In this text, Octavio Paz contemplates the characteristics of “Hispanic” art in the United States. In a section entitled “Names and Constitutions,” he begins by describing what he argues is an archetype of all societies: the struggle to resolve the tension between “participation” and “separation,” or, in other words, collectivity and alienation. In “Children of the Idea,” Paz states that the idea of the nation is constructed by history in a process that is artificial, and he examines how this occurred in the United States. In “Guadalupe, Coatlicue, Yemanyá,” Paz considers the differences between Hispanic and Anglo culture, and how they are rooted in the ideas of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. While he notes enormous differences among Hispanic immigrants in the U.S., he concludes that they are united in how they differ from mainstream U.S. culture: they all value collectivity over individualism, and family over the individual. In the final section, “Art and Identity,” Paz argues that Martín Ramírez (the Mexican underground painter) is emblematic of all the artists included in the exhibition because of his experience as an immigrant, and the transcendent nature of his work. The dominance of surrealism, the talismanic, fetishistic, etc. in Ramírez’s work can be identified in all of the work in the exhibition organized by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1987, and distinguishes the work of Hispanic artists from mainstream U.S. contemporary art.

Octavio Paz (1914-98) wrote this essay for the catalog for Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors that John Beardsley and Jane Livingston co-organized at the MFAH. Under the initiative of director Peter C. Marzio, this 1987 exhibition was among the first efforts by mainstream museums in the United States to feature the work of contemporary Latino and Latin American artists on a large scale. Criticized for its U.S.-centric point of view, among other problems, this show provoked a debate during the late- 1980s and early- ‘90s about multiculturalism in U.S. museums. Paz’s essay constituted the curators’ effort to include a Latin American voice in their exhibition catalog. Paz, the venerated Mexican poet and critic, however, possesses a point of view that is Mexican, not “Latino.” His historical analysis of Hispanic culture and politics is, in the first three sections of this essay, rooted in the remote historical past—in a primordial time, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When he discusses the present, Paz has no problem with grouping Latin American immigrants in the United States as Hispanic, and, when he does address the issue of diversity among different contemporary immigrant groups he displays his elitism by emphasizing such stereotypes as the “deeply religious, traditional,” and “stubborn” nature of the Mexican “peasants” who migrate to the U.S., versus the modern professionals that make up the majority of Cuban immigrants in the U.S. Paz’s argument that the self-taught artist Martín Ramírez is emblematic of all of the artists in the show, also distorts readers’ understanding of contemporary Latino Artists. Instead of characterizing the artists in the exhibition as trained professionals active in the contemporary art world, Paz presents them as irrational and visionary, like Ramírez.