Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlac20

América indígena and inter-American visual

indigenismo, 1941–1951

Deborah Dorotinsky

To cite this article: Deborah Dorotinsky (2022): América�indígena and inter-American

visual indigenismo, 1941–1951, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, DOI:
10.1080/17442222.2022.2050501

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2022.2050501

Published online: 08 Mar 2022.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 8

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rlac20
LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2022.2050501

América indígena and inter-American visual indigenismo,

1941–1951
Deborah Dorotinsky
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Circuito Mario de la Cueva
s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, Ciudad de México, México

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article focuses on the visual imagery within the journal América Alfredo Zalce; Carlos Mérida;
Indígena published by the Inter-American Indigenist Institute (IAII). Ethnographic photography;
I analyze how the images published there operate as symbolic capital illustration; Social science
magazines; Visual
in the formation of an indigenista visual culture. I hold that the
indigenismos
images published by the IAII’s journal significantly contributed to the
consolidation of an indigenista discourse and the establishment of an
inter-American indigenista visuality. This article examines three types
of images used by the IAII’s journal highlighting the ideological agen­
das they played in the articulation of inter-American indigenismo.
First, I analyze the emblematic image designed by Carlos Mérida that
represented the IAII institutional identity. Second, I analyze some
woodcuts designed by artists active at the Taller de Gráfica Popular
(TGP, Popular Graphic Workshop). Their images gave the journal
an homogenous editorial visual identity even though the publication
attempted to recognize the diversity and plurality of indigenista
perspectives. Finally, I focus my attention on photographs taken by
different practitioners – explorers, anthropologists, state-allied photo­
graphers, and photographers working for tourism offices and publi­
city. This work allowed inter-American indigenous diversity to reach
(or be exported to) international audiences; it also facilitated the
plurality of agendas taken up by indigenistas during the 1940s.

Introduction
During the first half of the twentieth century, social science journals followed the guide­
lines set for and by literary and cultural journals. In Mexico, as well as in other countries of
the Americas, publishers approached local artists to collaborate in different ways on the
journals’ visual identity. Images were commonly published to illustrate texts, thus co-
constructing modern notions around indigenismo through both visual and written text.
Like other print media, indigenista journals needed visual elements to give a coherent
form to new indigenist concepts in the minds of their readership.
The Inter-American Indigenist Institute (IAII) published the first issue of América
Indígena in October 1941. Undoubtedly, this is a privileged print resource for studying
the conceptual and visual hybrid nature of pan-American indigenismos because of its
effective integration between texts on the new indigenist public policies created in the

CONTACT Deborah Dorotinsky deborahd@unam.mx Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional

Autónoma de México, Circuito Mario de la Cueva s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, Ciudad de México, México
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 D. DOROTINSKY

Americas and a series of images that allegedly accounted for indigenous diversity. In
journals published both in Spanish and Portuguese during the first half of the last century,
we see the formation of visual and textual narratives that served to visualize the indigen­
ous communities inhabiting the American hemisphere. Mexican examples of these
magazines include the avant-garde periodicals Forma, Horizonte, and Contemporáneos;
the well-known bilingual folklore journal Mexican Folkways; and the Revista Mexicana de
Sociología; among others.1 In Perú, the journal Amauta, edited by prominent writer José
Carlos Mariátegui, predominantly disseminated Andean visual indigenismo (Adams and
Majluf 2019). In Brazil, publications such as O Cruzeiro and Revista do Globo published
photographs, drawings, engravings, lithographs, and illustrations displaying the complex
and rich visual culture from the modern era.2
This article will deal with the indigenist images in América Indígena (AI). I focus my
attention on the first ten years of the journal (1941–1951) because it was mostly during
this decade that the publication displayed a wider variety and profusion of images. This is
also a crucial decade for Mexican indigenista policies. Mexico City served as the home of
the Inter-American Indigenist Institute’s office and the editorial office of the journal, as
well as the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH), where the formal aca­
demic training of anthropologists took place starting in 1946. Later, in 1951, the Escuela
Nacional de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales (Political and Social Science Faculty) was created
at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). This implied not only the
creation of academic institutions, but also the training of a new generation of profes­
sionals that would carry out field research, inform their practice with an up-to-date
theorical background, and contribute to the design and development of indigenist public
policies. This article analyzes the images published by AI with the goal of reflecting on
how these images, scattered between the texts and not always clearly tied to them,
contributed to bringing forth a visual inter-American indigenismo during the crucial years
of World War II and the first years of the Cold War, a period in which the United States was
advocating for continental pan-American unity and launching programs like the Good
Neighbor Policy.
By analyzing the images published by AI, I seek to problematize the following ques­
tions: Did these images serve to establish an inter-American indigenist imaginary? Did
they operate in favor of an understanding of the great diversity of being Indian? Did they
expand, or establish, a visual cannon of indigenism?
One of the hypotheses I put forth in this article is that images published in AI,
particularly woodprints, endowed the journal with a graphic unity and aesthetic homo­
geneity. This homogeneity, paradoxically, contested the diversity of positions and defini­
tions of indigenism present in the articles and essays. While the texts, coming from all over
the Americas, sought to structure and organize the different conceptual elements that
could make up a ‘general’ indigenist theory and policy (a nearly insurmountable task), the
stylistic homogeneity of the woodprints depicted a sense of unification. Simultaneously,
photographs stood in stark contrast to the prints in that the former were widely hetero­
genous. Moreover, by publishing woodprints created by artists from the politicized
aesthetic avant-garde, like the antifascist Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP, Popular Graphic
Workshop), América Indígena capitalized on the prestige and symbolic power of the
visually striking artwork of the members of the TGP.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 3

I will analyze three different kinds of images published in the pages of AI. The first of
these is the journal’s logo, designed by the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida, which
became the primary visual identifier of the IAII. Second, I’ll turn my attention to the
woodprints, using as central examples the covers of the journal’s first two issues, one back
cover, and a few vignettes found in the journal’s pages. These vignettes functioned either
as decorative endings or to close out the academic articles. This was an editorial practice
common in literary and cultural magazines, which AI adopted for a few years but later
discarded as it became too expensive, fell out of fashion, and did not reflect the scientific
character of the journal. Finally, I will discuss the photographic imagery that ‘illustrated’
numerous articles, often contrasting with their content. I am interested in the journal’s
first decade because it can be regarded as representative of its formative phase, its
particular genesis, and its consolidation in a transnational academic milieu. The journal
was created by indigenist pedagogist Moisés Sáenz, but he died on 24 October 1941 just
as the journal’s first issue was being prepared, so it is difficult to address the specific
project he had in mind. The journal’s chief editor, Carlos Girón Cerna, had to oversee it and
decide its course until April 1942, when Manuel Gamio became its director.
Art historians and photo-historians have examined literary and avant-garde magazines
and press photography. However, there is very limited research on social science journals,
particularly on their visual cultures and indigenist visuality.3 As Patricia Artundo (2008, 11)
argues for cultural magazines, ‘the visual dimension of a magazine may offer key elements
for understanding a magazine and its underlying project, regardless of the field of study.’
América Indígena is no exception. Given its transnational inter-American character, this
journal stands out among social scientific periodicals, and it profited from the symbolic
capital and the prestige of certain artists and from a well-established figurative imagery to
embellish its pages. During the 1940s, anthropology and sociology were not drastically
separate or differentiated as social disciplines in countries such as Mexico, Argentina,
Brazil, and Perú. In fact, both disciplines were in the process of institutionalization and
professionalization.4 Giraudo and Sánchez (2011, 15) propose that the 1940s also allow us
to glimpse the moment of pre-professionalization of inter-American indigenism (as public
policy and ideology), before the establishment of applied anthropology as the dominant
trend in that field.
The work of Saturnino Herrán in Mexico in 1907–1911 and later the murals, graphic
images, and illustrations of the ‘Mexican Renaissance’ in the 1920s, combined with the
first pictorial indigenism in Perú, created an idealized and stylized image of the Indian in
order to establish mythical figures of an alleged national origin. Paradoxically, for coun­
tries with considerable indigenous populations such as México, Ecuador, and Perú, the
traditional figure of the Indian – in murals, easel paintings, and graphic works – trans­
mitted the avant-garde’s aesthetics, as can be appreciated in the work of artists such as
Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamayo, José Sabogal, Julia Codesido, and Camilo Egas (Greet 2009,
15–17). If the Inter-American Indigenist Institute was a way of inter-American indigenist
intellectual avant-garde, it stands to reason that its journal, América Indígena, appro­
priated recent artistic languages and the politicized images of the Taller de Gráfica
Popular’s (TGP) artists, such as Alfredo Zalce, Leopolodo Méndez, and others.
Like woodblock prints, photography was also a principal media for conveying the
indigenist visuality to the journal’s readership. In fact, since the late eighteenth century,
written descriptions of Indian lives were accompanied and complemented by images – as
4 D. DOROTINSKY

in casta paintings, for example – and then through engravings, lithographs and photo­
graphs. In the nineteenth century, such imagery also populated Latin American visual
costumbrismo and, as I already pointed out, profusely mushroomed Latin American avant-
garde painting and literature (Greet 2009; Moriuchi 2018).
Participation in AI ranged from Latin American social scientists such as Manuel Gamio,
Luis Chávez Orozco, and Julio de la Fuente, to Americans like John Collier and David
Blelloch, to South Americans like Vicente de Paulo Teixera da Fonseca Vasconcelos, and
even indigenous representatives like Rubén Pérez Kantule (Cuna), who participated in the
first Inter-American Indianist Congress in Pátzcuaro in 1940. International researchers also
collaborated with the journal, though not all of them identified themselves as indigenistas.
Giraudo and Sánchez (2011, 10) call our attention to the ‘scant historiographic knowl­
edge of the central decades of twentieth century indigenism.’ Ten years later, the knowl­
edge on this topic, particularly in México, is no longer scarce as can be seen through the
approaches to this topic made by Araujo (2015), López Caballero (2015, 2017) and
Rosemblatt (2018). Nevertheless, much is still to be done.
Indigenism in México, as a public and institutional policy, was an effort to understand
and produce knowledge regarding the many ethnic-cultural populations that inhabited
México’s vast territory. As public policy, indigenism was informed by plans of governance
for indigenous groups that did not ‘adjust’ or comply to the modernization and ‘economic
progress’ schemes planned or imagined by the elites in power. Most of all, these proble­
matic authoritarian policies, implemented to ‘manage’ indigenous communities, were
directed towards their effective integration and incorporation into a homogenous
Mexican nation.
Knowing, describing, explaining, and designing public policies for ethnic groups was
a common task for almost all Latin American indigenisms, a central task that also entailed
visualizing and making these communities noticeable and imaginable. Although the majority
of authors cannot agree on a single definition for indigenismo, it is not futile to say all
indigenismos were forms of internal colonialism particular to Latin American (and maybe
North American) modernities, and we have to treat them in the plural because they did not
imply homogenous public policies, even within one country (Coletta 2018, 1–4).5 For Mexico,
for instance, Guillermo Palacios and Alejandra Rosemblatt have convincingly proven that
there were some variants and divergences in the conception of indigenismo that cannot be
sharply differentiated, or better, they need not be conceived as radically separate. The concept
of campesino (peasant), referring to both mestizo and Indian agricultural workers, was coined
during the time of Narciso Bassols’ tenure as Secretary of Public Education (SEP) in the early
1930s. This notion helped elaborate general concerns regarding this economic activity and
general way of life as the much-debated ‘peasant problem’ (problema campesino). Palacios
suggests that it is possible to distinguish two stances in the 1930s toward the peasant Indians:
a Marxist productivism (Bassols’ own position) and a culturalist populism (Moisés Sánez and
Manuel Gamio’s perspectives) (Palacios 1999, 11–13). These approaches were not exactly
‘opposite’ positions, as Rosemblatt (2018, 145–146) very well notes: ‘[I]n practice the borders
between both were rather blurry and sometimes even Marxist productivists recognized some
cultural traits of rural indigenous communities that were worth preserving and promoting at
a national level: moral, spiritual and artistic qualities, hard work, discipline, and a strong will for
collective collaboration.’ These are also some of the traits highlighted by inter-American
indigenism. Under the provisional direction of Moisés Sáenz, the indigenism put forth by
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 5

the IAII was more a political than a scientific concept. This changed, according to some
(Giraudo 2012, 16–17), with Sáenz’s untimely death and the designation of Manuel Gamio as
head of the institution in 1942 and until his death in 1960.

Carlos Mérida and the new trinity

At the beginning of the 1940s, painter Carlos Mérida designed the IAII logo, an image that
depicts what Mérida felt was a new spiritual trinity. The three elements represent the
union of the pre-Columbian indigenous spirit (the male profile facing to our left), the
colonial past and present (male profile facing to our right), and the realization of a future
(feminine face facing us). Here, I will analyze this particular image and the different
agendas at play behind its elaboration.
In October of 1941, Carlos Girón Cerna commissioned his compatriot painter Carlos
Mérida to create an image that would serve as the Institute’s emblem synthesizing the
idea of an inter-American indigenism (Figure 1).6 The result was an emblem that recalls
Mérida’s paintings from the 1920s or his silkscreens on indigenous dances. It is a style that
was present in his work as illustrator for different commissions, but which was already
gone from his paintings as he began favoring greater levels of abstraction. The illustration
that served as the IAII emblem has three synthetic and stylized human heads with Indian
features inscribed inside a medallion. This was the Guatemalan artist’s visual response to
the conceptual proposal of an inter-American indigenismo. In the letter that included the
sketches, Mérida wrote to Girón Cerna on 13 October 1941:

I am including for you here two ‘rough sketches’ with two ideas of what could be done; first of
all it is hard to interpret a general inter-American indigenist idea and afterwards give it
a simple form. As you shall see, I have opted for an indigenous type that reminds us of the
origin without it being typical of any specific place and I have adapted it to two resolutions:
one with the complete inscription and the other only with the [Institute’s] initials. In general,
it imitates carved stone. You will tell me which you like best to develop it or if you have
another more adequate idea.7

It is evident that the pre-Columbian Indian designed by the painter, if not ‘typical of any
specific place,’ is strongly evocative of Mayan art, confirming the centrality of Maya
indigenous influence in Mérida’s imagery. Mérida posited that the drawing ‘imitates
carved stone,’ which suggests that he based it upon a Maya stele. Art historian Karen
Cordero (1992, 12) argues that Mérida intensely participated in the redefinition of both
the Mexican as well as the American (that is, hemispheric) styles in modern visual arts. His
interest was never particularly bound to one exclusive region, regardless of his proclivity
for the Maya. This kind of dialogue with pre-Columbian art was characteristic of modern
Latin American avant-gardes who, among other practices, assimilated or appropriated
pre-Columbian and popular twentieth century artistic forms and structures. Even Girón
Cerna emphasized this connection with pre-Columbian imagery when he explained his
own description of the emblem and called upon the kind of narrative present in the well-
known indigenous legend of Popol Vuh.
On 21 October 1941 Girón Cerna responded to Mérida and commented on the sketch:
‘I think that a way could be found to make three Indian faces representing the pre-
Columbian Indian, the Indian of today, and the Indian of the future. Of course I leave to
6 D. DOROTINSKY

Figure 1. Front cover of América Indígena (vol. 2, no. 3) from July 1942 depicting the final version of
Carlos Mérida’s emblematic image.

you how to resolve this idea.’8 The sketches and a gouache came and went from Denton,
Texas, where Mérida was living and teaching a course on fresco mural painting at North
Texas State Teachers College (Fuentes 1992, 192). Merida’s strong intent to keep control
of the images is present in the correspondence he exchanged with Girón Cerna, with
some tense tones, and frictions in the negotiation of the iconography. Archival materials
demonstrate that the painter insisted that his assistant in Mexico, Alfonso Cervantes,
should make the drawings by hand for the color separation and so that figure tracing
could be carefully made. Unfortunately, Merida’s original sketches are lost. The journal did
not keep either color separation, most probably because of the cost of multicolor printing.
Although the journal’s first issue was published in October 1941, the graphic was not
ready, so the editors used an engraving by Alfredo Zalce as temporary emblem instead.
On 5 December 1941 Girón wrote to Mérida pointing out that the IAII Executive
Committee requested some additional modifications: ‘[I]t would be better that the braids
of the figure in the lower part of the drawing as well as the necklace of the figure on the
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 7

right side, be modified a little so that they do not remind the public of chains, and thus
I beg you to let me know if you can make those modifications, or if you authorize us to
make them here.’9 On the 15th of the same month Mérida responded:

I am glad to know the drawing was to your liking. Of course, the required modifications can
be made; Cervantes, the draftsman, will resolve these when he makes the definitive drawings
for the engraving. I do have to warn you that the head on the right side is indeed wearing
chains around his neck, and a mecapal as a sign of slavery. The one on the right [sic], the
Indian from the past, sports an antique necklace—of jade beads—. Regarding the braids, you
can modify them, but you have to consider that indigenous women always use them, unless
you portray her with loose hair.10

The painter evidently confused the figures’ faces, as the right-facing Indian was to
represent the present. From Mérida’s words, we can deduce that, for him, even present-
day Indians were subdued, and that is why he explained to Girón that, indeed, the Indian
of the present day was wearing chains. As writer Carlos Monsiváis (1992) states, for Mérida,
politics was never fundamental. Girón Cerna did not find Cervantes, the draftsman, and in
another letter suggested to Mérida that maybe Alfredo Zalce could make the modifica­
tions. In fact, he even sent Mérida some changes drawn by Zalce. Mérida refused them
and on 16 February 1942 he stressed to Girón:

I received the newspaper; the drawing is no good; I can’t sign if you use it like that; basic
artistic honesty prevents me from authorizing that you use it the way it is. It needs correcting.
And there will be a need to make new engravings. Please send it to me by airmail, protected
by cardboard in order to re-elaborate it.

