maintenance sectors; the program was in effect in various forms from
1942 to 1964. Concern about the potential stress to the northern Mexican labor
market upon the formal dissolution of the program prompted negotiation of the
Border Industrialization Program.
62. Palmer, 24.
63. Johnson cited in George Black, The Good Neighbor: How the United
States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean (New York: Pan-
theon, 1988), 114; for more on the outcomes of the Alliance, see Latham, 69–108.
64. Thomas M. Leonard, “Meeting in San Salvador: President Lyndon B. John-
son and the 1968 Central American Conference Summit,” Journal of Third World
Studies 22.2 (2006): 120.
65. Taffett, 175–97.
66. The ambassadors’ visit took place from 31 March to 2 April 1967; the
308 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

Punta del Este Summit was held in Uruguay from 12 to 14 April 1967. J.  J.
Newman to Frank Brady, 6 March 1967; “Latin American Ambassadors’ Trip to
Texas, March 31–April 2, 1967”; “Latin American Ambassadorial Visit to Texas,
Schedule of Events,” San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, Univer-
sity of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
67. HemisFair press release, n.d., R.G. 31, box 188, folder 6, Archives and Spe-
cial Collections, University of Texas at San Antonio Library; Betty Beale, “Texas
Weekend a Triumph,” San Antonio Evening Star (3 April 1967), B8; Catholic
Chancery, Archdiocese of San Antonio, press release, 2 April 1967, San Antonio
Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Librar-
ies Special Collections.
68. Beale, B8. The sermon certainly departed from the socially conscious cur-
rents of Catholicism that PAU directors of Cultural Affairs, including Rafael
Squirru, had been deploying since the Eisenhower administration. During the
1950s, the PAU Department of Cultural Affairs appeared preoccupied with
launching a progressive Catholic offense against McCarthyism that could not
be construed as procommunist. After Jorge Basadre resigned in 1950, subse-
quent PAU directors of Cultural Affairs, Alceu Amoroso Lima, Erico Veríssimo,
and Rafael Squirru played the Catholic card in an effort to distinguish noble
forms of communitarianism from Marxism, establish a cultural basis for pan–
Latin American fraternity, and draw attention to the need for social welfare to
benefit the Latin American underclass. In public lectures in the United States,
Veríssimo was outspoken in his call for “a kind of mild Christian socialism, with
plenty of social freedom,” and in his attacks on McCarthyites: “I accuse them of
being the true followers of the Moscow line: they are the real subversives!” Erico
Veríssimo, Speech for the UCLA Roundtable on Latin American Studies, May
1955, 7; Speech at Hollins College, February 1955, 28. Organization of American
States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services,
R.G. Department of Cultural Affairs, Office of the Director, file “Addresses by
Dr. Veríssimo, 1953–1955.”
69. Sculpture, Murals and Fountains at HemisFair ’68 (San Antonio: San An-
tonio Fair, Inc., 1968); “The Sculpture of HemisFair,” San Antonio Fair, Inc. Rec-
ords, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special
Collections.
70. Rafael Squirru to Richard Miller, 8 February 1966, San Antonio Fair, Inc.
Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special
Collections.
71. Gómez Sicre was to organize an exhibition of Western Hemisphere Art
since 1500; theater acts from Latin America; an exhibit of Colombian goldwork;
and an international poster competition. Rafael Squirru proposed ten commis-
sioned works of art in the $20,000 range; exhibitions of work by the Argentine
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 309

artist Antonio Berni; a selection of Argentine rug art; and an exhibition of con-
temporary Brazilian art. Gómez Sicre and Squirru also proposed exhibitions of
graphic art and the commission of buildings by prominent Latin American archi-
tects. Dick Miller to James M. Gaines, Proposed Cultural Program and Budget,
25 April 1966, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of
Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
72. (Draft) Minutes of Pan American Conferences (Reporting Sessions, McNay
Art Institute, 3:00–4:00 pm, Monday, March 21st), San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records,
1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collec-
tions. Gómez Sicre received approval to enter into discussions with the Brazilian
landscape architect Roberto Burle-Marx about designing a “Garden of Alumi-
num” that would have an appropriate corporate sponsor, such as Alcoa or Reyn-
olds Aluminum. Burle-Marx made a visit to San Antonio in April 1966 to make
preliminary plans for the garden, but the project was not carried out. Press release,
HemisFair 1968, 4 April 1968, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS
31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
73. The sculpture exhibit was organized by Gilbert M. Denman, San Antonio
attorney and a noted collector of ancient art. “The Sculpture of HemisFair,” San
Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Anto-
nio Libraries Special Collections.
74. Swartz, personal interview.
75. Other artists whom Squirru recommended included Marta Minujín, José
Luis Cuevas, Antonio Berni, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg; Rafael Squirru
to Richard E. Miller, 22 April 1966, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995,
MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
76. Dick Miller to James M. Gaines, “Proposed Cultural Program and Budget,”
25 April 1966; Minutes of Cultural Participation Committee Meeting, Wednes-
day, July 13, 1966; (Draft) Minutes of Pan American Conferences (Reporting Ses-
sions, McNay Art Institute, 3:00–4:00 pm, Monday, March 21st), 1966; Morning
Sessions (handwritten notes), San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31,
University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
77. James M. Gaines to Dick Miller, 12 July [1966]. See also Mary Sue Herman
to JGS, 13 June 1966; Minutes of Cultural Participation and Arts Council Ad-
visory Committees Meeting, Wednesday, August 31, 1966; Charles Meeker to
José Gómez Sicre, 28 October 1966, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995,
MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections. Gómez
Sicre, meanwhile, insisted once again on the clarification of his role for the fair:
“I should not have to continue in the nebulous, tentative, and probable manner
that I have been using but rather in a definite form. As it has been, I have had
to act contrary to customary procedure in Latin America.” Gómez Sicre’s three-
week trip to South America, initially scheduled for July 1966, was rescheduled
310 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

for November, and finally cancelled in October. JGS to Dick Miller, 30 June 1966,
San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San
Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
78. Pic Swartz to Jim Gaines et al., 10 May 1967; JGS to Pic Swartz, 10 May
1967, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at
San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
79. “Visual Arts Program,” San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS
31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.
80. Morning Sessions (handwritten notes), San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records,
1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special
Collections.
81. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London:
Routledge, 1995), 1–13.
82. Swartz, personal interview.
83. Funding for the OAS Pavilion came from the Kamko Foundation of Mrs.
Ike (Flora C.) Kampmann, the wife of a San Antonio Republican banker; the
foundation subsidized several exhibits and pavilions at the fair, including the
O’Gorman mosaic mural. The OAS presented its pavilion as representing all of
those nations of the hemisphere that could not participate in HemisFair. “Arte
de toda América presente en el pabellón de la OEA en la Hemisferia 68,” press
release, 4 abril 1968, Organization of American States, Archives of the AMA | Art
Museum of the Americas; I would like to thank Adriana Ospina of the AMA |
Art Museum of the Americas for locating this document. HemisFair press release,
14 January 1968, San Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University
of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections. See also Palmer, 52.
84. HemisFair ’68 website.
85. The book exhibit selected by Squirru featured texts by Bolívar, Bello, and
Sarmiento, among others. For more on the installation of the OAS Pavilion, see
Lowe, 7; Paul A. Colborn to Rafael Squirru, 6 February 1968; Arthur E. Gropp
to Ronald L. Scheman, 8 March 1968; “La OEA participará en la exposición
internacional ‘Hemisferia 68’ en San Antonio, Tejas,” OAS press release, 9 febrero
1968, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives
and Records Management Services, HemisFair Records, RMC 000 142.
86. Juan E. Tuyá to Miguel Aranguren, 7 May 1968, Organization of American
States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services,
HemisFair Records, RMC 000 141.
87. Carlos Freymann to Rafael Squirru, 19 December 1967, San Antonio Fair,
Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries
Special Collections; Juan E. Tuyá to Miguel Aranguren, 5 May 1968, Organi-
zation of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records
Management Services, HemisFair Records, RMC 000 141.
88. The following artists had work on display at the OAS Pavilion: Rogelio
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 311

Polesello, Eduardo MacEntyre, Antonio Berni (Argentina); María Luisa Pacheco

(Bolivia); Manabu Mabe, Yutaka Toyota (Brazil); Edgar Negret (Colombia); Lola
Fernández (Costa Rica); Cundo Bermúdez, Roberto Estopiñán (Cuba); Roberto
Matta, Raúl Valdivieso, Sergio Castillo (Chile); Darío Suro (Dominican Republic);
Enrique Tábara (Ecuador); Mauricio Aguilar (El Salvador); Carlos Mérida (Gua-
temala); Georges Liautaud (Haiti); José Antonio Velásquez (Honduras); Rafael
Coronel, José Luis Cuevas, Leonardo Nierman (Mexico); Armando Morales (Ni-
caragua); Alberto Dutary (Panama); Alberto Colombino (Paraguay); Venancio
Shinki (Peru); Lowell Nesbitt (United States); Joaquín Torres García (Uruguay);
and Alejandro Otero (Venezuela).
89. “Cuban Art Included in the HemisFair Show,” San Antonio Express-News
(3 February 1968): 12D, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial
Library, Archives and Records Management Services, HemisFair Records, RMC
000 142. The article cites the OAS Pavilion architect Carlos Framiñán as stating
that “Cuba remains a member of the OAS although by circumstance its govern-
ment is not currently represented there.”
90. Emily Genauer, “The Sculptural Scene at HemisFair ’68,” Newsday
(30 March 1968): 39–40. Latin American sculptors whose work was installed in
common areas of the fairgrounds include Alicia Penalba, Gyula Kosice (Argen-
tina); Juan Egenau Moore (Chile); Efraín Recinos, Roberto González-Goyri (Gua-
temala); Octavio Medellín (U.S., b. Mexico), Olivier Seguín (Mexico, b. France);
Tomás Bautista (Puerto Rico); and Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela). Additionally,
works by Marina Núñez del Prado (Bolivia) and Zulema Damianovich (Argen-
tina) were displayed in the Women’s Pavilion.
91. Palmer, 51.
92. Mary Schneider Enríquez, “Opening Doors to Vast and Varied Worlds:
Latin American Art and the Role of the Americas Society in a Post-NAFTA Era,”
in A Principality of Its Own: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society,
ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2006),
255. According to Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, one contemporary outcome of this
conflicted categorization is that the Latin American collection at MoMA is the
only one that is catalogued by geographical status, while all the other collections
are categorized according to media and aesthetic. “The Art of Babel in the Ameri-
cas,” in Latin American and Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo, ed. Miriam
Basilio et al. (New York: El Museo del Barrio and MoMA, 2004), 34–35.
93. Gómez Sicre proposed bringing to HemisFair Southern Cone performers
such as Astor Piazzola, Delia Garcés, and La Pérgola de las Flores. He issued an
ultimatum of sorts to HemisFair administrators regarding the stakes of failing to
educate this hypothetical norteño fairgoer: “Even though it might seem immodest
on my part to say so, I doubt that there will be any other agency or office in the
United States which could provide more precise information about the art world
of Latin America than this division; nor could evaluations in matters of quality
312 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

be made with more established certainty when a rigorous cultural discrimination

has to be applied. If every person crossing the border for a weekend returns with a
different idea about exhibits, performers, etc. and without a profound knowledge
of the historical position and background or the significance in the panorama of
culture in Latin America, it will be extremely difficult to arrive at any definite
conclusions; and for lack of coherence in planning, it will be almost impossible
to obtain a really valuable representation of the different arts. Not even this of-
fice, with its firsthand knowledge of directions and personalities and institutions,
will be able to remedy at the last minute what could be a real disaster.” JGS to
Richard Miller, 30 June 1966; JGS to Pic Swartz, 10 May 1967, San Antonio Fair,
Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries
Special Collections.
94. Chon Noriega, “US Latino Art: Qué Boom?” Panel on Revisiting the Latin
Boom, College Art Association Annual Conference, Los Angeles, California,
26 February 2009.
95. Miguel Aranguren to Reinaldo C. Santos, “Informe sobre la participación
de la OEA en ‘Hemisfair,’ ” 24 December 1968, Organization of American States,
Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services,
HemisFair Records, RMC 000 142.
96. Juan E. Tuyá to Miguel Aranguren, 12 September 1968; Juan E. Tuyá to
Miguel Aranguren, 5 May 1968, Organization of American States, Columbus Me-
morial Library, Archives and Records Management Services, HemisFair Records,
RMC 000 141.
97. Juan E. Tuyá to Aranguren, 5 May 1968; “Datos para el Informe,” n.d.,
Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and
Records Management Services, HemisFair Records, RMC 000 141.
98. Tuyá to Aranguren, 5 May 1968, Organization of American States, Colum-
bus Memorial Library, Archives and Records Management Services, HemisFair
Records, RMC 000 141; Richard Miller to Rafael Squirru, 29 April 1966, San
Antonio Fair, Inc. Records, 1963–1995, MS 31, University of Texas at San Anto-
nio Libraries Special Collections.
99. Fairgoers’ disinterest in high culture is corroborated by the sales of pub-
lications at the OAS Pavilion. Tuyá did not sell a single copy of the Argentine
opera libretto Bomarzo, which Squirru had placed prominently in the kiosk; Tuyá
reported that “a la gente corriente NO LE INTERESA el asunto” (ordinary people
ARE NOT INTERESTED in the subject)—on the other hand, publications such as
21 Latin American Meals and Motoring in Mexico sold reasonably well. Miguel
Aranguren to Reinaldo C. Santos, 13 September 1968; Miguel Aranguren to
[Rafael Squirru], 14 June 1968; Diego Latorre-Arango to John McAdams, 15 May
1968, Organization of American States, Columbus Memorial Library, Archives and
Records Management Services, HemisFair Records, RMC 000 141.
 NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR 313

100. Julio Ramos, “Hemispheric Domains: 1898 and the Origins of Latin-
Americanism,” in The Globalization of U.S.-Latin American Relations: Democ-
racy, Intervention, and Human Rights, ed. Virginia M. Bouvier (Westport: Praeger,
2002), 57.
101. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking
of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1–54.
102. Memo to Members of the Executive Dining Room from W. R. Hoyt, 24 Sep-
tember 1966, Papers documenting the Bienal Americana de Arte in Córdoba, Ar-
gentina, box 2, binder 2, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles, California (970074).
103. Jeffrey F. Taffet and Michael E. Latham describe similar attitudes toward
domestic poverty and the Alliance on the part of policymakers in their respective
studies (Taffet, 6; Latham, 214).
104. William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor, eds., Latino Cultural Citizenship:
Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
105. William V. Flores, “Citizens vs. Citizenry: Undocumented Immigrants and
Latino Cultural Citizenship,” in Latino Cultural Citizenship, 263.
106. Néstor García Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadanos: Conflictos multi-
culturales de la globalización (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1995); Consumers and Citizens:
Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
107. Instead of celebrating cultural citizenship categorically as a tactic of the
oppressed, I suggest that different forms of cultural citizenship accompany diverse
political and economic arrangements. Since the publication of the groundbreaking
Latino Cultural Citizenship volume in 1997, several scholars have made gestures
toward refining the concept in this direction. For example, Lynn Stephen’s study of
undocumented Mexican workers in the United States deemphasizes the objective
of claiming liberal citizenship rights by exploring ways in which undocumented
Mexican people in the United States assert political presence, even without access
to the rights conferred by U.S. citizenship. Stephen reclaims a premodern usage
of the word “citizen,” referring to denizens of a place by “opening up of the term
citizen so that it embraces the contributions of all who live in local towns and
communities.” Stephen’s use of the word “citizen” revisits various inflections in
English and the Romance languages that predate the French Revolution; these
define a citizen variously as a city-dweller, inhabitant, cosmopolite, or denizen
of a place. Lynn Stephen, Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico,
California, and Oregon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 241. In a comple-
mentary move that illuminates the potentially normative aspects of cultural citi-
zenship, Toby Miller and George Yúdice have demonstrated that claiming space
and visibility are often entirely consistent with multinational corporate expansion
and conservative politics. Yúdice argues that the growth of cultural citizenship is
314 NOTES FOR AF TERWORD

a by-product of neoliberalism’s promotion of civil society and nongovernmen-

tal organizations (Expediency, 164–67; 217–18); while Miller observes that the
culturalism of conservative thinkers, such as the “clash of civilizations” thesis ad-
vanced by Samuel Huntington, has contributed to racist and xenophobic popular
movements in U.S. civil society (Cultural Citizenship, 179). Michel Foucault cau-
tions that while liberal citizenship in Europe carries with it an encoded memory
of the ancien régime, in the United States liberalism is a founding ideology, which
imagines itself springing up from nothingness. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Bio-
politics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 215–37.
108. See, for example, Gísela Kánepa-Koch, “The Public Sphere and Cultural
Rights: Culture as Action,” E-misférica 6.2, special issue, “Culture + Rights +
Institutions,” ed. Jill Lane and Marcial Godoy-Anativia, accessed 7 August 2011,
http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/e-misferica-62.
109. Cipriano Ricardo Flores Magón (1874–1922) and Enrique Flores Magón
(1877–1954) were anarchist journalists and major intellectuals of the Mexican
Revolution through their role in founding the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexi-
can Liberal Party). The brothers relocated to the United States in 1904 in order
to flee censorship in Mexico; they resided in South Texas and other regions of the
United States. Ricardo Flores Magón died while serving a sentence in the Leaven-
worth Penitentiary on charges of obstructing the war effort. Emma Tenayuca
(1916–1999) was a labor organizer who worked during the 1930s and in later de-
cades to unionize Mexican agricultural workers in the San Antonio era; her ideas
were influenced by socialist and anarchist currents of Mexican leftist movements.
110. Alan Eladio Gómez, “’Por la reunificación de los Pueblos Libres de
América en su Lucha por el Socialismo’: The Chicana/o Movement, the PPUA
and the Dirty War in Mexico in the 1970s,” in Challenging Authoritarianism in
Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the “Dirty War,” 1964–1981, ed. Fernando
Herrera Calderón and Adela Cedillo (New York: Routledge, 2012), 81–104.
111. Eric Zolov, comments in response to panel on Culture and Society in
Cold War Mexico, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, San Diego,
8  January 2010. The term “Pan Americanism” is used by scholars to refer to
official governmental or institutional initiatives to link the countries of the hemi-
sphere. The lower-case “panamericanism” is used to describe vernacular or every-
day forms of interaction across the Americas.
112. Gómez, “Por la reunificación.”

