Nationalism without Patriotism: Frida Kahlo Remaps the Nation
Steven S. Volk Department of History Oberlin College Oberlin, OH 44074 steven.volk@oberlin.edu
More than a decade after the publication of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,1 Benedict Anderson has been justly credited with altering the discourse on nationalism. This is not to say that other scholars had not reflected on what Anderson termed the "imagined" status of the nation. As early as 1882, Ernest Renan proposed that a "nation's existence isa daily plebiscite."2 But Anderson's succinct, historically grounded, and compelling argument nudged the debate away from an sociologically centered polemic featuring irritating debates on "good" vs. "bad" nationalisms, and towards a discussion of nationalism as anthropology.3
Over the past two centuries, if not before, nationalism has narrated its own identity, and the identity it has narrated has been exceptionally compelling in its power and resilience. For Anderson, the vigor of the nation springs directly from the manner in which it is imagined. "The nation," he stressed, "is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possiblefor so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings."4 Yet even as students of nationalism have tipped their analytic hats to Anderson, they also have raised substantial questions about the displacements that sustain his thesis. Is it possible to imagine the nation only in the form prescribed by Anderson? If nationalisms all derive from specific "modular" forms "already made available to them by Europe and the Americas," what does the rest of the world have left to imagine?5 Is the nation the only collective subject of modernity?6 To these, and other, questions, I would add my own: Is nationalism only available as a political representation of a state? Can there be nations without privileged narrations, nationalism without patriotism?7
Prasenjit Duara addresses some of these concerns, arguing that nationalism "is often confused with the ideology of the nation-state, which seeks to fix or privilege political identification at the level of the nation-state."8 In fact, to continue and extend Duara's critique of Anderson, it is by proposing that politics and culture are coextensive that Anderson authorizes the emergence of a master narrative of the nation. Yet what if we disengage these two spheres? It is in the space between politics and culture, between the sense that nationalism is the primary political identity of modernity and the possibility that nationalism can exist independently of its political moorings, in the space between killing and dying, where we can begin to excavate nationalism's alternative identities.
Because nationalism grants itself so much authority, it becomes imperative to "step outside the history that nationalism gives to itself" 9 if we are to disentangle the fragments of its composition. Methodologically, one of the most useful ways of approaching this theme has proven to be through the entryway of gender. As Anuradha Dingwaney Needham observes, "Narratives of nation/nationalismarenarratives about political power The particular power that mobilizes these narratives is male power, for nationalism has most often focused on, and itself issues from, what is constructed as a masculine, "public" sphere and its concerns."10 A central weakness in Anderson's discussion of nationalism, as has been disclosed many times, is that he does not appreciate the gendered character of nations and nationalism. "[T]he nation," writes Mary Louise Pratt, "by definition situates or _produces' women in permanent instability with respect to the imagined community, including, in very particular ways, the women of the dominant class. Women inhabitants of nations were neither imagined as nor invited to imagine themselves as part of the horizontal brotherhood."11
Women produced the nation's future (children) and its past (tradition), but they did not act in the nation. They were caregivers, nurturers, those "naturally" better able to pass on to their children the fundamental lessons of culture and (ironically) patriotism, along with their superior moral standing. As Lucia, the bourgeois protagonist of a late-19th century Peruvian romantic novel, remarks after hearing of the thwarted rape of a neighbor girl, "If the women were bad, too, this would be a hell!"12
My concern here, however, is not just to take note of Anderson's (continued) inattention the issue of gender in his theorizing about the construction of the nation.13 Rather, I'm interested in the ways in which women historically have defied, complicated, or discarded such representations in favor of others, particularly those that point to the possibility of a nationalism that is divorced from the confines of the nation-state ideology. I am interested in discovering whether nationalism can sustain itself as a discourse when removed from ideologies that produce truth statements, whether these be master (hegemonic) narratives of the nation or alternative narratives that seek hegemonic standing.
