Diego Rivera Day

Arrived safely in Mexico City. The hotel is fantastico (it’s the Four Seasons, after all). This morning we met 6 others from my editorial committee for sightseeing. We took the subway to the Zocolo, which is the Tiananmen Square of Mexico City.

The Zocolo, like most main squares in Latin America, contains the cathedral and key government buildings. We went immediately to the Palacio Nacionale, under the guidance of Doug Massey, one of the co-editors for the Annual Review of Sociology, with the express purpose of seeing the Diego Rivera murals. They truly were spectacular. And try to imagine a principal government building in any country outside of Cuba, China, or the former Soviet Union that prominently depicts Karl Marx and a workers’ revolution. One of the stairways depicts pre-Columbian Mexico, then a history of Mexico, and then the future, featuring Karl Marx and the demise of capitalism. It was really wonderful.

The cathedral.

Committee members, spouses, and me learning about the murals.

School children in the Palacio come to see the murals also.

We then walked, talked, ate, and drank our way through the murals at the Ministry of Education and the Diego Rivera museum. As one committee member said, it was art and social/political commentary all in one. These are some very political murals: overt political slogans, hammers and sickles, Lenin, Trotsky….

We then broke off from the group and walked back to the hotel, past a random street protest and along the broad boulevards of this enormous city.

Tonight we were able to skype the kids and tell them all about our adventures, and hear about theirs. Tomorrow I get to work, and Arthur navigates the city, and the language, solo.