Las guardias blancas

Date: 1960

Medium: Linocut

Dimensions (cm.): 33.1 x 61.1

Variants: Méndez made a version of this image in cliché-verre (engraved on film stock and printed photographically).

Alternate titles: Campo petrolero; Nido de las compañías petroleras

Published edition: Unknown

Contemporary publication: Unknown

References: Exposición de Homenaje 289, 294

Commentary:  In 1960, as he was withdrawing from the TGP, Méndez addressed the exploitation of oil workers in a linocut produced for Roberto Gavaldón’s film La rosa blanca. White Guards (Guardias blancas shows workers slaving in an oil field, watched over by members of a paramilitary force during the era of Porfirio Díaz. The guards point their rifles menacingly at the workers who tend the machinery beneath massive oil derricks. 

Influenced by cinematic techniques, Méndez utilized a sophisticated visual language. A variety of strokes, long and wide in the foreground, intricate and delicate in the background, provide a wealth of narrative detail and subtlety of light, depth and action. The print uses tight spaces and eccentric angles to communicate a feeling of claustrophobic entrapment, made explicit in White Guards, where the focus is on collective servitude, and implying the need for unionization and collective action. (Deborah Caplow)

Catalogue record number: 190