Afterword

1. Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America:

World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 2000), 133.
 NOTES FOR AF TERWORD 315

2. Anna Indych-López, “Between the National and Transnational: Aspects

of Exhibiting Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art in the Americas Society,”
in A Principality of Its Own: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society,
ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2006),
84–99.
3. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming
Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002);
José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Didier T. Jaén
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); W. W. Rostow, The Stages
of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990).
4. Steve Nivin and David Plettner, “Arts, Culture, and Economic Develop-
ment,” Economic Development Journal 8.1 (winter 2009): 31–41.
5. Mary K. Coffey, “Banking on Folk Art: Banamex-Citigroup and Trans-
national Cultural Citizenship,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29.3 (2010):
296–312.
6. Toby Miller, Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and
Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 48.
7. What still remains outside of the international organizations’ cultural pur-
view, as Néstor García Canclini laments, is the audiovisual sector, popular music,
and other mass art forms, which are “where the aesthetic foundations of citizen-
ship take shape” for the majority of hemisphere’s people. Néstor García Can-
clini, Consumidores y ciudadanos: Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización
(Mexico: Grijalbo, 1995), 185; Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Mul-
ticultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001), 151. The 1968 Maracay conference initiatives were reinforced the
following year through the OAS adoption of the Programa Regional de Desarrollo
Cultural (Regional Program for Cultural Development); OAS cultural administra-
tors also demonstrated continued interest in the arts and culture of U.S. Latino
populations. Alejandro Orfila, “The Cultural Foundations of Development in the
Americas,” Revista/Review Interamericana 9.2 (summer 1979): 163.
8. The range of cultural forms incorporated into the Organization of Ameri-
can States activities also corresponded to the tradition and modernity coordinates
of HemisFair. The first cultural administration training session took place in 1978
at the Primer Seminario Interamericano sobre Políticas Culturales (First Inter-
American Seminar on Cultural Policies) in Aspen, Colorado. “La primera década
del Programa Regional del Desarrollo Cultural de la OEA,” Revista interameri-
cana de bibliografía 30.1 (1980): 37.
9. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global
Era (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
10. Néstor García Canclini, “Aesthetic Moments of Latin Americanism,”
Radical History Review 89 (spring 2004), special issue, “Our Americas: Political
316 NOTES FOR AF TERWORD

