The Mexican Muralists like Ideologists of Cultural Decolonization

Abstract

In this work I propose that the Mexican muralists were not only extraordinary artists who painted thousands of square meters in public buildings, but also constituted a fundamentally decolonizing intellectual and cultural vanguard. More than half a century before the rise of the epistemologies of decolonization, the muralists produced in painting, in their own texts and in declarations a profound movement of intellectual and cultural decolonization that had enormous repercussions in Mexico and throughout the American continent. I support my argument with examples of mural painting by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Aurora Reyes; as well as in texts by Rivera and Siqueiros. I relate the work and declarations of the muralists, with artists and theoreticians, who decades later, coincide in conceiving artistic production as their own theory; this is the case of Pierre Francastel, Hans Belting, David Hockney and William Kentridge. On the other hand, I expose examples of the early decolonizing thought of the Mexican muralists and of the later current of thinkers and sociologists of decolonization that emerged in the late eighties of the twentieth century, such as Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, among others. others.