The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2026
Time: 5:30 p.m., CDT
Place: Mexican Cultural Institute at the Mexican Consulate, 901 Convention Center Blvd., New Orleans, LA
Pablo Zavala, author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968, will speak about his book at the Mexican Cultural Institute located at the Mexican Consulate in New Orleans on Thursday, April 9. Zavala is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies and director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLAXS) at Loyola University. He has published in Southwest Philosophical Studies, Chasqui, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, and A Contracorriente: Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos. The event is free and open to the public.
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.
