In the shadow of Cuauhtémoc: commemorative sculptures, indigenous heroes, and indigenismo in Mexico and Brazil, 1944-1958

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article addresses the Brazilian interpretation of the Day of the Indian, a hemispheric indigenista celebration created in 1940 and observed in Brazil since 1944. It especially focuses on the prominence of the figure of Cuauhtémoc after the Mexican government sent a monument of the ‘Aztec hero’ to Brazil in 1922. The arrival of the Cuauhtémoc monument in Rio de Janeiro triggered a debate about who Brazil’s Indian hero should be, which continued until 1965 when a sculpture of the ‘Indian’ Araribóia was placed in Niteroi, on the other side of the Guanabara Bay. In the Day of the Indian ritual, the figure of Araribóia achieves some importance, but no autochthonous local figure could displace the mighty Cuauhtémoc and his status as Amerindian hero. The analysis of these specific stagings suggests a strong connection between the public displays of the ‘Indian heroes’ and the concomitant processes of national institutionalization and international recognition of Brazilian indigenismo. In the end, the heroic figures promoted by the Day of the Indian were not the Indians, but the indigenistas themselves. Their model, General Rondon, would be recognized in 1958, the year of his death, as ‘Indigenist hero.’