and Cultural Imaginings,” ed. Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, 13–24; Julio
Ramos, “Hemispheric Domains: 1898 and the Origins of Latin-Americanism,” in
The Globalization of U.S.-Latin American Relations: Democracy, Intervention,
and Human Rights, ed. Virginia M. Bouvier (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002),
47–64; Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell,
2005).
11. Ramos, 60.
12. García Canclini, “Aesthetic Moments,” 21.
 INDEX
Abbott, John, 251n49, 255nn66–67
Abduction of the Mulatas, The (El
rapto de las mulatas) (Enríquez),
79
Abela, Eduardo, 67, 80, 259n98
abstract art: Otero’s introduction to
Venezuela, 114
abstract expressionism, 15, 18, 88,
140, 143
Academia San Alejandro, 63, 67,
259n98
Acción Democrática movement in
Venezuela (1945–1948), 110–11,
115
Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto R., 294n104
Aceves, Gabriela, 283n14
Act of Chapultepec (1945), 90, 230n8.
See also Inter-American Conference
on Problems of War and Peace
Adams, Beverly, 179, 301n8
Advancing American Art (exhibition,
1946), 252n49, 265n155
aesthetic: conjunction between the
anthropological and, 25, 239n73;
decoupling from prescribed role as
a barometer of development, 212;
Martí’s ideas about compensatory
role of, 28; relational aesthetics,
226n2
African Americans: jazz musicians, in-
ternational tours during cold war,
174; in San Antonio, HemisFair
’68 and, 190–91, 305n40
Afrocuban culture, 51, 63, 65–67, 77,
79, 237n54
Afrocubanismo, 16, 64–65; Gómez
Sicre and, 16, 75, 85, 97; guajiro
(white or mixed-race peasant) and
Afrocuban cultures as dual bases
of cubanía, 77–79
age of curators, 15
“age of Pan Americanism”
(1890–1940), xii–xiii, 6, 8, 10
Aguilar, Mauricio, 311n88
Akin, John, 261n114
Alambert, Francisco, 235n42
Albee, Edward, 179
Alemán, Miguel, 137
Alexander, Felton S., 305n44
Allegory of Equality and Confra-
ternity of the Black and White
Races in Cuba, 1943 (Alegoría de
la igualdad y confraternidad de
las razas blanca y negra en Cuba,
318 INDEX
1943) (Siqueiros), 36–37, 73–80;
Prometheus in, 73, 76–77; reac-
tions to, 73–76, 80; representation
of race in relation to gender and
nation, 75–77; study for, 78
Allende, Salvador, 267n164
Alliance for Progress (1961–1973), 13,
30, 35, 39, 164–66, 185, 191, 215;
end date of, 234n34; Gómez Sicre’s
response to, 165–66, 183–84,
297n132; HemisFair as “last big
party” of, 180, 302n10; Johnson
and, 195–96; Kennedy and, 178,
195; OAS as administrator of, 13,
164–65; OAS Pavilion representa-
tion of, 204; priorities of, 164–65;
San Antonio as birthplace of,
195; scholarship about, 234n34;
Squirru’s view of, 186–87
Alpert, Herb, 181
Altoaguirre, Manuel, 265n152
AMA | Art Museum of the Americas
(Museum of Modern Art of Latin
America), 22, 83, 88, 230n3,
231n10, 238n65, 239n70, 304n24
Amauta (journal), 97
ambassadorship: ambassador of
culture, intellectuals as, 105–6,
275n49; collaborative possibilities
for art and, 109–10; rhetoric of,
275n49
American art as hemispheric phe-
nomenon, xvii
American Artists’ Congress (1936):
Mexican delegation to, xviii
American Council of Learned Societies,
250n46
American Declaration of the Rights
and Duties of Man, 26
Américas (OAS magazine), 184,
194–95, 204, 247n15; coverage of
32 Artistas by, 120–21
Americas Society (New York), xi
Amerika (Kafka), 145
Amoroso Lima, Alceu, 238n62,
282n8, 308n68
Anaconda Copper Mining Company,
117
Ancestro (Egenau), 207
Andalusian Dog, An (Un chien
anadalou) (Buñuel), 112
Angel, Félix, 218, 234n36, 302n9
Anguiano, Raúl, 112, 297n137
Anreus, Alejandro, 228n23, 234n36,
236n46, 238n60, 240n84,
243n115, 257n81, 258n91,
259n98, 272n24, 302n9; on Gómez
Sicre’s newspaper work, 257n85;
interviews with Gómez Sicre, 68,
102–3, 104, 264n148; on Picasso
exhibitions organized by Gómez
Sicre, 65
anthropological and aesthetic: con-
junction between the, 25, 239n73
antimaterialist perspective, 227n18
Arab-Israeli War of 1967, 170
Aranguren, Miguel, 312n95, 312n99
Arau, Alfonso, 149, 169
Arbenz, Jacobo, 100, 127, 273n33;
CIA-organized coup overthrowing
(1954), 13, 130, 136, 178, 220
Arbuckle, Fatty, 297n139
Archambault, Louis, 200
Arche, Jorge, 67
Arenal, Angélica, xviii, 75
Arévalo Bermejo, Juan José, 117
Argentina: Córdoba Bienales, 24,
31, 183, 184, 185; coup in 1966,
211; Kaiser Industries in, 24, 183,
211; Onganía dictatorship in,
242n99; Otra Figuración group,
173, 300n155; Perón regime, 46,
154, 245n11; at San Francisco UN
Conference (1945), 245n11
 INDEX
Arguedas, José María, 238n62
Ariza, Gonzalo, 116
Armstrong, T. R., 283n19
Arredondo, Inés, 288n71
art: American, as hemispheric phe-
nomenon, xvii; collaborative pos-
sibilities for ambassadorship and,
109–10; Cuevas and crafting of
new public art for Mexico, 159–64;
cultural citizenship and, 24–34,
182–83; developmentalism and, 68;
economic development and modern,
39–40, 117, 121, 126; position of
art and artists within circuits of
hemispheric cultural diplomacy,
xvii–xx, 8; postwar dissemina-
tion of art connoisseurship, 17; as
powerful “weapon” of cold war, 18,
241n97; in service of creating hemi-
spheric citizens, 24–34; transforma-
tive power of fine, 161, 162
art critics: Barr on Latin American,
58, 62, 256n77. See also Gómez
Sicre, José R.; Schapiro, Meyer;
Squirru, Rafael; Switzer, Leslie
Judd; Tibol, Raquel; Traba, Marta
“arte que progresa, el” (art that pro-
gresses): Gómez Sicre’s promotion
of, 93, 109
artistic freedom: concept of, 121
art market, 68; Cuban art in inter-
national, Gómez Sicre and, 18;
exportability and entry into, 22,
109, 139, 207, 238n63; Gómez
Sicre’s internal struggle between
trade liberalization and state or
supranational regulation of, 167;
inter-American, development of,
9–10, 136; in Mexico, 283n11;
muralism as problematic to, Barr
on, 136, 283n14; postwar inter-
national, 134, 136
319
Arviu, Manuel, 298n143
Ascher, Daisy, 285n38
Associação Brasileira do Congresso
pela Liberdade da Cultura, 282n8
Auden, W. H., 191
Austin, Derrel, 112
Auténtico Party (Cuba), 102, 103
Autorretrato en un campo de extermi-
nio (Self-Portrait in a Concentra-
tion Camp) (Cuevas), 172
avant-garde: linked to rupture and
critique, 212; Schapiro on, 68–69.
See also Cuban vanguardia
Avila Camacho, Manuel, 137
Ayala, Héctor de, 110
Azuela, Alicia, 69, 247n18
Baca-Corzo, Xavier, 287n54
Backward Glance at Cuevas, A (1978
retrospective), 299n151
Bacon, Francis, 285n39
Badii, Líbero, 112
“Balada de los dos abuelos” (Ballad of
the Two Grandfathers) (Guillén), 79
Ball, Mary Margaret, 239n67
Banamex, 217
Baranovitch, Nimrod, 249n32
Barnes, Rosemary, 305n44
Barnitz, Jacqueline, 236n48
Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 13, 15, 16, 20,
54, 109, 112, 118, 119, 236n49,
238n63, 244n7, 255n66–67,
259n99, 261n105, 261n113,
262n126; on Cuevas, 281n6;
embrace of emerging cold war
professionalism, 59; Gómez Sicre
and, 62, 87, 256n77, 257n80,
259n96, 289n74; Gómez Sicre and,
in Havana (1942), 36, 44, 62–63,
65, 82; installation of MoMA
permanent collection (1945), 59,
60, 256n72; installation practices
320 INDEX
devised by, 120; Kirstein’s tongue-
in-cheek proposal in 1943 to,
44, 244n7; on Latin American
critics, 58, 62, 256n77; muralism
seen as problematic to art market
by, 136, 283n14; perspective on
Latin American art, 58–59, 206;
politics of, 265n155; “Problems
of Research and Documentation
in Contemporary Art,” 256n71;
purchasing trip for MoMA (1942),
62–63, 66, 82, 256n76, 265n154;
“retired” as director of MoMA, 44,
245n8, 257n80; Rockefeller Foun-
dation grant competition between
PAU and MoMA, 57–58; Schapiro
and, 68; Siqueiros mural affair
and, 72, 73–74; on Soviet posters,
265n156; on third Córdoba Bienal,
185; “torpedo charts,” 60, 70
Barrios, Gonzalo, 277n72
Bartolí, José, 142
Basadre, Jorge, 8, 238n62, 254n61,
256n74, 272n23–26, 308n68;
career of, 97; Gómez Sicre and,
106–7, 275n50
Baschet, François and Bernard, 199
Basilio, Miriam, 256n72
Batis, Huberto, 288n71
Batista, Fulgencio, 64, 71, 85, 102,
103, 155, 237n55, 267n167
Baujín, José Antonio, 263n138
Bautista, Tomás, 311n90
BAV. See Boletín de Artes Visuales
Baxter, John, 268n172
Bazzano-Nelson, Florencia, 235n42,
304n24
Beale, Betty, 303n22, 308n67–68
Belkin, Arnold, 299n149
Bello, Andrés, 11, 26, 27, 240n77
Belnap, Jeffrey, 227n15
Beltrán, Alberto, 289n75; caricature of
Gómez Sicre and Cuevas by, 150;
cartoon series on crisis of public
art in Mexico, 159–60
Benamou, Catherine L., 250n43
Benítez, Fernando, 151–52, 288n71,
290n78
Benjamin, Bret, 240n74, 270, 300n2
Benmayor, Rina, 28, 241n87, 313n104
Bennett, Tony, 24, 203, 279n97,
310n81
Berdecio, Roberto, xviii
Berger, Mark T., 230n9, 231n16,
235n39
Bermúdez, Cundo, 67, 116, 205,
265n154, 286n48, 311n88
Bermúdez, José Y., 23, 236n45
Berni, Antonio, 309n71, 309n75,
311n88
Berrien, William, 57, 248n27, 253n61,
255n65
Betancourt, Rómulo, 110, 115
Bienales, São Paulo, 17, 109, 122,
124, 143, 150–51, 154, 183
Bienales Americanas de Arte (Cór-
doba, Argentina), 31; first and
second (1962 and 1964), 183, 184;
third (1966), 31, 185
Bilbao, Francisco, 231n18
biopolitics, 30
biopower: cultural policy as technique
of, 25–26
Black, Claude W., Jr., 305n40
Black, George, 307n63
blacklist, 100. See also Red Scare
Blanc, Giulio V., 243n115
Bogotá: Inter-American Conference
(1948), 90, 111, 270n5; response
to SPU in, xiv
Bogotá Charter, 90, 230n8
Boletín de Artes Visuales (Bulletin of
Visual Arts), 27, 35–36, 237n54,
257n80, 280n109–11; continental
 INDEX
consciousness-raising through,
122–24, 126; Gómez Sicre’s edito-
rials in, 27, 35–36, 109, 123–24,
126, 165–66
Boletín de Música y Artes Visuales
(later Boletín de Artes Visuales),
62, 87, 123, 280n109
Bolívar, Simón, xiv, xv, xvii, 11, 45,
226n11, 226n13
Bolshoi Ballet, 181, 203
Bolton, Herbert Eugene, 51
Boom authors, 33, 146, 163,
243n110, 288n71
Border Industrialization Program
(1965), 195, 215, 307n61
Borges, Jorge Luis, 266n161
Botero, Fernando, 5, 173
Bracero Program, 195, 307n61
Braden, Spruille, 262n115–16,
262n118
Brady, Frank, 307n59
Brands, Hal, 179, 284n23, 301n5
Braque, Georges, 144
Brazil: race mixing in dominant theo-
ries of race developed in, 77
Bretton Woods conference (1944), 91
Brickhouse, Anna, xv, 227n14
Brod, Max, 145
Brothers Karamazov, The
(Dostoyevsky), 160
Browning, Tod, 297n139
Broyhill Furniture, 183
Bruguera, Tania, xix
Bruno, Phillip A., 143, 287n53
Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato di
Tella in, 184; Museum of Modern
Art of, 184
Buñuel, Luis, 86, 112, 158, 265n152,
268n172
Burle-Marx, Roberto, 268n179,
309n72
Busch, Noel F., 244n5
321
Bustamante y Rivero, José Luis, 106
Butler, Horacio, 112, 232n20
Butler, Nicholas Murray, 229n2
Cabrera, Lydia, 66
Cabrera Nuñez, Eduardo César,
283n10, 292n81
Cáceres, Luis Alfredo, 120, 121–22,
279n95, 279n104–5
“Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on
Conformity in Mexican Art, The”
(Cuevas), 152–58, 159, 292n82;
appearance in Mexico just prior
to overthrow of Batista, 155; cold
war interpretation of, in United
States, 153–54; conclusion of,
156–58; contradictions in, 155–56;
Cuevas’s parallel life story with
fictive Juan of, 157, 169, 173; as
transnational, 157
Cafeteras (Coffeepots) series (Otero),
114
Calder, Alexander, 199, 206, 306n49
Calderón, Cristina, xiii
Caldwell, Robert G., 251n48
Calles, Plutarco Elías, 69
Camacho, Jorge, 286n48
Camargo, Sergio de, 206
Camino Brent, Enrique, 232n20
Camnitzer, Luis, 288n71, 301n8
Campa, Román de la, 231n18
Campbell, Kenneth D., 262n118
Campoamor, Fernando G., 287n56
Canadian art, 16
Canhête, Polyana, 235n42
Cano, Daniel, 306n48
Canto general (General Song)
(Neruda), 127
Cantú, Mario, 213
Caracas: Exposición Interamericana
de Pintura Moderna at Museo
de Bellas Artes in, 92–93, 110,
322 INDEX
111–15, 276n66; Inter-American
Conference (1954), 270n10,
271n18; response to SPU in, xiv
“Caracas Declaration” (Dulles), 130,
301n3
Carballido, Emilio, 288n71
Carballo, Emmanuel, 288n71
Cárdenas, Lázaro, 52, 137, 237n55,
283n20
Caribbean International Conference
(1940), 65
Carnegie Corporation, 246n12,
248n27
Carnegie Endowment for Inter-
national Peace, 1
Carnegie Foundation, 49
carpa, la (variety theater), 163
Carpentier, Alejo, 33, 65, 75, 263n138
Carr, Barry, 284n21
Carreño, Mario, 59, 67, 72, 86,
103, 120, 237n54, 265n154,
267n164–66, 273n41, 280n109;
correspondence with Gómez Sicre,
84, 104, 108–9; on Cuban paint-
ing show at MoMA, 263n127;
exiled under Pinochet dictatorship,
84, 267n164; role as intellectual
in contrast to Siqueiros, 84–85;
Siqueiros and, 80, 81, 84; views
on political art, 267n164. See also
Gómez Mena, María Luisa
Carrillo, Lilia, 290n76, 297n136
Carrillo Gil, Alvar, 140, 285n34,
299n152
“cartel considerado como arte, El”
(The Poster Considered as Art)
(Gómez Sicre), 71, 262n120
Casa de las Américas, La, 33–34
Casa-grande e senzala (The Masters
and the Slaves) (Freyre), 76
Cassou, Jean, 140, 285n34
Castellanos, Rosario, 288n71
Castillo, Mónica, 229n24
Castillo, Sergio, 311n88
Castle, David Barton, 230n7
Castle, The (Kafka), 145
Castro, Fidel, 83, 154
Castro-Klarén, Sara, xv, 226n13,
227n15
Catholicism: Archbishop Lucey’s
sermon, 196–97, 308n68; socially
conscious currents of, 308n68
Catlin, Stanton “Tod,” 179, 301n8
cause-related marketing, 217
Celanese Corporation, 199
celebrity: transformation of artist’s
role from educator to, 134–35. See
also Cuevas, José Luis
Center for Inter-American Relations
(Americas Society today), 179,
301n8
Central American Common Market,
196
Central America Pavilion at Hemis-
Fair ’68, 204
Chacón, Ramón, 213
Challenge of New Man, The (Squirru),
186–87
Chapultepec Conference (1945), 89
Chávez, Hugo, xiv
Chávez Morado, José, 112
Chicago: response to SPU in, xiv
Chicago school austerity measures,
215
Chicano Movement: connection to
third-world liberation struggles,
213
chien anadalou, Un (An Andalusian
Dog, 1929) (Buñuel), 112
Children of Sánchez, The (Lewis), 158,
294n104
“Choc Mool” (Fuentes), 163
Christian humanism as antidote to
communism: Squirru on, 186–87
 INDEX
CIA, 273n39, 301n9; coup overthrow-
ing Guatemalan president Arbenz
organized by, 13, 130, 136, 178,
220; funding of Congress for Cul-
tural Freedom, 282n8; revelations
in 1966 and 1967 about covert
funding for international cultural
initiatives, 180
Cisneros, Henry, 188
Citigroup, 217
citizen: consumer-citizen, 212;
importance of art in forging,
162; premodern usage of word,
313n107; San Antonio as hub for
different concepts of transamerican
citizenship, 213. See also corporate
citizenship; cultural citizenship
civil rights era: revitalized discourse
of, in Obama campaign, xiii; in
San Antonio, HemisFair ’68 and,
190–91. See also race
“claiming space”: concept central to
cultural citizenship, 211, 313n107
Clark, Stephen C., 278n89
Clark, T. J., 237n59
“clash of civilizations” thesis,
314n107
Coatsworth, John H., 31–32,
242n100–101
Cockcroft, Eva, 235n37, 236n51,
285n32
Coffeepots (Cafeteras) series (Otero),
114
Coffey, Mary K., 136, 217, 283, 315n5
Cohen, Jonathan, 232n21
Cohn, Deborah, 33, 138–39, 174,
242n107, 243n109, 283n16,
284n23, 284n26, 288n71,
300n158, 301n7
Colborn, Paul A., 310n85
cold war, 6; aesthetic oppositions
between realism and abstraction,
323
69; art as powerful “weapon” of,
18, 241n97; challenges from Com-
munist left during, 11; contain-
ment policy, 90, 91, 154, 284n21;
Cubacentrism of Gómez Sicre’s
anticommunist perspective, 82;
diverse aesthetic experimenta-
tion and intense polemics in Latin
America unleashed by, 18–19;
emerging professionalism during,
59; international tours of African
American jazz musicians during,
174; Latin Americanism in OAS,
89–93; new wave of historiogra-
phy about cultural, in the Ameri-
cas, 21; parallels and differences
between Latin American literary
and art worlds in, 32–34; postwar
shift in priorities from antifascism
to anticommunism, 90; protracted
end of, in the Americas, 215; rise
of modernization theory and, xvi,
125–28; tensions between “third
world” and united “Western
Hemisphere” designations, 139,
179; Third World and, 11, 21, 29,
30, 126; Truman Doctrine, 13, 90,
270n3. See also Alliance for Prog-
ress (1961–1973); communism;
cultural diplomacy
Coleman, Peter, 238n60, 301n9
Colina, José de la, 288n71
Colombia: Gaitán’s assassination and
la violencia in, 270n5
Colombino, Alberto, 311n88
colonialism, 26; similarities between
cold war cultural diplomacy and
civilizing mission of, 30–31; Span-
ish, Gómez Sicre on, 106
Columbus Memorial Library, PAU,
6, 8
Comba, Steve, 246n14
324 INDEX
Comins, Jennifer, 246n14
Comité Continental de Arte para la
Victoria (Continental Committee
of Art for Victory), 71–72
Commercial Bureau of American
Republics, 229n1
committed art: Gómez Sicre’s antipa-
thy toward, 18, 70–85, 88
Committee for Inter-American Artistic
and Intellectual Relations, 233n23
Committee of Conference on Inter-
American Relations in Field of
Music, 248n27, 251n49
communism: challenges from Com-
munist left during cold war, 11;
Christian humanism as antidote
to, Squirru on, 186–87; cold war
interpretation of Cuevas’s “Cactus
Curtain” letter, 153–54; domino
effect of, U.S. interventions to
prevent, 178; Lucey’s sermon on
threat of, in Vietnam, 196–97,
308n68; Mexico’s anticommunism,
138; Red Scare against, 16, 21, 37,
92, 98–103, 128
Communist Party: American Artists’
Congress as Popular Front initia-
tive of, xviii
Composers Collective of New York,
100
conceptual art, 185, 202
Confluence of Civilizations in the
Americas, The (Mérida), 200
Confluence of Civilizations in the
Americas, The (O’Gorman), 200,
201
Congress for Cultural Freedom, 130,
282n8
Connally, John, 192, 194
Connell-Smith, Gordon, 32, 239n67,
242n104
consumer-citizen, 212
Container Corporation of America,
183
containment: U.S. policy of, 90, 91,
154, 284n21
Continental Committee of Art for Vic-
tory, 71–72
continental consciousness-raising:
through Boletín de Artes Visuales,
122–24, 126; through survey exhi-
bition model, 122–23
Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y
el azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint:
Tobacco and Sugar) (Ortiz), 78
“Cooperación Intelectual en América,
1933 a 1936, La” (Intellectual Co-
operation in America, 1933–1936)
(Romero James), 48–49
Cornell University, 180; Latin
American Year (1965–1966),
304n24
Coronel, Rafael, 311n88
Coronil, Fernando, 276n61
corporate citizenship (corporate social
responsibility), 183–84, 241n90;
corporations as sources of global
aid, 217; Gómez Sicre’s recognition
of, 29; as revenue generator, 217
corporate sponsorship, 37, 41–43,
127; circumventing trade barriers