By examining the work of one Latin American artist, I hope to call attention to a fundamentally different conception of nationalism and the political community than that offered by Anderson. Frida Kahlo's profound ambivalence toward traditional markers of nationalism (particularly the demand that the nation be seen as the fountainhead of Truth) is not the product of an artist who works exclusively in the realm of the self or a woman who is living through a personal psychological crisis, as many have suggested (even though both are evident on some level). Rather, her stance vis-à-vis the privileged narrative of the nation underscores her struggle towards an understanding of political and cultural identity that worked to undermine stable national narratives at the same time that it asserted its roots in imagined national traditions. The question we ask, then, is whether the nation as imagined in this fashion is a reflection of what Mary Pratt has called the "permanent instability" into which nationalism casts women, or whether Kahlo was an active agent in the production of "multiple forms of national belonging."14
Frida Kahlo
You have no idea the kind of bitches these people are. They make me vomit. They are so damn _intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them any more.15
Frida Kahlo, 1939
Frida Kahlo, the iconic Mexican artist of the post-Revolutionary period, painted, wrote, danced, paraded, traveled, made love, suffered, and created. But she didn't do theory. Because she was, at times, so aggressively hostile to those who "poison[ed] the air with theories and theories that never come true,"16 and because she has become such an overworked symbol of (fill in the blank) feminism, mexicanidad, bisexuality, performance art, etc., one approaches her work from a theoretical perspective with more than a little caution. Yet Kahlo's self-representation as standing on a national "borderline" suggests that she was crafting a different way of understanding the meaning of identity, including national belonging, and one is therefore inspired to poison the air with one's own theories.
Born on July 6, 1907, Kahlo later changed her birth date to July 7, 1910, the year that marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. Magdalena Carmen Frieda (sic) Kahlo Calderón descended, on her mother's side, from Spanish and Indians, and, on her father's side, from German and Hungarian Jews.17 Probably as significant, both her maternal grandfather and her father were photographers, which may account for her singularly assured posture when in the camera's gaze.18 Three elements of Frida Kahlo's life need to be emphasized. In the first place, every life history is in some measure self-created; Kahlo's would be more so than most. Secondly, while Kahlo is largely considered to be intensely self-absorbed (55 of her 143 known works are self-portraits), her choice of themes at the same time suggests a profound, on-going dialogue about her relationship to her ancestors and her "homeland."19 Finally, Kahlo has been described as an artist of mexicanidad, yet her portrayal of the Mexican nation runs counter to the master narrative created after the Mexican Revolution and is purposefully uninterested in creating a competing, alternative narrative.
The Mexican Revolution was an inordinately violent political, social and cultural upheaval. While the class-based goals sought by such leaders as Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa were defeated, and while current historiography questions whether a "revolution" ever took place, this whirlwind that shook Mexico at the very least produced a thorough rewriting of the master narrative of Mexican nationalism. For most of the nineteenth century, Mexican leaders obstinately chased modernity by linking their country with Parisian fashions and British industry. No one represented this sycophantic adoration of the West better than Porfirio Diaz, who ruled from 1876-1910. Despite the fact that Mexico had suffered numerous foreign occupations and invasions over the course of the nineteenth century and had lost nearly one-half its territory to its neighbor to the north, Diaz joined his country both literally (via railroads) and symbolically to the scientific and industrial progress of the United States and the West.20 These western-inspired models were rejected with his overthrow, as the new Constitutionalist governments of the early 1920s sought to replace Europe with lo mexicano, a "true" and "pure" expression of the Mexican soul.21
Much as Mexican nationalists of the late eighteenth century had turned to idealized (and Romanized) pre-Columbian heroes and themes in their search for an identity unimplicated by Spanish conquistadores, and from which they could launch their calls for independence, so the leaders of post-Revolutionary Mexico would turn to the heroic pre-conquest past in their quest to define the "real" (post-Revolutionary) Mexico. The task of narrating this New/Old Mexico fell to a generation of philosophers, historians, writers, and artists, particularly the monumental Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros whose vast historical scenes were to create the new iconic representations of revolutionary Mexico.22
This was the environment in which Kahlo reached maturity. By 1922 Alvaro Obregón was president and the bloodiest phase of the Revolution had passed. Kahlo entered Mexico City's intellectually rigorous National Preparatory School to study with a faculty committed to the search for a new Mexico. "Turn your eyes to the soil of Mexico," admonished Kahlo's philosophy professor Antonio Caso, "to our customs and our traditions, our hopes and our wishes, to what in truth we are!"23 Kahlo was an active member of the "Cachucas" (named after the hats they wore), intellectuals and activists committed to nationalist and socialist ideals.
