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"Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy--and what it meant to be authentically Mexican."--

The state of Yucatan is commonly considered to have been a hotbed of radical feminism during the Mexican Revolution. Challenging this romanticized view, this book examines the revolutionary reforms designed to break women's ties to tradition and religion, as well as the ways in which women shaped these developments

Abstract
This article analyzes the interactions of artists, Mexico's Communist Party, or the Partido Comunista Mexicano (pcm), and the Mexican state within the context of Mexico's vibrant post-revolutionary era. Although during these early years the Party's official membership numbers remained relatively minimal, this article argues that the extraordinary influence of Mexico's creative participants on the politics of the period was significant. During the 1920s the pcm derived a great deal of prestige from its association with art and the muralists, including Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and as a result Mexico's lively political and artistic scene attracted the attention of writers, photographers, artists, and intellectuals from all over the world. Art and politics intertwined as artists played major roles in political affairs, and politicians appropriated the arts to transmit the "official" national history. Indeed, during these exhilarating years, the artists and the pcm built a powerful coalition, and one whose influence endured long beyond the 1920s.