in the arts through, 109; develop-
mentalism of Alliance for Progress
and, 165; during 1960s, 183; Stan-
dard Oil Company and, 41–42;
targeting firms with substantial
Latin American interests, 117; of
32 Artistas de las Américas, 110,
116, 118
Cortázar, Julio, 33
Cortés, Hernán, 76
“cortina de nopal, la”: Cuevas’s
 INDEX
coining of, 152, 292n81. See also
“Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter
on Conformity in Mexican Art,
The” (Cuevas)
Cosmic Race, The (La raza cósmica)
(Vasconcelos), 217
Cosmopolitan (magazine), 143
cosmopolitanism: of Cuevas, 139,
155; fine art as beacon of, at
HemisFair, 210; homosexuality
aligned with internationalism and,
105, 108; Mexican, 139, 167. See
also internationalism
Costa, Lúcio, 165
costumbrista, 129, 281
Council of National Defense, 244n5
Crab, The (Calder), 199
Cramer, Gisela, 244n5
Crane, Andrew, 241n90
Crane, Jane Watson, 279n98
Craven, David, 68–69, 237n59,
261n104, 261n107, 265n155
Creative Capital Foundation, 225n1
creative class: rise of, 216–17
Creole Petroleum, 45, 137
Crespo de la Serna, Jorge Juan, 284n26
Cret, Paul, 2
Crimen (Crime) exhibition (Cuevas),
173
cross-border activism, 213
cuatro monstruos cardinales, Los (The
Four Cardinal Monsters) (Traba),
140–41
Cuba: anticommunist movement in,
102; Auténtico Party in, 102, 103;
Batista and, 64, 71, 85, 102, 103,
155, 237n55, 267n167; Cuban art
exhibit at MoMA (1944), 66, 67;
“democratic spring” in, 237n55;
expulsion from OAS in 1962, 178,
205–6, 236n45, 301n3; Gómez
325
Sicre in Havana, 36, 44, 63–67, 82;
Gómez Sicre on cultural differences
between Mexico and, 79; Gómez
Sicre’s years in, 13–14, 15, 16,
36–37, 63–67; Grau San Martín
and, 64, 85–86, 103, 237n55,
267n167; guajiro (white or mixed-
race peasant) and Afrocuban
cultures as dual bases of cubanía,
77–79; Guantánamo military
base, 240n83; Machado dictator-
ship (1925–1933), 63–64, 67, 85,
257n83, 258n89; Ortiz on race
relations in, 51; Ortodoxo Party
in, 102; as quasi-colonial territory
of U.S., 27; representation in OAS
Pavilion at HemisFair ’68, 205–6,
311n89; during war years, 36
Cuban-American Cultural Institute, 71
Cuban Communist Party, 71, 102,
267n167
Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and
Sugar (Contrapunteo cubano del
tabaco y el azúcar) (Ortiz), 78
cubanía, 64, 258n86
cubanidad, concept of, 258n86
Cuban Ministry of Defense, 72
Cuban Missile Crisis, 178
Cuban Painting Today (exhibition,
1944–1945), 258
Cuban Painting Today (Pintura
cubana de hoy) (Gómez Sicre),
66–67, 75, 240n84, 259n96,
259n98, 263n138
Cuban Revolution (1959), 13, 21;
Cuevas’s early support for, 134,
154–56, 174, 293n94; Gómez
Sicre’s opposition to, 14–15,
21, 83–84, 165; increased U.S.
attention to Latin America after,
178, 179–80; literature supported
326 INDEX
through La Casa de las Améri-
cas, 33–34; polarizing impact
on American intellectual sectors,
14–15; promotion of social realism
as official aesthetic, 83–84
Cuban vanguardia (avant-garde), 15,
16, 66, 97, 237n54; Academia San
Alejandro and, 63, 67, 259n98;
coloration, 259n99; Gómez Sicre’s
aspirations and fears for, 18, 80,
82, 84; Gómez Sicre’s defense
of exhibit in Soviet Union, 82,
109–10, 265n156; perceived
similarity in relation to Mexican
muralists, 80; second wave of, 67
Cuban War for Independence
(1895-1898), 27, 63; evolution to
Spanish-Cuban-American War in
1898, 6, 7, 27, 29–30, 240n82–83
cubism, 114. See also Picasso, Pablo
Cueto, Lola, 142
Cuevas, José Luis, 5, 22, 23, 27, 33,
36, 88, 128, 129–75, 234n32,
268n179, 274n45, 281n4, 286n45,
309n75, 311n88; aesthetic ap-
proach of, 135–36, 140, 158–59;
Alliance for Progress and Mural
efímero, 164–72; art criticism of
early 1960s, 297n136; artistic
circles from mid-1950s to mid-
1960s, 149; awareness of early
construction of persona for foreign
press, 143, 286n52; “The Cactus
Curtain,” 152–58, 159, 169, 173,
292n82; celebrity of, potential to
transcend class and racial divi-
sions, 162–64; cinematic studies
of, 162–63; commercial projects,
167–69; conflicted reputation
in Mexico, 150; crafting new
public art for Mexico, 159–64;
critical obsession with nationality
of, 138–39, 141, 158, 294n104;
critical reputation, 139–41,
285n34, 285n39, 285n43; Cuban
artists and, 142, 286n48; Cuban
Revolution, initial support for, 134,
154–56, 174, 293n94; cultural na-
tionalism and, 138–39, 146, 156,
175; on detachment artist feels to-
ward his subject, 294n103; emerg-
ing consciousness of his Sephardic
heritage, 146–48, 288n58; as “ex-
portable,” 139; expressive figura-
tion of, 140–41, 143, 282n9; father
of, 297n139; formation as artist,
141–43; Gómez Sicre’s relationship
with, 104–5, 131–34, 142–57, 164,
166–67, 291n80; Gómez Sicre’s
relationship with, as mutually
beneficial, 173–75; Gómez Sicre’s
relationship with, 1968 as water-
shed in relationship, 172–73, 174;
Gómez Sicre’s relationship with,
writing collaborations, 36, 38,
134–35, 151–52, 282n10, 291n80;
grand tour of Latin American
capitals (1958–1959), 143, 151;
implicit rejection of Mexican
nationalist art, 135–36, 138; on
influences on his art, 294n103;
internationalism of, 138, 139, 157,
172; Kafka project, 143–49, 166,
288n68; marriage to Bertha Ries-
tra, 156; Mireya, model of, 160,
162, 295n112; Mural efímero as
challenge to muralists, 38, 169–72,
174, 298n140, 298n145, 299n153;
negotiation of U.S. Pan American-
ism and Mexican nationalism,
38, 130, 134; 1959 prize at São
Paolo Bienal, 143, 150–51, 154;
“open letters” in press cultivating
speaking position, 151–53; Orozco
 INDEX
and, encounter with, 160–62;
Orozco and, shared affinities with,
140, 141, 157; other Kafka-
inspired projects, 287n65; PAU
exhibition (1954), 37–38, 142–43,
281n1, 281n6; PAU exhibition
(1954), portraits of urban poor in,
158–59; PAU exhibition (1954),
questionnaire submitted prior to,
157, 294n103; PAU exhibition
(1954), success of, 129–30, 131,
139; PAU exhibitions after 1954,
299n151; performance-campaign
as candidate for deputy of capital’s
first district (1970), 170; Ponia-
towska interview with, 155–56;
popular-culture influences on, 169,
297n139; portraits of the poor and
ill in Mexico City, 129, 132–33,
142, 144, 158–59; portrayal in
Mexican press, 149–52, 158; as
prototype of Gómez Sicre’s “young
artist,” 130–31; role as writer and
public intellectual, 134–35; self-
fashioning as “alienated visionary,”
142–43; self-portrait as “man of
the street,” 159, 162–64; sexual-
ity of, 149–50, 289n73; Siqueiros
and, 135, 143, 156, 172–73, 174;
support of student movement for
democratization, 172; symbolic
“repatriation” to Mexico, 172,
173; ties to Mexico City’s Jewish
community, 171–72; universalism
and, 139, 146, 172
“Cuevas: El niño terrible vs. los
monstruos sagrados” (Cuevas:
The Enfant Terrible vs. the Sacred
Monsters), 152, 292n82. See also
“Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter
on Conformity in Mexican Art,
The” (Cuevas)
327
Cuevas por Cuevas (Cuevas), 160–62,
293n99–100
Cultural Charter of America, 94, 96,
187, 271n18–19
cultural citizenship, 213; art in service
of creating hemispheric citizens,
24–34, 182–83; claiming liberal
citizenship rights as objective,
limitations of, 212; “claiming
space” concept as central to, 211,
313n107; defining, 28–29; Gómez
Sicre’s strategies for asserting,
29–30; Mexico as springboard for
launching concepts of hemispheric,
38–39; paths toward, 211–12,
313n107; practices of, 28; role as
anticipatory strategy, 211, 212;
theories of, 215. See also corporate
citizenship
cultural developmentalism, 39, 178,
216–17, 300n2
cultural diplomacy, xvi–xx; art and
artists’ position within, xvii–xx,
8; assertive inter-American, in
World War II, 52–56; cultivating
“the International Mind,” 2–3,
229n2; dempro, 126; divergence
of second-wave liberal objec-
tives as product of U.S.–Latin
American, 31–32, 242n100; early
cold war, 14; historical dimen-
sions, xviii–xix; instrumentalist
versus idealist formulations of, 53;
intellectual recruitment, xvi–xvii,
xx, 6–8, 30; Mexicanism in 1930s,
xvii; Mexicanization of, at PAU,
48–49; part-whole relation be-
tween statecraft and, 25; similari-
ties between colonialism’s civilizing
mission and cold war, 30–31
cultural nationalism, 46, 69, 107;
Afrocuban, 85; Cuevas and,
328
138–39, 146, 156, 175; Mexican,
130, 137–38, 146
Cultural Olympiad, 193; portrayal of
Mexico as in “take-off phase” of
development, 194
cultural policy, 24, 234n33; centrality
of visual art to postrevolutionary
Mexican, 39; exclusionary, broad
generational campaign waged
against, 149; formations, 216;
historical role of, 25–26; intel-
lectual foundations of at PAU, 26;
Kant’s concepts and, 26, 240n76;
legacy of Pan American, 216–19;
Ninkovich on cultural relations,
240n74; at OAS, 26–27; tension
between the normative and trans-
formative capacities of, 34
cultural policy studies model, 24
cultural regulation, 218
cultural relativism, 79
curatorial gatekeeping practices,
157–58
curators, age of, 15
Dalí, Salvador, 296n122
Damianovich, Zulema, 311n90
D’Amico, Margarita, 288n66
Darío, Rubén, 7
Daumier, Honoré, 139
Dávila, Amparo, 288n71
Dávila, Arlene, 42, 244n3
Davis, Harold E., 252n51
Davis, Stuart, 116, 121, 306n46
Deane, Percy, 116
Death to the Invader (Muerte al
invasor) (Siqueiros), 261n112
Debroise, Olivier, 298n141
de Kooning, Willem, 285n39
Delpar, Helen, 228n23, 231n16,
233n22
INDEX
Democratic National Convention
(Chicago, 1968), 191
Democratic Party in San Antonio,
power struggles in, 189–90
“democratic spring” (1944–1948), 20;
in Cuba, 237n55; in Guatemala,
117; in Mexico, 237n55; in Peru,
106; scholarship on, 237n55; in
Venezuela, 110–15
Denman, Gilbert M., 201, 309n73
Denning, Michael, 239n73, 285n30
Deschamps, E., 298n143, 298n147
de Soto, Luis, 64, 257n84
de-Stalinization, process of, 18–19
development. See economic
development
developmentalism, 4, 20, 30, 49, 90,
138, 180, 184; art and, 68; as com-
mon prescription for transforma-
tion of U.S. inner cities and Latin
American countries, 39, 210–11;
conditions for contemporary
neoliberalism to flourish created
by, 215; Cuevas and, 142, 158;
cultural, 39, 178, 216–17, 300n2;
reinforcing shared visual culture
repertoire linking HemisFair to
Mexico City Olympic Games and,
193–94. See also Alliance for Prog-
ress (1961–1973); HemisFair ’68
(San Antonio)
d’Harnoncourt, Réne, 57, 62, 112,
185, 251n49, 254n63, 255n68,
263n138, 279n103
Diago, Roberto, 75
Diament de Sujo, Clara, 243n115
Diaz, Porfirio, 295n108
Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 146, 192
diplomacy. See cultural diplomacy
Disidentes, Los (the Dissidents),
277n79
 INDEX
Documents of Twentieth-Century
Latin American and Latino Art
(archive), 235n42
Domínguez, Jorge, 178
Dominican Republic: 1965 U.S. inter-
vention in, 178–79
Doña Bárbara (Gallegos), 276n62
Dondero, George, 265n155
Donoso, José, 33
Dos cumbres de América: Lincoln
y Martí (Two Mountain Peaks
of America: Lincoln and Martí)
(Siqueiros), 71
Doss, Erica, 236n51
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 160
Dove, Arthur, 116, 121, 306n46
Downtown Gallery (New York), 116,
191, 306n46
Dreier, John C., 239n67, 253n56,
301n6
Duberman, Martin, 245n9, 260n100
Du Bois, W. E. B., 29
Dubuffet, Jean, 285n39
Dufy, Raoul, 65
Duggan, Laurence, 253n57–58
Duke University, 180
Dulles, John Foster, 130
Dumbarton Oaks conference (1944),
241n89
Durán, Gustavo, 54, 227n20
Durand, Mercedes, 288n71
Dutary, Alberto, 311n88
Duve, Thierry de, 240n76
Echeverría, Enrique, 142
Echeverría, Luis, 173
Economic Commission for Latin
America, 179
economic development: aesthetic
quality and, 29, 30; decoupling the
aesthetic from prescribed role as
329
barometer of, 212; import substitu-
tion industrialization models of,
20; Latin American requests for
foreign aid from United States
for, 91, 270n10; modern art and,
39–40, 117, 121, 126. See also
Alliance for Progress (1961–1973);
developmentalism; modernization
theory
¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! (Carpentier), 75
Eder, Rita, 236n42, 236n54
Educational Trends in Latin America
(PAU), 62
Egenau Moore, Juan, 207, 311n90
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 98, 241n97,
245n10; emphasis on containment,
91; Executive Order 10422 passed
by, 99–100; foreign aid under, 91,
270n10; rise of modernization
theory and, 126
Ejercicio plástico (Plastic Exercise)
(Siqueiros), 263n133
Elizondo, Salvador, 288n71
El Salvador: indigenismo in, 118–19;
response to SPU in, xvii
embó (fetish), 263n138
Emergent Decade, The (exhibition,
1966), 304n24
Emmerich, André, 287n53
employment screening, federal, 99
Enguídanos, Miguel, 266n161
“En la Guerra, Arte de Guerra” (In
Wartime, War Art) (Siqueiros), 72
Enríquez, Carlos, 67, 73, 79, 80
Enríquez, Mary Schneider, 206,
311n92
Ephemeral Mural (Mural efímero)
(Cuevas), 38, 169–72, 174,
298n140, 298n145, 299n153
Escobar, Arturo, 210, 244n117,
313n101
330 INDEX
Espinosa, J. Manuel, 227n16, 232n20,
246n12, 252n49, 272n23
espíritu (spirit): as Latin contribution
to hemispheric interaction, 187;
PAU Department of Cultural Af-
fairs as domain of, 184
Esquenazi Mayo, Roberto, 236n45
Esso (Standard Oil) Salons of Young
Artists, 42, 177–78, 183, 206,
290n76, 302n18
Estopiñán, Roberto, 205, 206, 311n88
Estridentistas, Los (Stridentists), 130,
282n8
“ethical incompleteness”: Miller’s
concept of, 25, 239n72
European Enlightenment, 240n76;
cultural policy as technique of
biopower emerging during, 25–26;
translation of values to American
contexts, 26
European regional identity: develop-
ment of, 25–26
Evergreen Review, 152
Excélsior, 151; caricature of Gómez
Sicre and Cuevas in, 150; El buho
supplement of, 135
exclusionary cultural policies: broad
generational campaign waged
against, 149
Executive Order 10422, 99–100
exhibition practices: Gómez Sicre’s
techniques, 16, 120; revolution
in, 42
“exportability” of artists, 22, 109,
139, 207, 238n63
Exposición de Pintura Contemporánea
Norteamericana (Contemporary
Painting of North America, 1941),
278n89
Exposición Interamericana de Pintura
Moderna (Inter-American Exhibi-
tion of Modern Painting, 1948),
92–93, 110, 111–15, 276n66; as
dempro (cultural diplomacy aimed
at promotion of liberal democ-
racy), 126; painters and themes
represented in, 112, 276n69
expressive figuration of Cuevas,
140–41, 143, 282n9
Faget Figari, Jorge, 266n162
Fagg, John Edwin, 239n67
Falconi, José Luis, 235n42
fascism: cultural diplomacy during
World War II to preempt Latin
American attraction to, 52, 53
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI):
documents released pursuant to
Freedom of Information Act request,
273n38–39, 273n42, 279n94; Red
Scare and, 99, 100, 101–2
federal employment screening, 99
Federal Music Project of Works Prog-
ress Administration (1937–1941),
49
Fed-Up (Hartos, Los), 149
Fein, Seth, 174, 228n21, 242n103,
250n43, 284n21, 284n23,
298n148
Feldman, Eugene, 287n60
Felguérez, Manuel, 297n136
Fenwick, Charles G., 230n5
Fernández, Lola, 311n88
Fernández, Raúl, 227n15
Fernández Concheso, Aurelio,
260n101
Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 34
Fernández-Shaw, Félix G., 239n67
Ferrer, José, 163
Figari, Pedro, 112, 266n162
Findling, John E., 302n11, 314n1
Fiol Matta, Licia, 232n21
First International Conference of
American States (1890), 229n1
 INDEX
First Pan American Conference, xii
Flores, William V., 28, 211, 241n87,
313n104–5
Flores Magón brothers, 213, 314n109
Flores-Sánchez, Horacio, 285n34
Florida, Richard, 39, 216–17,
244n117, 315n3
Foppa, Alaíde, 151, 287n54, 290n78
Ford, Gerald, 245n10
Ford Motors, 127
foreign aid: as strategy for preempting
communism, 91, 270n10
Forner, Raquel, 5, 112, 186
Foucault, Michel, 25, 30, 240n75–76,
314n107
Four Cardinal Monsters, The (Los
cuatro monstruos cardinales)
(Traba), 140–41
Fox, Claire F., 295n118
Framiñán, Carlos, 311n88
Franco, Francisco, 154
Franco, Jean, 18, 149, 163, 229n27,
236n52, 238n60, 242n107,
288n72, 296n121
Frankfurt school, 69
Free Art Workshop (El Taller Libre de
Arte), 114, 116, 277n79
Freedom of Information Act,
273n38–39, 273n42, 279n94
free trade: in arts, Gómez Sicre’s sup-
port for, 4–5, 109; Border Industri-
alization Program (1965) and, 195,
215, 307n61; as “last big idea” of
Alliance for Progress, 302n10; Op-
eration Bootstrap in Puerto Rico
as prototype for contemporary
hemispheric, 121
Frenk, Margit, 288n71
Freymann, Carlos, 310n87
Freyre, Gilberto, 76, 93, 238n62,
264n141
Frito Lay–PepsiCo, 198
331
Fuentes, Carlos, 33, 146, 162, 163,
288n66, 288n71
funerales de un dictador, Los (The
Funerals of a Dictator) (Cuevas),
154, 156, 293n94
Gabara, Esther L., 295n110, 298n141
Gaines, James M., 305n44, 307n59,
309n76–77
Gaitan, Jorge Eliécer: assassination of,
270n5
Galarza, Ernesto, 54, 238n62
Galería de Arte Misrachi (Mexico
City), 169
Galería de la Zona Rosa (Mexico
City), 172
Galería del Prado (Havana), 66,
72–73, 75, 263n127
Galería Misrachi, 299n152
Galería Prisse (Mexico City), 142, 149
Galería Proteo (Mexico City), 149
Galería Souza (Mexico City), 149
Gallegos, Rómulo, 37, 102, 276n62,
277n71; Exposición Interameri-
cana in honor of inauguration
of, 92–93, 110, 111–15, 276n66;
overthrow in military coup in
November 1948, 115
Gamboa, Fernando, 136, 162, 192,
194, 307n53
García, Vida Mía, 305n41
García Canclini, Néstor, 194, 212,
219, 243n111, 307n57, 313n106,
315n7, 315n10
García Márquez, Gabriel, 33
García Marruz, Fina, 65, 103, 104, 105
García Ponce, Fernando, 290n76
García Ponce, Juan, 288n71, 290n76
García Terres, Jaime, 288n71
Garza Usabiaga, Daniel, 236n54
Gattorno, Antonio, 67, 80, 259n93,
259n98
332
Gego, 200
Gellman, Irwin F., 232n19, 250n45
Genauer, Emily, 311n90
gender and sexuality: value hierarchies
of, 108–9. See also homosexuality
General Song (Canto General)
(Neruda), 127
Generation of 1927, 66–67
Gerzso, Günther, 237n54, 297n136
Gilbert, James Burkhart, 249n35
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 47,
246n14
Gilman, Nils, 125, 227n21, 271n14
Gilman, Sander, 146, 287n65
Gironella, Alberto, 23, 142
Giunta, Andrea, 228n22, 235n42,
236n47, 302n10, 302n16, 303n23
Glantz, Margo, 288n71
Glessman, Louis R., 287n60
Glinkin, Anatolii Nikolaevich, 11,
233n26
Gobat, Michel, 242n100
Goeritz, Mathias, 297n136
Goldman, Shifra M., 145, 228n23,
282n9, 283n11, 283n15, 292n81
Gómez, Alan Eladio, 213, 314n110,
314n112
Gómez, Clemente, 63
Gómez, Juan Vicente, 111
Gómez Mena, María Luisa: death of,
265n152; denial of visa to attend
MoMA exhibition, 260n101,
263n127; financing of Gómez
Sicre’s Pintura cubana de hoy,
259n96; marriage to Altoaguirre,
265n152; meeting with Barr and
