Corrientes del Pacífico by Miguel Covarrubias

Miguel Covarrubias, “El Chamaco” (Mexico City, 1904-1957), was a caricaturist, painter, cartographer, scenographer, collector and promoter of Mexican art and modern dance. In addition to his prolific artistic output, he made valuable contributions to anthropological, ethnological and museographic studies. Covarrubias linked drawing and painting to the public image through works characterised by a fine sense of humour and a sharp political critique of modern society.

In the late 1930s, El Chamaco was commissioned to paint a series of murals in the now defunct Pacific House, which was to accompany the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, California. Each mural in the series, which he called Pageant of the Pacific, depicts, in map form, an aspect of life in the cultures bordering the Pacific Ocean: peoples, flora and fauna, economy, housing, transportation and artistic expression. Covarrubias managed to combine anthropology and caricature in a project that was both didactic and amusing, in a context in which the map of the world was changing day by day. He himself wrote a detailed description of each mural, its codes and intentions, trying to make clear the reasons for using one colour or another for each region, the choice of references represented in each, as well as his own vision of art. This text was included in a folder reproducing the murals, a kind of atlas published by Pacific House in 1940, which has now been recovered by Editorial Alias in this edition, with a foreword by Abraham Cruzvillegas, which reproduces the works in large format and in colour, with a design based on the original publication.