Avant-Garde Mexican Revolutionary Nationalism: Universalization or Cosmopolitanization? David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “Three Calls…” and Manuel Maples Arce’s Actual Nº 1 (1921)

This essay compares two foundational manifestos of the Mexican 20th century avant-garde, both from 1921: David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “Three calls…” and Manuel Maples Arce’s Actual No. 1. Resulting from the ideological milieu of the Mexican Revolution, these texts contain distinct proposals to think about the place of the nation within an international context, after the successful entry of Mexico to modernity via revolution. In the muralist Siqueiros’ case, to think the Mexican nation implies a process of what he calls ‘universalization’, and which is driven primarily by a classical understanding of the ‘natural order’ and a specific relationship to the past. In the estridentista Maples Arce’s case, his call for a ‘cosmopolitanization’ derives from the notion that modernity is an implacable process, the access to which necessitates no relationship to the past and which rejects the ‘natural order’ in favor of a conception of the modern as urban.