He added in a handwritten note, ‘Send me Cervantes’ definitive drawing which was used
to make the engravings. The letters are fine, but it is necessary to correct the center. It has
capital technical mistakes that I can’t explain to you. In essence it will look the same, but
right.’11 All these adjustments let us follow the nuanced differences we can see between
the emblems used in the frontispiece of the journal on January and July of 1942.
Unfortunately, Mérida’s original sketches and Cervantes’ final ink drawings have thus far
not been found in the archive.
We can reconstruct the iconographic program Girón Cerna had in mind for the official
IAII emblem thanks to the description he provides in the first issue of AI in 1942,
particularly regarding the passage from a native pre-Columbian conception of the
world, to the arrival of the conquistadores and the ensuing enslavement of indigenous
peoples and finally the possibility of a future for them. What follow are some lines of each
of the three descriptions, which will help bring into focus Giron’s central ideas

The mountain crawls strewn with sown fields [milpas]: Quetzalcoatl, Gucumatz, Kukulkán,
Quetzal-hill-serpent, sign of Venus. Agrarian man, made after three failed creation attempts
out of stone, wood, and clay, had a teozintle [teosinte] soul, nixtamal body and macaw
speech. When marmosets learnt to play, and serpents to fly, the first man’s vegetable soul
was formed amid the teosinte’s reeds [. . .]12

. . . [B]ut new gods with horse’s bodies came, breast, head and heart of steel [. . .] The gods of
terror came to destroy them, to torment and enslave them and they turned them into beasts
of burden and toil [. . .] To enjoy peace in another world, the Indians allowed for their own
subjection. They traded their feathered headdresses for humiliating mecapales [. . .]
8 D. DOROTINSKY

Future maternity. The hearth has been filled with nature’s blood. The Indian has sprouted
roots in his feet, the crosses have flowered, and quetzals already cross the skies of the
Americas. White men have begotten mestizo children that cry for the Indians, the steel
from their minds and hearts has melted and regret has become unanimous, of true indigen­
ista religion [. . .]

This explanation is not so concerned with the Indian of the past, the present, and the
future, as described by Mérida. For Girón Cerna, these faces represented three moments in
the development of Indian history: the so-called glorious pre-Columbian past, the tragic
colonial era of enslavement and exploitation (which for Mérida extended into the present,
but not for Girón Cerna), and, finally, the hope and longing for a better future which
would come thanks to indigenist thought and action. Together, the tree countenances
drawn by Mérida offered a new trinity that promised indigenous emancipation and the
persistence of historical memory, of the cultural and spiritual pride of First Peoples in the
Americas. The ‘Día del Indio,’ or Day of the Indian, was yet another way of attempting to
implement a celebration of these multiple heritages, a proposal already discussed at the
First Indigenist Congress in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, in 1940 (Giraudo 2017, 2020).13
We should not be surprised by Mérida’s disapproval, particularly if we keep in mind
what American Indian cultures meant to the painter. During the 1940s, explorations into
indigenous cosmologies, past and contemporary, had led Mérida to seek for an under­
standing of the spiritual and visual values of indigenous aesthetics. We should also
remember that as director of the first Escuela de Danza (dance academy) at SEP (from
1932–1935), Carlos Mérida did considerable research into indigenous dance elements –
gesture, choreography, wardrobe, music – to create an ‘authentic’ Mexican dance
movement.14 This respect, and maybe even a sort of romantic veneration, for the glorious
pre-Columbian past is something Mérida shared with IAII indigenistas, specially with
indigenous representatives at the 1940 Patzcuaro conference who proposed the celebra­
tion of the Día del Indio (Giraudo 2017, 82). Mérida’s archive preserved at the Museo
Nacional de Arte (MUNAL, the National Art Museum) in Mexico City shows the very ample
photographic documentation amassed by the artist regarding indigenous wardrobe and
traditional dances, and the marked interest he had in indigenous cultures in general.
These very diverse archival materials are of special importance because they speak to
Mérida’s particular understanding of indigenous communities. His archive brings together
photographs he commissioned from particular photographers in special regions of
Mexico, those he bought commercially, and even some photographs he took himself.
All these visual resources productively nurtured his illustrations, like those made for
President Cardenas’s Autonomous Press and Propaganda Department (Departamento
Autónomo de Prensa y Propaganda, DAPP) in 1937 (Figure 2). This way of synthesizing,
fragmenting, and uniting color sections – either in stencils, silkscreens, or lithographs –
had already been part of experimental graphic works by artists such as Dr. Atl (Gerardo
Murillo) and Fermín Revueltas, or even Mérida himself in his illustrations of children’s
books for SEP and the lithographic oeuvre that accompanied his book Carnival in Mexico
(1940).
Regarding Mérida’s work from the 1940s, Carlos Monsiváis (1992) asserts that by that
time Mérida was already very clearly separating the work he considered ‘his oeuvre’ and
his commercial illustration work. The image for América Indígena can be considered part
of the painter’s quest for the organic and cosmogonic essence of so-called ‘American
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 9

Figure 2. Carlos Mérida, poster commissioned by the Departamento Autónomo de Prensa

y Propaganda (Autonomous Press and Propaganda Department) to advertise Danzas Mexicanas
Auténticas (‘authentic Mexican dances’), at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, September 18–25, ca. 1938–
1940. Source: Museo Nacional de Arte, Archivo Carlos Mérida, Caja 1926–2000, Dípticos, Trípticos,
Invitaciones, Carteles, Cromos, Postales, fólder cromos, postales y propaganda.

Indian-ness.’ This is probably one of the reasons why there is a stylized unity in the
physiognomy of all the Indians represented. From my perspective, therein lies the sym­
bolic capital that this image offered to AI and the IAII, especially if we consider the
iconography alongside the story of the three heads as written by Carlos Girón Cerna.

The engraver as illustrator: Alfredo Zalce, Gustavo Savin, and Alberto

Beltrán
In this section I examine woodprints designed by the TGP artists Alfredo Zalce and
Gustavo Savin, which illustrated the IAII’s journal and significantly contributed to the
creation of a homogenous graphic identity for the publication.
Michoacán-born artist Alfredo Zalce elaborated the cover image for the first
and second issues of AI, published in 1941 and 1942. Zalce’s contribution demonstrates
that IAII authorities hesitated about whether to include a different cover for each issue or
if Mérida’s medallion was going to be used for all the covers. Partly, the engravers’
participation could be owed to the contact Girón Cerna established with Zalce while
Mérida’s design (and negotiations over it) was underway. Zalce joined the Taller de Gráfica
Popular when it was created, as did other members from the Liga de Escritores y Artistas
Revolucionarios (LEAR, Revolutionary Writers and Artists League) such as Leopoldo
Méndez, Luis Arenal, and Pablo O’Higgins.15
The TGP’s artistic production was the result of a collective effort. Artworks did not carry
a single authorial signature, particularly in the case of political posters used in the
antifascist struggle and in support of workers’ organizations. Some of TGP’s images
10 D. DOROTINSKY

were considered to have a more politically combative value proper to the collective work
of its members. The more ‘rustic’ style wood carvings had a more ‘popular’ character and
value because of their more ‘direct’ style and more energetic attack. Very few of the artists
were able to make a living by selling their artworks, and not all received commissions for
murals. Book illustration and commercial commissions offered ways to supplement the
meager incomes received by most of the TGP artists; the Secretary of Public Education
(SEP) hired others as art teachers.
Toward 1942, TGP created its own publishing house, La Estampa Mexicana, under the
advice of one of its members, Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (Musacchio 2007, 21 and
44).16 Mayer stated in 1949, as spokesperson of the publishing house, that intentions to
denounce oppression, make social criticism, and instruct the viewing public were all
present in TGP members’ hearts, as they had been in ‘the oeuvre of the great popular
graphic works master, José Guadalupe Posada’ (Meyer 1949, VIII). According to the Swiss
architect, and seen from the perspective of European avant-garde, more than in forms ‘in
themselves,’ the relationship between TGP artists’ works and pre-Columbian indigenous
art manifested in ‘their way of being,’ which is the collective spirit of the ancient indigen­
ous cultures. Furthermore, for Meyer, the ‘Indian concept’ also characterized the work of
members of the workshop, and its peculiar style reminded viewers of ancient codices, but
adapted to the present moment. Meyer invoked a repertoire of artworks from the Mexican
cultural past – pre-Columbian works, colonial art, all the way to nineteenth-century
graphic arts (mostly Posada’s oeuvre) – in order to justify TGP’s engraving style (Meyer
1949, X). Thus, he constructed a visual genealogy that validated the collective’s Mexican-
ness both inside Mexico and for foreign viewers. It also displayed a primitivist and
essentialist reading, on Mayer’s part, of alleged formal values of Mexican engravers’
artworks.
If TGP is recognized by its support of workers’ movements – in a fashion that distances
itself from more idealizing Soviet realism – and in that task constructed combative images
of the proletariat, some of its members, like Alfredo Zalce, also had a significant interest in
indigenous cultures. In 1935 Zalce had participated in one of SEP’s Cultural Missions,
possibly as an art teacher, to the states of Zacatecas, Hidalgo, Colima, and Puebla, and
later in the 1940s he traveled with his wife to the Yucatán peninsula (Williams 2006).17
Cultural missions implied contact with rural teachers and with campesino school commu­
nities – both Indian and mestizo; Zalce undoubtedly had first-hand experience of peasant
and rural life in these communities, on top of his own experience growing up in
Michoacán.
For the covers and vignettes Zalce created, he took advantage of the material qualities
of wood engraving by constructing synthetic images with marked expressive lines and
high contrasts zones between the black ink and the white paper. The cover of AI’s first
issue depicts a peasant family walking barefoot across an arid landscape scattered with
agaves (Figure 3). Here, a man folds forward under the heavy load of the ceramic pots tied
inside a wooden crate which hangs on his back from the mecapal. Next to him, there is
a smiling woman carrying a baby on her back in a rebozo. She holds in one hand a woven
basket and in the other the tiny hand of another child who marches beside her.
Representations of families have been a central feature of Western visual culture since
the nineteenth century; they serve to depict both the upper- and working classes as well
as indigenous communities. However, the use of a nuclear family to depict indigenous life
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 11