In 1925, while still at school, Kahlo was nearly killed in an horrific accident. As with much of Kahlo's life, details often appear so theatrical that the line dividing a life lived from a life imagined was often hard to establish. The wooden bus in which the schoolgirl was traveling with her boyfriend was rammed by a tram, and burst apart. Kahlo was thrown out of the bus and penetrated by a metal handrail that entered at the left side of her abdomen and exited her vagina. ("I lost my virginity," she later remarked.) Somehow the force of the impact had blown off her clothes, for she was found on the ground totally nude and covered with blood and powered gold from a packet that another passenger was carrying. She suffered extensive damage to her spinal column, her right leg was badly fractured, her right foot was crushed (furthering the damage caused by an earlier battle with polio), and her pelvis was broken in three places. Her life after the accident would be one of constant surgeries, ever-present pain (from injuries and attempted cures), and art for it was only during her convalescence that she began to paint seriously.
Constructing the Post-Revolutionary Mexican Nation
The narration of a national subject is constructed on a grid of contradictions. The nation must present itself as always having existed even though the call to bring the nation into being suggests its impermanence. The nation is presented as a unified actor in history even though its narration demands the presence of Others who move in and out of its literal and figurative borders. Nationalist discourse creates the people as historical objects (to allow their assembly as a nation) at the same time that the people must become active subjects of their own production.24 The nation is asserted as an unchanging unity rooted in tradition, culture, and history, even as the accumulation of everyday crises makes evident the changing nature of that subject.
The discourse of nationalism, then, typically seeks to obscure its fissures by asserting its unity, antiquity, harmony, and inclusivity. The nation is, after all, a "deep, horizontal comradeship." Those who set about composing the privileged narratives of post-Revolutionary Mexico did this by projecting an imagined heroic, traditional Mexico into the post-Revolutionary state. What is ironic about this move, of course, is that this same state had defeated the one political project that actually sought to return Mexico to a traditional (i.e., pre-capitalist) space. Zapatismo, as opposed to the bourgeois reformism of Francisco Madero or the ranchero mentality of Pancho Villa, imagined a Mexico of collective peasant holdings, where the large, capitalist haciendas would be either expelled or held in check. In a sense, Zapata attempted to recreate in the Mexican Bajio the political-economic standoff between peasants and landlords that existed from the arrival of the Spanish until the late nineteenth century.25 Obregón, Calles, Carranza and the other victorious Constitutionalists crushed this attempt.
José Vasconcelos, Obregon's influential Minister of Education from 1920-24, served as the main philosopher of this post-Revolutionary nation. He argued that the nation's strength was to be found in the raza cósmica (cosmic race), an ethnic and historical synthesis based on an idealization of indigenous life.26 In contrast to the European appetites of Porfirio Díaz and other nineteenth century Liberals, Vasconcelos argued that future of Mexico should be based on "our blood, our language, and our people."27 It was Vasconcelos who, in 1921, called on Diego Rivera to return to Mexico from his artistic exile in Europe and begin to paint the new nation. Rivera did return, spending months roaming the country for national subjects and materials: "It was my desire to reproduce the pure, basic images of my land. I wanted my paintings to reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through my vision of the truth, to show the masses the outline of the future."28 Most in Rivera's circle shared this same desire. As Maria Izquierdo (1902-55), a painter whose work was intensely involved in the search for lo mexicano, wrote, "I try to make my work reflect the true Mexico, which I feel and love."29
While Kahlo could have been expected to share the nationalist dreams of these post-Revolutionary artists she married Rivera in 1929 she adopted a very different perspective when representing the national subject. As I argued earlier, it is the fundamental task of the narrator of nationalism to dissolve the contradictions inherent in its discourse and to present the unity and coherence of the national subject. This Kahlo could not and would not do even though she was intensely occupied with Mexican themes and her Mexican heritage. In Kahlo's hands, Mexico emerges as does Kahlo herself in her numerous self-portraits as contradictory, divided, problematic, dual, compelling, complex, and impossible to simplify. Elements of nationalist discourse are present, particularly the return to an indigenous, pre-Conquest past and the immense pull of the fertile Mexican earth. But Kahlo's refusal to "patriotize" Mexico by simplifying its image, constructing its unity, or authorizing its masculine requirements, suggests that not only was Kahlo presenting an alternative nationalism to that of Diego Rivera and the other artists and intellectuals in charge of creating a new privileged nationalist narrative, but that she was suggesting a different way of understanding the nation itself.30
Kahlo and the Mexican Subject
Much of Kahlo's work is marked by impossible dualisms. In My Birth (1932), she likely gives birth to herself.31 In My Nurse (or I Suckle) (1937), it is Kahlo, face covered by a pre-Columbian mask, who nurses herself. In The Two Fridas (1939), a European Frida occupies the same space as a Tehuana Frida, united in solidarity even as the European Frida appears in some danger of bleeding to death. Many of her coupled representations involve an on-going dialog between her Mexican identity, usually symbolized by her Tehuana costume (although present as well in other symbols and colors), and her European self.
While it is certain that these binaries underscore the different personalities or identities that Kahlo assumed and created for herself, in fact the multiple self-images serve, as do multiple narrators in fiction, to undermine the truth statements that are ubiquitous in post-Revolutionary master narratives. One only has to compare, for example, Rivera's Political Vision of the Mexican People, painted in the inner courtyard of the Ministry of Education (1923-6) with Kahlo's What the Water Gave Me (1938). Both works invoke elements of mexicanidad, but Kahlo refused to adopt the master narrative evolving in post-Revolutionary Mexico or to contemplate the construction of an alternative narrative with equal (if competing) truth claims. Even the spaces that they occupy tell us something about their approach to the histories they are representing. Rivera's grand Political Vision appears in 117 separate locations in the Ministry's courtyard, covering some 17,000 square feet in all.32 Kahlo, unlike Rivera or the other muralists, chose to work on very small surfaces, most often painting on tin in the retablo or ex-voto style.33 Her message, except, perhaps, for some late paintings reflecting what some have called a religious faith in Communism, consistently suggests that lives (both of individuals and of nations) are multiply narrated, lived on the borderline between many truths.34
Kahlo's argument is most clearly evident in Self-portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States (1932). Kahlo began this small work (12" x 13") less than two months after she suffered a traumatic miscarriage. At the time she was living in Detroit with Rivera who was completing murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the Self-portrait, the artist stands on a concrete block set between the United States and Mexico, dressed in a fancy, revealing pink frock and lace gloves rather than her Tehuana costume. The "United States," to Kahlo's left, is dominated by technology smokestacks, skyscrapers, robot-like ducts with long "arms," and various machines and devices. A ruined Aztec temple, fertility idols, and rooted plants all occupy the "Mexican" side of the retablo. Kahlo holds a paper cutout flag of Mexico in her left hand (pointing toward the "Mexico" side of her painting), and a cigarette in her right hand. The critique of the United States, "gringolandia" as she called it, is withering. Kahlo has none of Rivera's adoration of technology and industry. For her, industry was suffocating, alarming, impersonal; pollution pouring from the "Ford" smokestacks threatens to obscure the U.S. flag itself.
In her portrayal of Mexico, Kahlo adopts a traditional nationalist trope, defining the land as the bearer of enduring traditions: here we see pre-Columbian fertility figures, a skull, and the ruined Aztec temple. There is a clear message of the superiority of nature to technology (as in the riot of brightly colored plants and flowers in the "Mexican" foreground), a sense that the Mexican land is capable of producing vegetation whereas U.S. soil only gives rise to sterile machines. Yet the Mexican past is presented as inaccessible, subverted. Indeed, the painting is too ambiguous to allow the production of a comforting vision of Mexico's "superiority" vis-à-vis the United States. Not only does one have the sense that the past cannot be exploited to resolve the problems of the modern nation as the blood-spewing sun and the downcast moon touch, they produce a bolt of lightening to intimidate any who would seek access to the Aztec pyramid but the roots of the "Mexican" plants are fast becoming entwined with the electric cords issuing from the "American" machines in the foreground.
Perched in front of this scene stands Kahlo, on the literal Borderline between these two representations. We know that when Kahlo painted this scene she was fed up with being in the United States (she began work on the picture one torrid August day in Detroit when the temperature hit 99 degrees), was a committed anti-imperialist,35 and longed to return to Mexico. But this painting suggests that even if she were to return to Mexico at that very instant, there was no true Mexico to which she could return. Mexico's past, the subject in many of her paintings, did not authorize an unproblematic national narrative. Mexico was continually changing, being drawn into modernity, just as the plant's roots stretched out to the machine's power cord. Kahlo's "unpatriotic" nation does not represent implied or imposed consensus; belonging to this nation was not an end to questions, but a beginning. Such a problematic representation is fundamentally unlike Rivera's muscular, Aztec idylls in which he describes the glory of Tenochtitlán and affirms that they will be regained in a modern Mexico.36 Kahlo warns that Mexico's past cannot be denied, but neither can it be appropriated to redeem the present.
