Taking its title from the late Olivier Debroise's watershed book Fuga Mexicana/ Mexican Suite, this chapter is the fruit of long conversations with interlocutors who are passionate about the legacy of Soviet Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que Viva Mexico!. Through their curatorial, artistic, and scholarly work around Eisenstein's part-ethnographic, part-essay, and part-nationalist symphonic film, they have painstakingly and rigorously examined some of the images and clichés that have constituted the canon of Mexicanist visual and inter-medial culture. For this, their anthropology of images is no visual anthropology as we know it. Moreover, their ethics of curation is animated by a desire to be on the lookout for the Achilles heels of Mexicanism and by shedding doubt on the preponderance of such nationalist and cosmopolitan cultural forms as the maguey plant, volcanoes, pre-Columbian pyramids, the Day of the Dead, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and more. I have conceived of this chapter as a stage that calls for a very specific form of concept work and theatrical thinking. Indeed, the actors – and conceptual personae – featured on this post-Mexican stage have spent their lives evaluating and bidding farewell to this magnetic and decaying legacy in the context of the splendors and miseries of the post-Mexican condition. And yet, as we bid farewell to them, these incurable cultural forms and images retain nonetheless an attractive appeal, an affective iconicity and hold on our psyche and experience of modernity. Speaking about the impact of Mayan cultural forms and cosmology on the cosmopolitan and nationalist modernist imaginary in Mexico – from Sergei Eisenstein's foundational ¡Que Viva Mexico! (1931–2) to Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque (1969) – one of the most futurist scholars of the Mexican avant-garde notes that “in time, these modern constructions fall into ruins. As problematic as many of these attempted projects may seem in retrospect, the ruins that modernism leaves behind endure as enticing, fascinating sites of decay.”

These anthropologically driven artists, curators, and scholars, whose work is featured in this chapter, are primarily interested in the relation between ethno-racialized political imaginaries and the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde. They are particularly skeptical about what has been indiscriminately called Third World, peripheral, hybrid or alternative modernisms and modernities, as well as non-Euro-American or non-Western avant-gardes tout court, as these are usually negatively articulated in the ideological idiom of cultural authenticity and resistance to cultural imperialism.