The essay takes its cue from Diego Rivera's murals accomplished in the thirties in the United States in order to localize in them an allegory of North-South relations, North America and Latin America. The Mexican muralist's trip to the United States allegorizes this relationship in which are formulated strategies for combining technology and nature, the machine and the body, in these murals which represent the Fordist production line and the racionalization of time in physical labor. Rivera's trip also allegorizes the constitution of "Latin Americanism", as an Academic field in which are introduced Cultural representations of Latin America in the United States. Drawing from this model the essay studies the politics of the Spanish language as a diasporic language in the United States, following the translation paradigm, and embodying itself in possible ways of enlisting the body as a body of language in the poems of Rosário Castellanos and Pablo Neruda's classic, "Alturas de Macchu Picchu".
Diego Rivera; assembly line; post-work; politics of language
