Abstract
During the Great Depression, the U.S. deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers. At the same time, Americans laid out the red carpet for the crème de la crème of Mexican artists, setting the stage for confusion between neighbors. This chapter examines the ballet H.P. (Horsepower) that composer Carlos Chávez and muralist Diego Rivera created for a Philadelphia audience in 1932. The piece aimed to represent U.S. industry working together harmoniously with the natural resources of Mexico. Rivera’s design for the principal dancer H.P. melded an ancient deer dance of the south with the modern machinery of the north. However, the story seemed to also subtly critique Pan-Americanism; misunderstandings arose between the Mexican creators, the conductor Leopold Stokowski, and the U.S. press and public.
Ando en tinieblas y tropiezo y caigo/ y me levanto y piso con pies ciegos.
—Octavio Paz
[I walk in darkness and I stumble and fall/ and rise.]
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- 1.
Rivera claimed Communist sympathies, although he was not always welcomed in the party. His 1927 visit to the Soviet Union proved to be a disappointment both for Rivera and for his hosts. To learn more about trips that artists of color such as writer James Baldwin made to Moscow as a “mythological beacon of equality,” and more on the influence of Soviet communism on avant garde artists of color in the 1920s and 30s including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, see Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
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That same year of 1940 the U.S. government founded the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and appointed Nelson Rockefeller to direct the agency. Its mission was to promote Pan-Americanism .
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U.S. interference during the revolution was unwelcome and unpopular with the Mexican public; see for example the corrido “The Punitive Expedition,” celebrating Pancho Villa’s resistance to U.S. General Pershing, who invaded northern Mexico in 1916 in an unsuccessful quest to capture the revolutionary general after he raided munitions across the border in New Mexico.
Bibliography
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Saavedra, Leonora, ed. Carlos Chávez and His World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
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Guerrero, E. (2018). 1930s: The Techno-Body. In: Dance and the Arts in Mexico, 1920-1950. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92474-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92474-8_2
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