Dance in Tehuantepec

One of Diego Rivera’s most significant easel paintings, "Dance in Tehuantepec" was created during an enormously productive phase in the artist’s career. It emerged within the context of José Vasconcelos’s cultural agenda, which sought to promote a specifically Mexican identity. In December 1922, shortly after joining the Mexican Communist Party, Rivera traveled for the first time to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a tropical region in southern Oaxaca, at Vasconcelos’s invitation. This experience profoundly influenced his later work, regardless of medium.

The sketches Rivera made on the isthmus would eventually serve as the basis for his first murals at the Ministry of Education. These sketches depict Tehuana women—some surrounded by tropical foliage or sugarcane, others bathing in the river—wearing the short huipils and long skirts typical of the region.

Rivera was not the first to “discover” the Tehuana woman; her traditional dress had been depicted by artists since the nineteenth century as part of a broader cultural phenomenon in which male artists from outside the region—both Mexican and foreign—envisioned the Isthmus of Tehuantepec as a tropical, sensual, authentic, or even paradisiacal counterpoint to modern urban life. Rivera dedicated dozens of oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings to scenes of the isthmus; at least two of these works reference the sandunga, the local dance portrayed in this painting.

This 1928 work features six barefoot dancers arranged in a zigzag formation in the foreground. Based on descriptions found in Mexico South, a book by Miguel Covarrubias—an artist and anthropologist who traveled to the region multiple times—the depiction of traditional clothing in the painting is almost documentary in its precision.

The women wear everyday garments: brightly colored cotton skirts known as rabonas and a modernized version of the traditional huipil. Red silk ribbons are woven into the braids bound to their scalps, and one woman wears an ancient gold necklace with a large medallion, a piece typically reserved for festive occasions.

The dance takes place in an open wooden structure or arbor, most likely in the street. Through these elements of communal life, Rivera paints a folkloric scene aligned with the revolutionary Mexican imaginary, which celebrated vernacular traditions.