In this text, the painter José Clemente Orozco states that the “Manifiesto del Sindicato” [the Painters and Sculptors Manifesto] is “extraordinarily important; its influence has been felt for two decades and younger painters have fought against it in vain.” In describing the proclamation, he emphasizes the important role that David Alfaro Siqueiros had in creating it and he also takes the opportunity to clarify some of its proposals. Orozco lists the proposals, and also explains and reflects upon them. He tempers what at that time was radicalized; for example, the socialization of art, the stigma against easel painting, and the presence of indigenous influences. Orozco argues: “Of course the socialization of art was a long-term promise because it would not be possible without a radical change in the structure of society. We would also have to define the exact meaning of the word ‘socialize’ in relation to art given that there were many very different interpretations.” Also: “To condemn easel painting for its aristocratic background would be to condemn a good part of the art of all eras” and “in the epoch of nativism, we identified the native with the proletariat without taking into account that not all natives were proletarian and not all proletarians were natives; and then came the indigenous-proletarian paintings . . . . ” Orozco no longer accepted these proposals, but defended them for their specific individuality.

Signed by all the muralists in 1923, the “Manifiesto del Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores” (SOTPE) [Manifesto of the Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors Union] is one of the few truly avant-garde documents of Mexico. Nonetheless, the significance of this article is that when José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) wrote it, he was no longer the young man who had recently joined the mural movement, the defender of his position against another group of painters searching for an alternative who were briefly brought together under painter Manuel Rodríguez Lozano and Los Contemporáneos group and who did not agree with muralism. Now, from the distance of time, Orozco criticizes what he formerly accepted. He conducts a comprehensive diatribe against the “proletarian art” that he considers the “legitimate child” of the Manifiesto, and states that it consists of “paintings that represented laborers working and that we supposed were addressing the workers.” This was an error because it only encouraged the bourgeosie (whom the art was directed against) to buy the artworks and “fill their bourgeois houses with proletarian furnishings and objects such as straw mats, tulle chairs, clay pots . . . .”With regard to indigenismo, Orozoco would be accepting what is identified by Ida Rodríguez Prampolini’s position in his article, “The figure of the native in 19th-century painting had ideological depth.” In her judgment, “the muralists introduced the native as a revolutionary actor, as one exploited, one who vindicates, as an anonymous hero, as one triumphant, anyway in a thousand ways, but always in the right framework: that of the struggle of the poor against the rich, of the dispossessed against the possessors, of the victims against the tyrants.”