This text, written by Salvador Novo (1904–1974), the poet, essayist and government official, provides a brief historical account of the evolution of the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre, although it focuses on the circumstances that existed during the years the book was being written. He emphasized the complete freedom that the students at the schools enjoyed with regard to models, both national and international. Novo likewise celebrates the results as the worthy continuation of the indigenous tradition. He refers to the diversity of the schools, both in terms of their production and their student bodies; but at the same time, his text highlights an indigenous discourse that clearly does not coincide with his statements about the heterogeneity of the students or the diversity of their expression and style. The Monografía de las Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre [Monograph of the Open-Air Schools] represents a specific stage in the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre, which had originally opened in 1913–14 in the Santa Anita neighborhood in Mexico City as an alternative teaching method within the program of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. Later, in the early-1920s, these centers were revived and fomented an iconography that focused on rural themes as well as a reevaluation of vice-regal architecture. When this book was published midway into the decade, several of the young artists who had received their training in the schools became directors of various schools, which principally focused on teaching children and youths. They promoted the aesthetic evaluation of their environment, with an emphasis on expression rather than on formal academic values, in order to generate works with a great diversity of styles. In general, however, there was a more naïve and crude aesthetic bent that would be of importance for the formal characteristics of the artists trained at the academy.