“The Republic of Letters: A Review of Politics, Art, and Society in Mexico”

The republic of letters

Humberto Musacchio

Pablo Gonzalez Casanova

Pablo González Casanova y del Valle died and with all haste he has already been beatified by a sector of the left. He was director of the National School of Political and Social Sciences on February 5, 1959, when this campus moved from the San Rafael neighborhood to Ciudad Universitaria. The inauguration of the new headquarters was attended by the then President of the Republic, Adolfo López Mateos, to whom González Casanova thanked “the high honor he has done to our School and the great encouragement he gives him with his presence” (Ahem!). . Of Don Pablone’s books, as Roger Bartra called him, only Democracy in Mexico is remembered, a text that is still prescribed to every sociology student, despite the fact that from its origin the work offered outdated data, hardly useful for some historians. As rector, he created the CCHs and the so-called Open University, with which the massification of the UNAM began and, as a consequence, the decline of the academic level. He dogmatically opposed university unionism, something that the leaders of STUNAM forgot, who expressed their deep regret in an obituary that appeared in La Jornada, a newspaper where, in an assembly of the public limited company, PGC had the statutes reformed to establish the cacicazgo of his buddy Carlos Payán. From January 1994 to date, he has acted as a devoted follower of the no less caciquil Subcomandante Marcos. Want to take town baths…

The mural of Siqueiros in CU

At the end of March, in the University City, during a rally of students from the Faculty of Arts and Design (former Academy of San Carlos), several hooded men attacked a UNAM employee with a hammer and severely damaged the mural that Siqueiros executed. outside the Rectory, on which they painted and scratched. Of course, it cannot be forgotten that on the dates that the artist stamped on the right side of his work, during each student movement the year in which it occurred was added, but the alteration was limited to a small rectangle that was easily rehabilitated. Instead, the damage now affects the lower half for the entire length of the mural. It is surprising that plastic arts students have allowed this attack against the patrimony of university students and the nation. Of course, the masked criminals continue in impunity, since there is no authority to stop them. Even when?

The polyhedral Lucero Isaac

A beautiful book, well documented and written with the talent and good pen of Elisa Lozano is Lucero Isaac. Woman of all spaces, a work that offers the biography of a daring, charming and very gifted lady for multiple chores, because having found her natural space in the cinema -she is the winner of four Arieles- she has gone through “equally fascinating areas”, she says the author, as “dance, theater, photography and image design”, to which must be added her brilliant performance in assemblages, those sculptural pieces built from various objects. Wife for several years of Alberto Isaac, mother of Claudio, their son, close friend of Rulfo, García Márquez, Buñuel, José Luis Cuevas, Diana Bracho and other great characters, Lucero dedicated several decades to the cinema, many times without actually seeing her name on the screen, since it was a macho environment dominated by a unionism that led our seventh art to become a showcase of the most pedestrian commercialism, with its exceptions, in which that wonder woman who worked on costumes, setting and artistic direction with directors such as Miguel Littin, Costa Gavras, Maurice Ronet, Juan Luis Buñuel, Ripstein, Juan Manuel Torres, Olhovich, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and, of course, Alberto and Claudio Isaac. In short, a book that grabs the reader and does not let go until the end. Formidable.

If you are thinking of traveling to the EU

In an old edition of his column game of eyes (II/8/12), reports Miguel Ángel Sánchez de Armas: “In Nevada, sexual relations without a condom are illegal; in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, it is against the law to have an affair with a trucker in the tool bay; the city of Newcastle, Wyoming, prohibits the same activity in butcher’s refrigerators and the severe fathers of the Nation maintain in Washington DC the prohibition of making love in any position that is not face to face; Washington state prohibits intimate contact with a virgin under any circumstances, including your wedding night! States where oral sex is illegal and penalized: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia, and Washington DC. States where an erection evident through clothing (and reported, I assume) is a violation: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington DC, and Wisconsin. Do not allow the desire to put you in chirona.