Francisco Mora’s Miners: Excavating Print Histories

Sarah W. Mallory

Francisco Mora’s (1922–2002) printed depictions of miners are among the Taller de Gráfica Popular’s (People’s Graphics Workshop, TGP) most consummate critiques of the cultural, social, and political legacies of North American and European imperialism in Mexico. His works reveal exploitative labor conditions and are often (rightly) characterized as examples of the TGP’s earnest use of the print medium to advocate for social reforms. Reinforcing this linkage between printmaking and social justice, Mora’s depictions are thought to be informed by the artist’s eyewitness accounts and thus are understood as guerilla reportage.1 Such historiography overlooks other influences shaping Mora’s miners. The artist drew upon a wide range of sources and practices, from early modern European prints to surrealism and other modes of abstraction. In bringing these references to the fore, he expanded the scope of the TGP’s social reform: his miners explore both the legacies of abusive labor practices and the role prints had played in inflicting Indigenous and enslaved African peoples with the social ills he and his colleagues sought to address.

Mora was not the first Mexican printmaker to explore the paradox of political prints in colonial contexts. From the time José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) introduced his subversive calaveras skeletal figures informed both by Indigenous and early modern European artistic precedents—prints had for Mexican artists been an especially nimble medium for critiquing imperialist values espoused by the ruling elite and their bourgeois supporters. Posada’s prints became an emblem for Mexican revolutionaries. At the close of the war, radical social change ensued in fits and starts; popular prints produced by the TGP (the self-professed inheritors of Posada’s legacy) remained vital tools for change. Rather than simply accepting printmaking as a medium of violent revolution, the TGP’s politically progressive, pacifist agenda revolutionized the medium itself, transforming it into a tool of education, governance, and advocacy for marginalized groups.

Mora’s artistic formation in the wake of such events inevitably shaped his depictions of miners, who were some of Mexico’s most exploited laborers. His generation was among the first to experience postrevolutionary educational reforms that dramatically increased access to education for underserved populations, that supported the arts, that valued local and Indigenous art and history, and that eschewed the Catholic Church’s imperialist governance. Moral reforms, particularly temperance movements often led by women in rural agrarian and mining communities, frequently accompanied anticlerical campaigns. 2 Behind many of these efforts was Lázaro Cárdenas (1895–1970), a general in the revolutionary army who would later become president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. From 1928 to 1932, he was governor of the state of Michoacán, which was where he first implemented changes he would instrumentalize more broadly as Mexico’s president and then as secretary of national defense. Mora, born and raised in Michoacán, attended regional schools and no doubt benefited from these developments. As an adult, Mora, a devoted communist, produced a print portrait of Cárdenas that extolled the leader’s acceptance of the Stalin Peace Prize awarded by the Soviet government. The portrait, done in linocut and rendered in three-quarter profile, reveals a stoic man whose distant gaze emphasizes his collective vision and his singularity among his peers. Here we see the coalescence of Mora’s artistic telos with an actualization of Cárdenas’s vision for social and educational reforms first implemented so many years before in Michoacán.

Born in 1922 in the city of Uruapán, Mora came from humble beginnings. 3 He showed a talent for art from a young age, perhaps encouraged by his mother (a textile maker) and his father (a musician and artist). As a child he “decorated the hallways of his primary school” and was known as “the school’s best artist.”4 In 1933, he began his studies at the Escuela Técnica Industrial (Technical School of Industry) in Morelia (a city known as a stronghold for revolutionaries), and in 1936 enrolled in the Escuela Agrícola “La Huerta” to study drawing and painting. In 1940 he studied art at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. While there, the young artist perhaps knew of Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish, and Jules Langsner’s large wall mural The Inquisition (1935), which was painted in the university’s Museo Michoacano, formerly the baroque palace of Emperor Maximilian. 5 Commissioned by Diego Rivera and (soon-to-be) TGP members David Alfaro Siqueiros and Pablo O’Higgins, the monumental work depicts various forms of torture at the hands of Klan-like figures. Though covered up shortly after its debut, the subversive sentiment behind an antifascist mural painted onto the walls of a colonial palace was likely not lost on Mora. His depictions of miners would similarly enfold an imperialist past into present-day inequities.

By 1941, Mora had moved to Mexico City. In his prints Mi primera visión de la metrópoli (My first impression of Mexico City, 1941) and La gran ciudad (The haves and have nots, 1945), we see what a shock it must have been for him to leave rural Michoacán.6 In Mi primera visión, the page is covered in a sea of bodies knotted together (some in a state of undress) in an orgiastic party. La gran ciudad features party revelers in a tall apartment building oblivious to unhoused individuals— women, children, and barefoot men clad in farmers’ overalls—gathered around a fire in a dark alley. In Michoacán, policies promoting ostensibly modern living relied on a certain understanding of moral decorum, which included curbing the consumption of alcohol. Mora’s prints suggest that such ideas had been cast aside along with the impoverished laborers who lived in the shadows of the nation’s largest and wealthiest city. A later self-portrait from 1944 depicts the artist’s face half in light and half in shadow, as if he were a marginal figure receding into the darkness of his surroundings.

Ideological quandaries did not deter the artist from living in the city, though they perhaps spurred him to create art that resonated with his own sensibilities. He was awarded a scholarship to study at La Esmeralda under the tutelage of the like-minded Rivera. There, Mora delved further into the study of European art. He once remarked, “Since my student days with Diego Rivera I have always used the golden section of the Italian Renaissance.”7 Mora’s painting of a miner, with prominent profile and donning a red hat and neckerchief, set against a cubist landscape with blue sky, is a contemporized iteration of an early fifteenth-century Italian portrait and betrays its influences. The artist reclaims this European mode of envisioning to ennoble his subject via a genre that traditionally depicted elites, including those who had already accrued mining wealth from the so-called New World.8

Mora became a member of the TGP in 1941 and remained active until 1965.9 He produced linocut and lithographic prints and posters, drawings, easel paintings, and murals. He married fellow member Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) in 1947, and the two worked from their studios in Cuernavaca until his death in 2002. Catlett’s struggles, as a Black woman and communist, to achieve personal and artistic autonomy beyond the suffocating overreach of the U.S. government no doubt crystalized Mora’s sense of purpose in his selection of subjects.10

The mining industry wielded one the most enduring and oppressive imperialist legacies in Mexico, even after the revolution. Since the sixteenth century, foreign mining ventures had exploited Indigenous and enslaved African labor to extract untold wealth from vast tracts of land. By the 1940s, the mining industry accounted for at least 36 percent of Mexico’s exports and for 20 percent of all foreign investment.11 Most mines were owned by North American companies, who were concerned neither with the rights of miners nor with the general social, cultural, and economic welfare of their communities. For the TGP, revealing the hardships of these laborers demonstrated the need for social and political reforms that ensured the welfare of miners and by extension the welfare of the nation.

While various artists within the collective took up the subject of miners, Mora’s depictions differentiate his works from those of his colleagues who were guided by the social realist aesthetic milieu led by Rivera, Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. These artists eschewed abstract forms in order to unambiguously depict the work of disenfranchised laboring classes. Hannes Meyer, director of the TGP during part of Mora’s tenure, wrote that the printmaking collective, too, “has always been characterized by the absence of abstract techniques, which would not be understood by the masses,” and, moreover, that “abstract form has been used to camouflage social injustice.”12 Such an approach, however, often made stage sets of landscapes, producing choreographed scenes in which the laboring body is heroized, glamorized, metaphorized, or merely mimed. The compositional and chromatic harmony so often demonstrated in these beguilingly serene works belies the physical, mental, and environmental trauma experienced by laborers. Moreover, these depictions fail to reckon with the role that representational art historically played in inflicting trauma on Indigenous and enslaved African miners. Since the advent of Spanish occupation, some European figural woodcuts and engraved prints had been tools of oppressive colonial governance masquerading as administrative, religious, or educational images and texts. In an effort to further subjugate non-European bodies in the Americas, prints were also used to perpetuate grotesquely false stereotypes about Indigenous and enslaved African peoples.

