Marisol Rodríguez

Waves from the Pacific: Miguel El Chamaco Covarrubias Today

The year is 1939. There are gestures that do not announce themselves as ruptures or claim the spectacular nature of historical events but silently reorganise the way the world thinks. A simple shift of the centre on a map can, over time, become an anticipated form of dislocation, a change of play that allows us to imagine from another place.

That same year, as Europe rushed toward war and the United States consolidated its image of power and expansion, Miguel Covarrubias produced a series of six wall maps for the main pavilion of the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California: a cultural fair celebrating the construction of the iconic bridge and positioning the city as the gateway for American expansion toward the Pacific. In these richly illustrated maps, Covarrubias imagined the world with the Pacific Ocean at its centre, thus redefining the inherited spatial hierarchy and giving its basin a leading role as an area of historical connection and interdependence.

What makes an artist contemporary? The answer seems to lie less in chronological time than in the relevance of the ideas. An artist becomes (or remains) contemporary when his work continues to offer tools for thinking about the present, even long after their death.

These conditions are always contextual. Marcel Duchamp, for example, is central to those who find an origin and a horizon in 20th-century European conceptual art; there, his gestures maintain a lively critical power. However, in other latitudes, his relevance may be less or even non-existent. To attempt to universalise an art born in specific historical circumstances, simply transplanting it, implies ignoring its material, cultural and political basis.

This tension has been addressed by various artists as a critical response to Anglo- Saxon—and, we might say today, white—conceptual art. The recently deceased Lorraine O’Grady (a self-declared fan of Duchamp) claimed to be a conceptual artist, but questioned postmodern conceptualism for the disappearance of the body in art. For O’Grady, a black woman of Afro-Caribbean descent, the body was central: the origin of her history and physical and intellectual experience, but also the emancipatory horizon of her artistic practice.

In Latin America, Juan Acha laid the theoretical foundations on which various artists and cultural workers are now charting their paths. This Peruvian theorist, whose texts we have returned to especially since the 2000s to contextualise the productions of his time (especially those of the 1970s and 1980s), taught us—from a materialist reading of art, design and crafts—that Latin America could aspire to more than just importing an Anglo-Saxon conceptual model. What they must do (conceptual art) is one thing, and what we must do (non-objectual art, yes, but with our own vocabulary, our own flavour) is quite another.

Today, Acha’s influence permeates productions that go beyond conceptualism. His footprint is visible in the Southern Conceptualisms Network, which states in its founding declaration: “The term Conceptualisms was born from the initial circumstances of the Network’s founding in 2007, in the context of a meeting in Barcelona (Vivid Radical Memory), where other stories of the beginnings of conceptualisms were discussed. (…) We have chosen to take on that legacy, which is also ours, and compress that name into an unknown C, so that the C can mean so many other things: paths, conditions, caresses.”¹Red Conceptualismos del Sur. ‘Manifesto / Founding Declaration.’ 2007. https://redcsur.net/manifiesto/

But beyond theoretical frameworks, Mexico went through at least two decades—the 1990s and the early 2000s—dominated by conceptual art. An art that, in the image of European and Anglo-Saxon art (and in rejection of a stereotypical perception of what is “Mexican”), led to both the almost total dematerialisation of the work (Gabriel Orozco, Home Run, 1993) and the explicit staging of the abject body (Grupo SEMEFO, La justicia, 1994). Today, in Mexico, the arts of the long-ignored period of neo-Mexicanism (Julio Galán, Nahum B. Zenil), the non-objectual art of the 1980s (the Groups), and a hybrid and globalised contemporary art that critically re-evaluates figures, theories and genealogies, drawing from any era, mixing and redrawing artistic friendships and enmities.

It is in this context that Miguel Covarrubias: Una mirada sin fronteras (Miguel Covarrubias: A View Without Borders), curated by Sergio Raúl Arroyo and Anahí Luna and presented in 2025 at the Palacio de Cultura Banamex in Mexico City, finds its place. Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957) is, in this sense, a fully contemporary artist, and that was the most important finding of an exhibition that made accessible, for six months, the body of work of a man who was a cartoonist, illustrator, ethnologist, and historian, among other talents. Abraham Cruzvillegas, one of his most attentive readers, sums it up accurately: Miguel, El Chamaco Covarrubias, “managed to hybridise anthropology and caricature” in a work guided by curiosity, in which “no distinction is made between ‘popular culture’, ‘fine arts’ or ‘craftsmanship’”. This hybridisation (this dissolution of hierarchies) is his most radical and most relevant mark.

