Another job was to paint a watercolour poster for the “Programme for Belize”, on the subject of rainforest and wildlife conservation. It encouraged people in the UK to ‘buy’ an acre of rainforest for £25, thus saving it from destruction. The copy announced that Belizean birds included white ibises, snail kites, plain chachalacas, ocellated turkeys, ruddy crakes, sungrebes, groove-billed anises, wedge-tailed sabrewings, white-necked puff-birds and scaly-throated leaftossers.
My next commission was to design a t-shirt on the theme of ‘Africa Music’, for a small company in Cirencester, run by a man who had taught at Corsham School of Art. He always wore a spotted bow-tie. After that I did an album cover for Nick Gold of World Circuit Arts - ‘Cumbia Cumbia’, lively Colombian dance music. For some reason, I painted a train with clouds of steam puffing from its chimney with the words ‘Cumbias de Oro de Colombia’ written on the clouds. I haven’t been to Colombia but did once screenprint an edition of posters for a health project involving fishing communities on the Pacific coast. The poster showed a man sitting on the loo and urged people to build themselves pit-latrines - ‘Instalelas!’.
That summer, I’d also had an exhibition in Lichfield cathedral, as part of the Lichfield Festival, for which I’d done some graphics earlier in the year. The cathedral, in its peaceful close behind Erasmus Darwin’s house, has a dark and highly decorated west front. Its gargoyles and saints and sinners, which I looked at a lot at the time, set me up for a trip to Mexico City.
Mary Farquharson had left Arts Worldwide and gone to live in Mexico City. She had soon become interested in a grassroots peoples’ organisation called the Asamblea de Barrios. The Asamblea was initially concerned with finding housing for thousands of people who had been left homeless after the 1985 earthquake or ‘terramoto’. The quake happened at around 7 a.m on Thursday September 19 and measured 8.1 on the Richter scale. So many houses had been destroyed that demand greatly
exceeded supply. Landlords rubbed their hands together, thinking about pesos, and evicted poorer tenants so that they could rent their houses for higher prices.
The Asamblea started to actively oppose evictions, to provide lawyers for the threatened families and to draw media attention to this issue. Their most visible and photogenic symbol was a plump ex-wrestler who dressed up in a Superman suit and called himself ‘Superbarrio’. The Asamblea’s leader, Marcos Rasgon, was charismatic and inspiring. “We have 20,000 members and one typewriter”, he told me, laughing. “Superbarrio represents the people against the authorities”. The choice of the comic book hero, the Superman character, is interesting. He transcends the everyday. He is strong and handsome, good against evil. Machismo with a human face. Most interesting of all, he’s American. He’s not Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata. He’s a gringo!
Mary wrote some notes about the idea of us doing a workshop - “The Asamblea has recently taken over an old building in the city centre which it aims to make into a place for formal and informal meetings, as well as a centre for generating information and employment. The building is located in the heart of the old printing area, where people who can’t write can have their letters typed up, where ancient machines print up cards for Christmas, baptisms, marriages and business.”
“The Asamblea would like to teach its members to screenprint, so that they can produce posters for Asamblea campaigns that will cover the issues of health, housing, pollution and rehabilitation of the old centre without throwing out the working class communities who have lived there for generations. In addition to enabling the members to make their own posters, the Asamblea would like to teach young members the technique, in the belief that it may awaken a talent that can become a source of employment in a part of the city with a centuries-old tradition of printing, but, so far, no facilities for screenprinting.”
These were the broad terms of reference for the workshop which Luis Cook and I were to help conduct. Luis had studied graphics at Middlesex Polytechnic and at the Royal College. We met for the first time in “The Artichoke” pub in Charing Cross Road. Over a drink, Luis showed me some of the work he’d been doing at college. He’d made striking images for the English National Opera’s production of “The Barber of Seville” and for a concert by Don Cherry at the Festival Hall. He also showed me some illustrations for safe sex and a great cover design for Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Opressed”. That morning I’d been to Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street and bought a record by Don Cherry, Nana Vasconcelas and Colin Walcott. Paulo Freire was one of my heroes. We got on well straight away. After our Mexico trip, the graphics magazine “Creative Review” published an article on Luis’s work, in a section entitled “Upstart”. Luis had spent some time in a Tibetan refugee school, using painting and drawing as a tool for increasing confidence and communication skills. He’d also set up village art workshops in Bangladesh on a visit sponsored by Action Aid. In rather bland journalese, Creative Review “quoted” Luis as saying “I believe that art can have a social function and assist social reform”.
