"Carlos Chávez in Mabel Dodge Luhan's "Whirling around Mexico

For a brief time during the early 1930s, art patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan and composer-conductor Carlos Chávez formed a transnational alliance. They sought to foreground Native American music in modernist artistic expression, and each found in the other useful talents and resources. Chávez showed Luhan a musical equivalent to the Rivera murals she so admired and proffered a potential pathway to elevate her husband, the Pueblo musician Tony Luhan, and his practices. Luhan, meanwhile, allowed Chávez access to the network of New York modernists who congregated at her salon in Taos, New Mexico, including Paul Strand and Leopold Stokowski, as well as familiarity with the Native music in the Taos area. Using a postcolonial lens, this article embarks on a close reading of Luhan’s unpublished memoir, “Whirling around Mexico,” and Chávez’s articles in El Excélsior. Through such an examination we can track the shared characteristics and divergences in their worldviews

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