In My Dress Hangs There (1933), Kahlo presents us with a similar set of images. This work was begun when Kahlo and Rivera were living in New York, and finished after she returned to Mexico. Rivera was working on his ill-fated Rockefeller Center murals and Kahlo was increasingly irritated with what she saw as capitalism's pervasive ability to corrupt American values. A complex, small work (18" x 19"), My Dress features Kahlo's only collage in the foreground, replete with bread lines, marching soldiers, and crowds. Two classical columns define the center of the painting. A toilet graces the top of one column; on the other stands a cheap trophy like those given out at a myriad of minor sporting events. Politics, justice, religion, history, sex everything in the United States is corrupted by capitalism. Federal Hall and its statue of George Washington are trapped behind a chart displaying "weekly sales in millions." A large dollar sign has come to occupy the stained glass window in Trinity Church. Gasoline pumps rival skyscrapers and overwhelm the Statue of Liberty in the background. Flowers are heaped in trashcans (along with body parts, bones and whiskey bottles), as Mae West, from her perch on a billboard, waits to be engulfed by the smoke from a burning building directly below her.
In dead center, suspended on a blue line that ties the toilet to the trophy, dangles Kahlo's Tehuana dress empty. Is the dress empty because Kahlo, "disgusted with watching millionaires sip cocktails while the poor starvedwanted to flee to Mexico"?37 Can "Mexico" serve as an antidote to the infectious growth of American capitalism? Patriotism, as Horace Smith long ago wrote, is "too often the hatred of other countries disguised as the love of our own."38 Does Kahlo ground a love of Mexico in her disdain for the United States? I think the answer to these questions is clearly no. I agree with Claudia Schaefer who suggests that the empty dress stands in for an empty tradition. "Like the slippery concept of national unity, there seems to be no bedrock on which to foster the construction of cultural, political, or personal equilibrium."39 What one reads in My Dress is not the juxtaposition of false or contaminated values (the United States) with true values (Mexico), a characteristic theme in patriotic tales. Mexico as a geography, a culture and a past exists, and it is more than evident from Kahlo's own writings and journals that she longed to be there.40 But Kahlo provides her audience with no sense of satisfaction that the Mexican nation is either "truer" than its imperialist neighbor to the north or that there is an unproblematized past that can resolve the problems faced by the modern nation. The dangers that Kahlo describes are those of unfettered capitalism, but tradition the empty Tehuana costume does not provide a platform from which one can launch a harmonious national narrative. Kahlo will not compose the privileged narrative of the post-Revolutionary Mexican nation.
Kahlo and Rivera divorced in late 1939 only to remarry a little more than a year later. While Rivera would continue as an unrepentant womanizer, at least Kahlo seemed to reach a new understanding about their relationship. Some of this is expressed in The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego and Señor Xólotl (1949). Kahlo paints herself at the center of this canvas, a mother-Madonna who cradles Rivera, her child-husband-Christ, in her arms. They are surrounded by Mexico: the greenish earth goddess (probably Cihuacoatl), cactus, maguey, and other plants, "Sr. Xolotl", Kahlo's itzcuintli dog, itself a figure from Mexican mythology, and the sun and the moon. Surely Kahlo will find protection and harmony in the verdant arms of ancient Mexico. Yet she doesn't. A tear rolls down her cheek, her neck is rent from one side to the other, and blood pours down her left shoulder where it turns into milk, much like the milk that drips from Cihuacoatl's breast. The Kahlo-Rivera marriage was not what one would call happy in conventional terms. Yet this painting is remarkable since Kahlo quite literally places herself and Rivera in the "love embrace" of nationalism's greatest tropes: the nation as land, woman, life-giver and nurturer. In Kahlo's view, nationalism was a strong and vital attachment, but it neither was an exclusive political identity, nor did it promise harmony or unity. The nation as imagined by Kahlo envelops all, implicating all in its narrations, surrounding and embracing, but not resolving, never coming to equilibrium or producing Truth.
