Picturing the Proletariat revisits the familiar territory of art, labor, and politics in postrevolutionary Mexico. Even though these topics dominate the historiography on modern Mexico, this thoroughly researched and copiously illustrated book is a welcome addition. John Lear offers expert analysis of visual culture, a feature often lacking in the historical literature on labor politics. Simultaneously, he provides a deeper and more nuanced account of the intellectual identification with the working classes than one typically finds in the art historical scholarship. The book is thereby an impressive hybrid that will be of great interest to scholars in both disciplines.
Lear focuses on representations of workers in Mexican visual culture from the turn of the twentieth century through the end of Lázaro Cárdenas's presidency. He traces shifts in how the proletariat was pictured, from Saturnino Herrán's “worker-citizen” and the “worker-victim” popularized by José Guadalupe Posada to the “worker-victim-militant” that characterized imagery...
