by Emily Burkhart
August 30, 2024
Aurora Reyes at work, ca. 1937. Anonymous photographer. Secretariat of Culture, Mexico. Image courtesy of Mexico Desconocido.
“I love freedom above all else.”
-Aurora Reyes Flores
Aurora Reyes Flores (1908-1985), better known as Aurora Reyes, was an artist, poet, teacher, and political activist. She was the first exponent of Mexican muralism (1920s-1950s), art projects funded by the government in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) to help unify the people and foster a national identity, or Mexicanidad. She was also the first woman to receive an official mural commission from the government, resulting in her most celebrated work, Atentado a las Maestras Rurales (Attack on the Rural Teachers, 1936) created for the lobby of the Centro Escolar Revolución (Revolution School Center) in Mexico City. While not as renown as Diego Rivera (1886-1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), or David Siqueiros (1896-1974), known as Los Tres Grandes (The Three Greats) of Mexican muralism, Flores brought a feminist perspective to her work that they did not. She also taught drawing and painting for decades, organized for teachers unions, and fought for the rights of women, the working class, and the poor; earning her the nickname, la magnolia iracunda (the fiery magnolia). In addition, she was an accomplished poet and founding member of the feminist group Las Pavorosas (The Terrifying Ones) dedicated to fighting for women’s rights, suffrage, and gender equality for Mexican women. Although she received much acclaim in her lifetime, after her death in 1985, Flores fell into obscurity. Her murals fell into disrepair, one was lost. Today, she remains little known outside of art circles and her native Mexico.
Portrait of Aurora Reyes Flores. Photographer and date unknown. Image courtesy of the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions.
Early Life and Education
Aurora Reyes Flores was born in Hidalgo del Parral in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, on September 9, 1908, two years before the outbreak of the revolution, to Captain León Reyes, a soldier, and his wife Luisa Flores. Her paternal grandfather, Bernardo Reyes, was a military general, and her uncle, Alfonso Reyes, a well-known writer and scholar. In 1913, due to political persecution and her grandfather’s involvement in La Decena Trágica (the Ten Tragic Days), a failed coup d'état by opponents of president Francisco I. Madero between February 9 and 19, Flores’s father went into hiding for a year. To avoid government backlash, Flores and her mother fled to Mexico City. Forced into poverty, her mother baked bread that they sold at the Lagunilla market to survive. There, Flores suffered firsthand the harshness of life for the country’s most marginalized classes. Her childhood experiences shaped her political convictions, encouraging her to fight for social justice on behalf of the rights of women, the working class, and the poor throughout her adult life.
When the persecution against her family lessened in 1921, Flores began classes at the National Preparatory School; however, she was soon expelled after an altercation with another student over her family’s political connections. During her brief attendance at the National Preparatory School she did meet the future artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) who would become a lifelong friend and whose portrait she later painted in 1946, Retrato Frida frente al espejo (Portrait of Frida in Front of the Mirror). Kahlo would introduce her to Diego Rivera and the Mexican Communist Party.
Aurora Reyes (1908-1985), Retrato Frida frente al espejo (Portrait of Frida in Front of the Mirror), 1946. Oil on canvas, dimensions unavailable. Instituto Chihuahuense de la Cultura, Chihuahua, Mexico. Image courtesy of the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions.
Soon after her expulsion, Flores began attending the National School of Fine Arts where she took evening painting classes, graduating in 1924. She had her first solo art exhibition at age eighteen in 1925 at the Galería ARS. That same year, she married the journalist and writer Jorge Godoy (1891/2-?) with whom she would have two sons, Héctor, born in 1926, and Jorge in 1931. Post-divorce, Flores and Godoy never saw each other again, leaving Flores to raise their sons on her own. From 1927 onwards, beginning at age nineteen and for the next thirty-seven years, she taught painting and drawing at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City. In 1937, she co-founded the avant-garde collective Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios or LEAR (the League of Writers and Revolutionary Artists), a group dedicated to promoting the ideals of the Mexican Revolution and struggles of the working class through art.
Atentado a las maestras rurales (Attack on the Rural Teachers, 1936)
Aurora Reyes (1908-1985), Atentado a las maestras rurales (Attack on the Rural Teachers), 1936. Fresco, 86 ft. Instituto Chihuahuense de la Cultura, Chihuahua, Mexico. Image courtesy of the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions.
Flores’s most famous mural, Atentado a las maestras rurales (Attack on the Rural Teachers, 1936), originally titled The Murdered Teacher, was painted for the lobby of the Centro Escolar Revolución in a downtown neighborhood of Mexico City. The Mexican government commissioned Flores and LEAR to create murals for the school to promote its embodiment of a new form of “socialist education” in the country. Attack on the Rural Teachers commemorates the real-life massacre of sixteen teachers in the village of San Felipe Torres Mocha in the state of Guanajuato. During the 1930s, rural school teachers, many of them women, were regularly attacked by zealous supporters of Catholic-controlled education in the country. Flores blamed the Catholic Church for supporting these actions. Indeed, the man at the center of the mural wears a scapular, a Catholic necklace associated with devotion to the Virgin Mary. Barefoot with his face obscured by a sombrero, he violently beats a teacher with the stock of his gun. The teacher’s face and body lie contorted in pain, arms flailing helplessly. To the left, another man in a hat with his back to the viewer, clutches her hair in a tight fist while holding pages torn from a book. His arms and legs eerily form the shape of a swastika. On the far right, three children, two boys and a girl, stand in the doorway of the schoolhouse. The taller boy in front stares in horror, the girl behind him with her hand on his shoulder looks shocked while the younger boy in the background buries his face in the girl’s hair, unable to watch the violence taking place. Attack on the Rural Teachers was featured in the 2018 group exhibition, “The Mexican Muralism Movement” at the Central University of New York (CUNY) alongside works by Diego Rivera, Fernando Leal, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Death and Exhibition History
Aurora Reyes Flores died at the age of seventy-six on April 26, 1985. She was the subject of the 2011 biography, Aurora Reyes: Alma de Montaña (Aurora Reyes: Mountain Soul) by Margarita Aguilar Urbán, which was named Best Book of 2011 by the Mexican literary criticism website Sálon de Letras. Posthumous exhibitions included the 2007 group show, “Women Artists of Modern Mexico: Frida’s Contemporaries” at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. In 2015, the Metro Collective Transportation System, in collaboration with the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature through the Museum of Art of Ciudad Juárez and the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, paid tribute to Flores with an exhibition of her work at the Bellas Artes train station. The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature and the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana also mounted the 2018 exhibition, “Aurora Reyes (1908-1985): The First Mexican Muralist” at the Museum of Art of Ciudad Juárez. Flores had a career retrospective at the Mexico City Museum entitled “Aurora Reyes: A Life in Art 1908-1985.’’ Curated by Ester Echeverría, the exhibition ran from March 14-May 26, 2019. Flores’s contributions paved the way for other women muralists in Mexico, notably Elena Huerta Muzquiz, Rina Lazo, and Fanny Rabel.
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