On the flight to Mexico, Luis and I chatted about our ideas for the workshop and wondered what the next couple of weeks would bring. Settling into the unreality of a long flight, we had a beer and drifted away into tiredness and anticipation. On arrival, we sleepwalked through baggage and customs, vaguely expecting that we would bump into Mary at some point. In the busy arrivals hall there was a group of thirty or so people and a large banner which read “Bienvenido Bob y Luis”. Mary greeted us and explained that some of the Asamblea members had wanted to come and welcome us. It was so nice to look upon our slightly scruffy, smiling reception committee. I made a short speech in pidgeon Spanish, courtesy of the BBC publication “Digame”. We all shook hands and patted each other on the back then happily, if a bit sleepily, went outside to get a taxi.
It was dark as we drove, squashed up, into the sprawling city, the place where an Aztec leader had had a vision of an eagle sitting on top of a cactus eating a rattlesnake. This image was taken as a sign that the Aztecs should build their largest settlement right there. I have never understood the connection between the vision and the site for Tenochtitlan. Leaders, though, are often untroubled by logic. Building began on an island in the middle of a swampy lake. Was it a good place for one of the world’s biggest cities? The swamp is encircled by hills and mountains which now help to create what meteorologists call ‘thermal inversion’. This phenomenon causes extreme atmospheric pollution in present day Mexico City where there are now many more Volkswagen Beetles than there were in Aztec times. The site is also located directly above an active geological fault line just to add to the excitement.
It is now a Catholic city, thanks to Hernando Cortes who arrived here with a handful of colleagues and some horses, in 1520. These were the first horses that ever lived in the Americas. Their descendants have appeared in countless cowboy films. Cortes, then 35, was given a concubine by an Indian chief. Mexicans now sometimes refer to themselves as ‘hijos de la chingada’, sons of the raped one. Something like 90% of Mexicans are ‘mestizos’, admixtures of Amerindian and Spanish genetic material.
It took three hundred years for Mexico to gain independence from Spain. In 1821, political independence was declared, although three centuries of Spanish influence had certainly left its mark on Mexico’s culture and language. Ninety years after independence, the violent struggles for land reform were in full swing. Around 1910, Mexican revolutionaries in sombreros and
moustachios led movements to try to restore land from powerful landowners to powerless peasants. These were the days of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, whose legacy still encourages groups struggling for social justice in the south western states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. The revolution was bloody. For a decade or two civil war blew things apart. In the end, a constitution was written for the country and the violence abated.
In the 1920s, an enlightened Minister of Education, Jose Vasconcelas, thought it would be good to record and express, in pictures, something of the revolutionary spirit. He commissioned, among others, the artists Diego Rivera, David Siqueros, Jose Orozco and Pablo O’Higgins to make large public images celebrating the revolution, the culture of Mexico and the country’s ideals, as they then stood. I saw several of these murals at the university. The most memorable, though, was the football pitch sized Rivera that had been moved to a new, specially built museum, after the earthquake had nearly destroyed it. Standing in front of it I felt very small. It seemed like every conceivable upstanding socialist in the whole of Mexican history had been painstakingly depicted along with several of their good deeds. There was a sort of map of it to help you identify the hundreds of characters, most of them men. A ‘painting by numbers’ keyline drawing like those provided to identify landscape features at panoramic viewpoints or inset line drawings below group photographs in biographical books. Diego is usually described in written accounts as being ‘larger than life’.
In the late 1920s, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario was formed to carry on the revolutionary programme. In the late 1940s, it changed its name, becoming the Partido Revolucionario Institucionalizado. The PRI was, more or less, the only party in what was, effectively, a one-party state. It remained so for the rest of the twentieth century. In later years, it held on to power by various means, including electoral fraud. The PRI became thought of as a corrupt regime which had, as time went on, grown far away from the original revolutionary ideals. For example, an Amnesty International report from the mid-1980s, referring to land disputes in Chiapas and Oaxaca, talked about “deliberate killings of members of peasant organisations in circumstances suggesting that municipal authorities or members of the security forces were involved”. The revolution had, initially, been driven by the peasants’ passion for land reform, yet, by the end of the twentieth century, after decades of rule by the institutionalised revolutionary party, such reform had still not taken place in the south west. So, more bloodshed.
