Mabel Dodge Luhan, Carlos Chávez, and “Whirling Around Mexico”

• In Event: Fragmentos de lo mexicano: Música e identidad del México siglo XIX al México del siglo XX.

Abstract

In 1930, ten years after the Revolution (c. 1910-1920), Mexico had a palpable reformist energy, despite continued political fragmentation and occasional military conflict. Mexico City’s artistic community was re-imagining a mexicanidad that privileged pre-Conquest and Native culture in a simultaneous effort to reject Colonial hierarchies and embrace a new national identity. Streams of U.S. “pilgrims,” many of them part of the intellectual elite, made their way to Mexico, resulting in a transnational exchange often called the “Mexico Vogue.” Patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan made one of these pilgrimages in 1930; her book describing her experiences, “Whirling Around Mexico,” remains unpublished, but a copy at Yale University provides an unusually detailed account of the personal connections required to navigate “Vogue”-era Mexico.
Carlos Chávez is as central to “Whirling Around Mexico” as he was to Mexican cultural life. Luhan and Chávez met in Mexico, but both had lived in Greenwich Village. She ran an artistic salon there in the 1910s, and he began his career as a radical modernist there in the mid-1920s. By 1930, she had moved her artistic salon to Taos, New Mexico, and he was director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México and head of the National Conservatory. From these positions of power, he became the primary voice of Mexican modernist musical identity. In this paper I explore the ways in which “Whirling Around Mexico” adds both specificity and nuance to our understanding of the “Vogue,” of Chávez, and of the way people work to shape both identity and art.

Author

• Christina Taylor Gibson, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.