San Ildefonso: Living History. Interview with Eduardo Vázquez Martín

Eduardo Vázquez Martín

UNAM Internacional: We know that UNAM shares the management of the Colegio de San Ildefonso with the federal government and the government of Mexico City; it is a tripartite mandate, but ¿how does it work?
Eduardo Vázquez Martín: The mandate was created in 1992 for the management of the great Mexico: Splendors of 30 Centuries exhibition. Developed in the context of the commemoration of five centuries of the “discovery of America”, and of the imminent integration of Mexico to the North American Free Trade Agreement, its cultural and political impact allowed the institutions involved in its organization—then National Council for Culture and Arts (Conaculta), our university, and the Department of the Federal District—to think of keeping this new vocation around museography for the Colegio. 32 years after the exhibition took place, the Colegio de San Ildefonso is still being managed by the three institutions: an autonomous organism, a federal institution and a local government. This institutional model has the particular complexities of shared governance, and an administration that combines resources from different sources, each one of which responds to specific regulations. Institutional governance at San Ildefonso is a valuable experience, and for it to work needs dialogue, consensus, and coordination between public structures of different nature.

UI: Which explains the “mandate” model.
EVM: We have to acknowledge that, after these 30 years that the mandate has been in operation, Mexico’s cultural life has undergone through deep changes, and that the country’s cultural infrastructure has multiplied. Three decades ago—for example—UNAM didn’t have the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC); the federal government had not yet concluded the National Center for the Arts, and there was no Los Pinos Cultural Complex. The big private museums we know today in Monterrey, Puebla, or Mexico City. In these 30 years Conaculta became the Secretariat of Culture, the Department of the Federal District was transformed in Mexico City’s Head of Government, while the local government’s cultural entity—the Direction of Social, Civic, and Cultural Action, formerly known as Socicultur—became, first the Cultural Institute of Mexico City, and since the new century, the Secretariat of Culture of the Government of Mexico City.

At the start of the 1990s, the members of the mandate of the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso view the institution not only as common ground, but—among the whole country’s cultural institutions—as the one that had the best physical conditions, as well as the best location, for the organization of the most emblematic exhibitions, both national and international. This has changed through time, also due to the multiplication of cultural infrastructure, and this is why it is pertinent today to reconsider Sal Ildefonso’s institutional design and renew its vocation

Escuela Nacional Preparatoria
Picture: Archivo Histórico de la UNAM (ahunam)

UI: But, despite any change, Sal Ildefonso is still a must in terms of cultural references.
EVM: The museographic and cultural project that started 30 years ago has allowed San Ildefonso to prevail as a public space for art, open to society, to national and international visitors. But San Ildefonso’s symbolic value is wider and deeper: for a starting point, it is one of the earliest education projects of the Viceroyalty, established within the grounds of the ancient Main Temple of Tenochtitlan, just meters away from the Calmecac, the school for the young Aztec aristocracy before the Conquest. In the New Spain, the Jesuits assumed as their mission to train the Creole elite and the emerging mestizo merchant class, a very different view than that of the Tlatelolco College, where the Franciscans educated the Indigenous nobility integrated in the colonial project. Jesuit vocation towards excellence and truth developed an educational project that was somehow independent from the crown interests. This allowed non-orthodox ideas to circulate in San Ildefonso, ideas that would eventually build the Enlightened thought.

Students of San Ildefonso ca. 1930
Picture: ZONA Octavio Paz

After a long time, when the expulsion of the Jesuit order was already history, the independence had been consolidated, and the Republic restored, this space would be dedicated to the National Preparatory School, first pushed by Gabino Barreda in Juárez times, and later by Justi Sierra, during the porfiriato (Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship). This school, where Modernity was being achieved through scientific thought and secular education, created its own critical antithesis, incarnated in the Atheneum of Youth, a group of new intellectuals and artists who thought that the prevalence of scientism and positivism had lost the humanist sense of education and culture. That generation—to which, among others, José Vaconcelos and Diego Rivera belonged—would build, also starting in San Ildefonso, the cultural and educational project of the Mexican Revolution. As a consequence of the 1910-1917 Revolution, San Ildefonso would become again the epicenter of the education project of the new power: in its classrooms, the Mexican school of the Revolution would try its most ambitious pedagogical programs, always with a scientific and social, historical and humanist character, and its walls would give birth to the muralist movement, basis of the “Mexican School of Painting”, which has a definitive impact in modern art during the 20^th century.

UI: You pointed out the relationship of San Ildefonso with the education of elites since its most distant past. How did it transform into the space of open access, of inclusion it is today?
EVM: This is a direct consequence of the revolutionary process that started in 1910, and of the consolidation of the constitutionalist project developed by President Álvaro Obregón between 1920 and 1924. But the specific weight of the transformation of the National Preparatory School cannot be understood without José Vasconcelos’ vision, and in the same sense, the presence of the young Marxist Vicente Lombardo Toledano cannot be diminished: as the Director of the School, he created the evening shift so that San Ildefonso’s classrooms were accessible for young workers.

But it is necessary to emphasize that before the revolutionary and post-revolutionary phases, San Ildefonso was not exclusively dedicated to educating the elites; it was also a safe haven for many manifestations that dissented from the dominating thought of the times. It is known that some of the prohibited books that Sor Juana used to read, shared with her by her confessor, Jesuit Antonio Núñez de Miranda, came from the Colegio’s library. Also, that Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos walked these patios and passages. The liberal revolution that turned San Ildefonso into the National Preparatory School, trained groups of bachelors that were indeed small, but it did it with a very ample and inclusive idea. The National Preparatory School created by Benito Juárez in 1867 is characteristic of a liberal republic of citizens, not anymore of subjects to a monarchy.