Figure 3. Front cover of América Indígena (vol. 1, no. 1) from October 1941 with an untitled woodprint
by Alfredo Zalce.

has its genesis in eighteenth-century casta paintings and nineteenth-century academic

painting. Regarding the technique for the AI illustrations made by Zalce, I refer to them as
woodcuts or wood prints because that is the way they are identified in the journal itself:
‘maderas de Zalce.’ The representation of the family published in the journal’s first issue
not only operates as a starting point or aperture, but also allows us to imagine a narrative
that favors the family’s role as a sense-giving agent. Furthermore, it permits us to under­
stand the principal role of family in indigenous lives throughout the Americas, and to
better understand how popular arts or handcrafts were deemed positive productive
activities that supplemented the incomes of peasant or indigenous families.
I focus my attention on two more images from AI: the front cover of the April 1942 issue
and the back cover of the January 1943 one. Starting in the 1940s, once Mérida was finally
satisfied with the emblematic image and agreed to its final version, the painter’s emblem
illustrated every cover until the late 1970s. For the 1942 cover, Zalce represented a group
of masked men dancing in a circle, with some vague figures in the background. The
painter drew upon his knowledge of popular festivities and in so doing also highlighted
12 D. DOROTINSKY

one of the central concerns of American indigenism: the preservation of certain artistic
traditions (mask-making, for example), dance, music, and folklore in general. Many con­
tributing authors examined these expressions of cultural tradition in AI articles through­
out the 1940s. In the image that took up the entire back cover of the January 1943 issue
(Figure 4), titled ‘Día del Indio: 19 de abril,’ an Indian couple stands dignified and
inscrutable on a tier divided into segments which contain a clay pot, a metate (stone to
grind maize), a basket, some clouds, and a wave. The barefoot man carries a sack filled
with corncobs while the woman standing to our right is sewing a garment. The image
invokes engaged labor, and also calls upon the idea of abundance because the corn sack
is full. Between the human figures grows a tall corn plant, and a prickly pear patch extends
out behind it. In the background, a mule driver marches behind a flock of llamas or
vicunas, and another person is hunting a deer with a bow and arrow. There is also a reed
hut and a few vessels reminiscent of the totoras used in Lake Titicaca. The composition is
complex and quite abstract, although the title, ‘Day of the Indian: 19 April,’ suggests that it
is meant to celebrate Indian lives. This is an eclectic visual reference that simultaneously
calls upon Andean, Amazonian, and Mesoamerican indigenous iconography. As Laura
Giraudo states, ‘it is a commemoration dedicated to “the Indian” (as atemporal subject),
but that actually refers to the recipients of the ambitious program of continental

Figure 4. Back cover of América Indígena (vol. 3, no. 1) from January 1943 with ”Día del Indio: 19 abril”
woodprint by Alfredo Zalce.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 13

indigenist policies that were meant to be put into action (“today’s Indian”)’ (Giraudo 2017,
82). It was also supposed to remind readers of the First Indigenist Congress held in
Pátzcuaro, where the Día del Indio was proposed. As Giraudo explains in this issue,
Getulio Vargas’ 1943 decree, which adopted the new civic holiday for April 19, fulfilled –
at least in writing – compromises made during the First Inter-American Indigenist
Congress.18 These three examples published in America Indígena foretell other equally
forceful but more complex Zalce images, like those he made to accompany Ortiz de
Montellano’s book El sombrerón (1946), published by TGP’s own publishing house.19
On a different note, AI often used vignettes as decorative endpieces for the printed
page, whether or not the content of the image corresponded to the content of the article
preceding it. As examples we can regard one that was included at the end of an article
that did not speak of kwakwaka’wakw (kwakiutl) (Figure 5) totem poles. There are other
less narrative figures that hold a more openly decorative character, and serve as elegant
closures to articles unrelated to the images. Rather than illustrate texts as a visual
complement to their written content, vignettes worked as random marginalia, decora­
tions alluding to popular art or a scene from the daily lives of indigenous people. They
were published on the page the same way they would have been in any other cultural
magazine or book, as was quite common in Mexico in the 1920s. Even though they are
small figures and it is not possible to see all their tiny details, we can identify the ethnicity
of the indigenous person portrayed. For example, a woman from the Cuna region in San

Figure 5. Alfredo Zalce, untitled (fragment of ‘totem pole’), 1942, América Indígena 2 (1): 38.
14 D. DOROTINSKY

Blas, Panamá (Figure 6). The visual sources for these images representing Indians from
Bolivia, Perú, Canada, or the United States, came from a photographic collection that the
journal created based upon the plethora of information it constantly received. For
example, one year prior to Zalce’s woodcuts with Cuna women, in 1942, the journal had
published some photographs of Cuna women in an article that explained how their
blouses (molas) were made, how they decorated their bodies, and what type of jewelry
they wore (Figure 7). In a way, the vast archive the journal acquired through article
submissions partly served as a visual source for the woodcuts, and later illustrations,
that decorated its pages.20
The collective oeuvre of visual indigenista artists like Zalce, Mérida, and Alberto Beltrán
has seldom been examined in terms of its connection to the consolidation and correlation
between nationalist and continental public policies. Clearly, the visual discourse of the
Day of the Indian woodcut expects to appeal to an inter-American meaning. Zalce
collaborated with the journal from 1941 up to the second 1943 issue, but his vignettes
were reutilized in different journal issues for a long time.21 Starting in July 1943, another
printmaker, Gustavo Savin, started working for the journal. His last collaboration appeared
in the fourth issue of 1946. Gustavo Savin was born in 1913 and died in 1945, which
explains why his interventions in the journal stopped; after his death, the editors would
reuse his images. He is a poorly known printmaker, and he is not listed as an ‘official’
member of TGP. Justino Fernández (1940) misspelled his name as Gustavo ‘Saven’ when
listing some of Savin’s pieces in a March 1939 exhibition of Kolomon Sokol’s students in
the Escuela de Artes del Libro (School of Book Arts), the director and founder of which was
the well-known artist and illustrator Francisco Díaz de León.22 Starting in 1947, the new AI
illustrations were made by Mexican artist Alberto Beltrán.23
The work of illustration for journals, including scientific ones, has recently begun to
earn more scholarly attention, in part thanks to new questions about the transformations
of visual cultures, through which we may analyze and better understand what art

Figure 6. Alfredo Zalce, untitled, 1943, América Indígena 3 (1): 54.

 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 15

Figure 7. Photographer uknown, ‘Indígena Cuna del Pueblo de Carti-Sugtup, Comarca de San Blás,
Panamá’ and ‘Indígenas de la tribu Cuna de Carti-Sugtup luciendo sus bonitas molas,’ 1942, América
Indígena 2 (1): 84.

historian Michael Baxandall calls the ‘period eye’ (Baxandall [1972] 1988, 29–109). This
notion refers to all the mental tools that people possess to make order and finally make
sense of their visual experience, a complex sensorial experience that varies not only
between individuals, but also between cultures, social groups, and historical periods
(40). In that respect, the visual period when ‘art became Pan-American,’ as Claire Fox
put it (2013), would be incomprehensible without this kind of visual culture disseminated
through literary, cultural, and social science journals. For anthropologist Deborah Poole,
a ‘visual economy’ is made up of the weave of relationships between image producers,
the media themselves, agents, patrons, and institutions and spaces of circulation (Poole
1997, 9–19). In that respect, as media for circulating certain visual habits, these journals
participate in a complex and sometimes even ambiguous mid-century ‘visual economy.’

