Manifesto of the Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors
MEXICO – 1923
Written in 1923, at a moment when the fate of the Mexican Revolution was still uncertain, the Manifesto of the Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors set out a radical vision for art as a collective force for liberation. Signed by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Xavier Guerrero, and emerging from a union that included major figures such as José Clemente Orozco, Fermín Revueltas, and other artists committed to cultural revolution, the manifesto argued that art must break with bourgeois individualism and align fully with the struggles of workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities.
Rooted in the creative traditions of the people, the document rejects elitist easel painting and calls for monumental public art capable of educating, mobilizing, and transforming society. It stands as one of the clearest articulations of how culture can act as a weapon in the fight for a new social order, where beauty serves the collective rather than the privileged few.
Manifesto of the Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors
MEXICO – 1923
Comrades:
The military uprising of Enrique Estrada and Guadalupe Sánchez (the most significant enemies of the aspirations of the peasants and workers of Mexico) has had the transcendental importance of clearly precipitating and clarifying the social situation of our country, which, beyond the small accidents and purely political aspects, is concretely the following:
On one side, the social revolution, more ideologically organized than ever, and on the other side, the armed bourgeoisie: soldiers of the people, armed peasants and workers defending their human rights against soldiers of the people dragged in by deceit or forced by political bosses sold out to the bourgeoisie.
On their side, the exploiters of the people, in concubinage with the turncoats who sell the blood of the people's soldiers entrusted to them by the Revolution.
On our side, those who clamor for the disappearance of an aged and cruel order, in which you, field worker, fertilize the earth so that its sprout is swallowed by the rapacity of the encomendero and the politician, while you burst with hunger; in which you, city worker, move the factories, spin the fabrics, and form with your hands all modern comfort for the amusement of the prostitutes and the drones, while your own flesh cracks from the cold; in which you, indigenous soldier, by heroic voluntary action abandon the lands you work and surrender your life without reserve to destroy the misery in which the people of your race and class have lived for centuries, so that afterward a Sánchez or an Estrada can render useless the grand gift of your blood for the benefit of the bourgeois leeches who suck the happiness of your children and steal your labor and land.
Not only is everything that is labor noble, everything that is virtue is a gift of our people (of our indigenous people very particularly), but the smallest manifestation of the physical and spiritual existence of our race as an ethnic force springs from it, and what is more, its admirable and extraordinarily particular faculty of making beauty: the art of the people of Mexico is the greatest and healthiest spiritual manifestation in the world and its indigenous tradition is the best of all. And it is great precisely because, being popular, it is collective, and that is why our fundamental aesthetic objective lies in socializing artistic manifestations, tending toward the absolute disappearance of individualism as bourgeois. We repudiate the painting called easel painting and all ultra-intellectual cenacle art as aristocratic, and we exalt the manifestations of monumental art as being of public utility.
We proclaim that all aesthetic manifestation alien or contrary to popular sentiment is bourgeois and must disappear because it contributes to perverting the taste of our race, which is already almost completely perverted in the cities. We proclaim that, our social moment being one of transition between the annihilation of an aged order and the implantation of a new order, the creators of beauty must strive so that their present labor offers a clear aspect of ideological propaganda for the good of the people, making art, which is currently a manifestation of individualistic masturbation, a purpose of beauty for all, of education, and of combat.
Because we know very well that the implantation of a bourgeois government in Mexico would bring with it the natural depression in the indigenous popular aesthetics of our race, which currently lives only in our popular classes but was already beginning, however, to purify the intellectual circles of Mexico; we will fight to prevent it because we know very well that the triumph of the popular classes will bring with it a flourishing, not only in the social order but a unanimous flourishing of ethnic, cosmogonic, and historically transcendental art in the life of our race, comparable to that of our admirable autochthonous civilizations; we will fight tirelessly to achieve it.
The triumph of De la Huerta, Estrada, or Sánchez, aesthetically as well as socially, would be the triumph of the taste of the typists: the criollo and bourgeois acceptance (which corrupts everything) of popular music, painting, and literature, the reign of the "picturesque," of the North American kewpie, and the official implantation of "l'amore e come zucchero." Love is like sugar.
Consequently, the counterrevolution in Mexico will prolong the pain of the people and depress their admirable spirit.
Previously, the members of the Union of Painters and Sculptors adhered to the candidacy of General don Plutarco Elías Calles, considering that his definitively revolutionary personality guaranteed in the Government of the Republic, more than any other, the betterment of the productive classes of Mexico, an adhesion that we reiterate at this moment with the conviction given to us by the latest political-military events, and we place ourselves at the disposal of his cause, which is that of the people, in the manner in which we are required.
We make a general call to the revolutionary intellectuals of Mexico so that, forgetting their proverbial sentimentalism and idleness for more than a century, they join us in the social and aesthetic-educational struggle that we are carrying out.
In the name of all the blood shed by the people in ten years of struggle and facing the reactionary coup, we make an urgent call to all the peasants, workers, and revolutionary soldiers of Mexico so that, understanding the vital importance of the struggle that is approaching, and forgetting differences in tactics, we form a united front to combat the common enemy.
We advise the common soldiers of the people who, due to ignorance of events and deceived by their traitorous chiefs, are about to shed the blood of their brothers of race and class, to meditate on the fact that the mystifiers want to snatch the land and well-being of their brothers, which the Revolution had already guaranteed with those same weapons.
-"For the proletariat of the world."
The general secretary, David Alfaro Siqueiros; the first member, Diego Rivera; the second member, Xavier Guerrero;
Fermín Revueltas, José Clemente Orozco, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Germán Cueto, Carlos Mérida.
For further reading, explore primary texts such as David Alfaro Siqueiros’s “Calling All Artists,” Diego Rivera’s My Art, My Life, and José Clemente Orozco’s Orozco: Autobiography of a Mexican Artist, all of which illuminate the political and aesthetic foundations of the muralist movement. For deeper scholarly context, see Leonard Folgarait’s Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, Desmond Rochfort’s Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Mary K. Coffey’s How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture.