Modern Mexican Culture

Critical Foundations

Stuart A. Day (Editor)
Paperback ($35.00), Ebook ($35.00) Buy
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.

Contributors:

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
“These essays, written by some of today’s leading scholars, offer exemplary approaches to comprehensively reading Mexican history and politics through art, literature, film, and music.”—Brian L. Price, author of Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction
 
Modern Mexican Culture captures some of Mexico’s most persistent and pervasive historical and cultural paradigms. Drawing on artistic and literary production that manifests and confronts these themes, this book is necessary reading for a deep understanding of contemporary Mexican politics, society, and culture, and it is an effective instrument in teaching the same.”—Anna M. Nogar, co-editor of A History of Mexican Literature
Modern Mexican Culture
320 Pages 6 x 9
Published: October 2017Paperback ISBN: 9780816534265
Published: October 2017Ebook ISBN: 9780816537532

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