Carlos Merida's Integration of Art, Architecture, and Ideology in the Multifamiliar Juarez

During the administration of Mexican President Miguel Aleman, the architect Mario Pani completed construction of an apartment house complex in Mexico City for federal government employees and their families. The Guatemalan-born artist Carlos Merida decorated the exterior of the buildings with bas-relief images of prehispanic legends of Mexico's natives. Although he identified figures in the legends by costume elements recorded in sixteenth-century manuscripts, the figures themselves resemble modern European (e.g. Paul Klee), rather than prehispanic, figuration. Merida's depictions of the legends therefore parallel the disjunctive use of prehispanic imagery by sixteenth-century native artists, which art historians call "Mestizo Art". Merida created Mestizo Art to reinforce the ideology of "mestizaje" (policies benefiting mestizos) then being promoted by the Aleman administration. A review of the art created by Merida between 1920 and 1952 shows that changes in Merida depictions of Indians illustrate the changes in the Mexican government's social ideologies concerning Indians during the same period of time. Louis Althusser's 1971 model of the State, composed of both Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses, closely fits the government in Mexico following the second World War when it commissioned visual artwork to instruct the public in ruling class ideology. Mario Pani, whose career paralleled that of Le Corbusier, designed many public housing complexes and colleges during and after the Aleman administration and was a leader in adapting architecture to state ideology. Besides Merida, several other artists decorated public buildings constructed during Aleman's term with images of "mestizaje": Jose Clemente Orozco at the National School for Teachers (also designed by Pani), Juan O'Gorman and Francisco Eppens at the National Autonomous University (for which Pani designed the site plan). During the rapid construction of public buildings during Aleman's term artist and architects engaged in a polemic over "plastic integration", the ideal of combining art and architecture into a unified whole. Carlos Merida's decoration of the Multifamiliar Juarez became the most sophisticated realization of "plastic integration" in the post-war period.