Kaufmann, 262n126; Siquerios’s
mural for, 36–37, 72, 73–80;
support of Gómez Sicre’s visit to
United States in 1944, 260n101
Gómez Sicre, Clemente Ricardo,
102–3
INDEX
Gómez Sicre, José R., 1, 89,
231n11, 231n13–14, 236n49,
243n115–16, 257n85, 259n96,
285n33, 296n129–32, 303n20;
as advisor to Barr, 44, 281n6;
Afrocubanismo and, 16, 75, 85,
97; Ahlander’s falling out with,
269n182; Alliance for Progress,
response to, 165–66, 183–84,
297n132; animus toward social
realism, 17–18, 22, 37, 75–76,
83; antibourgeois sensibility, 27;
anti-Castrismo after the revolution,
15, 16; anticommunist perspective,
Cubacentrism of, 82; antipathy
toward committed art, 18, 70–85,
88; anxiety over Cuevas’s fame,
166–67; appreciation for “ex-
portability,” 22, 109, 139, 207,
238n63; arrival in Washington,
D.C. (1945), 36; art studies in New
York, 13, 67–68, 86, 260n101;
ascendant values of his critical
vocabulary, 128; avant-garde
movements and, 212; aversion to
national selection model for orga-
nizing exhibitions, 119–20; aware-
ness of Cuevas’s work, 286n46;
background of, 16, 63–65; Barr
and, 62, 87, 256n77, 257n80,
259n96, 289n74; Barr and, in
Havana (1942), 36, 44, 62–63, 65,
82; Basadre and, 106–7, 275n50;
BAV and, 280n109–11; Boletín
de Artes Visuales editorials of
1950s, 218; career at PAU, 44–45;
Carreño correspondence with, 84,
104, 108–9; as chief of PAU Visual
Arts Section, 3–7, 12–13, 27, 35,
86–88, 230n10; child molestation
accusation against, in Cuba, 104,
108, 274n45; collaborative possi-
 INDEX
bilities for art and ambassadorship,
109–10; commitment to renovate
cultural branches of PAU, 97;
conflicted relationship to Mexican
art world, 135, 136–38; consul-
tancy work in Texas, 302n14; as
consultant for HemisFair, 39, 180,
182, 200–203, 204, 308n71–72,
309n77, 311n93; contemporary
epitaph as “Cold Warrior” for
arts, 16; criticism of indigenismo,
119; Cuban art sent to Barr and
d’Harnoncourt, 263n138; Cuban
Revolution and, 14–15, 21, 83–84,
165; Cuban vanguardia, commit-
ment to, 18, 80, 82, 84, 109–10,
265n156; Cuevas and, 104–5,
131–34, 142–57, 164, 166–67,
291n80; Cuevas and, as mutually
beneficial relationship, 173–75;
Cuevas and, 1968 as watershed in
relationship, 172–73, 174; Cuevas
and, as prototype for “young art-
ist,” 130–31; Cuevas and, writing
collaborations, 36, 38, 134–35,
151–52, 282n10, 291n80; cultural
citizenship, strategies for assert-
ing, 29–30; curatorial competition
of, 17; curatorial philosophy, 82,
113; on decentralized development
of visual art’s “reception points,”
33, 34; description of Washing-
ton, D.C., 106–7; editorials in
Boletín de Artes Visuales (Bulletin
of Visual Arts), 27, 35–36, 109,
123–24, 126, 165–66; efforts
to fuse perspectives of Barr and
Romero James on Latin American
art, 59–61; egalitarian geopolitical
relations projected through exhibi-
tion practices of, 16; end of career,
83; enemies made by, 65–66; Esso
333
Salons of Young Artists organized
by, 177–78; Exposición Interameri-
cana de Pintura Moderna (1948),
92–93, 110, 111–15, 126, 276n66,
276n69; FBI file on, 101–2,
273n42, 279n94; first grand tour
of Europe in 1949, 87, 268n178;
flexible institutional network, 14,
57, 239n68; formative experi-
ences in Cuba during World War
II, 36–37; former fiancée, Fina
García Marruz, 65, 103, 104,
105; on free trade in the arts, 4–5,
109; Gorostiza’s exchange with,
149–50; on growth of Visual Arts
Section, 165–66, 296n132; in
Havana and New York, 62–70;
image of new hemispheric circuit,
5–6; as informal art dealer to
OAS ambassadorial corps, 110;
intellectual formation of, 13–16;
interest in cinema and vernacu-
lar art, 236n46; internal struggle
between trade liberalization and
state or supranational regulation
of art market, 167; introduction to
The Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas,
145; “invention of Latin American
art” and, 1, 8–9, 59, 88; juxtaposi-
tion of cultural nationalism and
queer modernist internationalism
for, 107; Lam and, 66, 258n93;
Lavender Scare and, 98–99, 103–8;
lecture tour of Amerika Haüser
in West Germany (1951), 103;
letter to Borges scholar, 266n161;
long-term investment in art worlds
of Northern Andean and Central
American OAS member states,
122; manifest contradictions of,
35; map depicting activities of
his division, 167, 168; marriage
334 INDEX
of, 103–4, 274n43; Mexican
muralism, view of, 17–18, 71–72,
79–80, 82, 88, 264n148; Mexico,
Ecuador, and Peru as main targets
of, 83, 266n159, 266n161–62; “Mi
credo,” 82, 113, 124, 128; modern-
ist idioms endorsed by, 19–20;
modernization theory and, 125–26,
280n121; modernizing experiments
in Latin Americanism, 15; MoMA
contract to rewrite Kirstein’s vol-
ume on Latin American collection,
269n179; Museum of Modern
Art of Latin America (AMA | Art
Museum of Americas) and, 22,
83, 88, 230n3, 231n10, 238n65,
239n70, 304n24; Neruda and, 65,
127–28; new interests and phase
of career in 1960s, 185; ostracism
by Rodríguez Feo at Middlebury
College, 107–8; at Partisans of
Peace Conference (1949), 238n60;
Pintura cubana de hoy, 66–67,
75, 240n84, 259n96, 259n98,
263n138; on pop art, 170; on
poster art, 71, 262n120; post-
revolutionary Mexico as deeply
conflicted source of aesthetic in-
spiration for, 70; projects in Cuba
in 1944, 85–86; promotion of
abstract and experimental aesthet-
ics, 18–19; promotion of “el arte
que progresa” (art that progresses),
93, 109; recommendations for
MoMA permanent collection, 87,
268n179; reconception of Martí’s
ideas about the compensatory role
of aesthetic, 28; recruitment as
Switzer’s successor at PAU, 86–88;
Red Scare and, 98, 101–3; Romero
James’s falling out with, 101;
Schapiro’s influence on, 13, 67–70;
sexuality of, 104–5, 107–9, 149,
150, 274n46–47; shifting orienta-
tion in 1960s toward United States
and Europe and away from Latin
America, 185, 303n24; Siqueiros
and, polemic with, 17–18, 36,
70–85, 88, 134, 264n148, 289n74,
289n74; special interest in coun-
tries of Central America and the
northern Andes, 17; 32 Artistas de
las Américas exhibit, 37, 92–93,
110, 116–22, 279n101; topics for
further investigation of, 239n70;
tour of MoMA given to Gallegos’s
staff by, 112, 277n72; transatlantic
connections as form of tutelage
sanctioned by, 114–15; transfor-
mation from progressive social
democrat and communist fellow
traveler to cold war liberal, 20–21;
universalist claims about contem-
porary Latin American art, 15,
45, 126, 146, 172; young artists,
concern with and promotion of,
5–6, 17, 18, 21–22, 23, 35, 37, 64,
80, 83, 85, 105, 114, 121–22
González, Henry B., 188
Gonzalez, Rita, 225n1
González-Goyri, Roberto, 311n90
González Prada, Manuel, 94
Good Neighbor Policy (1933–1945),
xvi, xvii, xx, 7–11, 13, 31, 35, 216,
232n19; Exposición Interameri-
cana de Pintura Moderna of
works collected during, 112–13;
final years of, 43–44; PAU Visual
Art Section break with cultural
exchange programs of, 124–25;
state-private network evolved dur-
ing years of, 36, 45–62, 232n20
Gordon, Lincoln, 196, 307n55
Gorostiza, Celestino, 149–50
 INDEX
Goya, Francisco, 139
Grace Line, 110, 116, 117, 118,
278n87
Gramsci, Antonio, 31
Granada, Carlos, 235n38, 274n47
Grandin, Greg, 32, 241n94
Grau San Martín, Ramón, 64, 85–86,
103, 237n55, 267n167
Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art,
The (exhibition, 2001–2003), 217
Great Society, 39, 181, 191, 195
Greenberg, Clement, 20, 88
Greet, Michele, 235n41, 266n159
Gris, Juan, 114
Gropp, Arthur E., 310n85
Grosz, George, 139
Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 105–6,
275n48–49
Grupo Contemporáneos, 108
Grupo Minorista, 63, 259n97
Grupo Orígenes, 66, 103, 107–8, 142
guajiro (white or mixed-race peasant),
77–79
Gual Vidal, Manuel, 93
Guatemala, 178; Caracas Declaration
censuring Jacobo Arbenz regime in
(1954), 130, 301n3; CIA-organized
coup overthrowing Arbenz (1954),
13, 130, 136, 178, 220; “demo-
cratic spring” in, 117; indigenismo
in, 118, 119
Guayasamín, Osvaldo, 143, 232n20
Guernica (Picasso), 171
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 22, 165
Guggenheim Foundation, 232n20,
246n12
guía de colecciones públicas de arte
en la América Latina, La (Gómez
Sicre), 269n179
Guilbaut, Serge, 18, 236n50
Guillén, Nicolás, 64, 79, 238n60
Gurrola, Juan José, 169, 288n71
335
Hall, Forest J., 250n39
Halpert, Edith Gregor, 191, 306n46
Handbook of Latin American Studies,
247n15
Hanke, Lewis, 246n14
happenings, 201–2
Harrison, Wallace K., 251n48,
253n56–57
Hart, Sheldon, 70
Hartos, Los (The Fed-Up), 149
Hauptman, William, 236n51
Havana, Cuba: Gómez Sicre in, 63–67
Helguera, Pablo, xi, 226n3, 226n7,
226n9–10, 229n25, 229n27;
background and career of, 225n1;
intellectual inspirations for School
of Panamerican Unrest, xvii–xviii;
project blog of, xiv–xv; reflection
on SPU journey, xiv–xv, xx; School
of Panamerican Unrest (SPU)
project, xi–xv, 225n1, 226n2; SPU
iconography selected by, xii, 226n5
Hellman, Lillian, 179
Helman, Edith, 52
Hemingway, Andrew, 261n104
HemisFair Plaza, 196
HemisFair ’68 (San Antonio), 180–83,
188–213; African American op-
position to, 190–91, 305n40; area
razed for, 188–89; articulation
of futurity through mestizaje,
or “confluence,” 39, 182–83,
188; commissioned works of art
at, 200; concern over prevent-
ing racial boycotts and “sit ins,”
191, 305n44; confluence of
anticommunism and free trade
economics at, 215; cross-border ac-
tivism in San Antonio at same time
as, 213; Cuban art at, 311n89;
fairgoers’ response to, 208–9,
312n99; financial losses of, 190;
336 INDEX
financing of, 188; global events
occurring during, 191; Gómez
Sicre and Squirru as consultants
for, 39, 180, 182, 200–203, 204,
208, 308n71, 309n75; immediate
objective of, 188; impact on San
Antonio, 188–96, 305n41; Institute
of Texan Cultures at, 188, 194–95,
212; ironic twist on cultural
citizenship strategies, 211; as “last
big party” of Alliance for Progress,
180, 302n10; leadership of, 188,
189–90; Mexican Americans and,
39, 181, 190–91, 194, 203–4,
207–8; Mexico Pavilion at, 192,
193, 194, 200; mixed-provenance
attractions, 199–200; as model of
state-private sector collaboration in
cultural arena, 181; OAS Pavilion,
204–9, 210, 310n83–85, 310n88,
312n99; path of hypothetical fair
visitor, 198; PAU cultural branches
at, 180; pavilions at, 198–200;
politics of, 189, 190; portrayal of
South Texas as in “take-off phase”
of development, 194; problems
with construction of, 306n49;
“progress effect” created by, 210–
11; Project Y at, 201–2; regional
objectives, 191–92; San Antonio as
“funnel” between North and South
America, hopes to establish, 195;
sculpture exhibition, 201, 206,
309n73, 311n90; tejano expres-
sive cultures at, 207–8; Theater
for Performing Arts, 192, 201;
theme of, 181; underrepresentation
of Latin American countries and
Mexican American San Antonio at,
203–8; United States Pavilion, 191;
at urban and hemispheric spatial
registers, 188–213; visual art and
its placement at, 199–204, 212–13;
visual art at, 181, 183; web of
state-private connections creating,
198–99
hemispheric citizens: art in service
of creating, 24–34; Luis-Brown’s
concept of hemispheric citizenship,
29–30
Henestrosa, Andrés, 159, 284n26
Henriquez Ureña, Pedro, 47
Hepworth, Barbara, 206
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass,
203
Herman, Mary Sue, 309n77
Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro, 243n107
hijo pródigo, El (journal), 19
hijos de Sánchez, Los (The Children of
Sánchez) (Lewis), 158
Hilton Hotels, 183
Holland, Kenneth, 227n20, 251n48
Holly, Michael Ann, 261n104
Holmesly, Sterlin, 304n33, 305n40–41
Holocaust-related themes: exploration
of, 299n149
“hombre nuevo, el” (the new man): of
Cuban Revolution, 186; Squirru’s
claim of, for liberal democracy,
165, 186
Homenaje al lápiz = Homage to the
Pencil (1999 exhibition), 300
homosexuality: anxiety about re-
pressed, in Mexican cultural scene,
149–50, 289n73; association with
pedophilia, 274n45; Gómez Sicre’s
sexuality, 104–5, 107–9, 149, 150,
274n46–47; internationalism and
cosmopolitanism linked to, in
United States, 105, 107, 108; in-
vocation of mariconería (faggotry),
108–9; Lavender Scare, 16, 21,
 INDEX
37, 98–99, 103–8, 128, 272n29;
screening in 1950s to detect, 21
Hope, Bob, 181
Horan, Elizabeth, 232n21, 273n36
Horror Theater (exhibition, 1964),
297
House Committee on Un-American
Activities, 98. See also Lavender
Scare; Red Scare
Hoyt, W. R., 313n102
Hull, Cordell, xvi
human rights: American Declaration
of Rights and Duties of Man and,
26
Hungary: Soviet invasion of (1956),
18
Huntington, Samuel, 314n107
Hurlbert, Laurance, 80, 265n151
Hurtado, Angel, 296n119
IACC. See Inter-American Cultural
Council, OAS
Ibañez, Juan, 288n71
Ibargüengoitia, Jorge, 288n71
Iber, Patrick, 282n8
IBM Pavilion at HemisFair ’68, 198
I Do Not Forget (Yo no olvido)
(Cuevas), 171–72
import substitution industrialization
models of development, 20
INBA. See Instituto Nacional de Bellas
Artes
Indian Arts and Crafts Board of De-
partment of Interior, 255n68
indigeneity: ethical imperative of SPU
provided by, xiii
indigenism, 5, 75, 82, 83
indigenismo, 118–19
Industrias Kaiser Argentina (IKA)
Bienal (1964), 24. See also Bienales
Americanas de Arte
337
Indych-López, Anna, 8, 216, 228n23,
233n22, 235n41, 283n14, 315n2
In from the Cold (Joseph), 243n114
Insiders, The (Rodman), 140,
299n149
installation practices, 120
Institución Hispano-Cubana de
Cultura, 65, 71, 103, 258n89,
262n120
Institute of Texan Cultures at
HemisFair, 188, 194–95, 212
institutional cross-pollination, 254n64
Instituto de Arte Moderno de Carta-
gena, 183
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes
(INBA: National Institute of Fine
Arts, Mexico), 136–37, 149–51,
175; curatorial gatekeeping prac-
tices at, 157–58
Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos
Aires, 184
integration through culture, 178
Intellectual Cooperation in America,
1933–1936 (“Cooperación Inte-
lectual en América, 1933 a 1936,
La”) (Romero James), 48–49
intellectuals: casting of artists as,
228n22; characterization in
metaphysical “mentalist” model of
transmission of ideas, 227n18; geo-
political borders serve as powerful
zones of passage for queer Latina/o
American, 107; Mexican, responses
to Cuevas’s “The Cactus Curtain”
and Kafka projects, 174; as mod-
ernizing elite after World War II,
xvi; nation-building letrados, or
lettered, 26, 27, 34, 105–6. See also
Latin American intellectuals
Inter-American Committee, 301n7
Inter-American Conference on
338 INDEX
Problems of War and Peace (The
Chapultepec Conference, 1945), 89
Inter-American Conferences of
American States: Eleventh, cancel-
lation of, 271n18; Ninth (Bogotá,
1948), 90, 111, 270n5; Tenth
(Caracas, 1954), 270n10, 271n18
Inter-American Cultural Council,
OAS, 26–27, 93–94; Committee
for Cultural Action, 271n16; Cul-
tural Charter of America, 94, 96,
187, 271n18–19; Fifth Meeting of
(Maracay), 177–78, 184–85, 187,
303n21, 315n7; Multilateral Fund
of, 303n21
Inter-American Development Bank
(Washington, D.C.), 218
Inter-American Foundation for Arts,
179–80, 185, 301n7; symposia
series sponsored by, 180
Inter-American Fund, MoMA, 44, 87,
112, 256n76, 276n68
Inter-American Institute of Intellectual
Cooperation, 246n12
Inter-American Meeting of Ministers
of Culture, 303n21
Inter-American Music Center, PAU,
49–50, 53, 55, 248n27, 249n31,
251n49
inter-American system of governance:
popularity among Latin American
liberal elites, 92; security treaties
administered by, 90. See also Orga-
nization of American States
Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal
Assistance (the Rio Treaty), 90,
230n8
Interioristas, Los, 149
International Conference of American
States, 229n1
International Development Advisory
Board, 245n10
internationalism: cosmopolitanism
and, 19, 210; cosmopolitanism
and, homosexuality aligned with,
105, 107, 108; of Cuevas, 138,
139, 157, 172; liberal, 1–2, 6, 11,
12, 31–32, 50, 93; MoMA-esque,
87
International Mind, 2–3, 229n2
International Music Council, 249n31
International Office of American
Republics, 229n1
International PEN Club conference
(1966), 33
International Petroleum Corporation
of Colombia, 183, 303n24
International Union of American
Republics, 229n1
Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in
Latin America (2004 exhibition),
300n155
In Wartime, War Art (“En la Guerra,
Arte de Guerra”) (Siqueiros), 72
“Irresponsibles, The” (MacLeish), 51
Irwin, Robert McKee, 289n73
“Is America a Continent?” (Points of
View roundtable), 51–52
James, Earle K., 246n14
Jodorovsky, Alejandro, 149
Johnson, David K., 99, 103, 272n29,
272n31, 274n43
Johnson, Lyndon B., 178, 179, 191;
Alliance for Progress and, 195–96;
Great Society and, 39, 181, 191,
195; Latin American ambas-
sadorial visit to Texas and, 196,
307n66; Vietnam war and, 195,
196–97; War on Poverty, 191
Joint Committee on Cultural Rela-
tions, 250n46
Jones, Marie Smith, xiii
José Luis Cuevas (documentary), 169
 INDEX
Joseph, Gilbert M., 31, 230n9,
237n55, 243n114, 280n120
Kafka, Franz, 129, 160, 281,
300n159; Cuevas’s project based
on writings of, 143–49, 166,
288n68
Kaiser, Edgar F., 211
Kaiser Industries, 24, 183, 211
Kamko Foundation of Mrs. Ike
(Flora C.) Kampmann, 310n83
Kánepa-Koch, Gísela, 314n108
Kant, Immanuel, 26, 240n76
Kantor, Sybil Gordon, 245n8,
261n105
Karen, Ruth, 239n67
katharsis, La (Orozco), 161
Kaufmann, Edgar, Jr., 256n76,
262n126, 265n154
Keaton, Buster, 297n139
Kelchner, Warren, 253n58
Kelsey, Albert, 2
Kennedy, Jacqueline, 185, 186
Kennedy, John F., 31, 164, 270n10,
285n30; Alliance for Progress and,
178, 195; arts-friendly administra-
tion of, 179; assassination of, 178
Kennedy, Robert F., 191
King, John, 235n42
King, Martin Luther, Jr.: assassination
of, 191
Kipp, Anita, 287n54
Kirchwey, Freda, 47
Kirstein, Lincoln, 54, 58, 109, 238n63,
244n7, 256n73, 261n113, 276n68;
Gómez Sicre’s rewriting of volume
on MoMA’s Latin American col-
lection, 269n179; “spying and
buying trip” through Southern
Cone countries for Rockefeller, 70;
tongue-in-cheek proposal to Barr
in 1943, 44, 244n7
339
Klein, Cristina, 241n93
Knight, Alan, 237n55
Kosice, Gyula, 311n90
Kozloff, Max, 236n51
Krauze, Enrique, 282n10, 292n81
Krenn, Michael L., 252n49, 292n86
Krenn, Thomas, 242n97
Kubitschek, Juscelino, 109, 270n10
Kumar, Amitava, 240n74, 301n2
Kutzinski, Vera, 51, 79, 250n37,
257n86
laberinto de la soledad, El (The Laby-
rinth of Solitude), 139
Lagunilla, La (flea market in Mexico
City), 163
Lam, Wifredo, 66, 67, 79, 113,
258n93, 259n98, 265n154
Lara, Augustín, 163
Larkin, Oliver, 238n60
Larsen, Neil, 243n110
Lasansky, Mauricio, 299n149
Lasch, Pedro, 296n122