The evolution of the PRI in Mexico illustrates a more general problem. Revolutions, when they are in full swing, are full of ideals, hopes and actions that will lead to better things. Change is the goal. In some revolutions, change does happen and, to begin with, life is more cheerful for the majority. As time goes on, though, the revolutionaries become prime ministers, presidents and high-ranking government officers. They gradually mutate into conservative anti-revolutionaries, as power gradually corrupts. Former revolutionaries become authoritarian leaders. The attitudes and actions required to bring about revolution are quite different from those needed to sustain stable, ongoing government.This is an interesting and real phenomenon. In their book “Literacy and Power”, David Archer and Patrick Costello discuss what they call the “paradox of revolutionary education”.
‘Revolutionary education’, they write, ‘implies the constant transformation of reality....However, the difficulties really begin once the repressive regime is forgotten, when the reality to be transformed is the product of the revolutionary state itself. How then is it possible for a revolutionary state to design educational programmes which, to be revolutionary, must challenge that state? Either the state dictates the content of a revolutionary education and silences criticism as counter-revolutionary, in which case the education system becomes as repressive as its predecessor, or the state accepts the challenge and nurtures a continuing revolution in education, which might overthrow the very structures which made it possible’.
The PRI didn’t cope very well with the consequences of this paradox. Several of the people I worked with expressed a degree of disappointment that history had not followed the revolutionary script. The muralists’ images celebrating social justice seemed rather hopeful, idealistic and, sadly, somewhat dated. I often stopped to look at small groups of rural women standing outside the cathedral in the Plaza de la Revolucion holding photographs of their menfolk who had disappeared because they had agitated for land reform. Memories of husbands, sons, lovers, the reality fading, the photographs becoming the reality. Standing outside the cathedral, feeling solidarity together, human warmth against the concrete and the straight lines of authority.
We spent our first night in the Hotel Castropol but were transferred the next day to the Hotel Catedral in the Centro Histirico. It was close to the big main square, La Plaza de la Constitucion, known locally as the Zocalo. The cathedral sits at one end while the other three sides are mainly made up of government and administrative buildings. The cathedral has railings around it on which were usually tied old photographs of sons and husbands who had, for one reason or another, ‘disappeared’. The wivesand mothers of some of the desparecidos stood around, waiting for the opportunity to tell anyone who would listen about the terrible injustices that had taken their loved ones away. These stories often involved wealthy landowners and their hired thugs.
It was sad to see these country women and to reflect on the hopelessness of their condition.
A dozen or so tradesmen also sat waiting hopefully in front of the cathedral’s railings, with bags of tools and signs either next to them or, in some cases, round their necks, that read ‘Plumber Needs Work’ or ‘Safe Electrician for Hire’. One morning we stood at the west end of the cathedral watching a man with a boa constrictor round his neck, giving a sales talk to a group of interested bystanders. He was singing the praises of herbal medicine while displaying, on a table, a motley array of plants, nuts and bits of animals. I bought a couple of bits of armadillo skin to show the kids back home and got told off for my troubles. I also bought a piece of amber with a fly in it, reminding me of the wonderful amber shop in Southwold.
The workshop
Our workshop was attended by fifteen members of the Asamblea de Barrios. They were mainly concerned with housing issues and said that they are only asking for what was promised to Mexicans in the country’s constitution i.e. decent housing. As Rodolfo Cisneros Marques, one of the participants, told me “We are not asking for anything new, only what the government has already promised”.
On the Monday morning, Luis and I made our way by metro to the Fraternidad de Vicinos Associacion Civil, a sort of urban village hall in a suburb called Colonia Valle Gomez. I was entranced by the names of some of the stations - Allende, Bellas Artes, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Tlatelolco, Misterios and, further out on the metro map places like Azcapotzalco, Iztapalapa, Mixiuhca, Atlalilco and so on. In almost every carriage on the train there seemed to be a guitarist busking.
We spent the day talking with the group about their expectations for the workshop. They had already managed to produce a poster about HIV/AIDS and had flyposted it around the city. Many of the posters had been torn down by offended members of the pro-vida association. I was interested to learn, from one of the participants, Virgilio Vargas Velasquez, that flyposting is not illegal in Mexico City. Furthermore, in an inversion of British thinking, it was illegal to tear down posters, on the grounds that to do so was to infringe freedom of expression. It reminded me of the way that, in England, it is illegal both to put something into and to take something out of, somebody else’s skip.
