Mesoamerican Modernism: William Carlos Williams and the Archaeological Imagination

This article explores the popularity of Mesoamerican cultures in the U.S. in the 1920s and ’30s and considers how these cultures were adopted by members of the U.S. avant-garde as a way of distancing themselves from European traditions and linking themselves with thoroughly “American” art forms. This “Mayan Revival” flourished in the 1920s, particularly among architects who built neo-ruins throughout the U.S. After exploring this cultural context, I then turn to the literary fascination with Mesoamerican cultures, seen most dramatically in the Maya-themed issue of Broom magazine, in which William Carlos Williams’s “The Destruction of Tenochtitlan” first appeared. In his quest for an “indigenous” American art, Williams frequently echoed the popular culture’s fascination with “reviving” native civilizations. However, Williams’s vision was a far more pessimistic one, and the archaeological remains of fallen civilizations of the Americas provided a mordant critique of U.S. greed and consumerism in Williams’s own day.