Miscellaneous photography
In this section, I examine photographic images published in AI. They were taken by
different photographers and their aesthetic quality is significantly uneven. The photo­
graphs were taken by explorers, anthropologists, state employees, and also by photo­
graphers working in publicity or tourism. The texts they accompany were written not only
by social scientists (though increasingly so over the years) but also by educators, jurists,
physicians, biologists, and national and international public functionaries from the Pan-
American Union or the Organización Internacional del Trabajo (International Labor
16 D. DOROTINSKY

Organization, ILO). These initial photographic repertoires are a bit of a bricolage that
partly makes visible a varied Indian diversity from the American continent. However, some
photographs were taken along the lines of certain formal canons, particularly in the case
of portraits during the first ten years of the journal. The presence of images produced by
state agencies and tourist transport enterprises (cruise companies and airlines), also
reveals how indigenous peoples and indigenous ways of life were (and still are) instru­
mentalized as objects of tourist spectacle. What these photographs reveal is the effort to
find an appropriate visual language for the documentation of ethnographic research and
indigenist discussions to be published in a scientific periodical. A detailed analysis of the
texts included in each issue of AI exceeds the scope of this essay; however, I can say that,
in general, photography and text were not often intertwined in the journal until after the
1950s.24
By 1941, social science journals like American Anthropologist and Revista Mexicana de
Sociología were using graphic and photographic images to ‘make visible’ for their readers
those indigenous and minority groups about whom researchers wrote.25 Beyond these
academic sources, many photojournalistic essays published in popular media often
vulgarized anthropological inquiry. I am referring here to the popularized versions of
ethnographic knowledge seen on the covers of magazine like Life (in North America) or
Mañana (in Mexico) that were widely circulated. As I have shown in several examples for
Mexico’s indigenous groups (Dorotinsky 2009, 2013, 2014, 2017), these photographic
images often became ‘salvage’ images, that is, they documented a considerable diversity
that the full-fledged consolidation of a Mexican nationality would make disappear, owing
to a good degree to integrationist indigenist interventions. These photographs also
helped sociologists and anthropologists constitute themselves as ‘researchers’ and active
subjects in scientific inquiry.
There is a photograph of a smiling Otomi boy in the first issue of AI, on the page
opposite the Editorial.26 In general, in the photographic imaginary and in ethnographic
archives from the early 20th century, it is quite exceptional to find portraits of indigenous
peoples smiling. I find the use of a smiling child in AI’s first issue, and particularly in the
editorial space, highly rhetorical; it persuades us of the wellbeing that indigenist policies
were to bring for the indigenous populations of the Americas. As the editorial introduc­
tion states, the purpose of AI is to serve as a space to present and redefine indigenist
theory, to refine it for the Indigenist Conferences organized by the IAII

There is, nevertheless, another very important aspect in outlining a definite work program for
the Institute. This is to elucidate and clarify Indianist theory so that differing opinions may be
reconciled, and Indianist efforts may have a scientific orientation.

[. . .] By studying the subject and keeping an open discussion, Indianist theory will reach the
Conferences each time more clarified and clearly founded. The magazine AMERICA INDIGENA,
official organ of the Institute, has this as its major purpose. (Editorial 1941)

Three anthropologists collaborated in this first issue in 1941: Julio de la Fuente (photo­
grapher and former LEAR member), John Collier (Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of
Indian Affairs) and Julian H. Steward (who in those years was compiling the Handbook of
South American Indians at the Smithsonian Institution). But above all we see the collabora­
tion of government officials: Luis Chávez Orozco (head of Mexico’s Departamento de
Asuntos Indígenas, or Department of Indian Affairs); Girón Cerna himself (as the General
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 17

Consul of Guatemala in Mexico); Vicente de Paulo Teixeira de Fonseca Vasconcelos

(Director of Brazil’s Indian Protection Services); José Andrés Orantes (Subsecretary of
Public Education in El Salvador); David H. Blelloch (ILO official and labor advisor to the
governments of Venezuela and Bolivia); Pedro de Alba (Mexican Deputy Director of the
Pan-American Union) and Javier Uranga H. (a rural school teacher in Mexico who presided
over a Cultural Mission). During these first ten years of the journal, we can attest to the
increased participation of ethnologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, and to the
increasing inclusion of texts with concrete case studies or social scientific methodology
as the discussion of indigenist policies diminished.
The arrival of anthropologist Manuel Gamio to IAII leadership in 1942 brought along
Girón Cerna’s resignation as director from AI. Gamio’s new appointment benefited the
journal through his local and international professional networks, including, for example,
new access to images from the ‘México Indígena’ archive housed at UNAM’s Instituto de
Investigaciones Sociales (IIS-UNAM). (During the 1920s, the director of IIS-UNAM, Lucio
Mendieta y Núñez, had collaborated with Gamio in his landmark three-volume book La
población del Valle de Teotihuacán [Gamio 1922]). In 1942, for example, AI published an
image of a Lacandon Indian from that archive (Figure 8), perhaps photographed by one of
the researchers from IIS-UNAM who traveled to the Lacandon rainforest.27 As in the case
of the photo of the Otomi child, this picture of a smiling Lacandon Indian accompanied an
editorial note, written by Gamio. This note laid out for readers the definitive organization
of the IAII at the time of the first meeting of its governing board, held on 25 March 1942 at
Mexico’s Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Foreign Affairs Ministry). This meeting was
hosted by Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Jaime Torres Bodet, which demonstrates the role
the IAII has been called to play in inter-American cultural diplomacy since its beginning.
Other photographs published by AI came from the work of researchers and anthro­
pologists such as Julio de la Fuente, Gertrude Duby, Calixta Guiteras, Alfred Metraux, and
Weston A. Price, to name just a few. Other photographic materials belonged to ministries
of tourism or government offices such as the Brazilian Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos
Indios, the U.S. Indian Services, and the Canadian Agriculture and Commerce Ministry.
Even commercial airlines such as Pan Am or the Grace Line cruise ships sent photographic
series to the journal (Figure 9). This photographic universe seems to suggest that, at least
during the journal’s first decade, the publication did not set strict criteria over the type of
documentary photographic material it would publish. The verisimilitude of photography
was broadly intended to offer evidence to readers of the living conditions on the ground
and of the fieldwork conducted. In a way, photographs authorized or validated the
discourse being put forth by the texts.
During the early years of the journal, the vast majority of photographs printed were
portraits, some full-length but mostly shots taken at a low angle looking up from the waist
level (Figure 10). These portraits monumentalize isolated subjects, a common practice in
modern photography. Some forms of the canonical studio portrait were also recovered,
with neutral or ‘nowhere’ backgrounds, and with the subject posing in three-quarter
profile (a pose that was flattering for sitters according to nineteenth-century photo­
graphic portraiture treatises).28 These portraits played a double role. On the one hand,
they presented their subjects as individuals; on the other, they served to create typologies
and classify people into social classes, races, and minorities.
18 D. DOROTINSKY

Figure 8. Photographer uknown, ‘Indígena lacandón,’ 1942, América Indígena 2 (2): 4. This is one of the
images from the ‘México Indígena’ archive at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM.

The use of the portrait as a genre in the construction of inter-American indigenism was
not merely by chance, particularly if one considers that anthropologists and sociologists in
the 1940s were striving to delimit, define, and establish their study subjects. Furthermore,
ever since the Renaissance, painted portraits have operated as the main media for
creating honorific identities. First the nobility and the clergy, and later the haute bour­
geoise, were painted with visual elements that in the social imaginary established
privileged class identity: jewelry, the texture and quality of clothing fabrics, details in
shoes and hairstyles, and sumptuous background elements. However, with the invention
of photography in 1839 and the relative democratization of the portrait picture around
1860 with the appearance of cartes de visite (small portrait photos mounted on cards to be
exchanged and/or collected), portraiture established honorific identities as well as social
otherness, and consequently contributed to building typologies of people. Once the
social use of the photographic portrait extended beyond the validation and promotion
of bourgeoise identity (collected in family albums), it entered social control systems –
deployed in prisons, asylums, schools, factories, and the military – and began to operate
as a biopolitical apparatus. Portraits then served to identify criminals, patients with mental
illness, prostitutes, factory workers, slum dwellers, and the natives encountered and
oppressed by nineteenth-century colonial expansion. To portray these subjects, to estab­
lish a physiognomy (non-white, non-bourgeoise, and often non-masculine) was a form of
exercising power over the bodies of these Others (Tagg 1988). Portraiture of cultural and
racial ‘others’ was instrumentalized in conjunction with nineteenth-century liberal indi­
genist and twentieth-century Mexican post-revolutionary projects. In Europe, before and
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 19

Figure 9. Photographer uknown, ‘Escena en un mercado indígena de México,’ 1942, América Indígena
2 (3): 48. Courtesy of Pan American Airways.

during World War II, portraiture of ‘otherness’ was adopted by fascist regimes with the
goal of identifying undesirable ‘others,’ pointing out accepted physical qualities, and
promoting control and eradication of ‘deviants.’
Authors like Josh Ellenborgen (2012) and Anne Maxwell (2008) have already pointed
out the way in which the photographic portrait was integrated into twentieth-century
eugenics, a project in which quite a few Latin American indigenists participated. However,
some portraits in América Indígena seem to highlight the individual person without
typological subjection. This difference depends on the photographer’s own gaze. In
some instances, photographers individuated their subjects more by following in the
footsteps of avant-garde photographers (Soviet constructivists like Aleksandr
Ródchenko or New Objectivity authors like László Moholy-Nagy) who elevated or exalted
their photographic subjects – specially workers, peasants and cultural others – and
portrayed them in a dignified way shot from bottom angle looking up, thus making the
sitter look larger than if shot from a frontal angle. In other photographs, we can ‘read’ the
sitter’s agency in deciding the pose, or at least negotiating it with the photographer,
based on the sitter’s projection of confidence, bodily control, or ease, or even by the way
he or she may stare directly at the camera. It is fundamental to examine these images
through case studies that can shed light on the genealogies and specific historical
processes of the ways of visually constructing specific ethnic groups throughout different
eras.29 Reconstructing the multiple genealogies of these visual cultures also allows us to
critically understand the interpretations of them.
20 D. DOROTINSKY

Figure 10. Photographer uknown, ‘Indio de Cusco, Perú,’ 1941, América Indígena 1 (1): 38.