San Ildefonso’s history is also that of the educative and cultural battles that changed the shape of the 20^th century: the debate about the direction of the Revolution’s education project, that finds one of its highest points in the controversy between Antonio Caso and Vicente Lombardo Toledano, happened here; the struggle for an autonomous university, was enthusiastically voted by a crowd in San Ildefonso’s central patio; The student’s and popular movement of 1968 had an important node in San Ildefonso, and this took Díaz Ordaz’s government to send the Army to attack the premises and submit the youth that rallied against repression and for freedom. The public vocation of San Ildefonso has evolved through the years, always in a complementary form to the educational vocation, as a historic place linked to critical thought, to modern art, to freedom expression, to the open debate of ideas, and the interchange of knowledges.

Today’s idea of a museum as an effective tool for art and culture dissemination, as it happens to so many of our institutions, is under watch because, in its way, it has dropped many exclusions—women, native and afro peoples, the working class, sex and gender diversities, peoples with disadvantages, neurodivergent persons—, but mainly because the new hegemonic powers—industrial, political, military— are trying to take the debate of ideas, values, tastes, and life’s sense at large, from the traditional physical spaces of education and culture to cybernetic virtuality, where dissent management and masses control becomes more effective and convenient.

Diego Rivera painting his mural “The Creation”, 1922
Picture: Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo

UI: This new scenery sets important challenges for people involved in cultural promotion. How is it being done? How are we handling access to cultural goods, dialogue with new diversities, and the transformation of spaces for art and culture?
EVM: We live a generalized crisis that in the cultural realm produces more and more precarious situations for every creative and value-adding chain, both in the creative economies and in public resources for culture. Cultural action still is the place where an intense process of critical creation and resignification of the world takes place, but societies and states have diminished the importance of culture in their way to development. Culture and art remain the most important good that societies have to face the adverse conditions of our world today, but institutions are limited by a vision that reduces their importance to a political instrument, a potential place for propaganda and legitimacy. Understanding cultural life in this way produces the precarious situation I mentioned before; reduces its autonomy, and subjects it to political will (or makes it dependent of economic powers).

I think that socially and politically speaking, we live a general devaluation of culture because we are investing much less than we need, also less than we can invest without great budget sacrifices, but with enormous social benefits.

Inaugural tour, Thursday, November 26, 1992
Picture: La Jornada, 1992

UI: Despite this, our country is still considered as a cultural power.
EVM: Nevertheless, since Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, the State’s cultural activity has been systematically reduced. Later, some kind of misunderstanding has prevailed: thinking that we should bet for one of two alternatives apparently exclusive from each other: high culture or popular culture. I know I am reducing a very complex debate, but I think this bipolar view radically distorts the dinamics of cultural life, because in reality, culture is a great interconnected ecosystem that feeds mainly from its diversity.

In times of civilizational crisis, of climate change, or wars and conflicts, one of the human spaces that always responds more effectively and that we still have now, is precisely that of art and culture. It is from here that critical thought and creative imagination are capable of conceiving other desirable futures; if not necessarily utopian, at least not apocalyptic. In the moment when there should be a lot of social and public resources to redirect the course of our development, we suffer culture precariousness.

San Ildefonso in Dance Night
Picture: Cultura UNAM

UI: In recent years, private initiatives like the ones you have mentioned—Jumex Museum Foundation since decades ago; the Soumaya Museum more recently; the multimedia shows on art being presented at the Mother’s Monument—invest in culture. Are they modifying the scenery? Do they offer access to “great culture”, but lacking a critical point of view?
EVM: I’m against prejudice. Everything adds up and vitality manifests itself in different forms.

UI: Maybe these are ways that allow making art more familiar to people who otherwise would not enter a museum.
EVM: It is true that museums, as theaters and concert halls, are territories where not everyone feels invited to. This is due to different reasons, from economic to social, cultural and of accessibility. The institutions responsible for these spaces, their managing teams, have the responsibility to make access easier, to eliminate barriers and get every citizen to feel invited. But museums are in principle hospitable and open places where meaningful and transforming experiences take place. Our task is to socialize the exercise of observing and listening, of surprise and critical approach. What is not desirable is for these spaces to end reproducing the logic of spectacle, of selfies and algorithms, of acritical consumption, which would end up banalizing cultural spaces until they are as irrelevant as a reel.

UI: Is culture capable of reducing hate and inequalities?
EVM: Yes, of course. Art and culture work beyond the symbolic level. They unleash individual, collective, political, and communitarian processes, as well as economic ones. Because culture is in essence the manifestation of diversity, it is also a form of democratic exercise and political pluralism, but this pluralism expresses itself in different ways than those that adhere to the exercise of power and politics. Without the free expression of cultural diversity, democracy is limited. We cannot suppose that democracy only expresses itself through five or six political parties and two or three ideologies. What takes place in the cultural world is an intense democratic exercise, because it deals with manifestations ever more diverse and dynamic that emerge from social plurality, and their expression and free development are essential for public health.

San Ildefonso in Dance Night
Picture: Colegio de San Ildefonso

UI: Could you elaborate around the subjects of accessibility and participation?
EVM: I think that we need to open culture governance to diversity. Cultural and social communities should participate in the design, operation, and evaluation of cultural institutions and spaces. We have to develop a wider way for access and participation. We also need economic and finance policies to push independent cultural entrepreneurship development. We need to generate conditions for the multiplication of bookstores, publishers, dance and theater groups, concert halls, galleries, and independent museums. Not everything would depend on public resources, this is not the only solution, although, anyway, it is urgent to at least double it. We need to invent new ways for collaborative management and governance, and at the same time, we have to guarantee an active and ideally prosperous independent cultural life.

San Ildefonso in Dance Night
Picture: Colegio de San Ildefonso

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