Not Fit for the Nation: Modern and Folk Architecture and the Politics of Exhibiting Mexicanidad

In the summer of 1940, visitors to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reveled at the largest and most provocative show on Mexico, "Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art." Filling MoMA’s recently inaugurated modern building with “painting, sculpture, craft of all kinds and architecture” from all parts of the country, it presented an overarching official narrative on Mexico’s past, present and future. Sponsored by President Lázaro Cárdenas’s government, while embroiled in the nationalization of a foreign-owned oil industry, and assembled with the collaboration of Mexican scholars, each artistic period—from pre-Columbian to modern—and every creative expression—from folk art to muralism—contributed to the construction of Mexicanidad. All except for modern and folk architecture. John McAndrew, curator of MoMA’s Department of Architecture, installed the exhibition and worked closely with Mexican scholar Roberto Montenegro, artist Diego Rivera, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo, and architects Juan O’Gorman and Enrique Yáñez to include vernacular and modernist architectural examples in the exhibition. Folk architecture lacked the support of the newly formed Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, thus it failed to deliver modernism to Mexicanidad. Because modern architecture threatened Pan American cultural politics, Nelson Rockefeller’s political ambitions, and Mexico’s propaganda directives, it was eliminated. The absence of these expressions—which has not been examined closely until now—discloses pressing political anxieties over the presence of commu-nazis, the “Bauhaus boys” in Mexico, and the North American political alliance, and continues to reverberate amid the cultural exchanges between Mexico and the United States.