Educar es Redimir: La Maestra Rural, Education, and Nation in Taller de Grafica Popular Prints

The Taller de Gráfica Popular (Workshop for Popular Graphic Arts) or T.G.P. founded in 1937, situated its point of view with campesinos in rural settings by depicting idealizations of proletariat uprisings and agrarian rights to land. Relying on authenticating ascriptions of indigeneity and tradition rooted in late nineteenth-century print culture, its artists took a position against fascism, U.S. imperialism, and the Catholic Church with the purpose of cultivating a national art. T.G.P. artists illustrated the explicit violence enacted against rural educators as a violation against the nation during the Guerra de los Cristeros (1926-1929), a reactionary rebellion to education’s secularization. The rural education program aimed to culturally unify the nation and endow its citizens with a sense of buenas costumbres. The project of education, as a tool of colonization, can be traced back to the mission systems during the colonial period. In this paper, I will take a feminist approach to explore the T.G.P. prints and how indigenized bodies, juxtaposed with the body of la maestra rural—a feminized mestiza rural school teacher— evoke sentimentalized understandings of Mexicanidad. Sentimentality, utilized as a tool of the state, employed empathy in the larger project of domesticity, and the (dis)integration of its native peoples into the fabric of the nation. As such, this trope of la maestra rural emerged in postrevolutionary visual culture as a means to speak to the redemptive and civilizing qualities that education could bring to the nationalist project throughout Mexican history.