Other images published by AI refer to material culture and appear sporadically during
the first decade of the journal. By the 1950s, other photographs published in the journal
show everyday practices, often in the form of series that suggest a narrative just like
photo-essays or photojournalism. To elaborate on this topic I consider the article ‘Manual
Arts in Ecuador,’ written by Raúl Salinas on the value and benefit of popular arts for
bettering the living conditions of indigenous populations in Ecuador (Figure 11). This
article was illustrated with five photos of indigenous artisans at work and some examples
of the textiles they are crafting.
As López (2010, position 815) has demonstrated, there was a significant change in
discourse and perspective regarding popular or indigenous handcrafts after the centen­
nial celebration of Mexican independence in 1921, and even more so after the Popular
Arts exhibition organized by artists Jorge Enciso and Roberto Montenegro in 1921 (see
Atl’s two-volume Las Artes Populares en México [1922]). This new attitude contrasted with
the Porfirista policies of the previous century; now contemporary indigenous culture
would be designated a central role in post-revolutionary nationalist cultural policies. In
this manner, artesanías, folklore, indigenous industries, and popular arts (all synonyms for
Indian material cultural production) became a banner of Mexican-ness. It provided the
post-revolutionary state with an extraordinary identity that was local, original, and differ­
entiated from the rest of the world. The appropriation and interpretation of popular art
forms and figures were soon blatantly visible in painting, sculpture, murals, and even
architecture in the 1920s, part of an avant-garde primitivism of which Adolfo Best-
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 21

Figure 11. Utrera Bros. Photography, untitled, 1954, América Indígena, 14 (4): 325.

Maugard’s drawings are a classic example. The Mexican art scene was not alone in this
regard; in Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, indigenous peoples
were recognized and praised for their artisanal production, as were Native peoples in the
U.S. For this reason, the First Indigenist Congress in Pátzcuaro included prominently in
their resolutions discussion of artesanías as a source of complimentary income. This
explains the presence of some texts in AI that deal more in depth with these productions.
The contents of América Indígena still await more detailed studies, either by period or
subject matter, including such trending subjects as indigenist policies in each IAII-
affiliated country, indigenous education, land tenure, health, gender and Indian women’s
issues, and political activism and social movements. Changes in thematic focus possibly
reflect relevant agendas in different historical moments. It is important to examine the
ways that images – tables, maps, pictures – operate alongside the articles, how images
can mediate or contest the arguments elaborated by authors.
Over the years, a distinguished group of international researchers was incorporated
into the lists of AI authors, allowing the journal to more fully capture the expansion
of indigenisms; their changing meanings, ideologies, and orientations; and the decon­
struction and critique of these concepts. The woodblock vignettes disappeared and
indigenist visuality turned almost exclusively to photography. Artistic avant-garde dis­
courses were no longer a necessary symbolic element once the academic and scientific
reputation of the journal was well established.
One of our main questions and initial concerns was to determine how the early images
in América Indígena participated in the visual making of an inter-American indigenist
imaginary. The journal was created during a period in which cultural and artistic literary
magazines and journals put significant effort into their editorial design, as demonstrated
22 D. DOROTINSKY

by the journal Amauta. Like in Amauta, América Indigena’s image-makers understood well
the value and symbolic potential of images. On the one hand, we can posit that photo­
graphs, woodcuts, and the journal’s emblem favored the comprehension of inter-
American indigenous diversity and established a connection with indigenist pictorial
cannons of the first half of the twentieth century, and even adopted the language of
a certain indigenist modernist graphic. On the other hand, this experimentation helped
build the characteristics of social scientific journals during the first years of pan-American
indigenism as an evolving discursive field that was diverse, contradictory, at times
ambiguous (protect the Indian, incorporate the Indian, rescue the Indian, etc.), and spread
over disparate disciplines. In this sense, Carlos Mérida’s logo gave the publication impor­
tant symbolic cultural capital, while woodprints by Alfredo Zalce, Gustavo Savin, and
Alberto Beltrán gave América Indigena an aesthetic unity (or uniformity) that paradoxically
contradicted the diversity of scholarly perspectives and definitions of indigenism.
However, the task of making diversity visible fell on the multiple photographic materials
taken from miscellaneous and dissimilar sources. Since the mid-1940s, photography had
a central role at the beginning and closing of articles and was associated, very vaguely,
with the articles. The effort implied constructing a continental indigenist imaginary that,
even if it was spelled out in the texts, became whole or complete in the readers’ minds
through the image repertoires that graced the pages of América Indígena.

Notes
1. See (Fernández and Saucedo 2016; González, Stanton, and Cruz Porchini 2013; Rodríguez
Mortellaro 2008; Sheridan 1985; Stanton 2014). On the Revista Mexicana de Sociología, see
(Olvera Serrano 2013).
2. On Amauta, see (Adams and Majluf 2019) (specially Majluf’s chapter, 69-123); (Costa and Burgi
2012) (see their discussion of Indians on page 42). Regarding illustrations in the Brazilian
magazine Revista do Globo, so close in format and style to the Mexican Revista de Revistas, see
Paula Ramos’s monumental and essential book, A modernidade impressa: Artistas ilustradores
da livraria do Globo-Porto Alegre (2016).
3. Artundo (2008) and Elizalde (2007) are two notable approaches to visuality in cultural
magazines.
4. On the institutionalization and professionalization of both sociology and anthropology in
Mexico, see (Olvera Serrano 2004; Rutsch 2007).
5. I am referring to ‘American modernities’ in the plural, in dialogue with ideas put forth by
Michel Coletta (2018), Mari Carmen Rodríguez (2013), and S.N. Eisenstadt (2002). These
modernities were local and particular iterations that stylistically dialogued with European
and North American avant-gardes but found imaginative grips in local artistic traditions, in
the re-readings and updates of nationalist visual repertories, and in the invention of new ones
inspired by international movements such as futurism, constructivism and surrealism.
6. Girón Cerna was the General Consul of Guatemala in Mexico, secretary of the Provisional
Executive Committee of the IAII, first editor of América Indígena, lawyer, poet, writer, and later
stage writer.
7. Letter from Carlos Mérida to Carlos Girón Cerna, dated 13 October 1941 from Texas, s.f.,
Archivo Histórico del Instituto Indigenista Interamericano (AHIII), Mexico, Mérida, Carlos file.
8. Letter from Carlos Girón Cerna to Carlos Mérida, dated 21 October 1941 oficio No. 3373, s.f.,
AHIII, Mexico, Mérida, Carlos file.
9. Letter from Carlos Girón Cerna to Carlos Mérida, dated 5 December 1941 oficio No. 3981,
AHIII, Mexico, Mérida, Carlos file.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 23