Latham, Michael E., 125, 234n34,
270n10, 301n3, 307n63, 313n103
Latin America: as coherent regional
and historical designation, troubled
status of, 219; “democratic spring”
(1944–1948) in, 20; diverse aes-
thetic experimentation and intense
polemics unleashed by cold war in,
18–19; lack of Marshall Plan for,
91, 230n9; U.S. interventions in, 26,
27–28, 31–32; violent repression
of progressive movements in late
1940s, 20; “war of maneuver” and
“war of position” during cold war,
31. See also Good Neighbor Policy
(1933–1945); specific countries
Latin American area studies: as
academic discipline in the United
States, 6–7
340 INDEX
Latin American art: Barr’s perspective
on, 58–59, 206; boom in drawing
in 1960s, 22, 129–30, 173; corpo-
rate sponsorship of, 37, 41–43, 109,
110, 116–18, 165, 183; diverging
postwar perspectives about, 206–7;
Gómez Sicre’s claim to have trans-
formed periodization of, 177, 178;
Gómez Sicre’s promotion of “el arte
que progresa,” 93, 109; institu-
tions dedicated to contemporary, in
postwar years, 17; “invention” of,
1, 8–9, 29, 39, 59, 88; from “na-
tional pavilion” model to regional
model of institutional presentation,
42–43; parallels and differences
between boom in, and its literary
counterpart, 32–34; as reductive or
essentialist category, debates over,
218–19; Romero James’s perspec-
tive on, 8–9, 58–59, 206; 32 Artists
as first traveling exhibition of, or-
ganized for Latin American publics,
117. See also Gómez Sicre, José R.;
Pan American Union, Visual Arts
Section
Latin American Collection of Museum
of Modern Art, The (exhibit,
1943), 261n113
Latin American Collection of Museum
of Modern Art, The (Kirstein),
269n179
Latin America, New Departures (exhi-
bition, 1961), 304n24
Latin American Free Trade Associa-
tion, 196
Latin American intellectuals, 6–11,
59; as ambassadors of culture,
105–6, 275n49; Cuban Revolution
and, 134, 174, 293n94; in cultural
branches of PAU, 8, 93–94; geo-
political borders as powerful zones
of passage for queer, 107; influx
into United States, 7–8; lati-
namericanismo tradition associ-
ated with fin de siècle literary, 7,
9, 11; letrados, 26, 27, 34, 105–6;
modernismo and, 7, 9–10; Points
of View as venue for, 50–52, 62,
249n34; Squirru’s “new man,”
186; U.S. cultural diplomacy tar-
geting, xvi–xvii, xx, 6–8, 30; value
hierarchies of gender and sexuality
in critical debates about aesthet-
ics and modernity among, 108–9;
visual artists as public intellectuals,
7, 228n22; during and after World
War II, 21, 106
Latin Americanism: as antiquated and
insufficient discourse, 218–19; cold
war, in OAS, 89–93; of Cuevas, 38;
interplay between Pan American-
ism and, 11, 33; nationalist aspira-
tions aspect of, 27; O’Gorman’s
defense of, 51; at Pan American
Union, 6–7, 12, 15, 22, 33, 59, 97,
98, 183, 184; Ramos on, 10–11,
209, 231n18; rooted in nineteenth-
century humanism, 59, 88
Latin Americanism against Pan Ameri-
canism: From Simón Bolívar to
the Present (El latinoamericanismo
contra el panamericanismo: Desde
Simón Bolívar hasta nuestros días)
(Glinkin), 11
latinidad, 182, 208
Latino: HemisFair’s division of cul-
tural labor between Latin Ameri-
cans and Latinos, 208; leap from
Latin American to, 182–83; OAS
fascination with U.S. Latino cities
in 1960s, 187–88
latinoamericanismo. See Latin
Americanism
 INDEX
latinoamericanismo contra el pana-
mericanismo: Desde Simón Bolívar
hasta nuestros dias, El (Latin
Americanism against Pan Ameri-
canism: From Simón Bolívar to the
Present) (Glinkin), 11
Latino Cultural Citizenship (Flores
and Benmayor), 28, 313n107
Lavender Scare, 16, 21, 37, 92, 128,
272n29; Gómez Sicre and, 98–99,
103–8
Lavender Scare, The (Johnson),
272n29
Laville, Helen, 234n35
League of Nations, 246n12
LeBlanc, Aleca, 235n42
Lebrun, Rico, 299n149
Lectura Para Maestros (Reading for
Teachers), 62
Leñero, Vicente, 288n71
Lenin, Vladimir, 261n104
Leonard, Irving A., 41, 244
Leonard, Thomas M., 307n64
Le Parc, Julio, 206
letrados, 26, 27, 34, 105–6
Levinson, Jerome, 234n34
Lewis, Jo Ann, 230n3
Lewis, Oscar, 158
LeWitt, Sol, 170
Leyva, Maria, 231n12
Lezama Lima, José, 66, 107, 108
Liautaud, Georges, 311n88
liberal internationalism, 1–2, 6, 11; of
modernization theory, 93; philo-
sophical concerns shared with Latin
Americanism in PAU, 12; Seeger’s
challenge to, 50; U.S. interventions
in Latin American and, 31–32
liberalism: crisis of liberal notion of
representativity, 219; Foucault
on, 314n107; hard and soft sides
of, 30–32, 242n100; merging of
341
Kantian and Hobbesian perspectives
on, 241n94; Pan American, muta-
tions of, 26; of Points of View, 51
Liberman, Alexander, 206
Library of Congress, 254n63
Lichtenstein, Roy, 309n75
Life en español, 143
Linden, Diana L., 228n23
Lipchitz, Jacques, 206
Liss, Peggy K., 226n11
Liss, Sheldon B., 226n11
literary Boom: parallels and differ-
ences between Latin American art
boom and, 32–34
Littleton, Taylor D., 306n46
Lleras Camargo, Alberto, 3, 269n1,
270n2–3, 270n11; directorship
of PAU, 89–98; la violencia and,
270n5; post-tour thank-you to
d’Harnoncourt, 279n103; Red
Scare and, 100; reorganization of
PAU’s divisions, 92, 93–98; rise of
modernization theory and, 126;
Rockefeller and, 46, 90, 97
Loeb, Pierre, 258n90
Lomas, Laura, 232n21, 240n85
López, Nacho, 158
López Mateos, Adolfo, 137, 138, 156,
284n23, 284n30
Losada, Jorge, 262n126
Lowe, Arbon Jack, 307n58
Lowe Art Gallery of University of
Miami in Coral Gables, 303n24
loyalty oaths and screenings, 21,
99–100
Luce, Henry R., 6, 231n15
Lucey, Archbishop: sermon of,
196–97, 308n68
Luis-Brown, David, 29–30, 76,
241n92
Lydeum, El (Havana), 65, 120,
258n89
342
Mabe, Manabu, 5, 311n88
MacEntyre, Eduardo, 311n88
Machado, Gerardo, 46; dictatorship
of, 63–64, 67, 85, 257n83, 258n89
MacLeish, Archibald, 51, 241n97,
249n35, 254n63
Madman (Cuevas), 130, 132, 281n6
Madwoman (Cuevas), 130, 133, 281n6
Mafia, la, 149, 169–70, 173, 288n71.
See also Cuevas, José Luis;
Monsiváis, Carlos; Piazza, Luis
Guillermo
mafia, La (Piazza), 169
Malamud, Bernard, 172
Malinche, La, 76
Mañach, Jorge, 47
Mañach, Mrs. (Jorge), 108
Manaure, Mateo, 116, 277n79
Manger, William, 239n67
Manuel, Víctor, 67, 259n98
Manzur, David, 274n47
maquiladora industries, 195
Maracay, 177–78, 184–85, 187,
303n21, 315n7
Marcellino, Michael C., 230n6,
264n148, 265n149, 281n5
Marco, Hugo de, 206
Mariátegui, José Carlos, 97
mariconería (faggotry), invocation of,
108–9. See also homosexuality
Marín, Lupe, 65
Marini, Marino, 268n178
Marino, Luz, 263n138
Mariscal, George, 191, 306n48
marketing, cause-related, 217
Marquis, Alice Goldfarb, 256n76
Marshall, John, 254n63, 255n67
Marshall Plan, 91, 230n9
Martí, José, xv, 11, 27–28, 29, 94,
106, 240n85, 257n86; death of,
27; Grupo Minorista inspired by,
INDEX
63; ideas about compensatory
role of aesthetic, Gómez Sicre’s
reconception of, 28; as inspiration
for SPU, xvii; “Nuestra América,”
48–49, 233n29, 247n22; Pan
American Conferences and, 7,
227n15, 231n17; Pan Americanism
and frequent citation of, 8; writ-
ings about life in the United States,
28, 227n15, 240n86
Martin, Gerald, 243n110
Martínez, Juan A., 65, 70, 236n44,
257n82, 260n99, 261n111
Martínez Pedro, Luis, 67
Martz, Mary Jeanne Reid, 271n18
Marxism, 308n68
Masiello, Francine, 257n86, 258n89
Masters and the Slaves, The (Casa-
grande e senzala) (Freyre), 76
Mathews, Jane de Hart, 236n51
Matisse, Henri, 268n178
Matta, Roberto, 112, 124, 311n88
Matten, Dirk, 241n90
May, Rollo, 145
Mayhall, Marguerite, 115, 277n75
Mbembe, Achille, 30, 31, 241n95
McCarthy, Joseph: and McCarthyism,
98, 99, 102, 238n60, 308n68. See
also Lavender Scare; Red Scare
Meacham, J. Lloyd, 239n67, 270n10
Medellín, Octavio, 208, 311n90
Meeker, Charles, 309n77
Meisler, Stanley, 292n85
Melo, Juan Vicente, 288n71
Mérida, Carlos, 19, 117, 119, 120,
297n136, 311n88; HemisFair ’68
project, 200, 202
Messer, Thomas, 304n24
mestizaje: Cuevas’s “aesthetic of feliz
mestizaje” (happy mestizaje),
140; cultural, in former Spanish
 INDEX
and Mexican territories of South
and Southwestern United States,
187–88; HemisFair’s articulation
of futurity through “confluence”
or, 39, 182–83, 188; leading to
New World identity, draft Cultural
Charter’s emphasis on, 94, 187;
officialist narrative of, in postrevo-
lutionary Mexico, 76, 79; political
uses of, Mexico’s role at HemisFair
as franchisor of, 194; San Anto-
nio as heart of Texan “cultural
confluence” or, 194–95; Siqueiros’s
permutation of, into mulatez
for Cuban context, 76, 77–79;
Squirru’s retooling of, 187
“Metamorphosis, The” (Kafka), 144,
145
Mexican Americans: HemisFair ’68
and, 39, 181, 190–91, 194, 203–4,
207–8
Mexican art: Cuevas’s implicit rejec-
tion of Mexican nationalist art,
135–36, 138; in Exposición In-
teramericana de Pintura Moderna
in Caracas, 112; Gómez Sicre’s
conflicted relationship to Mexican
art world, 135, 136–38; MoMA
perspective on Cuban art vs.,
80–82; postrevolutionary popu-
larity of, xvii, 8, 45, 58, 228n23;
postwar shift from muralism
to easel painting, 135, 136–38,
283n11. See also Cuevas, José
Luis; Mexican muralism
Mexican Esso Salon, 290n76
mexicanidad, 162
Mexican intellectuals, 136, 266n161;
cosmopolitanist discourse on
Mexican identity and culture,
139; debates about sexuality and
343
national identity, 149, 289n73;
massacre of student demonstra-
tors at Plaza de las Tres Culturas
and, 173; postwar debates of
“universalist” and “nationalist”
positions within, 138–39; progres-
sive internationalist orientation
of, following Mexican Revolu-
tion, xix; responses to Cuevas’s
work, 138–39, 174; support for
Siqueiros, 156
Mexican Liberal Party (Partido Lib-
eral Mexicano), 314n109
Mexican muralism, xvii, 9, 70,
228n23; Barr’s concerns about,
136, 283n14; Cuevas’s “Cactus
Curtain” critique of, 152–58, 159,
292n82; Cuevas’s work as con-
tinuation by other means of, 141;
Gómez Sicre’s indebtedness to,
88; Gómez Sicre’s view of, 17–18,
71–72, 79–80, 82, 264n148; height
of private commissions, 283n15;
influence in the Americas, 112;
as model for artistic production
within the New Deal, 247n18;
moral and educational weight of,
136; transition from dynamic to
codified, official aesthetic, 137
Mexican Revolution (1910–1920),
xvii, xix, 47, 213, 295n108
Mexico: anticommunism in, 138;
Batista regime, 64, 71, 85, 102,
103, 155, 237n55, 267n167;
breach between domestic and
foreign policies (1940–1964),
137–38; Cuba and, 138, 284n23;
Cuevas and crafting of new public
art for, 159–64; Cuevas’s conflicted
reputation in, 150; Cuevas’s sym-
bolic “repatriation” to, 172, 173;
344
“democratic spring” in, 237n55;
displays of Mexican nationalism
at world’s fairs, 181–82; diverse
aesthetic modalities practiced
in 1960s, 167; failings of state’s
“civilizing mission” exposed in
Cuevas’s portraits of urban poor,
158–59; Gómez Sicre on cultural
differences between Cuba and, 79;
Gómez Sicre’s visits to, 65; “Kaf-
kahuamilpa,” Cuevas and Fuen-
tes’s nickname for, 146, 287n66;
Lázaro Cárdenas presidency
(1934–1940), 52, 137, 237n55,
283n20; mestizaje and, 76, 79,
194; nationalization of foreign-
owned petroleum companies
in, 137; Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI), 155, 292n90;
Plaza de las Tres Culturas massacre
of student demonstrators (1968),
173, 191; policy framework for art
as civilizing force provided by, 216;
race mixing in dominant theories
of race developed in, 77; railroad
worker strikes, 137, 138, 155; rise
of middle-class art market and
gallery system in postwar, 283n11;
role in shaping popular U.S.
conceptions of Latin American art,
216; tradition of anti-imperialism,
136, 138; U.S. Punitive Expedition
to (1916), 47; U.S. relations with,
130, 136, 138, 284n23
Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries
(exhibition, 1990), 217
Mexico City: Cuevas’s Mural efímero
in Zona Rosa of, 38, 169–72, 174,
298n140, 298n145, 299n153;
Cuevas’s personal association
of Kafka’s work with, 144, 146;
INDEX
Cuevas’s portraits of the poor
and ill in, 129, 132–33, 142, 144,
158–59; HemisFair branch office
in, 192; Jewish community of,
171–72, 288n68; mural commis-
sion at Centro Médico (Medical
Center), 158; Museo Nacional de
Antropología e Historia in, 194;
Olympic Games (1968) in, 192–94;
San Antonio and, as linked sites,
192–94; la Zona Rosa, 149, 169
Mexico City College, 142
México en la cultura, 135, 151, 159,
290n78, 292n89; Cuevas’s “Cactus
Curtain” in, 152–58, 159, 292n82
Mexico Pavilion at HemisFair ’68,
192, 193, 194, 200
Meyer, Doris, 232n21
Miami, Florida, 187–88
“Mi credo” (Gómez Sicre), 82, 113,
124, 128
Middlebury College: ostracism of
Gómez Sicre by Rodríguez Feo at
(1947), 107–8
Mignolo, Walter, 219, 297n134,
316n10
Miller, Dick, 309n76–77
Miller, Dorothy, 277n69, 278n85
Miller, Nicola, 228n22
Miller, Toby, 287n64, 302n12,
302n18, 313n107, 315n6; concept
of “ethical incompleteness,” 25,
239n72; on corporate citizenship,
217; on cultural citizenship, 28; on
cultural policy, 24, 25, 34, 234n33
Mine Grande Oil Company, 117
Minujín, Marta, 201, 309n75
Miró, Joan, 4, 65
Misrachi, Alberto, 171
Mistral, Gabriela, 8, 47, 52, 101, 105,
232n21, 238n62, 246n12
 INDEX
Mitchell, W. J. T., 238n66
modernism, 65–66, 257n86; aesthetic,
not coterminous with moderniza-
tion, 69; cultural branches of post-
war international organizations as
transfer points of aesthetics, 21;
museum-gallery nexus of Anglo-
European, 29
modernismo (literary movement), 7,
9–10; Rodó’s canonical modernista
essay “Ariel,” 10
modernity: defined as economic vs.
cultural process, challenge to, xi;
modernismo movement as counter-
weight to, 7, 9–10
modernization theory, 37, 215,
280n121; contrast between tradi-
tion and modernity at heart of,
125; culture as central to, xx;
driving concept of evolutionary
social progress spearheaded by
human endeavor, 125; keywords,
126; liberal internationalist current
of, 93; linkages between visual
art and, 13; rise of, xvi, 125–28;
“take-off phase” of development
in, 194, 307n55
MoMA. See Museum of Modern Art
Monsiváis, Carlos, 155, 169, 283n13,
288n71, 288n73, 292n81,
298n145; crónica about Cuevas’s
Mural efímero, 173, 299n153
Moody Bible Institute, 198
Moore, Henry, 206, 268n178
moradas, Las (journal), 19, 144,
237n54
Morales, Armando, 143, 311n88
Moreiras, Alberto, 232n18
Morley, Grace McCann, 57, 255n68
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, 181
Motherwell, Robert, 260n104
345
“Mr. MacLeish: We Are Not Irrespon-
sible,” 51, 249n36
Mudrovcic, María Eugenia, 243n107
Muerte al invasor (Death to the In-
vader) (Siqueiros), 261n112
Mujer con piña (Woman with a Pine-
apple, 1941) (Tamayo), 119
mulatez: in Cuba, 79
Multilateral Fund of Inter-American
Cultural Council, 303n21
mundo, El (newspaper), 64, 65, 82
Mundo nuevo (literary magazine),
33–34
Mural efímero (Ephemeral Mural,
1967) (Cuevas), 38, 169–72, 174,
298n140; breaking “solemnity” as
operative concept for, 298n145;
multiple publics addressed by,
170–72; as part of transnational
youth culture and generational
conflict, 169–70; public unveiling
as first “happening” in Mexico
City, 169, 299n153; as turning
point in artist’s relation to both
PAU and Mexican cultural institu-
tions, 170
muralism. See Mexican muralism
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá,
183
Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas: Ex-
posición Interamericana de Pintura
Moderna in, 92–93, 110, 111–15,
126, 276n66, 276n69
Museo Nacional de Antropología e
Historia (National Museum of An-
thropology and History) (Mexico
City), 194
museum-gallery nexus of Anglo-
European modernism, 29
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),
13, 216, 228n23, 245n7–8; Barr’s
346 INDEX
purchasing trip for (1942), 62–63,
66, 82, 256n76, 265n154; Barr’s
“retirement” from, 44, 245n8,
257n80; collaboration and compe-
tition among PAU and OIAA and,
45–62; d’Harnoncourt at, 57, 112,
255n68; emphasis on transcendent
value, 87; exhibition of Cuban
art (1944), 66, 67; Exposición de
Pintura Contemporánea Norteame-
ricana (Contemporary Painting
of North America, 1941) and,
278n89; Exposición Interameri-
cana de Pintura Moderna in
Caracas and, 111–13; founding of,
45; Gallegos’s presidential staff’s
visit to, 112, 277n72; installation
practices, 279n96; Inter-American
Fund, 44, 87, 112, 256n76,
276n68; International Program of
Circulating Exhibitions, 301n8;
International Publications Pro-
gram, 269n179; Kirstein’s “spying
and buying trip” through Southern
Cone countries for Rockefeller, 70;
Latin American collection at, 87,
269n179, 311n92; New Images of
Man (exhibition), 285n37; OIAA
and, 251n49; permanent collec-
tion, Barr and, 59, 60, 256n72;
perspective on Cuban vs. Mexican
art, 80–82; Primary Documents
series, 235n42; retreat from Latin
American art after Pearl Harbor,
43–44; Rockefeller and, 45–46,
251n49; Rockefeller Founda-
tion grant competition, 56–59;
Siqueiros exhibitions discussed at,
261n113; state-private network
involving, 36, 45–62; Studies in
Latin American Art conference
(1945), 44, 58; Twenty Centuries
of Mexican Art exhibit (1940),
137; works in 32 Artistas de Las
Américas from collection of, 116
Museum of Modern Art of Buenos
Aires, 184
Museum of Modern Art of Latin
America (AMA | Art Museum of
the Americas), 22, 83, 88, 230n3,
231n10, 238n65, 239n70, 304n24
music: Federal Music Project of Works
Progress Administration, 49; Music
and Visual Art Division, PAU,
48–50, 53, 55, 98, 123
Musical Fountain, A (Baschet and
Baschet), 199
nacional, El (newspaper), 113, 114
NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement), xiv, 42–43, 195, 215,
217
Naïve Art of World (exhibition, 1961),
304
Nakian, Ruben, 206
ñañigo (Afrocuban religious leader)
drawings, 263n138
Nass, Raúl, 102, 277n72
National Autonomous University of
Mexico (Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México), 192
National City Bank, 117
national identity and sexuality:
intellectual debates about, 149,
289n73. See also homosexuality
National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA),
Mexico, 136–37, 149–51, 157–58,
175
nationalisms: Gómez Sicre’s “young
American artist’s” escape from,
5–6. See also cultural nationalism
National Museum of Anthropology
 INDEX
and History (Museo Nacional de
Antropología e Historia) (Mexico
City), 194
“national pavilion” model of institu-
tional presentation, 42–43
National School of Fine Arts
(Tegucigalpa, Honduras), 120
National Security Council Report 68
of 1950, 13
NATO, 99
“Nature and Abstract Art” (Schapiro),
68
Navarro, Pascual, 277n79
necropolitics: theory of, 30–31
Negret, Edgar, 268n179, 311n88
Nelken, Margarita, 151, 171, 290n78
neoliberal arts administrator, 5
