Con una piedra se matan muchos pájaros... Nalgones

Date: 1940

Medium: Linocut with typeset text, printed as a volante

Dimensions (cm.): 12.6 x 18.6 (image); 33.6 x 23.0 (sheet)

Alternate titles: None

Published edition: This volante, printed on thin colored paper. Méndez [1949?] gives number of impressions as 3,000 approx.

Contemporary publication: This volante. See published edition, above.

References: Prignitz 254.

Commentary: Méndez’s 1940 linoleum print, Con una piedra se matan muchos pájaros… (With One Stone One Kills Many Birds…) uses fantastic imagery. The cartoon-like print depicts two workers throwing a rock at a vulture standing on a nest, labeled “Nido de las Cias. Petroleras” (“Nest of the Petroleum Cos.”). The vulture (a common sight in Mexico) is an established symbol for greed and exploitation. The bird holds coins with pound and peso (or dollar) symbols in its claws. Three vulture chicks in the nest have the heads of British, American and Mexican oil industry businessmen and below them Méndez included two long quotes from Cárdenas, dated February 1940, that summarize the president’s radical opinions vis-à-vis the Mexican people and foreign business interests: “The enthusiastic and superficial judgment of those who criticize the work of revolutionary governments and demand of them the immediate success of their program maliciously overlooks the resistance of affected interests that during centuries have established a regimen to maintain, in alliance with exterior forces, a position of opposition to the impulses of social justice. The fact that they pursue only their hold on our natural resources and the exploitation of our human energies, still constitutes obstacles that added to the burden of ignorance, misery, insecurity and the biological and moral depression of the proletarian majorities, prevents the constructive force from consolidating and realizing itself in an efficacious manner to satisfy the growing necessities of the population in a more human and more just system.”

The print is remarkably similar to a wood engraving by American political cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose works were likely familiar to Méndez. Nast’s 1871 A Group of Vultures Waiting for the Storm to Blow Over satirizes New York’s Boss Tweed and his Tammany Ring, who stole millions of dollars from the public treasury. Images such as these were instrumental in Tweed’s downfall. Like Méndez, Nast used a huddled group of vultures with human heads to represent corruption. (Deborah Caplow)

Catalogue record number: 73.1