While some of Mora’s oeuvre does include works that trade in social realism’s visual tropes, his printed depictions of miners are entirely devoid of idealistic yens. Using various visual references that teeter between realism and abstraction, he implicates the history of the medium in the contemporary struggle of miners. Mora seemingly dismantles their bodies, merging the figure and landscape to produce fractured forms that betray a brokenness born from centuries of oppression. In these bodies, abstraction makes evident labor’s fracture of the individual and the collective sense of humanity.

Two of Mora’s best-known lithographic depictions of the subject, Minero (Miner, 1946, p. 355) and El minero (The miner, 1945), present wiry, sharp bodies that are bent, crumpled, crushed, and squeezed within tunnels and caves. Heads with hollow cheeks and blank stares are juxtaposed at odd angles with arms and shoulders. The viewer, as if seeing through the eyes of a miner in a dimly lit tunnel, is rarely afforded a sweeping or grand compositional vista. Rather, we see men entombed within landscapes, their bodies and movements bound to the land.13 These collapsing figures are rendered in a variety of scratching, chipping, and digging marks, the work of the artist’s tools echoing the blows of a miner’s pick or the flickering flash of shadow cast by fugitive lamp light. In conjuring forth the vision of a miner from the lithographic stone, Mora unites materials with meaning, excavating once invisible bodies from the long history of mining images that had for centuries trapped workers inside a stony matrix of tunnels.

Mora draws upon this visual history to formulate his compositional and iconographic formulas. Theodore de Bry’s sixteenth-century depiction of mining in Potosí, Bolivia, a watershed moment in the documentation of colonial labor practices, provides Mora with an array of precedents he absorbs into his own work. Laborers depicted within a cross-section of the mine, men climbing ladders, halos of light around candles, and the miners’ stiff postures so characteristic of early modern European prints depicting American and African bodies—all appear in Mora’s works. While de Bry’s mine, however, is set within a larger landscape, Mora claustrophobically closes in his miners and shows only the insides of tunnels. This compression of space is also illustrated in the 1842 British report on child labor that depicts men and children crawling through darkened tunnels.14 These prints circulated in books and newspapers that Mora might have studied. The artist was also likely aware that in the first half of the nineteenth century thousands of British laborers immigrated to Mexico to work in various mines throughout Hidalgo.15 The visual resemblances between the UK report, de Bry’s work, and Mora’s mining images also suggest the artist’s linkage of twentiethcentury Mexican miners with nineteenth-century British laborers and sixteenth-century Potosí miners. This visual continuum presents a history of mining that not only speaks to the confluence of peoples who worked in Mexico but also aligns with the broader aims and communist philosophy to which Mora and the TGP were dedicated: to achieve peace and equality for all peoples through unified advocacy for laborers’ rights the world over.

Mora’s depictions of miners also take up decidedly more modern artistic influences. He turns to geometric abstraction with elements of surrealism, the latter a global artistic movement that had by the 1940s developed a strong following in Mexico City.16 Such impulses are apparent in several of Mora’s linocut prints depicting the life of miners. In La olla (The pot, 1948), for example, we see from above the crouching body of a miner with bare feet nestled into a bucket as he is lowered down a vertiginous mine shaft. While the form of the bucket and rope are clearly visible, the miner’s body is less apparent: it comprises merely a circle (the top of his hat) and toes formed from a series of tiny, white, shard-like forms. As if falling into a nightmare, the viewer peers into a bottomless pit that also resembles a giant eye—the curve of the bucket’s handle arcs like a sleepy eyelid over a pupil formed by the miner’s compact, round body. Mora constructs a vision of hopelessness and helplessness so deeply inhabited by the miner as to become a part of his subconscious, a place here visually likened to the deep, dark underground world the laborer is forced to inhabit for endless hours. Mora’s La olla digs deep into the miner’s and, by extension, the nation’s darkest unconscious, bringing it to the surface of the printed page for collective contemplation. In what might be understood as an insightful critique of the TGP’s foregoing linkage between alienation and abstraction, Mora’s abstract forms render visible true alienation—the long history of injustices suffered by the often unseen miner. Using the print medium, the artist exhumes underground laborers to create a unique array of images whose production and replication fights the invisibility that had for so long terrorized miners. Mora’s prints are a vitally important though often overlooked contribution to both the global history of art and the visual history of labor.