neoliberalism, xix, 29, 215, 313n107
Neruda, Pablo, 13, 16, 21, 84,
238n60, 267n164, 281n123;
Canto general, 127; Gómez Sicre
and, 65, 127–28; Siqueiros’s escape
from Mexico to Chile through, 70
Nesbitt, Lowell, 311n88
Nevelson, Louise, 206
New Critics, 59
New Day of Democracies, The (El
nuevo día de las democracias)
(Siqueiros), 262n125
New Deal, 35, 44; postwar backlash
against, 98–99; progressive reforms
in Latin America inspired by, 125;
public arts projects, 8, 247n18;
Seeger’s programs for agencies in,
49
New Images of Man (exhibition),
285n37
New International Year Book (1958),
153–54
Newpher, James O., 273n39
New York City: Gómez Sicre in,
347
13, 67–70, 86; Latin American
artists relocating to, in 1960s,
180; Martí’s fin de siècle crónicas
(chronicles) about, 28
New York University: Gómez Sicre’s
short-term fellowship to study art
criticism at, 13, 67, 86
Nierman, Leonardo, 311n88
Ninkovich, Frank A., 25, 125,
227n18, 229n2, 240n74, 242n100,
280n118
Nivin, Steve, 315n4
Nixon, Richard, 196, 270n10
Noel, Martín, 232n20
Noriega, Chon, 208, 312n94
North American Free Trade Agree-
ment (NAFTA), xiv, 42–43, 195,
215, 217
Novedades, México en la cultura
supplement, 135, 151, 159,
290n78, 292n89; Cuevas’s “Cactus
Curtain” in, 152–58, 159, 292n82
Novo, Salvador, 108, 288n69
“Nuestra América” (Martí), 48–49,
233n29, 247n22
Nueva Presencia (New Presence)
artists, 149, 282n9, 288n70,
299n149; Cuevas’s break with,
291n80, 297n136
nuevo día de las democracias, El
(The New Day of Democracies)
(Siqueiros), 262n125
Nunes, Zita, 77, 264n142
Núñez del Prado, Marina, 311n90
OAS. See Organization of American
States
OAS Pavilion at HemisFair ’68,
204–9, 210, 310n83–85; Alliance
for Progress representation at, 204;
artists on display at, 205, 310n88;
348 INDEX
book exhibit, 310n85; Cuban
representation at, 205–6, 311n89;
funding for, 204, 310n83; sales of
publications at, 312n99; sculpture
exhibition in contrast to, 206
Obama, Barack, xiii
Obregón, Alejandro, 5, 128, 143,
268n179, 279n107
Ocampo, Victoria, 52
Office of Inter-American Affairs
(OIAA), xvi, 45, 216, 233n23,
244n5–6; Art Committee, 251n49;
Art Division of, 255n68; collabora-
tion and competition among PAU
and MoMA and, 45–62; commis-
sion for Siqueiros to paint mural
for Cuban-American Cultural Insti-
tute, 71; creation and termination
of, 43, 244n5; cultural diplomacy
for explicit military and economic
ends, 53–54; Cultural Relations
Division, 53, 251n47–49; employee
conflict of interest between PAU
and, 54; film projects funded by,
250n43; funding of, 53; Inter-
American Music Center funding
from, 49, 248n27; key role in
funding PAU programs, 54–56;
MoMA projects under OIAA
contracts, 251n49; music and art
programs, 53–54; origins of, 53;
reorganization in 1943, 56; Science
and Education Division, 53; shift
in priorities before and after Pearl
Harbor, 43, 53, 251n48; State De-
partment and, 43, 55–56, 250n45,
251n46; state-private network
involving, 36, 45–62; title changes,
244n5; total expenditures from
inception to dissolution, 250n45
Office of the Coordinator of Inter-
American Affairs, 117
O’Gorman, Edmundo, 51, 250n36
O’Gorman, Juan, 192, 200, 201,
310n83
OIAA. See Office of Inter-American
Affairs
Oldenburg, Claes, 309n75
Olea, Héctor, 300n155
Oliver, María Rosa, 47, 52, 247n16,
255n65
olvidados, Los (The Young and the
Damned) (Buñuel), 158, 294n104
Olympic Games (Mexico City, 1968),
192–94
Onganía dictatorship in Argentina,
242n99
Onís, Juan de, 234n34
Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico,
121
Operation Pan-America, 270n10
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 165
Ordman, Elaine, 258n92
Orfila, Alejandro, 178, 218, 230n3,
300n2, 315n7
Organization of American States
(OAS), 230n8; as administrator of
Alliance for Progress, 13, 164–65;
adoption of Regional Program for
Cultural Development, 315n7; cold
war Latin Americanism in, 89–93;
comprehensive regional policy on
education, science, and culture for,
184–85, 303n21; Cultural Affairs
Department of, headquartered
in Mexico City, 83, 266n162;
cultural arm of, success of, 22–23;
cultural charter, lack of, 27, 94, 96,
187, 271n18–19; cultural policy
at, 26–27; Economic and Social
Council, 303n21; establishment
of, 90; evolution from tool of U.S.
policy to increasingly anti-U.S. or-
ganization, 179; expulsion of Cuba
 INDEX
from, 178, 205–6, 236n45, 301n3;
fascination with U.S. Latino cit-
ies in 1960s, 187–88; founding
documents of, 26–27; investment
in U.S. Latino populations after
HemisFair and Maracay, 217–18;
Latin American cities included in
travels of Division Personnel, 167,
168; Lleras Camargo’s reorganiza-
tion of PAU in relation to major
branches of, 93–94, 95; motives
for establishing, 241n89; organiza-
tional charts (1949 and 1962), 96;
Pan American Union as General
Secretariat of, 3, 90; Pan American
Union as headquarters of, 37,
87; Professorship Program, 165;
Rockefeller and cold war mission
for, 45–46; Secretaría de Educación
Pública (SEP; Secretariat of Public
Education) in Mexico City, 93;
training workshops for cultural ad-
ministrators, 218, 315n8; uneven
power dynamic within, 32; U.S.
interventionist policy objectives
pursued through, 178–79. See also
Inter-American Cultural Council,
OAS; Pan American Union
Orlando, Felipe, 67, 142, 286n47–48
Orozco, José Clemente, xvii, xviii, 45,
112, 264n140; Cuevas’s encounter
with, 160–62; Cuevas’s shared af-
finities with, 140, 141, 157; Gómez
Sicre’s admiration for, 65, 71, 80
Ortiz, Fernando, 65, 77–78, 250n36,
258n89, 264n143; cubanía as
defined by, 258n86; on race rela-
tions in Cuba, 51; as “spiritual
father” of modernist intellectuals,
257n86; study of Cuban monocrop
economy, 78
Ortiz de Rozas, Marilú, 267n165
349
Ortodoxo Party (Cuba), 102
Osuna, Ramón, 86, 110, 236n45
Osver, Arthur, 276n69
Otero, Alejandro, 22, 115, 116,
128, 143, 280n109, 311n88; Los
Disidentes (the Dissidents) and,
277n79; solo exhibition at PAU
(1948), 114
Otra Figuración group, 173, 300n155
Oxford Art Journal, 261n104
Paalen, Wolfgang, 237n54
Pacheco, María Luisa, 311n88
Padilla, Heberto, 293n94
Painter of the Grimace (El pintor del
rictus) (Gamboa), 162
Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City),
161
Palerm, Angel, 238n62
Palés Matos, Luis, 65
Palmer, Timothy James, 190, 304n34
PanAgra, 42
Panama Congress (1826), xv
Pan American Airways, 42, 117
Pan American Conferences
(1889–1891): first, xii; goodwill
railroad tour of United States in
1889 prior to, xvi; Martí’s denun-
ciation of, 227n15, 231n17; Pan
American Union and, 1, 2; Seventh
(1933), 48
Pan American Day, xiii
Pan American Highway, xii
panamericanism, 213, 314n111
Pan Americanism, xii–xiii, xv–xvi;
“age of” (1890–1940), xii–xiii, 6,
8, 10; diverging motives of U.S.
and Latin America for embracing,
92; elite, 211–12, 213; foun-
dational figures, 11; interplay
between Latin Americanism and,
11, 33; legacy of cold war, 175;
350 INDEX
legacy of Pan American cultural
policy, 216–19; Points of View
and, 51–52; popular counterpart
(panamericanism), 213, 314n111;
postwar stigma as “haven for
isolationists” of, 91; “rational-
mystical character” of hemispheric
exceptionalism underwriting, 91;
scholars’ use of term, 314n111
Pan American Union (PAU), 1–40;
artists having first solo show
abroad at, 5; careerism at, 98;
collaboration and competition
among OIAA and MoMA and,
45–62; Columbus Memorial
Library, 6, 8; complex, 230n3;
continental canon formation at,
8–9; Cuevas as “young artist” at,
129–39; Cuevas’s 1954 exhibit
at, 37–38, 142–43, 157, 158–59,
281n1, 281n6, 294n103; Cuevas’s
solo exhibitions after 1954 debut,
299n151; cultural policy at,
intellectual foundations of, 26;
curatorial gatekeeping practices
at, 157–58; diverse interests and
historical institutional practices in
cultural programs of mid-1940s,
44–45; dynamism and innova-
tion among low-level employees,
46; employee conflict of interest
between OIAA and, 54; founda-
tions of, 1–2; as general secretariat
of OAS, 3, 90; as headquarters of
OAS, 37, 87; heterotopic dimen-
sions of, 238n62; intellectuals at,
8, 93–94; Latin Americanism at,
6–7, 12, 15, 22, 33, 59, 97, 98,
183, 194; latinoamericanismo
rooted in nineteenth-century hu-
manism, 59, 88; Lleras Camargo
as director general of, 89–98;
location of, 1, 2, 229n1; loyalty
oaths and screening procedures of
early 1950s, 21, 99–100; Museum
of Modern Art of Latin America
(AMA | Art Museum of Ameri-
cas), 22, 83, 88, 230n3, 231n10,
238n65, 239n70, 304n24; Music
and Visual Art Division, 48–50,
53, 55, 98, 123; Office of Cul-
tural, Scientific, and Informational
Affairs at, 184; Office of Educa-
tion, 46–47; Office of Intellectual
Cooperation, 117; OIAA’s key role
in funding programs of, 54–56;
Otero’s solo exhibition at (1948),
114; profits on sales of art at
exhibitions of, 165, 166; recruit-
ment of Gómez Sicre as Switzer’s
successor at, 86–88; Rockefeller
Foundation funding of develop-
ment of archive on Latin American
art, 56–62, 253n60; similarities
between INBA and, in construc-
tion of lo nuestro (that which is
ours), 175; state-private network
involving, 36, 45–62; strategy for
cultivating “International Mind,”
2–3, 229n2
Pan American Union, Department of
Cultural Affairs, 11–12, 93–94, 97,
100, 230n10; Alliance for Progress
and, 164–65; as domain of espíritu
(spirit), 184; socially conscious
currents of Catholicism deployed
by, 308n68; Squirru as director of,
184; Zéndegui as adjunct director
for Cultural Affairs, 184, 300n1
Pan American Union, Division of In-
tellectual Cooperation, xx, 46–49,
230n10, 246n12; major publica-
 INDEX
tions from late 1930s and 1940s,
62; Romero James at, 41, 47–52,
55–56, 247n20
Pan American Union, Visual Arts Divi-
sion: elite strategies for cultural
citizenship, 211; experimenta-
tion with collaboration between
commercial and aesthetic sectors,
203; Maracay and decentralization
of networks, 185; retrenchment
and reorganization during 1960s,
179–80, 183–88
Pan American Union, Visual Arts
Section, 8, 11, 12, 13, 96, 230n8,
303n20; accounts of, 234n36;
break with Good Neighbor
Policy cultural exchange programs,
124–25; decline of influence in late
1960s, 30, 38–39; distinct histori-
cal periods of, 34–35; Gómez Sicre
as chief of, 3–7, 12–13, 27, 35,
86–88, 230n10; Gómez Sicre’s
early postwar arts projects in
Latin American locations, 110–22;
growth in 1961, 165–66, 296n132;
invention of Latin American art,
8–9, 29, 39, 59, 88; programs,
12–40; programs, unusual or
unpredictable alliances resulting
from, 22–24; protagonistic role in
brokering corporate, political, and
artistic linkages in postwar period,
43–44; as stronghold of culturalist
Latin Americanism, 6–7, 12; view
of hemisphere, 5
Pan American Union at the Service of
Visual Arts in America, The (Unión
Panamericana al servicio de las
artes visuales en América, La),
61–62
Pan American Union Salons, 122, 124
351
Panofsky, Erwin, 13, 67–68, 261n104
Panorama (Correio, Correo), 62
Pantin, Yolanda, 277n78
Parisian art world, 114, 124; Los
Disidentes, Venezuelan artists in,
277n79
Parra, Gabriel, 298n144
Parsons, Talcott, 59, 125
Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican
Liberal Party), 314n109
Partido Revolucionario Institucional
(PRI), 155, 292n90
Partisans of Peace Conference (1949),
238n60
PAU. See Pan American Union
Payró, Julio, 232n20
Paz, Octavio, 21, 43, 138, 139, 244n4,
284n25, 288n71, 289n73
peace movement, early twentieth-
century, 1–2
Pedrosa, Mário, 17
Peláez, Amelia, 67, 73, 259n98,
265n154
Pelle, Kimberly D., 302n11, 314n1
Peña, Jesse, 306n48
Penalba, Alicia, 311n90
Pentagon, 191
PepsiCo, 183
Pérez, Louis A., Jr., 237n55, 242n102
Pérez Cisneros, Guy, 259n98
Pérez de Miles, Adetty, 225
Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 115, 154
Pérez-Oramas, Luis Enrique, 311n92
performative aspects of art and
diplomacy: SPU’s engagement
with, xix
Perls, Amelia, 258n90
Perón regime in Argentina, 46, 154,
245n11
Personas (magazine), 135
Peru: “democratic spring” of
352 INDEX
Bustamante y Rivero presidency,
106
Pescatello, Ann M., 238n60, 248n29,
249n32, 272n28
Pettoruti, Emilio, 59, 112, 117, 120
Philadelphia Museum College of Art,
145
Philip Morris Industries, 42
Piazza, Luis Guillermo, 169, 172,
288n71, 298n142, 299n149
Picasso, Pablo, 114, 140, 171, 206,
238n60, 259n93, 263n138,
268n178; Gómez Sicre and, 16, 65,
102; Lam as protégé of, 66
Pierson, Harry H., 260n101
Pike, Frederick B., 227n19, 232n19
Pinochet, Augusto, 84, 267n164
pintor del rictus, El (Painter of the
Grimace) (Gamboa), 162
Pintura cubana de hoy (Cuban Paint-
ing Today) (Gómez Sicre), 66–67,
75, 240n84, 259n96, 259n98,
263n138
Pitol, Sergio, 288n71
plantation economy: Siqueiros’s
Alegoría as caricature of, 76
Platt Amendment, 27, 64
Plaza de las Tres Culturas massacre
of student demonstrators (1968),
173, 191
Plaza Lasso, Galo, 46
Plettner, David, 315n4
Plumed Serpent, The (La serpiente
enplumada) (Valdivieso), 208, 209
Point Four program, 91
Points of View (publication series),
50–52, 62, 249n34
Poleo, Héctor, 112, 117
Polesello, Rogelio, 311n88
Política (magazine), 156
political art, 72, 267n164; Gómez
Sicre’s antipathy toward committed
art, 18, 70–85, 88. See also social
realism
Political Prisoner (Preso político)
(Estopiñán), 205
politicization of everyday life, 31
Pollock, Jackson, xvii
Ponce de León, Fidelio, 67, 73, 142,
259n98
Poniatowska, Elena, 155–56, 289n73,
293n94, 296n120, 297n137
Poole, Sean M., 259n93
pop art, 170, 185
Pope, Annemarie Henle, 23
Popular Front, 44, 260n104, 267n167
Portinari, Candido, 112
Portner, Leslie. See Switzer, Leslie Judd
Portocarrero, René, 67, 73, 265n154
poster art, 71, 191, 262n120,
265n156, 308n71
Poster Considered as Art, The (“El
cartel considerado como arte”)
(Gómez Sicre), 71, 262n120
Pound, Ezra, 143
“Poupées de Paris, Les” (marionette
act at HemisFair ’68), 198
Poveda, Carlos, 274n45
poverty: Mexican, depictions of, 144,
158–59, 294n104; U.S. Pavillion
(HemisFair) acknowledgment of
U.S., 191; War on Poverty, 191
Pratt, Mary Louise, 12, 233n31
Prebisch, Raúl, 179
pre-Columbian art, 19, 65, 192, 200
Preso político (Political Prisoner)
(Estopiñán), 205
PRI, 155, 292n90
Prieto, Antonio, 298n141
Primera Exposición de Arte Nuevo
(First Exhibition of New Art,
1927), 66–67
 INDEX
Prío Socarrás, Carlos, 103
“Problems of Research and Docu-
mentation in Contemporary Art”
(Barr), 256n71
professionalization, 17
Progressive Era, 191
Project Y at HemisFair ’68, 201–2
Prometheus (Orozco), 264n140
Prutsch, Ursula, 244n5
public art: Cuevas and crafting of
new, for Mexico, 159–64
Puerto Rican art, 16
Puerto Rico: Operation Bootstrap
(U.S. export processing industrial-
ization program) in, 121; as quasi-
colonial territory of the United
States, 27
Punta del Este Summit (1967), 196,
308n66
que vieron la luna, I y II, Los (Those
Who Saw the Moon, I And II)
(Forner), 186
Quintanilla del Valle, Luis, 130, 131,
158, 238n62, 282n8
Quiroga, José, 107–8, 275n52–53
Rabe, Stephen, 234n34
race: civil rights era and, xiii, 190–91;
guajiro (white or mixed-race
peasant) and Afrocuban cultures
as dual bases of cubanía, 77–79;
racism as explanation of reactions
to Siqueiros’s Alegoría, 75. See also
mestizaje
railroad worker strikes in Mexico,
137, 138, 155
Rama, Angel, 228n22
Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 236n42,
300n155
Ramos, Julio, 33, 34, 228n22,
353
231n18, 233n25, 233n30,
313n100, 316n10; on crisis of
liberal notion of representativity,
219; on Latin Americanism, 10–11,
27, 209; on modernistas, 7, 9
Ramos, Samuel, 289n73
Rangel, Gabriela, 235n42
rapto de las mulatas, El (The Abduc-
tion of the Mulatas) (Enríquez), 79
Rashkin, Elissa J., 282n8
Rattner, Abraham, 306n46
Raymont, Henry, 289n74
raza cósmica, La (The Cosmic Race)
(Vasconcelos), 217
Raza Unida, La, 190
Reading for Teachers (Lectura para
maestros), 62
Reagan, Ronald, 83, 267n163
Realidad y alucinación de José Luis
Cuevas (Reality and Hallucina-
tions: José Luis Cuevas) (OAS),
162–63, 164, 296n119–20
Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Cur-
rents in South American Drawing
(1997 exhibition), 299n155
Recinos, Efraín, 311n90
Red Scare, 16, 21, 37, 92, 98–103,
128
Reed, Alma, xviii
Rees, Helen, 248n26
regionalism, 6, 126; European
regional identity, development
of, 25–26; postwar, perceived as
outdated, 91; UN Charter and
regional security pacts, 245n11
regional model of institutional presen-
tation, 42–43
Regional Program for Cultural Devel-
opment, 315n7
región más transparente, La (Where
the Air Is Clear) (Fuentes), 162
354 INDEX
Reich, Cary, 245n11, 276n64, 284n20
relational aesthetics, 226n2
Rendón, Manuel, 124
Republican Party: postwar backlash
against New Deal, 98–99
“republic of letters” model, 33
Revista de Avance (magazine), 259n97
Rexach, Rosario, 258n89
Reyes, Alfonso, 47
Rich, Daniel Catton, 9–10, 11, 26,
233n23
Riestra, Bertha, 156
Rindge, Agnes, 255n66–67
Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 124
Rio Treaty, The, 90, 230n8
Rise of Creative Class, The (Florida),
39, 216–17
Rivera, Diego, 45, 59, 65, 112,
228n23; dismissal of Cuevas’s
work, 289n73; Gómez Sicre’s cri-
tique of, 71, 80; influence of, xvii;
public murals commissioned under
Calles, Schapiro’s study of, 69
Robbins, Stanton, 257n77
Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich, 45, 306n46
Rockefeller, Nelson A., xvi, xvii,
36, 52, 71, 233n23, 242n100,
252n49–50; anticommunism as
rationale for inter-American system
of governance, 245n11; Barr’s rec-
ommendation of Gómez Sicre to,
62; business interests in Venezuela,
111, 115; career in public service
of, 245n10; conversation with
Cárdenas, 137, 283n20; “demo-
cratic spring” in Venezuela and,
111; Exposición Interamericana
de Pintura Moderna in Caracas
and, 112; foreign aid propos-
als for Latin America, 276n64;
inter-American diplomacy, 45–46;
involvement in PAU, 45–46;
Kirstein’s “spying and buying trip”
through Southern Cone countries
for, 70; Lleras and, 46, 90, 97;
MoMA and, 45–46, 251n49;
MoMA and, Inter-American Fund
endowment, 87, 112, 256n76,
276n68; Office of the Coordinator
of Inter-American Affairs, 117; rise
of modernization theory and, 126;
Welles and, 250n46; work on UN
Charter, 245n11. See also Office of
Inter-American Affairs
Rockefeller Foundation, 50, 232n20;
funding of Points of View, 249n34;
grant competition between PAU
and MoMA, 56–62, 253n60;
grant to Basadre to return to Peru
(1950), 106; Library of Congress
project and, 254n63
Rodman, Selden, 140, 141, 146,
282n9, 289n73, 299n149
Rodó, José Enrique, 7, 10, 233n24
Rodríguez, José, 107–8