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The exhibition allows us to trace how this intuition (the artist as a mediator between worlds) runs through all his work. His starting point is the body. Or rather, bodies: the ‘popular types’ who, from the late colonial period and throughout the 19th century, were the subject of representation by chroniclers, travellers, and intellectuals who, in documenting them, also classified them. This tradition—oscillating between ethnographic observation, caricature, and exoticisation—is reabsorbed by Covarrubias, not to replicate it, but to intervene critically.

If Mexico was his symbolic cradle, Harlem was his testing ground. New York, from his arrival in 1923 (at the age of 19), became a decisive formative territory. With the support of José Juan Tablada and in contact with the Mexican cultural diaspora that orbited around his bookshop (which included one of his mentors, Adolfo Best Maugard), Covarrubias entered one of the most intense cultural moments of the 20th century: the Harlem Renaissance.

More than a mere spectator, he was a visual interpreter of a world in turmoil. Afro- American culture—jazz, dance, nightclubs, theatres, bodies in motion—functioned as an aesthetic laboratory for him. There he found a modernity different from that of Latin America: an embodied, rhythmic, sonorous, racialised and proud modernity. He experimented with gouache, oil paint, and stylised lines, capturing an energy that linked him to Africo-American artists such as Archibald Motley, Palmer Hayden, and Hale Woodruff, and which would later continue to link him to figures of the stature of Langston Hughes in various projects.

His book Negro Drawings (1927), published by Alfred A. Knopf, summarises this period. It is a universe charged with humour and sensuality in which stylisation intensifies, rather than simplifies, the complexity of the scenes. But it is also a body of work permeated by the limits, prejudices, and exoticisations that time has clearly revealed.

Researcher Veka Duncan has accurately described this ambivalence by pointing out that, although Covarrubias was celebrated for “rescuing a beauty that no one had seen”²Tablada, José Juan. ‘New York by Day and by Night: Miguel Covarrubias; the Man Who Discovered Black People in the United States; Beauty Where No One Had Seen It Before.’ El Universal: Mexico’s leading newspaper (Mexico City), 30 November 1924. and for getting “a black body into” a magazine like Vanity Fair for the first time, we cannot ignore that ‘the very exaggeration of ethnic features that Covarrubias displays […] contributed to fixing the idea of the African American—and Afro- Caribbean—body as inherently sensual, reinforcing its objectification in the dominant visual culture.’ Duncan concludes: ‘Whether inadvertently or not, Covarrubias played an important role in reinforcing these stereotypes.’³Duncan, Veka. Miguel Covarrubias and the Harlem Renaissance: The Mexican who “discovered” Black people in the United States.’ Goethe-Institut Mexiko, 2020.https://www.goethe.de/ins/mx/es/kul/wir/pos/22551012.html

However, this critical—and necessary—reading coexists with another observation: in the context of American visual modernity, his work was subversive. Duncan points out that his caricatures, accompanied by texts by Afro-Caribbean writer Eric Walrond, ‘raised more than a few eyebrows’ among Vanity Fair’s white readers. Not only because of their humorous content, but also because they had been created by a Mexican. Accustomed to being the ones being observed, Mexicans in New York were now reversing the tradition of the colonial gaze. As Duncan writes:

“Through José Juan Tablada’s column ‘New York by Day and by Night’ it was now a Mexican who was chronicling his travels in the same way that European explorers had once done, capturing a world that was completely foreign to him through his pen. (…) It was also a statement to the West: now we are the ones observing you. A new Mexican has arrived.”⁴Ibid.

This reversal of the gaze is key. Covarrubias looks, interprets, and translates, but he also reveals the tensions of his time, the contradictions of his own position, the ambivalences of the racialised modernity in which he is formed.

