Of Commitments and Polemics

Pablo Neruda served as Consul General in Mexico from 1940 to 1943. This was a foundational period on his path toward becoming Latin America’s politically engaged poet par excellence, when his verse and public persona fused around a sharpened commitment to the working class and the struggles against fascism and imperialism. As a haven for left-wing exiles, Mexico City during World War II was a “key node” in global cultural Cold War debates about “the relationship between the intellectual to revolution,” according to Patrick Iber. Neruda found common cause with Mexico’s ideologically engaged muralists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, and feuded with the more artistically independent poets, principally Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize, 1990). Years later, during an odyssey of political exile from his native Chile, Neruda returned to Mexico. There, in 1950, he published his magnum opus, Canto general , a sweeping epic about Latin America’s revolutionary historical destiny, considered the literary equivalent of Mexican muralism.