1. Helga Prignitz notes that “Mora and Castro Pacheco toured Hidalgo and made sketches of the workers in the silver mines and also of the Otomi.” Helga Prignitz, El Taller de Gráfica Popular en México 1937–1977 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1992), 105. See also Dawn Adès and Alison McClean, Revolution on Paper: Mexican Prints, 1910—1960 (London: British Museum Press, 2009), 148; and Francisco Mora, Unidad y variedad: Palacio de Bellas Artes, Salas 3 y 4, del 11 de Octubre al 22 de Noviembre de 1974 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 1974), 48.

2. Jocelyn H. Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 73–75.

3. Theresa Avila, “Chronicles of Revolution and Nation: El Taller de Gráfica Popular’s ‘Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana’ (1947)” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2013), 27. For further bibliographic information about Mora, see Dawn Adès, “Francisco Mora,” British Museum, https:// www.britishmuseum.org /collection/term/BIOG39328; Alisa W. Terry and John Arledge, eds., A Courtyard Apart: The Art of Elizabeth Catlett and Francisco Mora (Biloxi, MS: Mississippi Museum of Art, 1990), 38–40; Mora, Unidad y variedad; and Prignitz, El Taller de Gráfica Popular en México 1937–1977, 296–97.

4. Terry and Arledge, Courtyard Apart, 38.

5. For further information about the mural, see Ellen G. Landau, “Double Consciousness in Mexico: How Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish Painted a Morelian Mural,” American Art 21 (1): 74–97.

6. My First Impression of the City of Mexico is included in Hannes Meyer, El Taller de Gráfica Popular: Doce años de obra artística colectiva (Mexico City: La Estampa Mexicana, 1949), 99. An impression of La gran ciudad was sold in lot 214 at the Brand/Werthan auction held in Philadelphia on April 30–May 1, 2016. Sale information indicates a date of 1945.

7. Terry and Arledge, Courtyard Apart, 38.

8. His master’s admiration for Parisian avant-garde is also apparent in Mora’s print Las regaderas (The showers, 1944)—included in Meyer, El Taller de Gráfica Popular, 98—which handily references Paul Cézanne’s Les grandes baigneuses (The Large Bathers, ca. 1898–1905).

9. Mora and Catlett left the TGP around 1965 for pollical reasons. See Prignitz, El Taller de Gráfica Popular, 198–99.

10. Mora produced throughout his career several print series addressing peoples of African descent in Mexico using the designation “los negros.” He was also heavily influenced later in his career by the arts of Africa.

11. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 209.

12. Lowrey Stokes Sims, “A Life in Art and Politics,” in Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, ed. Lowery Stokes Sims and Michael Brenson (Purchase: Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York), 35.

13. Mora’s entombed miners likely refer to Karl Marx’s concept of entombment, also used to refer to miners. As Alan Sekula notes in his richly detailed essay on the history of mining images, Marx in the thirty-first chapter of the first volume of Das Kapital observes, tongue firmly in cheek, “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population . . . signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Allan Sekula, “Photography between Labour and Capital,” in Mining Photographs and Other Pictures 1948–1968, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Robert Wilkie, 193–264 (Halifax, NS: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Sydney, NS: University College of Cape Breton Press, 1983), 212n42.

14. Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Collieries of the United Kingdom (London:

William Strange, 1842). Sincerest hanks to Sarah Rosenthal for bringing these images to my attention.

15. Robert W. Randall, Real del Monte: A British Mining Venture in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972).

16. A recent exhibition and accompanying catalog at the Metropolitan Museum of Art also elaborate the community of surrealists in Mexico City. See Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, eds., Surrealism beyond Borders (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021).