Includes Guadalupe Rivera Marín´s voice. Mesmerized for days outside Posada´s shop, watching as the master gave form to his figures, the boy Diego Rivera was invited in by the artist himself, to see how he worked. Since that moment, Rivera recognized Posada as one of his greatest teachers. In this book, an homage to the mexican engraver, we present a text in which Rivera the muralist speaks passionately about influence that Posada the lithographer and caricaturist had on his work: “Surely no bourgeoisie has been as unlucky as Mexico, to have a rapporteour who meted out justice upon their fashions, their actions, their comings and goings, like the brilliant and incomparable José Guadalupe Posada”, he writes.

Diego Rivera is famous for painting murals of everyday life in Mexico. But he was also known for his work in literature, cinematography, and his marriage to another artist, Frida Kahlo. Discover the world of Diego Rivera, from the Mexican Revolution to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, learn all about this talented artist and his creative life.

273 great 19th-century woodcuts: crimes, miracles, skeletons, ads, portraits, news cuts. Table of contents includes Calaveras; Disasters; National Events; Religion and Miracles; Don Chepito Marihuano; Chapbook Covers; Chapbook Illustrations; and Everyday Life.

From the introduction by Pru Devon: “There are various ways of assembling a song collection. The most common procedure seems to be that of gathering together the most familiar and therefore the slightly hackneyed ones in the belief that since they are so well-known it follows they must be the best. Another and far more challenging approach is to collect a great many song from a broad assortment of areas, to evaluate carefully each one, finally selecting a group that gives a truly cross-sectional representation. This is obviously how Elena Paz has succeeded in gathering together this excellent collection of songs. . . . They are the sort of songs that people actually sing. Many have proved their strength and merit by having endured in the people’s hearts for many generations while others, equally representative are actually “living folkmusic”. Lullabies and children’s songs are usually immigrants that came with the colonists from the “old country”, such as A la Nanita Nana. These have wide dispersal and are sung in slightly differing ways from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego. Others reflect episodes in the evolution of a republic, such as the various songs that grew out of the Mexican revolution. They run a fine gamut of expression and mood and offer a just and attractive sampling of the wealth of Latin American music.

Chronicles the life of Mexican artist Diego Rivera and discusses the artists who influenced him, his involvement in Communism, his family life, and other related topics.

A year of weekly interviews (1949-1950) with artist Diego Rivera by poet Alfredo Cardona-Peña disclose Rivera’s iconoclastic views of life and the art world of that time. These intimate Sunday dialogues with what is surely the most influential Mexican artist of the twentieth century show us the free-flowing mind of a man who was a legend in his own time; an artist who escaped being lynched on more than one occasion, a painter so controversial that his public murals inspired movements, or, like the work commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, were ordered torn down. Here in his San Angelín studio, we hear Rivera’s feelings about the elitist aspect of paintings in museums, his motivations to create public art for the people, and his memorable, unedited expositions on the art, culture, and politics of Mexico. The book has seven chapters that loosely follow the range of the author’s questions and Rivera’s answers. They begin with childlike, yet vast questions on the nature of art, run through Rivera’s early memories and aesthetics, his views on popular art, his profound understanding of Mexican art and artists, the economics of art, random expositions on history or dreaming, and elegant analysis of art criticisms and critics. The work is all the more remarkable to have been captured between Rivera’s inhumanly long working stints of six hours or even days without stop. In his rich introduction, author Cardona-Peña describes the difficulty of gaining entrance to Rivera’s inner sanctum, how government funtionaries and academics often waited hours to be seen, and his delicious victory. At eight p. m. the night of August 12, a slow, heavy-set, parsimonious Diego came in to where I was, speaking his Guanajuato version of English and kissing women’s hands. I was able to explain my idea to him and he was immediately interested. He invited me into his studio, and while taking off his jacket, said, “Ask me...” And I asked one, two, twenty... I don't know how many questions ‘til the small hours of the night, with him answering from memory, with an incredible accuracy, without pausing, without worrying much about what he might be saying, all of it spilling out in an unconscious and magical manner. A series of Alfredo Cardona-Peña’s weekly interviews with Rivera were published in 1949 and 1950 in the Mexican newspaper, El Nacional, for which Alfredo was a journalist. His book of compiled interviews with introduction and preface, El Monstruo en su Laberinto, was published in Spanish in 1965. Finally, this extraordinary and rare exchange has been translated for the first time into English by Alfredo’s half-brother Alvaro Cardona Hine, also a poet. According to the translator’s wife, Barbara Cardona-Hine, bringing the work into English was a labor of love for Alvaro, the fulfillment of a promise made to his brother in 1971 that he did not get to until the year before his own death in 2016.

Ilan Stavans’s collection of essays on kitsch and high art in the Americas makes a return with thirteen new colorful conversations that deliver Stavans’s trademark wit and provocative analysis. “A Dream Act Deferred” discusses an issue that is at once and always topical in the dialogue of Hispanic popular culture: immigration. This essay generated a vociferous response when first published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as the issue of immigration was contested in states like Arizona, and is included here as a new addition that adds a rich layer to Stavans’s vibrant discourse. Fitting in this reconfiguration of his analytical conversations on Hispanic popular culture is Stavans’s “Arrival: Notes from an Interloper,” which recounts his origins as a social critic and provides the reader with interactive insight into the mind behind the matter. Once again delightfully humorous and perceptive, Stavans delivers an expanded collection that has the power to go even further beyond common assumptions and helps us understand Mexican popular culture and its counterparts in the United States.

Poems that capture the life and work of artist Diego Rivera.