Although there were several commercial companies using silkscreen printing in Mexico, Mary had assured us that, nevertheless, our involvement was necessary. She had written to me to say that local firms “wouldn’t touch an organisation fighting for social changes - your participation is the only way that the Asamblea can teach its members this skill. One of the workshop participants later told a journalist that “No Mexican artists ever offered us a free poster workshop”.
The Asamblea saw three main areas in which posters could help in its work. These were, firstly, by raising awareness of the Asamblea itself as an organisation working for local people; secondly, by helping to highlight the important social and political issues in Mexico City at that time; and, thirdly, by publicising community events held by the Asamblea.
On the first day of the workshop we were told that Superbarrio was present but, for some reason, we were not supposed to know which of the participants was him. He was, of course, in civvies and I had a pretty good idea that he was the slightly aloof plump one.
“Mama, nos estamos cambiando da casa?”. Mum, are we moving house? This was the slogan on the poster designed by sixteen year old Alba Mondragon Banos. The image was striking - a jagged, broken chair that spoke of violent eviction and a girl with tears streaming down her face. Evictions had been widespread in the immediate post-terramoto period. Poor families were made homeless without warning, unless Superbarrio and the lawyers who worked voluntarily for the Asamblea could intervene in time to stop the bully boys.
Angela Gutierrez Ayala created a strong image about atmospheric pollution which showed a large skull, a skeleton of arms and ribcage above which floated clouds of smog. The skull cropped up in several of the designs made at the workshop. It is, in fact, a widely used symbol in Mexican art, probably best known in the work of the nineteenth century artist Jose Guadalupe Pousada, in particular from his image ‘La Calavera Catrina’ (The Elegant Skull).
In addition, this was the time of the Day of the Dead festival, so we saw lots of skulls, mostly made of papier mache, everywhere we went. At the end of the workshop, Luis and I were given white skulls made of sugar, with our names piped onto them in pink. These are known, reasonably enough, as ‘calaveras de azucar’.
As well as posters about housing and pollution, workshop participants made designs about womens’ rights, electoral fraud, conservation of the historic city centre, health and transport. Their transport slogan was “Un dia sin auto”, meaning that car owners should use public transport on one day of the week. A similar suggestion was made in more recent times for the citizens of Athens, where atmospheric pollution approached Mexican levels. Marcos Rasgon told me that his slogan was “Un dia con auto”.The health/AIDS image made at the workshop featured Superbarrio and carried the slogan “Salud deficiente, Gobierno
indiferente”.
Participants worked in pairs, each pair printing multiple copies of their designs. There were no serious hitches in the running of the workshop and a good, co-operative atmosphere soon developed. By the fifth day, a Friday, participants and organisers alike were well pleased with what had been achieved so far. At the end of the day Mary told the group that their poster work was “five hundred times better” than anything she had anticipated. At this point, one of the participants, Victor Manuel Santana Rivera, produced a bottle of finest quality tequila from Guadalahara. We took turns at the ritual of drinking it - first lick a line of salt off your forearm, second gulp down a glass of tequila in one go, third and without delay bite into a lime and suck in the juice. Before each person took his or her swig, we all shouted a boisterous toast - “Salud y revolucion social!”. All good fun and a warm feeling of togetherness - especially around the throat area. Virgilio Vargas Velasquez announced that he was going to get a journalist friend to write a piece about the workshop for one of the local papers - either ‘El Dia’ or ‘La Jornada’.
We didn’t work on the Saturday but everybody was back, hard at it, on the Sunday. On Tuesday Marcos Rasgon came again to the workshop to encourage and congratulate.The following evening we went to the old building in the Centro Historico that the Asamblea had occupied. We were presented to the commitee. I was asked to make a short speech, hoping that people would understand my Spanish. Marcos announced that the workshop was the inaugural event of the Asamblea’s new cultural programme, which they named ‘Barriocult’.
On Thursday, after the tenth and final workshop day, we went to a large outdoor meeting of Asamblea members. I think there were about 1,000 people there, a stage with lights and microphones and the large banner saying ‘Welcome Bob and Luis’. I’m not used to that sort of stuff but soon got into the swing of it. To begin with, Luis and I were showered with confetti, a few bits of which had found their way into my navel, as I discovered later when I undressed for bed. The crowd clapped and cheered as Marcos displayed each poster. I was then handed the booming microphone and asked to present certificates to the participants and again make a speech. Much applause, hand-shaking and hugging, followed by an interview with the journalist from ‘La Jornada’.