Conclusion
Kahlo's approach to the nation is not solely informed by an understanding that women are marginalized in the "horizontal comradeship" that embodies male power in the hegemonic nation. In many ways through her life choices, selection of clothing, behavior, affairs, performance and, above all, her oeuvre, Kahlo managed to occupy the center even though her devotion to Rivera is extreme. That is why arguments that imply that she allowed Rivera to influence her life in all its details strike me as incorrect and rather patronizing.41 But the fact that she calls attention to the marginalization of women in a nation that equates public power with men's power is not Kahlo's most original move.
Rather, her work undermines the hegemonic patriotic-patriarchal form that nationalism has adopted while still allying herself with many traditional tropes that carry the nationalist narrative. By removing the nation as a Truth-producing refuge, she opens all nationalist claims, both hegemonic and alternative, to interrogation. By divulging the multiple voices that narrate the nation, she destabilizes the closures that nationalism effects. By dressing herself in the costume of tradition, she refuses to relinquish the past to those who claim it for a new privileged narrative. Nationalism, as disclosed by Kahlo, becomes one political identity among others. As Kahlo strips it of its patriotism, of its ability to authorize its own history, she also removes it from the geography of killing and dying. Thus, Kahlo's representation of the nation as a perpetual borderline suggests that Anderson's construction of the horizontal comradeship is far from the only way that this identity can be imagined.
Notes:
1 London: Verso, 1983. Anderson published a revised edition in 1991. All citations are taken from the revised edition.
2 Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation?" trans. Martin Thom, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 19.
3 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 5-7.
4 Ibid., pp. 6-7.
5 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 5.
6 See Prasenjit Duara, "Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When," in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 150-177.
7 Patriotism, from patris or "fatherland," is often conflated with nationalism. Webster's New World Dictionary, College Edition (1959), defines it as "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own country, especially in all matters involving other countries; nationalism." The first usage reported in the Oxford English Dictionary of "patriotism" is "the acting like a Father to his Country" (1726).
8 Duara, "Historicizing National Identity," p. 157.
9 Sudipta Kaviraj, "The Imaginary Institution of India," Subaltern Studies VII. Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 1.
10 Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, "Multiple Forms of (National) Belonging: Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column," Modern Fiction Studies 39:1 (Winter 1993), p. 95.
11 Mary Louise Pratt, "Women, Literature, and National Brotherhood," in Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America: Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 51. See, for just a few representative examples of this critique, Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1989; Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism, and the Family," Feminist Review 44 (1993), pp. 61-80; Mary Layoun, "Telling Spaces: Palestinian Women and the Engendering of the National Narratives," in Andrew Parker, et. al, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 407-423; Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Woman-Nation-State (New York: St Martin's Press), 1989; Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender & Nation (London: Sage), 1996, and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1993.
12 Clorinda Matto de Turner, Birds Without a Nest. A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru, trans. J.G.H., emended by Naomi Lindstrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996 [1889]), p. 133.
13 Anderson still maintains that the relationship between gender and nationalism, while "central," is "a somewhat difficult relationship for him to ponder," and he criticizes those who "read back contemporary [feminist] anxieties and worries into an earlier time." "Sawyer Seminar Meeting Summary," National Humanities Center (November 1, 1996): http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/sawyer/nov1.htm.
14 Needham, "Multiple Forms."
15 Cited in Hayden Herrera, Frida. A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 245-6. (English in original)
16 Ibid.
17 Kahlo's family genealogy is the subject of a number of her paintings. See, for example, My Grandparents, My Parents and I (1936), Portrait of Frida's Family (1950-54), and Portrait of My Father (1951). Gannit Ankori has argued that Kahlo's use of the genealogical chart as a model for her family tree was a deliberate inversion of the document recommended by her German school teachers to establish one's puerza de sangre. See "The Hidden Frida: Covert Jewish Elements in the Art of Frida Kahlo," Jewish Art 19/20 (1993-4), p. 232.
18 See, for example, Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman, eds., et. al., Frida Kahlo. The Camera Seduced (San Francisco: Chronicle Books), 1992.
19 Ida Rodriguez Prampolini makes this argument in Claudia Schaefer, Textured Lives: Women, Art and Representation in Modern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), xii.