The material dimension of this process is no less important: the use of synthetic gouache, printing methods, the mass circulation of the image. His work was not confined to the museum space; it travelled from hand to hand, from page to page, infiltrating the daily lives of thousands of people. The Entrevistas imposibles (Impossible Interviews, 1932–1936) are an example of this visual ingenuity that intertwines characters, territories, and imaginaries, deploying a network of multiple associations that anticipates his later obsession with cultural interconnectivity

Here, humour operates as a critical tool. Not to soften, but to dismantle. Laughter, in Covarrubias, is a form of knowledge.

The 1930s saw a decisive turning point in Covarrubias’s life and work. That turning point has a name: Rosa Rolanda. The traditional narrative presents his travels to Bali as an almost fortuitous discovery, an extended honeymoon that turns into an ethnographic immersion. But that reading reduces (or outright erases) the decisive presence of an artist whose career, talent, and aesthetic agency were fundamental to Covarrubias’ metamorphosis.

Rosa Rolanda (born Rosemonde Cowan) was already, before meeting him, a fully formed figure within transnational modernity. The daughter of a Scottish father and a Mexican mother, she was born in Azusa, California, and from a noticeably early age her life was intertwined with theatre, dance, costume design, and the visual arts. At the age of 16, she was chosen from among 300 applicants to join the Marion Morgan Dancers, a milestone allowing her to travel to New York and launch a Broadway career. She soon changed her stage name—Rosa Rolanda—to her legal name, and her talent took her on international tours, including to Europe as part of the Ziegfeld Follies.

When Covarrubias met her in the late 1920s, thanks to Best Maugard, during a performance of Rancho Mexicano, Rolanda was already a cosmopolitan artist, with stage presence and a visual sensibility that had absorbed the modern avant-garde from its nerve centres. In Paris in the 1920s, she met Man Ray, who photographed her in a flamenco dress; shortly afterwards, she posed as a Tehuana for Edward Weston, with whom, along with Tina Modotti, she would strike up a lasting friendship when Weston and Modotti were living in Mexico. These relationships were not mere anecdotes: they fuelled a sophisticated photographic practice, conscious of image construction, attentive to the geometries of the body and the poetics of everyday objects.

Having settled in Mexico after her marriage in 1930, Rolanda delved into experimental photography that incorporated elements of surrealism, particularly the photogram, a technique in which she became an expert. Her work Self-Portrait (c. 1930), created with found objects (a jade deer, a butterfly brooch, a seashell, and a plastic ruler), demonstrates a remarkable ability to turn the domestic into a symbolic stage: a selfportrait surrounded by signs, more performative than documentary, more poetic than literal.

Her painting evolved in parallel. With a neo-figurative style, featuring almondshaped eyes and personal or folkloric objects orbiting the figures, Rolanda produced memorable portraits of women (María Félix, Dolores del Río), but her most penetrating work is her self-portraits. In Self-Portrait (1952, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City), she is shown facing forward, with an intense gaze, surrounded by bodies, memories and symbols that oscillate between scenic memory and the imagery of death. Rolanda was not a satellite of Covarrubias; she was a complete artist whose professional life—as a painter, photographer, choreographer, and costume designer—embodied a radically feminine and crossborder Mexican modernity until her death in 1970.

All this matters because without Rolanda, Covarrubias’ anthropological turn would simply not have the same depth or the same sensitivity to the body, gesture, ritual, and performance. The figure who emerges alongside him in Bali is not a “muse”, but a cultural mediator with a sharp visual intelligence and a sophisticated mastery of the technologies of representation.

When they travelled together to Bali—first briefly and then for an entire year—the transformation was twofold and simultaneous. There they discovered a symbolic universe governed by ritual rhythms, by an intense relationship with the divine, by a community fabric where dance, theatre and physicality were part of everyday life. And it is significant that Rolanda, with her training in theatre and photography, was the first to recognise the choreographic power of that world. Her photographs not only record: they compose, interpret, phrase.

From her second trip—a full year—Covarrubias’ practice becomes systematic: she observes, draws, classifies, writes. But this collection is permeated by the theatrical and visual sensibility she shares with Rolanda: each dance is a diagram, each mask a grammar, each ceremony a system of signs. Covarrubias’ gaze becomes more rigorous, but also more open, more aware of his own position and the boundary between fascination and exoticism. The result is, yes, exoticizing, but also luminous and deeply human.

