Estéticas del desplazamiento: Artistas mexicanos en Nueva York (1920-1940)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the contributions of writer José Juan Tablada, cartoonist Miguel Covarrubias, and choreographer José Limón to New York’s modern art scene from 1920 to 1940. I analyze the ways in which the experiences of exile (Tablada), foreignness (Covarrubias), and migration (Limón) affected their creative process. I argue that, in all three cases, these experiences worked to create an “aesthetic of displacement,” an aesthetic that capitalized on ethnic and racial differences to establish cross-cultural ties between the artistic communities in both Mexico and the US. For all three artists, their physical displacement implied the reconfiguration of their aesthetic, literary, and intellectual projects, as well as an ambivalent relationship with the American intelligentsia. In the local intellectual scene, foreign intellectuals and artists will never be entirely assimilated, nor will they be wholly entirely excluded; their national origin always precedes them. As a mechanism for mitigating the peculiarity of being a foreigner and the difficulties of living between two languages and two cultures, these three artists used translation as an act of cultural resistance. At the same time, the dynamics of displacement allowed for the creation of transnational artistic and intellectual networks between the two countries. I propose that displacement acts as a double agent, working within the foreign artists’ materiality—bodies and practices—as well as through their ideas—artistic, political, or social—to help us understand their alliances, negotiations, and resistance.