You want roadways and factories; you want universal literacy. You want, above all, an iron grip on the spoils of war. You need more than import controls and export diversification for that. You need more than detention centers and paramilitary police. For simultaneous uplift and repression, you need political consensus. You need propaganda: stationery, flags and statues, murals, and postage stamps. You need metro stations and housing projects emblazoned with the logo of your brand of national salvation. You need an Art Department.
In this unit, my students and I will examine and interrogate works of nationalist architecture and visual art from Spain and Mexico. We will examine works large and small, public and intimate. The artifacts selected may not be commonly studied in an art-historical context, but they have more to tell us about life in Spain and Mexico than many works from these countries commonly held up for praise in the English-speaking world.
The Franco era in Spain produced some of Spain's most widely read and studied literature, but the social, economic, and political conditions of Spain during that epoch receives disproportionately scant attention. We will study two artifacts of Spain's Franco regime in the decades following the Spanish Civil War. The first will be the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) war memorial outside Madrid, begun in the immediate aftermath of the war (built 1940-1959). The second will be the Franco Peace Medal issued to Francoist veterans of the Spanish Civil War and to their surviving families in 1964 during Spain's year-long celebration of twenty-five years of peace—peace, such as it was.
We will then turn our attention to Mexico. As of 2012, there are 33.7 million Hispanics of Mexican descent in the United States; Mexican-Americans represent 64% of the Hispanic population. 1 Yet Mexican history receives little attention in our classrooms, especially the story of Mexico's transformation under seventy-one years of single party rule under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). We will explore architect Mario Pani's tragically situated Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco Housing Complex) at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, a doomed utopian city-within-a-city built in 1964. We will also examine the political uses of Mexico's indigenous past in the contemporary one-hundred-peso note featuring the portrait and verse of the poet-king Nezahualcóyotl.
These works of art and architecture are important because they are present in the lives of millions of citizens of Spain and Mexico. They provide a window on the Mexico and Spain of living memory, on political and social forces very much alive in these countries today. We can't understand contemporary Spain without knowing about Generalissimo Francisco Franco. We can't understand today's Mexico without knowing about the PRI.
We will explore the ways public art is and has been used to communicate and propagate national identities and agendas. We will draw connections between examples of nationalist art and the practices and perspectives of the cultures in which they were created. Students will synthesize what they have learned about different nations, cultures, and cultural figures to use text and images to create their own interpretations of nationalist art. In the end, we will have expanded our understanding of twentieth-century history within and beyond Spain and Mexico. We will use the target language as a medium for learning and expression, learning Spanish while learning in Spanish. Finally, we will heighten our independence and agency as citizens through an understanding and awareness of the techniques that commercial and political interests use to influence our behavior and to manufacture consensus by saturating the environment with visual messages.
Background
I teach grades nine through twelve in the Academy of International Studies, a magnet program housed at Independence High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Academy of International Studies was originally established with a grant from the Asia Society and a mandate to extend the advantages of a rigorous global education to students from largely minority, high-poverty urban and rural settings. There are approximately 400 students in the program: 70% white, 13% black, 7% Latino, 4% Asian, and the remainder mixed race or not reporting. The school as a whole, including the magnet program, has approximately 2000 students: roughly 40% black, 34% white, 18% Latino, 5% Asian, and 3% mixed race. Roughly 55% of students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The host school has an unusually high rate of violent incidents, but it outperforms the state average on leading academic indicators. 2
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