The Island of Bali (1937) marks the beginning of his career as an ethnographer. In that book, text and image—Covarrubias and Rolanda—merge into a narrative of cultural translation that does not hide its distance, but neither does it hide its dedication. The artist becomes a mediator between worlds, and that mediation implies not only curiosity, but also a shift of the centre, an exercise in decentring that anticipates his later cartographic project.

This project crystallised in 1939 with the wall maps for the Golden Gate International Exposition. But reread in the light of his experience in Bali—and his work with Rolanda—they take on a different texture: they are maps conceived by someone who understood that the world is more legible when its centres are cracked, when its hierarchies are displaced, when it is observed from multiple historical positions.

This is Covarrubias’ most contemporary endeavour. And a fundamental part of that endeavour was conceived (technically, aesthetically, and emotionally) in dialogue with a woman whose name has been relegated, even in the exhibition itself, but whose mark is on the very architecture of his work.

After his Balinese period, Covarrubias embarked on one of the most fertile and complex chapters of his intellectual life: his relationship with the Tehuantepec Isthmus. Between 1926 and 1942—although his work intensified after his return from Southeast Asia—the isthmus became an ethnographic laboratory of extraordinary intensity for him. And here something crucial happened: the tools that his experience in Bali had honed—attention to gesture, rhythm, and the theatricality of everyday life; awareness of his position as an observer; the notion of the artist as an intercultural translator—became fundamental to the way he looked onto Mexico.

If before he observed from the cosmopolitan fascination of the Harlem Renaissance or from the ritual immersion of Southeast Asia, now he turns his gaze to his own country with a different sensibility: more complex and critical. It is no longer a question of questioning the nationalism of the first post-revolutionary decades, but a deeper question: how is a society symbolically organised? What role do bodies play in the construction of the sacred, the political, the economic, the everyday?

The isthmus offers him a dense and vital universe. More than a dozen trips lead him to study, with extraordinary meticulousness, the Huave, Zapotec and Mixe-Zoque cultures, which he considers essential matrices of Mesoamerican civilisations. What he observes is not a “people of the past”, but a vibrant present with a sophisticated social structure. And an essential part of that sophistication comes from the main place that women occupy in the economy, aesthetics, and public life.

The Tehuanas, with their exuberant dresses, their flowers, their confident gestures, their direct gazes, reveal to him a notion of modernity that does not come through industrialisation or urban cosmopolitanism, but through the symbolic power of the female body as an aesthetic and economic foundation. For Covarrubias, this discovery is not picturesque; it is structural. His attention to the body, posture, and rhythm—inherited from both Harlem and Bali, but also from the disciplined eye of Rosa Rolanda—allows him to recognise in the isthmus a cultural grammar that destabilises the Western patriarchal gaze.

The result is Mexico South: The Tehuantepec Isthmus (1946), accompanied once again by Rolanda’s photographs (or Rose Covarrubias, as she names her in the acknowledgements). The book is an exquisite synthesis: text, drawing and photography intertwine to produce a vitalistic reading of the isthmus. It is neither archaeology of the past nor postcard folklore; it is an ethnographic approach on the borderline between science, art, and literature⁵This book can be read in its entirety here: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.16391/mode/2up

This shift towards the ethnographic, towards systematic observation and the relationship between territory and gesture, paves the way for one of Covarrubias’ most ambitious and visionary projects: the construction of an alternative history of American art. A continental project that symbolically organises the continent into three great mythical territories: the eagle for North America, the jaguar for Mexico and Central America, and the serpent for South America.

This division is neither administrative nor geopolitical: it is mythical. And, like all mythological gestures, it proposes a non-linear reading of time and space. Covarrubias imagines a continent woven together by formal affinities, symbolic resonances, and ancestral contacts that destabilise the hegemonic, Eurocentric narratives about the isolation of pre-Columbian civilisations.

Although his premature death in 1957 allowed him to complete only two volumes, the preserved materials—drawings, maps, diagrams, paintings, archaeological studies—reveal the scope of his project: a history of art as a system of flows and correspondences, closer to a continental choreography than an academic manual. It is a history written from the body, from form, from movement. And it is also a deeply political history: a vision of the continent that does not depend on the Atlantic as its backbone, but on a constellation of multiple centres.

