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Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations
Diego Rivera’s mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central is a fascinating critique of high society and wealthy elites. It also offers a multitude of other stories that intersect in a web of historical memory. The massive mural, the histories it depicts, and even its physical journey after a devastating earthquake, hold answers to many of the questions readers might ask about Mexico. It also demonstrates how cultural artifacts explain the world around us and expose intersections and entanglements of specific power dynamics.
Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente , a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics.
Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us.
Rafael Acosta Morales
Jacqueline E. Bixler
Marta Caminero-Santangelo
Debra A. Castillo
Christopher Conway
David S. Dalton
Stuart A. Day
Emily Hind
Robert McKee Irwin
Ryan Long
Dana A. Meredith
Magalí Rabasa
Luis Alberto Rodríguez Cortés
Fernando Fabio Sánchez
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Analisa Taylor
Oswaldo Zavala
Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente , a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics.
Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us.
Rafael Acosta Morales
Jacqueline E. Bixler
Marta Caminero-Santangelo
Debra A. Castillo
Christopher Conway
David S. Dalton
Stuart A. Day
Emily Hind
Robert McKee Irwin
Ryan Long
Dana A. Meredith
Magalí Rabasa
Luis Alberto Rodríguez Cortés
Fernando Fabio Sánchez
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Analisa Taylor
Oswaldo Zavala
336 pages, Paperback
Published October 31, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
September 2, 2023
Once again I find myself reluctantly giving an edited volume 3 stars. As I've mentioned before, I know from personal experience that it's hard to put together a cohesive collection for reasons that are at times unavoidable for the editor. And perhaps this volume was not aimed at me. It's Mexican Cultural Studies and I'm a historian. But I do Cultural History of Mexico so it's not like I'm THAT far away from the target audience. And with that said, there are some things about this volume that bothered me.
One problem I had is that there was a lot of repetition. Repetition between chapters is not in and of itself a bad thing. It can show you what's really important if several authors thought to include similar information. However, 8 of 15 chapters were mostly or wholly based on the last few decades so there was a lot about drugs, violent crime, and corruption. This can be seen in the fact that there was one chapter each on: femicide; war (conceived of mostly as the war on drugs and dissidents); murder (political, cartel-related, and other socio-economic homicides) and its ties to state-building; democracy (and how it's been challenged by violence and drugs); the North (which has been wracked by drugs, femicide, and political corruption, though admittedly part of the point is that the North is more than just this); and both media and net art that challenges violence, the drug war, and corruption. Notice a pattern? It's hard to know if the editor wanted so much repetition or just got these as the only chapters sent to him and didn't try looking for ones on some different topics. However, for me it got tedious to read some of the same ideas over and over.
Also I wish there had been a better geographic distribution of the chapters. Several revolved around Mexico City and/or federal issues, which is typical for a book on Mexico. A few also were centered on or at least partially focused on Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Chiapas. But as the above paragraph may have made clear there was a heavy focus on the North and even a few on Mexicans in the US.
As a Type A and a historian I also had a problem with the strange use of chronology in the book. Each chapter has a historical section to give context to the sources, many of which were very modern, as I've already mentioned. The context was great. And I understand that it would make it hard to put the chapters completely in chronological order since they might cover a great deal of time. However, most chapters had at least a period or two that they focused on. Even an imperfect sense of order would have been better than what felt like just a random smattering of chapters. The editor addresses this in the introduction. He says that the order is intentionally not chronological to better emphasize the fact that old issues in Mexico are still present and that seemingly new ones have a long history. I understand the logic, but in my opinion the book felt disorganized as s result. I think having every chapter have a historical section was sufficient to meeting the editor's goal.
To end on a positive note: some of the chapters were great, A level. These included Dalton's piece on teachers, Conway's on charros, and Taylor's on milpas. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my background, these were some of the most historical or relevant to my own research and teaching. The B level chapters (for me) were also from less recent periods of history. As a bonus, I also learned about a whole bunch of new texts, especially films and documentaries, that I'm excited to look at myself.
Final pronouncement: 3/5 stars for the book as a whole.
One problem I had is that there was a lot of repetition. Repetition between chapters is not in and of itself a bad thing. It can show you what's really important if several authors thought to include similar information. However, 8 of 15 chapters were mostly or wholly based on the last few decades so there was a lot about drugs, violent crime, and corruption. This can be seen in the fact that there was one chapter each on: femicide; war (conceived of mostly as the war on drugs and dissidents); murder (political, cartel-related, and other socio-economic homicides) and its ties to state-building; democracy (and how it's been challenged by violence and drugs); the North (which has been wracked by drugs, femicide, and political corruption, though admittedly part of the point is that the North is more than just this); and both media and net art that challenges violence, the drug war, and corruption. Notice a pattern? It's hard to know if the editor wanted so much repetition or just got these as the only chapters sent to him and didn't try looking for ones on some different topics. However, for me it got tedious to read some of the same ideas over and over.
Also I wish there had been a better geographic distribution of the chapters. Several revolved around Mexico City and/or federal issues, which is typical for a book on Mexico. A few also were centered on or at least partially focused on Jalisco, Oaxaca, and Chiapas. But as the above paragraph may have made clear there was a heavy focus on the North and even a few on Mexicans in the US.
As a Type A and a historian I also had a problem with the strange use of chronology in the book. Each chapter has a historical section to give context to the sources, many of which were very modern, as I've already mentioned. The context was great. And I understand that it would make it hard to put the chapters completely in chronological order since they might cover a great deal of time. However, most chapters had at least a period or two that they focused on. Even an imperfect sense of order would have been better than what felt like just a random smattering of chapters. The editor addresses this in the introduction. He says that the order is intentionally not chronological to better emphasize the fact that old issues in Mexico are still present and that seemingly new ones have a long history. I understand the logic, but in my opinion the book felt disorganized as s result. I think having every chapter have a historical section was sufficient to meeting the editor's goal.
To end on a positive note: some of the chapters were great, A level. These included Dalton's piece on teachers, Conway's on charros, and Taylor's on milpas. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my background, these were some of the most historical or relevant to my own research and teaching. The B level chapters (for me) were also from less recent periods of history. As a bonus, I also learned about a whole bunch of new texts, especially films and documentaries, that I'm excited to look at myself.
Final pronouncement: 3/5 stars for the book as a whole.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review