MEXICO: South to Tehuantepec

As Mexico’s “boy wonder” artist he came to New York in the ’20s and helped Novelist Carl Van Vechten discover Harlem. In the ’30s his book on Bali started a vogue that still persists. In his newest book, Mexico South: the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Knopf; $7.50), Artist-Writer Miguel Covarrubias has done it again. His gorgeous portfolio of prose, paintings and photographs, introducing to the U.S. the statuesque beauties of Tehuantepec, should do much to make the isthmus a new fad and a tourist goal.

Jack-of-all-Cultures. With a popular caricaturist’s quick, sure eye for the new and bright, Covarrubias is drawn irresistibly to exotic cultures. His special interest is what he calls “transculturation”—the effect of one culture on another. In Bali he saw an ancient culture untouched by the modern, in Tehuantepec another that had adapted Spanish culture to a native folk pattern. Last week 42-year-old Miguel was looking restlessly toward China and learning Chinese; he was thinking about a book on Orientalism under pressure from the West.

Miguel Covarrubias is one of Mexico City’s busiest men. Besides studying Chinese, he is working on an ambitious work on pre-Columbian art in the Western Hemisphere (to be finished by 1948), and teaching Indian arts at the National School of Anthropology. He is preparing an illustrated edition of Pearl Buck’s translation from the Chinese, All Men Are Brothers; he has sketched out two gigantic mural maps of Mexico for the lobby of the big new Hotel del Prado. Yet he has time for some painting of his own, and time also to be one of the city’s most genial, gregarious characters.

Totem & Taboo. For his latest and most lavish book Covarrubias (and his Los Angeles-born wife Rose) worked on & off for six years. He first went to the isthmus in the early ’20s, when it was still possible to find the Tehuantepec River filled twice daily with naked bathers splashing unselfconsciously in the brown waters. Since then he has visited the country almost every year, sketching the handsome tehuanas with their vivid costumes, necklaces of $20 gold pieces, and spectacular headloads of fruit and flowers. He has collected tribal jadeite masks and jaguar figurines, has painted the giant ancient basalt heads of La Venta, has written down the Italian-like speech of the formidable matriarchs of the market places. Result: an alluring book, rich with the Indian savor that is the best of Mexico.