Following the museographic thread of the exhibition, towards the 1940s, Covarrubias’ practice increasingly turned towards study, archaeology and collecting. But even here—where it would be easy to read a gesture of appropriation—a desire for deep understanding predominates. His fascination with the pre-classical period led him to defend the antiquity and complexity of Olmec art long before scientific methods confirmed it. The pieces he collected (from Mezcala, Tlatilco and various pre-Hispanic cultures) now form one of the most significant collections of its kind, donated to the National Museum of Anthropology.

But the crucial thing is this: Covarrubias does not function as an accumulator, but as an interpreter. For him, each object is a door to a cosmology, to an aesthetic system, to a logic of the world that goes beyond any simple Western classification. His gaze does not seek to dominate; it seeks to read.

The work of illustrating books (often underestimated) was for Covarrubias a natural extension of his visual thinking. His images do not decorate the text: they expand it. Each illustration is a form of cartography: a mental, cultural, or symbolic map where continents, languages, mythologies and imagined geographies intersect. His narrative universe as visual thought unfolds on the page as a form of knowledge itself.

Dance, for his part, was to him what photography was to Rolanda: a method for studying the rhythm of the world. He did not just observe, but rather designed, choreographed and created stage sets (for Antígona, Los cuatro soles and Tonantzintla). In 1953, he was appointed Dance Coordinator at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico, and the stage became another map for him: a territory where mythologies, affections and collective memories are inscribed.

The portrait, that classical form, is transformed in his hands: a territory of revelation. His practice blurs the line between “high” painting and caricature, demonstrating that the line can be as profound as monumentality. Humour—never cruel, always critical— once again operates as an instrument of knowledge. Each portrait is a piece within an inventory of the modern world, a sensitive archive that allows us to read his time, but also our own.

If anything defines Covarrubias (and makes him thoroughly contemporary), it is this conviction: the image, like the map, is a way of thinking about the world. Not to consolidate a centre, but to displace it.

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The year is 2025, and the impact of Alvin, the first hurricane of the season, is felt in Mexico City with torrential rains that paralyse and flood roads and transport on the night of Thursday, 28 May. Against the wind and hail, an audience gathers at the Palacio de Cultura Banamex around Sergio Raúl Arroyo—one of the two halves of the curatorial duo—and artist Abraham Cruzvillegas.⁶Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C., ‘Round table: “Crossing borders: an encounter with Miguel Covarrubias”’ YouTube video, uploaded in April 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efEGE

Cruzvillegas has thought long and hard about Covarrubias’ work, and in his first intervention, he expresses, with emotion, something essential. He recalls that he studied pedagogy with the ideal of ‘transforming art education’ (‘just imagine,’ he adds, amused by his own youthful idealism). From that starting point, he outlines his genealogy: his beginnings as a monero (as those who commercially produce caricatures are called in Mexico), and the immediate recognition of a figure (Covarrubias) who, like him, did not fit into any taxonomy: a caricaturist, a ‘monero,’ excluded for decades from the official history of Mexican art precisely because he wore too many hats, because he inhabited disciplines, languages, and geographies simultaneously.

His admiration for Covarrubias dates to the beginning of his own training, but what the exhibition allows him to understand is more profound: that Covarrubias’ life project was to create another space through monumental, sustained pedagogical work, which led him to distance himself from Mexico in order to better observe it upon his return. And, that his practice was always unusually transdisciplinary, going against the grain of systems that seek to label and compartmentalise.

That mark, the decentring, the radical curiosity, pedagogy as a method and not as a tool, is one of the most fertile legacies that Covarrubias left to contemporary artists in Mexico. A generation that, growing up between a country with a millennial history and another with a very brief history but brutal iconographic power (the United States), has remixed its strategies, gestures, and appetite for research with its own contexts and political urgencies.

This is the case, for example, of Wendy Cabrera Rubio (Mexico City, 1993), for whom artistic practice is inseparable from pedagogical exercise. Cabrera Rubio draws on 1950s Disney iconography to explain contemporary Mexican politics: felt landscapes and characters activated in puppet shows that directly recall American educational programmes produced for television. Her pedagogy is not illustrative: it is critical, dismantling pop culture from within, revealing its mechanisms of power, turning the educational apparatus into a political stage.

The same can be said of Josué Mejía (Mexico City, 1994), who is fascinated by the way the present obsessively dialogues with a supposed past. Mejía tracks down vague stories about the history of objects: he interviews things, furniture, frames, tickets, letters. Like Covarrubias in Entrevistas imposibles, he practises a method that turns the inanimate into an archive, the trivial into a document, the improbable into a generator of knowledge. His stories not only decentralise History with a capital H: they complicate it, thicken it, humanise it.

In both artists, Covarrubias’ visual influence is transparent, but what is truly fundamental is that they have internalised what made his work unique: the originality of his approach to subjects that aroused his curiosity. They do not imitate Covarrubias: they inherit his method of openness, his narrative way of thinking, his humour as knowledge, his desire to make research a way of life.

This impulse, which ranges from the documentary to the fabulist, also permeates other contemporary artists whose practice extends from drawing to broader territories of observation and care.

This is the case of artists linked to the Cooperativa Crater Invertido, such as Waysatta Fernández (Mexico City, 1983), whose work moves from painting to ceramics and, above all, to community projects where drawing functions as a tool for recovering memories and agricultural knowledge in beekeeping communities. Fernández conceives these processes as Narrative Practices: stories that are activated on community radio stations, expanding the notion of drawing to include forms of oral, affective, and pedagogical transmission. The image is no longer just a representation; it is a gesture of symbolic restitution.

Similarly, Abraham González Pacheco (San Simón el Alto, Malinalco, 1989) has turned excavation—in its literal and metaphorical sense—into a subject of contemporary art. An artist, set designer, and draughtsman, he works from drawings of archaeological fictions, starting from the landscape and its rapid transformation under political, extractive, and identity forces. His drawings do not illustrate ruins: they invent strata, propose alternative genealogies, and dismantle the idea of “remains” as objective testimony. In deep harmony with Covarrubias, González Pacheco understands territory as a narrative, as a device for memory and as an ever-unstable archive.

The same attention to the body as a reading instrument —so present in Covarrubias and, in a unique way, in Rosa Rolanda’s practice—appears in the delicate work of Rita Ponce de León (Lima, 1982). Her training in dance and martial arts informs a line that is like breathing: drawings that can inhabit both an intimate sheet of paper and extend across large walls without losing their quality of internal gesture, of bodily energy translated into space. In Ponce de León, drawing is a form of presence, a choreography in a latent state.

These practices—as diverse as the geographies that give rise to them—find in Covarrubias not a model to follow, but a precedent for freedom: the possibility that drawing, archiving, pedagogy, dance, fiction, and ethnography can coexist without hierarchies or disciplinary boundaries.

That same spirit is expansively manifested in El Colegio de la Desextinción, a multidisciplinary group dedicated to researching processes of disappearance of species, practices, and objects. Their situated and critical research approaches coloniality not as historical content but as an active force that shapes which lives, knowledge, and materialities are preserved and which are condemned to silence.

El Colegio operates in a hybrid field: its projects take the form of feature films, exhibitions that intertwine history, reality, and archaeological fictions, as well as multivoiced curatorial practices that function as extensions of the research. What they produce are not simple documents or speculative exercises, but counter-histories that revive what has been erased (or whose disappearance has been normalised) by colonial regimes of knowledge.

In tune with Covarrubias, the group rethinks the relationship between archive and life: it unearths, reconstructs, imagines, fabulates. But, unlike the classical archaeological tradition, it does not seek to “recover” what has been lost as if it were a matter of restoring an original order; rather, it proposes a pedagogy of reappearance, where extinction itself becomes a language, a critical device for understanding the present.

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The year is 2025 and, in front of Miguel Covarrubias’ monumental murals, the public stops in awe in the atrium of the Palacio de Cultura Banamex, formerly the Palacio Iturbide. The colours have not aged. The forms remain contemporary. It is not nostalgia: it is an unexpected synchronicity between 1939 and the present, between a cartographic vision that decentralises the world and a generation that seeks new ways to situate itself in it.

This is not the first time these murals have resurfaced to speak to another era. They were shown in 1987, in one of the first exhibitions of the now defunct Cultural Centre / Contemporary Art of the Televisa Foundation, in a show curated by Olivier Debroise. They reappeared in 2007 at the Amparo Museum in Puebla, after restoration by the INBA’s National Centre for Conservation and Registration of Movable Artistic Heritage, in an exhibition curated by Alfonso de María y Campos. But it is this 2025 exhibition that seems to give them a new lease of life, an unexpected resonance with contemporary debates on coloniality, cartography, territory, and interdependence.