So, we’d had a lot of fun...there was more to come... Marcos had told us that the next day we were going to exhibit the posters at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. I didn’t know if it was a joke, as it was like saying that, in London terms, we were going to have an exhibition at The National Gallery.
The next day started with a press conference. Then we made our way to the Bellas Artes. Several people from the Asamblea appeared there, one of the women carrying a large piece of cloth on which we painted a banner, working on our knees on the pavement. The finished banner read ‘Barriocult - Consejo Barrial para la Cultura y las Artes’. This was a parody of the Mexican Arts Council’s logo - the CN or Consejo Nacional. As I drafted it on the cloth, people gathered round to see what was going on. The Asamblea women, Luis and Sergio Marquez, one of the workshop participants, painted in the letters.
We also set up a printing table outside the Bellas Artes, using a screen we had prepared for printing ‘Barriocult’ posters. Before long, Superbarrio turned up in the Barriomovil, an old painted van with two large megaphone speakers fixed onto its roof. A loud announcement about what was happening came blazing from the speakers and a crowd of passers-by began to gather.
Meanwhile, Marcos and some Asamblea members had started to display the posters by tying string between the columns of the Bellas Artes’ portico and hanging the posters up with clothes pegs. It made a striking exhibition. Next, Asamblea members set up a table with a tablecloth and a vase of flowers and got ready the ‘limonade de honor’. Establishment functions have ‘vinho de honor’.
The activity must have aroused the director of the Bellas Artes. Out he came, a grey figure in suit and tie, looking distinctly agitated and demanding to know who had given us permission to mount our exhibition. Marcos and Superbarrio tried to calm the director. Soon the police arrived wearing sunglasses and highly polished riding boots, looking fairly nasty, guns at their belts. There followed a long conversation between the director, Marcos, the policemen and Superbarrio. The Asamblea
members gathered round them in a circle and the press arrived to take photographs. After a while the chief policeman stomped off angily. Marcos told me later that the police always turn up at Asamblea actions, ordering them to stop. “I always say ‘como quiere’ and then we just carry on as planned”.
Next, Superbarrio, in full Spiderman outfit with cape, screenprinted the first copy of the Barriocult poster, to the accompaniment of clapping and cheering from the crowd. A heckler started shouting at Superbarrio, challenging him to take off his mask. The director resumed his protestations, his face by now white with fury. Superbarrio tried to talk to him but the director replied ‘No hablo con enmascarados” ( I don’t talk to masked men), as if this had been one of the guiding principles in his life. At one point he asked Marcos “What do you know about art?”. Marcos replied “Entre tu arte y mi arte, prefiero miarte”, a sort of double entendre in Spanish meaning something like “Between your art and my art, I prefer to piss on you”. The police may or may not have captured this with their video camera with which they had filmed the proceedings.
There followed some more speeches. I thanked everyone and said that we were proud to be part of the first Barriocult event. I then presented a certificate to Superbarrio Gomez in recognition of his printing skills and we all drank to “Salud y Revolucion Social’ from our plastic ups of limonade de honor.
Later that afternoon Marcos drove us round the city to see some of the sights. This included a visit to the house and studio of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. I was particularly impressed by the collection of ‘miracle’ paintings that Diego had put together. The paintings were mostly done on the lids of tin cans and illustrated many of the appearances of the Virgin Mary to peasants in various parts of the country. More recently, some people in Mexico have seen visions of the Virgin in oil slicks on the surface of puddles, while some residents of Teheran have seen the name of Allah written in the clouds.
We rounded off the evening at a local club in one of the barrios where we saw several musical performances of varying degrees of competence. Top of the bill was ‘Paquita - la del Barrio’, a domineering stage presence who sang emotional songs about love and hardship. The night ended with a party given by two of the participants which went on until 2.00 a.m. It was one of the more memorable days of my life.
Rini Templeton
Towards the end of our stay I was presented with a gift from Marcos and the Asamblea. I had no idea, at the time, of how important it would become in my thoughts. It was just a book. “El Arte de Rini Templeton”. I continue to look at at it still and it never fails to lift my spirits.
