The University of Arizona Press
March 18, 2026
The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Pablo Zavala, author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968.
When asked why he decided to explore this part of Mexican history through print culture, Zavala replied, “I wanted to focus specifically on how artists, photographers, print makers, intellectuals, and journalists printed collected subjectivities. These denote a common sense of belonging, and group members that share some sort of identity. . . . I wanted to see how the prints, the newspapers and the magazines really negotiated with phenomena that was going on in Mexico during and after the revolution: state formation, modernization, urbanization, political ideology, popular movements, state repression and worker exploitation.”
Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
About the book:
Forging a Mexican People shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico.
Through meticulous research, Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to challenge hegemonic conceptions of state-guided narratives and forge alternative collective subjectivities. This book offers a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical landscape of postrevolutionary Mexico, revealing how cultural artifacts simultaneously crafted and reflected the people vis-à-vis different political and social categories. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, Zavala’s research contributes to scholarship that has recently reexamined the construction of nationalism by moving away from the focus on state formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions in products by cultural producers from nonstate and grassroots political sectors.
