The more I know about Mexican culture...

...the more I admire it, esp. the revolutionary strand, which seems much much closer to the surface than in American culture.

I was thinking about this a few weekends ago when I was looking at an exhibition of mid-20th c. Mexican prints that had such sharp anti-capitalist social criticisms aimed at successfully educating the masses.

On the one hand, that was only a few decades out from their revolution, and ours was so much longer ago.

On the other hand, it seems like that revolutionary spirit is an active resource in their culture, and can be meaningfully invoked a lot of times, like has recently happened with the self-defense forces in Michoacan, where people got fed up with drug traffickers and the corrupt local police and took up arms:

I find it very telling that people are calling such women "adelitas", after the women who nursed soldiers over a century ago.

That print exhibition also got me thinking, where are all the socially concerned American artists today depicting the struggles of the people like the mid-20th c. Mexican printmakers were doing?

There's more than enough subject matter with fast food and service industry workers, but to my knowledge, I see no-one doing that, the most people do is something about gender issues, apart from a handful of rockers like Springsteen who get into class issues through songs.

After the exhibition, I texted several friends my thoughts on this, and my one (Mexican) (naturalized American citizen) engineer friend from the city texted back:

Yes, you're right...  the American is a selfish society; we rarely think about other people's problems, even artists...

Interestingly, he told me once that he knew Mexico had no hope when his teacher asked his class in Mexico in high school, how many were willing to stand up to guns and die if they saw their rights being taken away, and no-one said that they would, and so she spat at them, "See, our country has no hope."

I can see where his perspective comes from - he agreed with her - but you sure as hell don't get that question in American high schools!

The only place that sort of idea every surfaces is with 2nd amendment issues by weird paranoid rightwing splinter groups...