Rini Templeton was born in 1935 in Buffalo, New York State, USA. Her family moved to Washington DC in 1943 then, three years later, to Chicago, where her father worked as an investment adviser. From the summer of 1952 to the winter of 1953/54, Rini hitch-hiked around most of the USA. In 1955 she went to live in Paris and later, in 1956, she was in England studying sculpture at the Bath Academy in Corsham.
By January 1959, Rini was in Havana to welcome the revolutionaries after Battista had fled on New Year’s Day. Amongst other activities, she worked on the campaign which reduced non-literacy to just 4%, a fraction of that found in other poor countries of the region.
Between 1965 and 1974 she lived in Taos, New Mexico. There she made graphics for the Chicano movement and was also staff artist on two newspapers - ‘El Grito del Norte’ and the ‘New Mexico Review’. During this period she exhibited drawings and sculpture in the USA and conducted several art workshops, for a variety of disadvantaged groups.
In 1974 Rini moved to Mexico City where she joined the Taller de la Grafica Popular. This was followed by further exhibitions of her drawings and graphics. Later, in 1976, she worked also in the Taller de Arte e Ideologia, and continued to carry out freelance graphic commissions.
In 1980 she was invited to Nicaragua by the Sandanista government to train people in the production of graphic materials for political education. During her six month stay, Rini helped to produce placards and posters for the revolution. One of the groups she worked with in Nicaragua was the ‘Jose Benito Escobar Sandanista Workers Central’. There she compiled and left for them a large file of xeroxed drawings that could be used as a resource by people who wanted to make their own graphic materials. At various times I have also been involved in putting together similar collections of resource images for use in Third World health promotion. In 1988 Bruce Wilson of the Association of Illustrators and I compiled a book of drawings for this purpose - ‘The Copy Book’ - at the suggestion of George McBean of Unicef. George also made a similar collection for use in Nepal; Jonathan Zeitlyn made an ‘Image Bank’ of pictures about rural development in Bangladesh; and Sudanese artists Wad Abu and Khalid Youssef Mohammed worked with me on a similar collection during my time with Unicef in Khartoum.
Back in Mexico City in 1980, Rini made more graphics for political organisations. She worked on the journal ‘Punto Critical’ for nine years, during which time she was responsible for cover designs, illustrations and overall production. In 1985 she had her first one-woman show in Mexico which consisted of thirty two silkscreen prints under the overall title ‘Donde Hay Vida y Lucha’. When the earthquake struck in September 1985, Rini was on a visit back to the USA. She stayed there for some weeks to organise aid for the earthquake victims. On her return to Mexico she worked with ‘La Coordinadora Unica de Damnificados’ (Earthquake Victims Co-ordinating Commitee). Sadly, in June 1986, she died suddenly, alone in her room, apparently of natural causes.
In April 1987 one of the housing complexes built to house earthquake victims in the Tlatelolco area was named after Rini. This was in recognition of her work with people who had been made homeless. In his book ‘Planet of Slums’ author Mike Davis points out that the term ‘classquake’ may be a more accurate one, since earthquakes affect the poor disproportionately. It was the poor who were evicted from their homes because they could not afford the increased rents after this classquake.
Rini Templeton’s commitment to using her graphic skills to try to help people to bring about social change is, to me, very inspirational. Not many artists in today’s globalised, commercialised, world use their skills in support of the oppressed. Rini used silkscreen, lino-cutting and scratchboard methods to make her black and white images, which could be easliy reproduced on copy machines. All her work shows a great natural and very graphic sense of design. Her images are always rhythmic, direct and beautifully bold.
According to the book about Rini that I was given, Fidel Castro once said that “A people begins to be happy from the very moment in which it begins to strive for something. For to strive for something brings happiness, just as succumbing without a struggle and effort brings misery and unhappiness.” I certainly think that Rini wanted to keep on keeping on with her work, supporting the next cause, painting the next banner and by doing so making herself happy. I’m also sure that she would have agreed with another of my heroes, Paulo Freire, who wrote that “by working we transform the world”. Rini played her part in this process,.