Rodríguez, Mariano, 67, 73, 80,
265n154
Rodríguez Bolufé, Olga María, 70,
261n111, 263n135
Rodríguez Feo, José, 107–8, 275
Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 34
Rodríguez Prampolini, Ida, 138,
282n9
Rojas Arévalo, Armando, 288n71
Romañach, Leopoldo, 259n98
Romero Brest, Jorge, 17
Romero James, Concha, 35, 36,
39, 87, 188, 216, 232n21, 244,
247n21, 250n38, 253n61, 255n68;
aptitude for diplomacy, 47–48; ar-
chival paper trail, 47; avant-garde
movements and, 212; background,
 INDEX
47, 49; as Basadre’s special advisor
and PAU liaison to UNESCO in
field of education, 97–98, 101;
at Columbia University, 246n14;
cultivation of hemispheric feminist
network, 105; at Exposición In-
teramericana de Pintura Moderna
in Caracas, 111; falling out with
Gómez Sicre, 101; life dates,
246n13; “Mexicanization” of
cultural diplomacy at PAU, 48–49;
obituary, 246n14; at PAU Divi-
sion of Intellectual Cooperation
(1933–1947), 41, 47–52, 247n20;
perspective on Latin American art,
8–9, 58–59, 206; Points of View
developed by, 50–52, 62, 249n34;
publications, 247n15; Red Scare
and, 100–101; rejected funding
request to OIAA, 250n39; Rock-
efeller Foundation funding for
development of archive on Latin
American art, 56–62; Sunday af-
ternoon gatherings in Washington,
D.C. (1944–1946), 255n65
Ronning, C. Neale, 242n105
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 47
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 45, 48
Ross, Camille M., 252n49
Rostow, W. W., 125, 196, 217,
280n121, 307n55, 315n3
Rowe, Leo Stanton, 253n55,
253n60–61; death of, 87, 89; as
director general of PAU, 3, 55,
230n7, 232n21, 246n12
Rubenstein, Anne, 295n110
Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo, 137
“Ruptura, La” (The Rupture), 138,
173
Russ, Elizabeth Christine, 264n143
Russell, John, 260n104
355
Ruta de la Amistad (Route of Friend-
ship), 192
Rydell, Robert W., 302n11, 305n41,
314n1
Sabogal, José, 143, 232n20
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
(Mexico City), 75, 261n111
Salas Anzures, Miguel, 290n76
Salas Marchán, Maximiliano, 49
Saldívar, José David, 227n15
Salmón, Agustín, 299n152
Salvatore, Ricardo D., 6, 230n7,
231n16, 235n39
Samuelson, Fred, 200
San Antonio, Texas: African Ameri-
cans in, 190–91, 305n40; connec-
tions between housing discrimina-
tion and poverty draft in, 306n48;
cross-border activism in, at same
time as HemisFair, 213; as hub
for different concepts of trans-
american citizenship, 213; impact
of HemisFair ’68 on, 188–96,
305n41; Mexico City and, as
linked sites, 192–94; new status as
heart of Texan “cultural conflu-
ence” or mestizaje, 194–95; post-
HemisFair campaign to nurture its
creative class, 217; power struggles
between liberal and conservative
wings of Democratic Party in,
189–90; as strategic point in Hemi-
sphere, Zéndegui on, 187–88. See
also HemisFair ’68 (San Antonio)
“San Antonio’s Example” (Zéndegui),
187–88
San Fernando Cathedral (San An-
tonio): Mass in honor of Latin
American and OAS ambassadorial
corps in (1967), 196
356 INDEX
San Francisco Conference, UN (1945),
89, 245n11
San Francisco Museum of Art, 255n68
Sanjurjo, Annick, 234n36, 277n79
Santiago de Chile, response to SPU in,
xiv, xv
São Paulo Bienales, 17, 109, 122, 124,
183; Fifth (1959), 143, 150–51,
154
Saunders, Frances Stonor, 234n33,
302n9
Schapiro, Meyer, 127, 238n60,
261n105; disillusionment with
Soviet Union, 260n104; influence
on Gómez Sicre, 13, 67–70; op-
position to World War II, 260n104;
on social function of art, 69
School of Panamerican Unrest
(SPU) project (Helguera), xi–xv;
community-building potential of
collaborative work stressed by,
xiii; concepts of “school,” xix;
divergent local interpretations of
basic keywords, xiv; Helguera’s
intellectual inspirations for,
xvii–xviii; iconography, xii, 226n5;
infrastructure making possible,
xii; institutionality of, xiii, xix–xx;
local hosts of, 226n2; position of
art and artists within hemispheric
cultural diplomacy and, xvii–xx;
rationale for, xi; sponsors of,
225n1; three temporalities coalesc-
ing in, xii; unanticipated obstacles
to, xiii; visits to host locations, xii
Schreiber, Rebecca M., 284n21,
284n23
Seattle Century 21 Exposition (1962),
302n11
Secretaría de Educación Pública, 216
Seeger, Charles, 49–50, 52, 53, 87,
238n60, 248n27–28, 249n33,
252n52, 272n27; academic career,
248n25; Boletín de Música y Artes
Visuales founded by, 280n109; dis-
may over postwar plans, 249n31;
under Lleras administration, 98; at
PAU Music and Visual Arts Divi-
sion, 49–50, 53, 55; Red Scare and,
98, 100, 101; as theoretician, 50
Seeger, Pete, 100, 248n25
Sefchovich, Víctor, 298n148
Segal, George, 206
Segovia, Tomás, 288n71
Seguín, Olivier, 311n90
Self-Portrait during a Reading of
Kafka (Cuevas), 145
Self-Portrait in a Concentration Camp
(Autorretrato en un campo de
exterminio) (Cuevas), 172
Semana (news magazine), 89
Sennett, Mack, 297n139
serpiente enplumada, La (The Plumed
Serpent) (Valdivieso), 208, 209
sexuality: national identity and,
intellectual debates about, 149,
289n73; value hierarchies of
gender and, 108–9. See also
homosexuality
Shahn, Ben, 306n46
Shalem, Avinoam, 300n159
Shapiro, David and Cecile, 236n51
Shifter, Michael, 271n13, 296n125,
301n4
Shils, Edward, 125
Shinki, Venancio, 311n88
Sicre, Doña Guillermina, 63, 104
Sicre, Juan José, 63, 165, 205
Siempre! (newspaper), 290n78
“silent interval” (1946–1951), 18
Silvan Simone Gallery, West Los
Angeles, 297n139
Sims, Lowery Stokes, 66, 79, 258n93
Sinkin, William, 188, 190
 INDEX
Siqueiros, David Alfaro, xvii, xviii,
13, 54, 113, 228n23, 256n73,
261n113, 262n115, 262n125,
265n150, 284n23, 288n73; assas-
sination attempt against Trotsky
and, 70, 262n114, 264n148; in
Chile, 70; Chillán murals, 70, 74,
75, 261n112; criticisms of muralist
movement and of Rivera’s work,
80; Cuevas and, 135, 143, 156,
172–73, 174; Gómez Sicre’s po-
lemic with, 17–18, 36, 70–85, 88,
134, 264n148, 289n74, 289n474;
imprisonment for “social dissolu-
tion” in Mexico, 138, 156, 174,
289n76; lecture in Anfiteatro
Municipal de la Habana, 262n121;
mural for Gómez Mena, 36–37,
72, 73–80; OIAA commission to
paint mural for Cuban-American
Cultural Institute, 71; parallels
between Gómez Sicre and, 80; per-
mutation of mestizaje into mulatez
for Cuban context, 76, 77–79; role
as intellectual in contrast to Car-
reño and Gómez Sicre, 84–85; visa
to United States revoked, 70–71
Siqueiros en el extranjero (virtual ex-
hibition, 2006), 261n111, 262n121
Slaughter, Anne Marie, 239n68
Slaughter, Joseph R., 240n74, 248n24,
295n115
Smith, Adam, 10
Smith, Carlton Sprague, 253n55
Smith, David, 206
Smith, Joseph, 227n17
Smith, Peter H., 282n7, 284n22
Smith, Robert C., 254n61, 254n63,
255n68
social realism: abstractionist turn
in Venezuela over, 115; crisis in
1950s, 18–19; Gómez Sicre’s
357
animus toward, 17–18, 22, 37,
75–76, 83; states’ promotion of,
as official aesthetic, 83–84, 154;
Zhdanovism, 80, 83, 140. See also
Mexican muralism
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
180
“Somewhere outside Duc Pho”
(Cano), 306
Sommer, Doris, xv
Sörenson, Christian, 242n99, 243n115
Sorenson, Diana, 243n107
Soto, Jesús Rafael, 311n90
Soupault, Phillippe, 285n34, 285n43
Soviet Union: Cuban vanguardia ex-
hibition Cuban embassy in (1945),
82, 109–10, 265n156; Cuevas’s
analogy between Mexico and, 153;
invasion of Hungary (1956), 18;
Schapiro’s disillusionment with,
260n104; Zhdanovism and, 80,
83, 140
Spaeth, Carl B., 253n55
Spanish colonialism: Gómez Sicre on,
106
Spanish-Cuban-American War (1898),
6, 7, 27, 85, 240n82–83; Latin
American generation of, 7; trans-
american solidarity movements
after, 29–30
Spencer, Herbert L., 41–42, 244n1
Spenser, Daniela, 32, 237n55
sponsorship. See corporate
sponsorship
SPU. See School of Panamerican Un-
rest (SPU) project (Helguera)
Squirru, Rafael, 35, 165, 238n62,
296n127, 304n25–26; back-
ground, 302n19; as consultant for
HemisFair, 39, 180, 200–203, 204,
208, 308n71, 309n75, 310n85;
as director of PAU Department of
358 INDEX
Cultural Affairs, 184; embrace of
emerging aesthetic modes, 185–86;
ideological values, 186–87; socially
conscious currents of Catholicism
deployed by, 308n68
Stalin, Josef, 80
Stalinism: revelations at Twentieth
Party Congress about, 18–19
Standard Oil Company, 41–42; Esso
Salons of Young Artists and,
42, 177–78, 183, 206, 290n76,
302n18; Latin American subsidiar-
ies, 45, 137
Staniszewski, Mary Anne, 279n96
State Department, U.S.: African
American jazz musicians sent on
international tours by, 174; cultural
exchange programs targeted at
Latin American intellectuals and
social leaders, 7–8; “disinterested”
approach to cultural diplomacy, 53;
Division of Cultural Relations of,
251n49; funding for art programs,
252n49; OIAA and, 43, 55–56,
250n45, 251n46; recruitment of
Seeger, 49; Red Scare and, 98–100
state-private network, 36, 45–62;
cultural exchanges as part of, 48,
232n20
Stephen, Lynn, 313n107
Stephens, David H., 254n63
Stevens, David H., 249n34, 254n61,
255n68, 256n74
Steves, Marshall, 305n41
Still Life: Le Jour (Braque), 144
Stoetzer, Carlos Otto, 233n28
Stoler, Ann Laura, 233n29
Stridentists (Los Estridentistas), 130,
282n8
Studies in Latin American Art confer-
ence (MoMA, 1945), 44, 58
Studies of Kafka and His Father
(Cuevas), 145
Suárez Suárez, Orlando, 235n39,
290n76
Sugar Cane Cutters (Carreño), 80, 81
Sukarno, Ahmed, 285n30
Sur (Argentine journal), 52
Suro, Darío, 311n88
surrealism, 237n54, 287n56; journals
with ties to international move-
ment, 19
Surrealism in Latin America workshop
(Getty Research Institute, 2009),
236n54
survey exhibition model, 122–23
Swartz, Arnold “Pic,” 202, 203,
306n49, 310n78
Switzer, Leslie Judd (aka Portner,
Ahlander), 41–42, 56, 244n1–2,
252n53, 254n63–64, 255n68,
274n43; as art critic for Wash-
ington Post, 87, 269n181; career
during World War II, 54; criticism
of indigenismo, 118–19; departure
from PAU, 86; falling out be-
tween Gómez Sicre and, 269n182;
grant-funded work with PAU art
materials, 57, 59, 62; loyalty to
Barr, 57–58; as member of PAU
Art Acquisitions Committee, 88;
recruitment of Gómez Sicre as suc-
cessor at PAU, 86–88
Sykes, Maltby, 306n46
Szyszlo, Fernando de, 1, 5, 22, 23,
27, 128, 143, 165, 229, 237n54,
243n108, 280n109
Tábara, Enrique, 311n88
Taffet, Jeffrey F., 234n34, 302n10,
313n103
Taller de Gráfica Popular, El, 289n75
 INDEX
Taller Libre de Arte, El (Free Art
Workshop), 114, 116, 277n79
Tamayo, Rufino, xviii, 19, 119, 124,
138, 284n25; HemisFair ’68 proj-
ect, 200, 202
Taniya, Kyn. See Quintanilla del Valle,
Luis
Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version)
(Bruguera), xix
tejano expressive cultures at
HemisFair ’68, 207–8
Tenayuca, Emma, 213, 314n109
Tenorio Trillo, Mauricio, 181–82, 193,
302n13
Tepatatles, Los (cabaret act), 169
Third World: in cold war, 11, 21, 29,
30, 126; common bases of oppres-
sion with U.S. minorities, 29, 213;
three worlds concept and, 91
32 Artistas de las Américas (32 Artists
of the Americas, 1949–1950), 37,
92–93, 110, 116–22, 279n101;
artists and styles represented in,
116–17, 118, 119; corporate spon-
sorship of, 110, 116, 118; Gómez
Sicre’s exhibitionary techniques,
120; Gómez Sicre’s personal cor-
respondence regarding, 121–22;
modern art cast as harbinger of
economic development in, 126;
precedent for, 278n89; rationale
for tour, 118; similarities between
Caracas exhibit and, 116–17; tour
itinerary of, 116, 118; venues used
for installation of, 120–21, 278n87
3,500 Years of Colombian Art (exhibi-
tion, 1960), 303n24
Thompson, Norma S., 253n60
three worlds concept, 91
Tibol, Raquel, 151, 167, 282n10,
284n26, 290n78, 300
359
Time magazine: coverage of Cuevas’s
PAU exhibition (1954), 143
Tlatelolco: massacre of student dem-
onstrators at, 173, 191
Tobin, Robert, 202
Todo en rosa (All in Rose, 1943)
(Mérida), 119
Tomasello, Luis, 206
Torres Bodet, Jaime, 238n62
Torres García, Joaquín, 112, 311n88
totalitarianism: association of
Cuevas’s Los funerales with,
154
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 65, 139
Tower of the Americas (HemisFair
’68), 181, 188, 198, 200–201
Toyota, Yutaka, 311n88
Traba, Marta, 22, 24, 83, 238n65,
239n70, 242n99, 266n160,
280n109, 282n9, 285n39, 288n71;
on Cuevas, 140–41
trade liberalization: HemisFair and
vision of borderless continent
achieved through, 182; NAFTA,
42–43, 215, 217; San Antonio as
“funnel” between North and South
America poised for hemispheric,
195. See also free trade
Treaty on Pacific Settlement (1948),
90, 230n8
Trial, The (Kafka), 144, 146
Tropics of Desire (Quiroga), 107–8,
275n52
Trotsky, Leon, 69, 80, 261n104; as-
sassination attempt on (1940), 70,
262n114, 264n148
Trubowitz, Lara, 261n104
Truman, Harry S., 45, 90, 245n10;
Point Four program, 91
Truman Doctrine of 1947, 13, 90,
270n3
360 INDEX
Tuyá, Juan E., 204, 208, 310n86–87,
312n96–99
Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art
(MoMA exhibition, 1940), 137
Two Mountain Peaks of America:
Lincoln and Martí (Dos cumbres
de América: Lincoln y Martí)
(Siqueiros), 71
Unión Panamericana al servicio de las
artes visuales en América, La (The
Pan American Union at the Service
of Visual Arts in America), 61–62
“United Fruit Co., La” (Neruda), 127
United Fruit Company, 110, 116, 118,
127, 278n87
United Nations (UN), 179; employee
“suitability” guidelines, 99; global
multilateralism represented by, 91;
San Francisco Conference (1945),
89, 245n11
United Nations Education, Scien-
tific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), 27, 99, 101, 249n31,
255n68
United States: bifurcation between
transamerican literary sphere and
isolationist, monolingual political
one, xv; CIA, 13, 130, 136, 178,
180, 220, 273n39, 282n8, 301n9;
cultural diplomacy, xvi–xx, 2–3,
6–8, 14, 25, 30–31, 52–56, 126,
242n100; domestic urban renewal,
HemisFair’s connection of foreign
development to, 210–11; expan-
sion and interventions in Latin
America and the Caribbean, 26,
27–28, 31–32, 63; Good Neighbor
Policy, xvi, xvii, xx, 7–11, 13, 31,
35, 36, 43–44, 45–62, 112–13,
124–25, 216, 232n19, 232n20;
interventionist policy objectives
pursued through OAS, 178–79;
Pan American movement, xii–xiii,
xv–xvi, 11
United States Pavilion at HemisFair
’68, 191
universalism: American variation on
Kantian, 26; Cuevas and, 139, 146,
172; Gómez Sicre’s universalist
claims about contemporary Latin
American art, 15, 45, 126, 146,
172; postwar debates of “univer-
salist” and “nationalist” positions
among Mexican intellectuals,
138–39
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México (National Autonomous
University of Mexico), 192
Urban League of Greater Dallas,
305n44
U.S. Department of Education, 54
U.S. Information Agency, 204; Project
Pedro, 174, 299n148, 300n157
U.S. Punitive Expedition to Mexico
(1916), 47
USS Maine incident, 240n82
U.S. State Department. See State De-
partment, U.S.
Valdés, Carlos, 288n71
Valdivieso, Raúl, 208, 209, 311n88
Vallejo, César, 27
vanguardia. See Cuban vanguardia
Vargas, Getulio, 46
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 33, 243n108
Vasconcelos, José, xv, xvii–xviii, 39,
216, 217, 244n117
Velásquez, José Antonio, 311n88
Venezuela: abstractionist turn in,
over social realism, 115; Acción
Democrática movement in,
110–11, 115; “democratic spring”
in, 110–15; Exposición Interameri-
 INDEX
cana de Pintura Moderna (1948) in
Caracas, 92–93, 110, 111–15, 126,
276n66, 276n69
Veríssimo, Erico, 8, 130, 131, 238n62,
282n8, 308n68
Vickers, Sue Bitners, 305n34
Vidal, Gore, 179
Vietnam War, 191, 195; Archbishop
Lucey’s sermon on, 196–97,
308n68
Villa, Pancho, 47
violencia, la, 270n5
Visconti, Luchino, 274n46
Visual Arts Section, PAU. See Pan
American Union, Visual Arts
Section
Vitier, Cintio, 103
Vlady, 142
Voladores de Papantla, Los (acrobats),
198
Von Eschen, Penny M., 174, 300n158
Wagner, Jeanine, 201
Wallace, Henry A., 47
Wallach, Alan, 238n60
Warhol, Andy, 173
War on Poverty, 191
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Belkin),
299n149
Washington Post, 269n181
Watson, John A., 306n44
Weinberg, Jonathan, 228n23
Wellen, Michael, 234n36
Welles, Sumner, 250n46
Wells, R. C., 283n19
Westad, Odd Arne, 11, 233n27
“Western Hemisphere”: tensions
between “third world” designation
and united, 139, 179
Westphalen, Emilio Adolpho, 144,
287n56
Whale, James, 297n139
361
Wheeler, Monroe, 256n73, 260n101,
269n179, 278n89
Whitaker, Arthur P., 91, 239n67,
270n4, 270n6, 270n12
Whitman, E. S., 277n84
Whitman, Walt, 105
Whitney, Robert, 237n55, 267n167
Wilford, Hugh, 174, 234n35
Williams, Patricia, 261n104
Witt, Doris, 239n68
Woman with a Pineapple (Mujer con
piña) (Tamayo), 119
Wood, Bryce, 232n19
Wool, Robert M., 179, 185, 301n7
“Words to the Intellectuals” (Castro),
83
Works Progress Administration: Fed-
eral Music Project of (1937–1941),
49
world as global village: trope of, xi
world’s fairs: displays of Mexican
nationalism at, 181–82; national
pavilions at, 229n26; New York
(1964), 191. See also HemisFair
’68 (San Antonio)
Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas: An
Unsettling Flight to the Fantasy
World of Franz Kafka by the Mexi-
can Artist José Luis Cuevas, The,
145–46; details from, 147–48
World War II: cultural diplomacy dur-
ing, 52–56; inter-American cultural
initiatives during, 117; Schapiro’s
opposition to, 260n104; U.S.–Latin
American relations during, 32
Yale University, 180
Yo no olvido (I Do Not Forget)
(Cuevas), 171–72
Young and the Damned, The (film),
158, 294n104
“young artist”: Cuevas as prototype
362
of Gómez Sicre’s, 130–31; Esso
Salons of Young Artists, 42,
177–78; Gómez Sicre’s concern
with and promotion of, 5–6, 17,
18, 21–22, 23, 35, 37, 64, 80, 83,
85, 105, 114, 121–22
Yúdice, George, 5, 218, 231n11,
287n64, 301n2, 313n107, 315n9;
on cultural citizenship, 28; on cul-
tural policy, 24, 25, 34, 234n33
Zabludovsky, Jacobo, 129, 171,
172–73, 281, 298n148, 299n152
Zachry, H. B., 195
Zaid, Gabriel, 288n71
Zéndegui, Guillermo de, 236n45,
INDEX
303n21, 304n32; editorial “San
Antonio’s Example,” 187–88;
on Maracay, 177–78; positions
at PAU, 184, 300n1. See also
Américas (OAS magazine)
Zerbe, Karl, 116
Zetina de Brault, Esperanza, 281,
299n152
Zhdanovism, 80, 83, 140
Zolov, Eric, 193, 213, 236n53,
238n64, 285n30, 307n54,
314n111
Zona Rosa, la (Mexico City), 149, 169
Zorrilla de San Martín, Luis, 232n20
Zulueta, Luis de, 56–57, 86,
254n63–64, 255n67
C L A I R E F. F O X is associate professor in the departments of English and
of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She is the author of
The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.–Mexico Border
(Minnesota, 1999).