10. Letter from Carlos Mérida to Carlos Girón Cerna, dated 15 December 1941 from Texas, AHIII,
Mexico, Mérida, Carlos file. Underlined words in the original. Usually figures looking to the left
symbolized looking to the past, while those looking ‘ahead,’ to the future, normally faced
right. Mérida is not using this convention since the figure that looks to the right is both the
colonial and present period figure. The figure facing us is actually the one representing the
future.
11. Letter from Carlos Mérida to Carlos Girón Cerna, dated 16 February 1942 n/f, AHIII, Mérida,
Carlos file. This is one of the typewritten letters with scribbled handwritten comments.
12. The original in Spanish says de tres fracasos de piedra, madera y barro regarding the three
failed attempts the gods made to create man.
13. Laura Giraudo recounts this celebration in her 2017 article, ‘Celebrar a los indígenas, defender
al indigenismo: el “Día del Indio” y el Instituto Indigenista Interamericano.’ In this issue,
Giraudo describes the IAII emblem and Giron’s text, which attempts to explain it to AI’s
readers. She draws our attention to indigenous heroism, particularly how it was aggrandized
by early indigenistas as a self-promoting strategy. In Mexico, both in mid-nineteenth century
liberalism and 1920s post-revolutionary discourse, heroic pre-Columbian Indian characters
were rescued; these figures were fundamental to the construction of nationalist narratives
and to the invention of new civic traditions that substituted solidarity ties previously gener­
ated through religious ceremonies and rituals.
14. See Rosalía Ruiz Santoyo’s 2006 ”1932-1935, La Escuela de Danza en México y el Método
Dalcroze” senior thesis, Facultad de Filosof´ia y Letras UNAM, 17-27.Mérida’s 1933 text,
‘Proyecto de plan de investigación coreográfica de las más características danzas del país
puesto a la consideración del C. Jefe del Departamento de Bellas Artes por la Escuela de
Danza,’ in the painter’s archive in MUNAL, is particularly telling. Also see (Mérida 1990).
15. Méndez, Arenal, and O’Higgins, who were closer to Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s unionist
ideas, left LEAR between April and May of 1937 and founded the studio that was then called
Taller Editorial de Gráfica Popular, known as Taller de Gráfica Popular or TGP. In spite of their
break with the LEAR and the frictions between Lombardo and the PCM (Mexican Communist
Party), apparently both groups kept collaborating with the Frente Popular (Popular Front)
(Wechsler 2006).
16. Hannes Meyer wrote about his colleagues’ work in his book El Taller de Gráfica Popular: doce
años de obra artística colectiva, published by La Estampa Mexicana in 1949. Meyer was the
publishing house’s manager between 1946 and 1949. Even though most of the TGP artists
produced figurative or realist works, while he was there Carlos Mérida created several
engravings that show his abstract inclination.
17. There is a short mention of Mérida’s graphic works in (Wechsler 2006), 172-173.
18. The proposal for the celebration came from the indigenous representative from Panama,
Rubén Pérez Kantule. The document, ‘Recomendación LIX. El Día del Indio,’ included two
points, calling upon American countries first to establish a Day of the Indian, ‘dedicated to
studying in all schools and universities, present day Indians’ problems with a realistic criteria,’
and second, to adopt April 19 as Day of the American Indian, ‘to commemorate the date on
which the Indigenous delegates meet for the First Inter American Indigenist Congress’ (III
(Instituto Indigenista Interamericano) 1948, 32). Pérez Kantule also authored the article about
the molas (Kuna women’s blouses) published in AI.
19. Pioneer research that dealt with a larger Mexican visual culture can be traced to the series of
exhibitions, ‘Los pinceles de la historia,’ displayed in MUNAL between 1999 and 2003, and to
the research that Salvador Albiñana brought together for the MuVIM in Valencia, Spain, for
the exhibition, ‘México ilustrado: libros, revistas y carteles, 1920-1950’ (Albiñana 2010). On
Zalce’s illustrations for El sombrerón, please see the object information provided by the Art
Institute of Chicago online at <https://www.artic.edu/artworks/199521/the-mask-of-the-
sombreron-illustration-for-el-sombreron>.
20. Other modern artists like Juan O’Goman and Josep Renau also gathered a ‘miscellaneous’
archive of images that served as sources for their paintings and murals. To the best of my
knowledge from what I was able to check at the IAII archive between 2019 and 2020, before
24 D. DOROTINSKY

we went on lockdown due to the covid-19 pandemic, there are no vintage photographs left,
though maybe these could appear further down the road once the re-cataloguing of the
archive is resumed.
21. In the IAII archive I did not find any original material belonging to Zalce, and in the artist’s
archive in Morelia, Michoacán, the staff have not yet found the vignette woodcuts, nor the
preparatory drawing, if they still exist.
22. Francisco Díaz de León had created the Escuela de Artes del Libro as a technical craft school
and as part of the Workers Education Department in SEP. I am grateful to David Eduardo Caliz
Manjarez from Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) for his support in finding information on
Savin and sharing it with me. MUNAL has one Savin painting in its holdings. The Gilcrease
Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the U.S. has an oil painting, ‘Éxodo’ (1943), that was on exhibit
in a show of Mexican art in 2010, to commemorate the Mexican Revolution’s Centennial. See
it online at <https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/01472025>. The Indian subjects and
maybe mestizo ones in this painting are strongly reminiscent of the bodies of his characters
for América Indígena.
23. In a marked contrast to Zalce’s and Savin’s artworks, which cannot be located in the IAII
archive, the archive does hold a series of ink drawings made by Alberto Beltrán that deserve
a separate study. They may be related to his line of illustrations for the bilingual Indian literacy
booklets, but exploring this possibility would exceed the limits of this essay and remains
pending future research.
24. Zaragoza (2014) indexed and briefly commented on a vast quantity of articles published in AI,
though regrettably only covering the issues published between 1982 and 1990.
25. The journal American Anthropologist included some drawings of a set of hands in its first issue
in January 1888. In 1900, they were illustrating articles with drawings and black and white
photographic reproductions of some paintings. Around 1909, original photographs (not
reproductions of other works) begin to appear in the journal. However, even up until 1941
their page design was very inconsistent and uneven. For example, in Sydney J. Thomas’s 1941
article ‘A Sioux Medicine Bundle,’ (43: 605-609) there are some handwritten annotations and
drawn images together with the photographs of Sioux bundles that appear in two inserted
pages with no numbering between pages 606 and 607.
26. This image is housed at UNAM’s ‘Mexico Indígena’ archive. Since its first issue in March/
April 1939, the journal Revista Mexicana de Sociología (published by Instituto de
Investigaciones Sociales-UNAM) has published photographs from the Institute’s ‘México
Indígena’ photographic archive. The photographs for the archive were commissioned by
Lucio Mendieta y Núñez, the Institute’s director and editor of the journal for decades.
Photographic images from the archive appeared in a special section called Exposición
Etnográfica (‘ethnographic exhibition’) until 1946, when the archive and some other materials
were displayed in the grand México Indígena exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (see
Dorotinsky 2003, 2016).
27. I find it unlikely that this photograph was shot by Gertrude Duby. As an experienced
photographer, she would have framed the subject more dexterously to avoid an important
composition mistake: the horizontal tree trunk behind the Indian’s head seems to ‘visually
decapitate’ him. It is probable that the photographer was Francisco Rojas González, a IIS-
UNAM researcher who wrote on this ethnic group and even published his best known short
story, ‘El Diosero,’ about his field work experience with the Lacandon Indians.
28. On the relations between photography, anthropology, portraiture, eugenics, and social
control, see (Dorotinsky 2009, 2018; Penhos 2005).
29. In Viaje de sombras (Dorotinsky 2013), I dealt with the relationship between portraiture,
landscape, literature, and journalism in the photographic construction of the Lacandon
Indians and the Lacandon rainforest in this same time period.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 25

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Laura Giraudo, Haydeé López, and Andrea García for shared discussions and
readings and great generosity, and I whole heartedly thank Cristóbal Jácome for his careful critical
reading and first copyediting of the English version. I am especially grateful to José de Jesús
Hernández of IIE’s ‘Justino Fernández’ Library and María de los Ángeles Juárez, head of the library;
the Centro de Documentación ‘Manuel Gamio,’ Programa Universitario de Estudios de la Diversidad
Cultural y la Interculturalidad (PUIC) UNAM, for allowing me to consult the IAII Historical Archive.
This article was first presented as a paper at the Research Seminar ‘Idiosyncrasies of Indigenism in
Latin America: Plurality of sources and appropriations outside of Latin America’ in November 2018.
Research for this article was supported by Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (IIE-UNAM) and the
project ‘Artesanías en transición, 1940-1980,’ PAPIIT IN-400519 financed by Dirección General de
Asuntos del Personal Académico-UNAM.
The archives consulted were the Archivo Histórico del Instituto Indigenista Interamericano
(Centro de Documentación ‘Manuel Gamio,’ Programa Universitario de Estudios de la Diversidad
Cultural y la Interculturalidad, UNAM) and the Carlos Mérida Archive (Museo Nacional de Arte,
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Deborah Dorotinsky is a full-time researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas in
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She has a BA in Cultural Anthropology from
UC-Berkeley, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from UNAM. She chaired the Art History Graduate
Program in UNAM from 2011 to 2017. Her book Viaje de sombras. Fotografías del Desierto de la
soledad y los indios lacandones en los años cuarenta was published by UNAM-IIE in 2013. She has
published in journals such as CAIANA, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Anales del
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas.

References
Adams, Beverly, and Natalia Majluf, eds. 2019. Redes de Vanguardia: Amauta y América Latina, (1926–
1930). Mexico City, Mexico: Secretaría de Cultura, INBAL, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Museo
de Arte de Lima, Blanton Museum of Art.
Albiñana, Salvador, ed. 2010. México Ilustrado 1920–1950. Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial RM.
Araujo, Alejandro. 2015. “Mestizos, indios y extranjeros: Lo propio y lo ajeno en la definición
antropológica de la nación. Manuel Gamio y Guillermo Bonfil Batalla.” In Nación y alteridad:
Mestizos, indígenas y extranjeros en el proceso de formación nacional, edited by Daniela Gleizer and
Paula López Caballero, 197–242. Mexico City, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-
Cuajimalpa.
Artundo, Patricia M. 2008. Arte en revistas. Publicaciones culturales en Argentina 1900–1950. Buenos
Aires, Argentina: Talleres Gráficos Nuevo Offset.
Baxandall, Michael. [1972] 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Coletta, Michel. 2018. Decadent Modernity: Civilization and ‘Latinidad’ in Spanish America, 1880–1920.
Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, Liverpool Latin American Studies Series, New Series 17.
Cordero Reinman, Karen, ed. 1992 . Homenaje Nacional a Carlos Mérida: Americanismo y Abstracción.
Mexico City, Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), Museo de Monterrey.
26 D. DOROTINSKY