The Day of the Dead
It is generally estimated that the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City killed more than 10,000 people - more dead people for the Dia de los Muertos ‘celebrations’. We were lucky enough to be there on November 2 for the festival. It’s a bit like our Hallowe’en, in particular regarding the use of skeletons and skulls for decoration. Breads and sweets in the form of skulls or skeletons also make an appearance in the shops but the most striking artefacts are papier-mache skeletons carefully painted and sometimes adorned with flowers. We had already been taken to meet the most famous papier-mache artists, members of the Linares family. They lived in a nice house which, to me, had the feel of an American place lived in by people who liked country and western music. They were very proud of the huge fishtank, containing lots of amazingly coloured tropical fish, which took pride of place in their living room. In and around their studio stood several life-size figures, in varying stages of completion. Their style clearly belonged well within the folk art traditions of Mexico, although the Linares men, modest but
conscious of their ‘celebrity’ status, were clearly modern urbanites.
The Dia de los Muertos is a time for remembering dead family members. It is akin to ancestor worship, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Many families build small altars in their homes and people spend a bit of time in one graveyard or other. We were taken to the Zocalo to join in the celebrations in the evening. It was very interesting to see so many people lighting candles in memory of their dead relatives or friends. I was encouraged to light a candle, too, which I did in memory of my mother. I put it with the thousands of other candles on the ‘zocalo’ (base) itself, in the centre of the great square, on the site of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, overlooked by the enormous Catholic cathedral. The atmosphere as well as the location spoke of the long history of Spaniards interacting with Indians. Later we were taken to a nearby cemetery, where lots of people were putting tasty looking meals on their ancestors’ graves.
Rini Templeton once made the following statement about the Dia de los Muertos -
“Tenochtitlan, Zocalo, main square of Mexico City, November 2nd, Day of the Dead. The people go there, thousands, tens of thousands. With flowers, with songs, with votive candles. One for each earthquake dead. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Will we ever know how many lives were snuffed out in the ruins? There they shine, each dead one a little light for the path of rebuilding. It is one more struggle for the Mexican people. They undertake it with slogans, with flowers, with little candles. We can light these candles to accompany them.”
Eduardo del Rio
The Mexican political cartoonist, Eduardo del Rio, pen-name ‘Rius’, was born in Zamora, Michoacan, in 1934. He has published several dozen books of comic/cartoon strips, full of speech bubbles, stereotypes, handwritten text, all about political issues. The first one I read was ‘Cuba for Beginners’, published in 1970 with the nice subtitle ‘An Illustrated Guide for Americans’. It’s short preface begins -
‘Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us' was the wish of Robert Burns. That wish is fulfilled for Americans by this book, which gives an unadulterated Latin American view of the U.S. Government’s relationship with revolutionary Cuba.
Rius’ black and white line drawings are direct and spontaneous and alive. Fidel and fellow Cubans smoking big cigars while Uncle Sam, in his stars and stripes top hat, runs away with a black eye and a Cuban footprint on the back of his coat.
Originally published as ‘Cuba Para Principiantes’, the book became popular throughout Latin America. It takes us in comic-book style from the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish language in 1492, through the years of slavery, and then the revolt against Spanish rule (c.1868-78). The struggle for independence from Spain continued, notably with the rebellion led by Jose Marti in 1895. The Cuban ‘army’ began inflicting defeats on the Spanish, including one at the now infamous Guantanamo Bay.
The Americans also declared war on the Spanish in 1898 and the latter soon left the island. Unfortunately, Cuba was still not ‘libre’ and became an American colony in all but name. There followed the notorious period of American domination, with it’s big business and brothels making substantial profits which didn’t trickle down very far. Inequalities in health and education grew while a particularly nasty, blatant version of American capitalism was imposed on the Cuban populace. Batista was the
Cuban puppet president who presided over this unpleasant period.
By 1955, Cuban students and workers were taking strike actions, demonstrating, protesting and generally doing whatever they could to oppose the Batista regime. Rius says that, at this stage, Batista was ‘a full-blown dictator’. In November of the next year, 1956, Fidel, Che Guevara and their guerilla comrades landed in Cuba. It took a few more years for the revolution to gain momentum, during which time Batista’s police and army killed more than 20,000 Cubans, using bombs, machine-guns, aeroplanes and tanks supplied by the USA. Rius writes that ‘On the first of January 1959, the presidential chair became too hot for Batista’. The rest is history.
The two other Rius books I read at that time were ‘La Guia Incompleta del Jazz’ and the story of Coca-Colonisation called ‘La Droga que Refresca’ (The Drug that Refreshes). Incidentally, Marcos had told me that they call Coca Cola ‘Cama Caca’ (Eat Shit). When ‘Marx for Beginners’, another of Rius’ comic books, was published in 1972, the English-speaking world began to take some notice of his work. Marx became an ‘international best-seller’ and began the ‘...... for Beginners’ series published, originally, by the Writers and Readers Publishing Collective.
