Uncontainable Zapata

Iconicity, Religiosity, and Visual Diaspora

Luis Adrian Vargas Santiago, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2015

Supervisor: George Flaherty

Co-Supervisor: Andrea Giunta

This dissertation examines the iterations and scatterings of the icon of Mexican
Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in Mexico and the U.S. during the twentieth century. In
theorizing Zapata as an uncontainable icon, this project interrogates its irrepressible
nature, shifting from one realm of signification to another as part of an incessant diaspora
of images between Mexico and the U.S. Looking at the intertwining of image-making
and religious structures surrounding the invention and reinvention of narratives around
modern Mexico, this project unfolds the diverse and often contradictory mutations of
Zapata’s icon, and its distinct ability to embody diverging political, gender, racial, and

ethnic agendas across borders and time.

Performing close readings of select visual and filmic works, each chapter focuses
on the dominant ideologies, the local, national and geopolitical values, and the myriad
affects permeating the social activations and uses of Zapata’s icon. Chapter One
considers the tensions between visualizations of historical Zapata that he promoted
himself during the 1910s through photographic means and the contemporaneous negative
representations in cartoons and newspapers that rendered him as a barbarian Indian, a
rapist and disrespected revolutionary charro. Chapter Two analyzes how post-
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revolutionary intellectual elites, particularly muralist Diego Rivera, gradually converted
the late Zapata into the consummate hero of a nationalist and socialist program that,
drawing heavily on Catholic forms, served to reconcile the country’s diverse ethnic and
political factions, while encompassing its various cultural backgrounds through the
homogeneous idea of mestizaje. Chapter Three concerns the scattering of his icon on U.S.
soil: first in Anglo-American contexts, where he served to reinforce forms of American
exceptionalism during the Great Depression and Cold War America, and then within the
Chicana/o movement where his icon served Indo-Hispanos in New Mexico and Mexican-

Americans in California to embody and promote complex ideas of race, belonging,

citizenship, and nationalism. Finally, the dissertation considers the case of modern
Zapatistas in Chiapas, as a call to challenge the internal limits, as well as the external
borders, of our discipline so as to engage a transnational art history of the Americas.

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