Costa, Helouise, and Sergio Burgi, eds. 2012. As origens do fotojornalismo no Brasil: Um olhar sobre
O Cruzeiro 1940–1960. São Paulo, Brazil: Instituto Moreira Salles.
Dorotinsky, Deborah. 2018. “It Is Written in Their Faces: Seri Women and Facial Painting in
Photography.” In Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts
and Global Practicess, edited by Lynda Klitch and Tara Zanardi, 166–182. New York, NY: Routledge.
Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah 2003. “La vida de un archivo: ‘México Indígena’ y la fotografía
etnográfica de los años cuarenta en México.” Ph.D dissertation, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah. 2009. “Imágenes e Imaginarios Sociales: Los Indios yaqui en la
revista Hoy en 1939.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 94: 93–126.
Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah. 2014. “Del registro a la creación del cuerpo indígena: El Archivo
‘México Indígena’ de la UNAM.” Alquimia 17 (51): 67–77.
Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah. 2016. “El asedio de los rostros: 1946 y la Exposición
Etnográfica México Indígena.” In Recuperación de la memoria histórica de exposiciones de
arte mexicano (1930–1958), edited by Dafne Cruz Porchini, Garay Molina, Claudia, and
Velázquez, Mireida, 127–141. Mexico City, Mexico: Coordinación de Estudios de Posgrado,
UNAM, Fundación BBVA Bancomer.
Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah. 2017. “The Ethnographic Archive.” In The Routledge Companion to
Inter-American Studies, edited by Wilfried Raussert, 350–362. New York, NY: Routledge.
Dorotinsky Alperstein, Deborah. 2013. Viaje de sombras: Fotografías del Desierto de la Soledad y los
indios lacandones en los años cuarenta. Mexico City, Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas,
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Editorial. 1941. “América Indígena.” 1: 5.
Eisenstadt, S.N., ed. 2002. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Elizalde, Lydia, ed. 2007. Revistas culturales latinoamericanas 1920–1960. Mexico City, Mexico:
CONACULTA, Universidad Iberoamericana-Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.
Ellenborgen, Josh. 2012. Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and
Marey. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fernández, Justino. 1940. “Las exposiciones, conferencias, publicaciones y otros eventos rela­
cionados con el arte, durante el año de 1939.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas
5: 86–88.
Fernández Félix, Miguel, and Arturo I. Saucedo, eds. 2016. Los Contemporáneos y su tiempo. Mexico
City, Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.
Fox, Claire. 2013. Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Fuentes, Elizabeth. 1992. “Carlos Mérida documentación.” In Carlos Mérida: Color Y Forma, edited by
Luis Cardoza and y Aragón, 191–206. Mexico City, Mexico: Ediciones ERA, CONACULTA, INBA.
Gamio, Manuel. 1922. La población del valle de Teotihuacán el medio en que se hadesarrollado, su
evolución étnica y social, iniciativas para procurar su mejoramiento. Vol. 2. México: Secretaría de
Educación Pública, Dirección de Talleres Gráficos.
Giraudo, Laura. 2012. “Neither “Scientific” nor “Colonialist.”” Latin American Perspectives 39 (5): 12–
32. doi:10.1177/0094582X12447275.
Giraudo, Laura. 2017. “Celebrar a los indígenas, defender al indigenismo: El ‘Día del Indio’ y el
Instituto Indigenista Interamericano.” Estudios Ibero-Americanos 42 (1): enero-abril): 81–96.
Giraudo, Laura. 2020. “La Colonia En la Contemporaneidad: El “Indio Americano” de Los
Indigenistas.” Historia Crítica 75 (75): 71–92. doi:10.7440/histcrit75.2020.04.
Giraudo, Laura, and Juan-Martín Sánchez, eds. 2011. La ambivalente historia del indigenismo: Campo
interamericano y trayectorias nacionales 1940–1970, 33. Lima, Peru: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos,
serie América Problema.
González, Renato, Anthony Stanton, and Dafne Cruz Porchini, eds. 2013. Vanguardia En México,
1915–1940, Exhibition Catalogue. Mexico City, Mexico: Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, UNAM.
Greet, Michel. 2009. Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean
Art, 1920–1960. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 27

III (Instituto Indigenista Interamericano). 1948. Acta Final del Primer congreso Indigenista
Interamericano celebrado en Pátzcuaro (México Abril 1940). Suplemento del Boletin Indigenista.
México. Accessed 25 November 2021. https://www.pueblos-originarios.ucb.edu.bo/digital/
106000093.pdf
López, Rick A. 2010. Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
López Caballero, Paula. 2015. ““Las políticas indigenistas y la ‘fábrica’ de su sujeto de intervención en
la creación del primer Centro Coordinador del Instituto Nacional Indigenista (1948-1952).”” In
Nación y alteridad. Mestizos, indígenas y extranjeros en el proceso de formación nacional, edited by
Daniela Gleizer, and Paula López Caballero, 69–108. Mexico City, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana Unidad Cuajimalpa, Educaciópn y Cultura, Asesoría y Promoción S.C.
López Caballero, Paula. 2017. Indígenas de la Nación: Etnografía histórica d ela alteridad en México
(Milpa Alta, siglos XVII–XXI). Mexico City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Maxwell, Anne. 2008. Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940. Sussex, UK: Sussex
Academic Press.
Mérida, Carlos. 1940. Carnival in México. 500 limited numbered copies. México
Mérida, Carlos. 1990. Escritos de Carlos Mérida sobre el Arte: La danza, compiled by Cristina Mendoza.
Mexico City, Mexico: Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Iinformación de Artes
Plásticas (CENIDIAP).
Meyer, Hannes. 1949. El Taller de Gráfica Popular: Doce años de obra artística colectiva. Mexico City,
Mexico: Editorial La Estampa Mexicana.
Monsiváis, Carlos. 1992. “La perdurabilidad de los orígenes (Crónica de un artista latinoamericano).”
In Homenaje Nacional a Carlos Mérida: Americanismo y Abstracción, edited by Karen
Cordero Reinman, 16–29. Mexico City, Mexico: INBA, Museo de Monterrey.
Moriuchi, Mey-Yen. 2018. Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society and Identity in Nineteenth-century Art.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Musacchio, Humberto. 2007. El Taller de Gráfica Popular. Mexico City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica.
Olvera Serrano, Margarita. 2004. Lucio Mendieta y Núñez y la institucionalización de la sociología en
México, 1939–1965. Mexico City, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzal.
Olvera Serrano, Margarita. 2013. Economía y sociología en México: Revistas especializadas, liderazgos
y procesos de institucionalización, 1928–1959. Mexico City, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana-Azcapotzal.
Ortiz de Montellano, Bernardo. 1946. El sombrerón: 40 grabados de Alfredo Zalce. México: Estampa
Mexicana.
Palacios, Guillermo. 1999. La pluma y el arado: Los intelectuales pedagogos y la construcción socio­
cultural del “problema campesino” en México 1932–1934. Mexico City, Mexico: El Colegio de
México, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas.
Penhos, Martha Noemí. 2005. “Frente y perfil. Una indagación acerca de la fotografía en las prácticas
antropológicas y criminológicas en Argentina a fines del siglo XIX y principios del XX.” In Arte
y Antropología en la Argentina, edited by Fundación Espigas, 15–64. Buenos Aires, Argentina:
Fundación Espigas.
Poole, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Race, Modenrity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World.
Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press.
Ramos, Paula. 2016. A modernidade impressa: Artistas ilustradores da livraria do Globo-Porto Alegre.
Porto Alegre, Brazil: UGRGS Editora.
Rodríguez, Mari Carmen, ed. 2013. Intersecting Modernities: Latin American Art from the Brillembourg
Capriles Collection. Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts.
Rodríguez Mortellaro, Itzel. 2008. “Forma, revista de artes plásticas.” In Revistas culturales latinoa­
mericanas, 1920–1960, edited by Lydia Elizalde, 83–104. Mexico City, Mexico: Consejo Nacional
para la Cultura y las Artes.
Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra. 2018. The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States,
1910–1950. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
28 D. DOROTINSKY

Rutsch, Mechtild. 2007. Entre el campo y el gabinete: Nacionales y extranjeros en la profesionalización

de la antropología mexicana (1877–1920). Mexico City, Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología
e Historia, UNAM.
Sheridan, Guillermo. 1985. Los contemporáneos ayer. Mexico City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica.
Stanton, Anthony, ed. 2014. Modernidad, vanguardia y revolución en la poesía mexicana, (1919–1930).
Chicago, IL: El Colegio de México, The University of Chicago.
Tagg, John. 1988. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. London, UK:
Macmillan Education.
Wechsler, James M. 2006. “Propaganda Gráfica: Printmaking and the Radical Left in Mexico, 1920–
50.” In Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950, Exhibition
Catalogue, edited by John Ittmann, 55–76. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Williams, Lyle W. 2006. “Zalce.” In Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts,
1920 to 1950, Exhibition Catalogue, edited by John Ittmann, 191. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia
Museum of Art.
Zaragoza Campillo, Ana Victoria . 2014. “América Indígena, revista del Instituto Indigenista
Interamericano: Índice de los años 1982 a 1990.” Senior thesis, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,
UNAM.