The murals — painted on movable Masonite panels — are also impressive for their scale. Although only two are on display, the six main ones measure 457×731.5 cm, while two others measure 274×396 cm. But perhaps most fascinating is the technique that Covarrubias developed especially for them: an experimental adaptation of duco lacquer, a nitrocellulose automotive lacquer produced by Dupont since 1920. In his own words:

“It was not used as an opaque lacquer, but simply by applying pure dry pigments in transparent lacquer diluted in solvent. The colour particles were inserted with each brushstroke into the nitrocellulose base, instantly dissolved by the effect of the solvent in a kind of fresco technique; in reality, it was a fresco on lacquer instead of traditional stucco.”⁷Miguel Covarrubias, Corrientes del Pacífico, preface by Abraham Cruzvillegas (Mexico City: Alias Editorial, 2022), 19.

Here, the image takes on a physical dimension: each stroke fixes something that is about to evaporate. It is a fresco of the modern world, painted with a technique originally intended for cars, speed, movement: a perfect synthesis of the ambivalences of the 20th century.

In his text for the facsimile reissue of Corrientes del Pacífico published by Alias, Abraham Cruzvillegas writes a sentence that sums up his identification with Covarrubias:

“From my stereotypes and prejudices, an infinite number of maps could be made; from my affections, another, just one, which would be the portrait of an archipelago, one of whose most outstanding islands, with small volcanoes, palm trees and dancing people, would be called Miguel El Chamaco Covarrubias.”⁸Covarrubias, Corrientes del Pacífico, 6.

The fact that two artists of the same generation—Cruzvillegas (1968) and Damián Ortega (1967)—have promoted this reissue and recognise themselves as heirs to Covarrubias is no minor gesture. It is proof of a profound relevance: that of an artist whose practice managed to spread, as Cruzvillegas says, ‘his sincere intention to produce knowledge and share it.’

Cruzvillegas added something even more revealing in his conversation with Sergio Raúl Arroyo: “As for his relationship with the Mexican School of Painting, Covarrubias deliberately did not want to belong to a nationalist school. He was a cosmopolitan artist; he was interested in looking elsewhere from Mexico, and he soon left. There is a substantial and radical difference with almost all the artists of that generation: his identity is configured in a different way”.

We can find there a key to understanding why today, in 2025, young artists read him so clearly. They also work from that position: traversed by the local, shaped by the global, and returning a sharp gaze—sometimes critical, sometimes affectionate, sometimes uncomfortably nationalistic—towards Mexico.

Like Covarrubias, they move around to get a better view and mix disciplines without asking permission. Like Covarrubias, they understand that a map is not a place, but a point of view.

The murals of the Pacific remain alive because they are not a vestige, but a method, and because Covarrubias, as an artist, as an ethnographer, as a draughtsman, as a choreographer of the world, continues to offer tools for thinking about the present.

• 1
  Red Conceptualismos del Sur. ‘Manifesto / Founding Declaration.’ 2007. https://redcsur.net/manifiesto/ ↩︎
• 2
  Tablada, José Juan. ‘New York by Day and by Night: Miguel Covarrubias; the Man Who Discovered Black People in the United States; Beauty Where No One Had Seen It Before.’ El Universal: Mexico’s leading newspaper (Mexico City), 30 November 1924. ↩︎
• 3
  Duncan, Veka. Miguel Covarrubias and the Harlem Renaissance: The Mexican who “discovered” Black people in the United States.’ Goethe-Institut Mexiko, 2020.https://www.goethe.de/ins/mx/es/kul/wir/pos/22551012.html ↩︎
• 4
  Ibid. ↩︎
• 5
  This book can be read in its entirety here: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.16391/mode/2up ↩︎
• 6
  Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C., ‘Round table: “Crossing borders: an encounter with Miguel Covarrubias”’ YouTube video, uploaded in April 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efEGE ↩︎
• 7
  Miguel Covarrubias, Corrientes del Pacífico, preface by Abraham Cruzvillegas (Mexico City: Alias Editorial, 2022), 19. ↩︎
• 8
  Covarrubias, Corrientes del Pacífico, 6. ↩︎