Research at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera, Vladimir Lenin, Nelson Rockefeller and Transnational Left History

In 1933, Diego Rivera began painting Man at the Crossroads, a mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City. After Rivera included a portrait of Bolshevik Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, and refused Nelson Rockefeller’s demand to remove this, the mural was first covered up, and then in February 1934, destroyed. That same year, Rivera painted a refashioned mural, Hombre, el controlador del universo, at the Palacio de Belles Artes in Mexico City. This talk examines this controversy through the lens of Rivera’s relationship with the Communist left, in particular the pro-Moscow Communist Party, the Trotskyist Communist League of America, and the Lovestoneite Communist Party (Opposition), and argues that this provides a fuller understanding of Rivera’s evolving political commitments and the changing politics of his paintings in this period. The talk will also use the controversy as an example of researching the interwar political left and labour movement from a transnational perspective and demonstrates how such a transnational perspective offers advantages over a strictly nationally based vision.

 

Jacob A. Zumoff is associate professor and chair of the history department and co-chair of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at New Jersey City University (formerly Jersey City State College). After earning his PhD in history at University College London, he has taught in different capacities at universities such as the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, University Massachusetts Boston, and the City University of New York before his present position. His is the author of The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929 (Brill, 2014); The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike (Rutgers, 2021) and an editor of the collected volume, Transnational Communism across the Americas (Illinois, 2023), and has published in journals such as Labour/Le Travail, American Studies, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Caribbean History, and the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.  

 

Commentator: Alejandra González Jiménez, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

 

Alejandra González Jiménez is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her research focuses on labour, social reproduction, and current reconfigurations of capitalism. She is working on her first book manuscript in which she examines transnational car production in Mexico in the era of free trade.

  

Moderator: Sean Purdy, Visiting Professor, Centre for the Study of the United States, Munk School, University of Toronto - Professor Doutor II, Departamento de História, Universidade de São Paulo

 

Sean Purdy is professor of the History of the Americas at the University of São Paulo since 2006. His research focuses on workers' and social movements in the United Status, Canada and Brazil in the post-Second World War era. He has published widely in English and Portuguese in historical and social science journals as well as in the popular press. He has translated four books from Portuguese to English as well as dozens of specialist journal articles.  

 

Organized by the Centre for the Study of the United States, the Munk School of Global Affairs and co-sponsored by the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto.