As was true of his earlier Middle East paintings, Dos Passos's Mexican paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s reveal a willingness to seek out vibrant ways of representing the uniqueness of the new world he was encountering. He spent considerable time during his 1926 visit in Mexico City, where he admired the work of the Mexican muralists, but he also visited several other cities and did much hiking in rural areas. His Mexican paintings, principally of villages, landscapes, and workmen, stem from his wanderings outside of major urban centers.

Present in almost all this work is Dos Passos's desire to capture the raw openness that he saw as the distinctive element in Mexican life. An isolated village, as in figure 38, Hill Village, mounts a hill side amidst a crudely shaped country-side, while in figure 39, Mexican Landscape, a threatening primitive landscape encroaches upon a thread of railway line and a single bright building. The natural world is only partly tamed in these paintings, a theme accentuated by Dos Passos's use of massiveness combined with heavy brush strokes and dark colors in representing it. An analogous directness is present in his portraits of this period. His Mexican fisherman (fig. 40) announces his occupation and character firmly and openly, staring directly at us. He is what he is, he appears to be saying. [DP]