Description
Book SynopsisFirst cultural history of post-1940s Mexico to relate issues of representation and meaning to questions of power
Trade Review“This innovative and important book is one of the first to focus on the history of Mexico since 1940. A pioneering volume of cultural studies that will show the field how far we have come.”—John Tutino, Georgetown University
“This marvelous book is an antidote to a generation’s worth of simplifications, romantizations, and folklorizations of Mexican culture. Throughout the book the authors always take the close view, so that we become intimate with the unfolding complexities and contradictions of Mexican culture, rather than being intimidated by them. By the end, we have come to understand Mexican culture as politics, politics as art, and art as only one of the multiple acts of creation Mexicans engage in daily to interpret, embellish, and survive their own lives. This is scholarship at its best.”—Alma Guillermoprieto
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Foreword / Elena Poniatowska
Acknowledgements
I. Reclaiming the History of Postrevolutionary Mexico
Assembling the Fragments: Writing a Cultural History of Mexico Since 1940 / Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov
Making It Real Compared to What? Reconceptualizing Mexican History Since 1940 / Arthur Schmidt
II. At Play Amongst the Fragments
Mexico’s Pepsi Challenge: Traditional Cooking, Mass Consumption, and National Identity / Jeffrey M. Pilcher
The Selling of Mexico: Tourism and the State, 1929–1952 / Alex Saragoza
Today, Tomorrow, and Always: The Golden Age of Illustrated Magazines in Mexico, 1937–1960 / John Mraz
Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema / Seth Fein
Bodies, Cities, Cinema: Pedro Infante’s Death as Political Spectacle / Anne Rubenstein
Discovering a Land “Mysterious and Obvious”: The Renarrativizing of Postrevolutionary Mexico / Eric Zolov
Toiling for the “New Invaders”: Autoworkers, Transnational Corporations, and Working-Class Culture in Mexico City, 1955–1968 / Steven J. Bachelor
El Santos and the Return of the Killer Aztecs! / Jis y Trino
Masked Media: The Adventures of Lucha Libre on the Small Screen / Heather Levi
Corazón del Rocanrol / Rubén Martínez
Cultural Industries in the Free Trade Age: A Look at Mexican Television / Omar Hernández and Emile McAnany
Cablevision(nation) and Rural Yucatán: Performing Modernity and
Mexicanidad in the Early 1990s / Alison Greene
The Aura of Ruins / Quetzil E. Castaneda
III. Final Reflections
Transnational Processes and the Rise and Fall of the Mexican Cultural State: Notes from the Past / Mary Kay Vaughan
Contributors
Index