20 See, for example, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1996.
21 See Edward J. Sullivan, "Mexicanness in Mexican Painting of the 1980s: Ismael Vargas," Arts Magazine 62:9 (May 1988), pp. 54-57.
22 See Anjouli Janzon, "Writing the Nation: Frida Kahlo and Rosario Castellanos," Lucero 4 (Spring 1993), p. 55.
23 Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 30. Kahlo was a member of the first class of 35 girls admitted to the school of 2,000 pupils.
24 See Homi K. Bhabha, "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 297.
25 See, for example, Samuel Brunk, ¡Emiliano Zapata! Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 1995 and John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico. Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1986.
26 The Cosmic Race : A Bilingual Edition, translated and annotated by Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1997 [1925].
27 Quoted in Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, p. 30.
28 Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life. An Autobiography, with Gladys March (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), p. 79.
29 Quoted in Edward Lucie-Smith, Latin American Art of the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 108. On early Mexican nationalism, see D.A. Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, Centre of Latin American Studies), 1985.
30 The clearest argument as for Kahlo's attempt to write an alternative narrative of the nation is presented by Janzon, "Writing the Nation." Claudia Schaefer, Textured Lives, Women, Art, and Representation in Modern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), especially chapter 1, argues that Kahlo's art is unable to present the equilibrium or unity needed for a nationalist narrative. She suggests that Kahlo can best be understood as a magical realist rather than a surrealist. For an excellent historically grounded discussion of alternative nationalisms, see Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation. The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1995.
31 The mother in My Birth lies with a sheet over her head, so it is impossible to know whether it is Kahlo (who had just suffered a miscarriage) or her own mother (who had just died) in the painting. Given Kahlo's continual re-inventions of herself, I tend to agree with Hayden Herrera that the mother in the painting is Kahlo herself. Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo. The Paintings, p. 10.
32 Andrea Kettenmann, Diego Rivera, 1886-1957. A Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art (Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1997), pp. 26-36.
33 Retablos are small paintings usually given as an offering of thanks to the Virgin when some adversity was avoided, some illness overcome. They are a marker of traditional popular or naive Mexican folk art. Salomon Grimberg, who has studied Kahlo's work extensively, argues that it was Rivera who encouraged Kahlo to adopt this format. Whether this was the case or not, the retablo approach fitted Kahlo both physically (since she often painted either sitting down or lying in bed) and conceptually, since she actively worked with Mexican traditions. Salomon Grimberg, "Thinking of Death," Woman's Art Journal 14:2 (Fall 1993/Winter 1994), p. 45.
34 Kahlo painted two striking works with a Communist theme shortly before her death in 1954: Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick and Self-portrait with Stalin. Her last painting, which still remains on the easel in her studio in Coyoacán, is of Stalin. Andrea Kettenmann has suggested that in the Self-portrait with Stalin, the Soviet strongman "assumes the role of saint. The artist thereby reveals her almost religious faith in Communism." Frida Kahlo, 1907-1954. Pain and Passion (Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1992), p. 87. This may well be an accurate reading, as Kahlo remained a faithful Communist for her entire adult life, and Stalin would not be denounced in the Soviet Union until some years after Kahlo's death. Yet the monstrous size of Stalin's head in the portrait as compared to Kahlo's own, and the oblique, almost cartoonish glance of his eyes, in juxtaposition to Kahlo's typically direct gaze, makes me wonder if she consciously or unconsciously questioned the heroic stature of the Soviet leader.
35 Kahlo's last public appearance before her death in 1954 was at a large rally in Mexico City protesting CIA involvement in the 1954 coup that overthrew the progressive government of Guatemala.
36 See, for example, his Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Mexico (1942-51), a fresco series in the National Palace in Mexico City.
37 Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, p. 105.
38 Horace Smith, The tin trumpet, or Heads and tales, for the wise and waggish: to which are added, poetical selections (London: Whittaker & Co.), 1836.
39 Schaefer, Textured Lives, p. 16.
40 "Here in Gringolandia I spend my days dreaming of going back to Mexico" Letter from Kahlo to Isabel Campos, New York, November 16, 1933 in Cartas Apasionadas: The Letters of Frida Kahlo, compiled by Martha Zamora (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995), p. 50.
41 Grimberg, "Thinking of Death," p. 45.