Among Rius’ other, mostly later, works are titles such as ‘The External Debt and How Not to Pay It’, ‘Manual of the Perfect Atheist’, ‘Rius for Beginners’, ‘His Majesty the PRI’ and ‘Quetzalcoatl Was Not Part of the PRI’, ‘Of Abortion, Sex and Other Sins’ and ‘Love in the Time of AIDS’, to name just a few.
So, when you are tired of listening to our political leaders urging us to believe that the whole of reality is a business enterprise, dip into Rius. He tells it straight. Unlike Coca Cola, it’s rather refreshing.
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Our departure from Mexico City was quite emotional. Several friends from the Asamblea were at the airport to see us off.Two of the workshop participants presented me with a sort of scroll they had made, on which they had written, in fancy calligraphic lettering, a rather overthetop thankyou letter. It started “Gracias, Bob Linney, para habernos transmitido en forma brillante tus valioses conocimientos a traves de los cuales reflejas tu inclinacion hacia los valores humanos mas profundos...”.
Looking back from the plane shortly after take-off, I got a very clear view of Mexico City’s strange geophysical location. A ring of mountains surrounded the vast urban sprawl, clouds glued to their summits, encircling and entrapping the very visible smog which hung over the flat plain which had once been a swamp. I also thought of some of the glimpses I had caught of life in the city. The Mariarchi musicians with their guitars and accordions, their tall hats and cowboy boots with Cuban heels; the huevos rancheros, refried beans and raw chillies we had for breakfast; the poor boy doing cartwheels in bare feet on the hot tarmac where cars stopped for the traffic lights; the one-armed man on the street corner who squeezed oranges for us on our way to work.
Then, back home with Jo, John, a wobbly little Alfie with his hands in the air for balance, and Jacky excitedly unpacking the souvenirs and presents I had acquired. The piece of amber with flies in it, a small piece of topaz, the sugar skull and a second smaller skull made of clear plastic. A large slab of nopal cactus which we ate straight away; a World Cup football shirt of the Mexican national team. Four audio tapes of Mexican music - Amparo Ochoa and the Folkloristas with ‘El Cancionero Popular’; a tape by a group called Los Pavos Reales with a picture of band members in white suits and cowboy hats against an arid landscape; one by Rodrigo Gonzalez, who Marcos had called Mexico’s Bob Dylan, entitled ‘El Profeta del Nopal’; and one by the famous Tigres del Norte. And, lastly, two cheap toys made by poor people. One is a small roundabout made from wire and a tin can. As the roundabout goes round, three small plastic babies, restrained with wire seat-belts, fly out centrifugally, like a fairground ride. The other is a model of two boxers made from lightweight, scrap wood, the boxers’ faces and hair drawn on in black felt-tip pen. If you press the vertical knob of wood between the two figures, their arms swing about randomly as the boxers head-butt each other. Quite realistic really.
These last two souvenirs, despite having a certain, if rather limited, charm do no more than hint at the wonderfully rich and varied world of Mexican handicrafts. Indeed, Mexico is one of the most interesting countries I have visited, in terms of its long handicraft tradition. I got a brief introduction to this when we went to the National Museum of Anthropology, but also, outside the walls of the museum, all around, one could see references to the country’s material, artistic culture, both pre- and post- Columbian. You could sort of feel it - yes, this was Mexico alright and it was distinctively Mexican. Just looking at the Contents page of Chloe Sayer’s book ‘Arts and Crafts of Mexico’ gives a quick idea of the range of folk art and crafts made there. Some chapter headings - ‘The Textile Arts’, ‘Jewellery and Adornment’, ‘Ceramics’, ‘Toys and Miniatures’ and ‘Ceremonial and Ephemeral Arts’.
So, that’s about it, although I am aware of a couple of big Mexican themes that I haven’t mentioned - chillies and maize. There’s too much to say about these two here, though, and my pen’s running out of ink.
Not long after this trip to Mexico, I was commissioned by World Circuit Arts to design a poster for a series of UK concerts by the Mexican group ‘Los Leones de la Sierra’. It didn’t take long - a cactus with an eagle on top with a snake in its mouth, a range of mountains in the background and a couple of fields growing the ‘blue agave’ plant from which tequila is manufactured. Nothing like a good racial stereotype to round things off......
