The University of Arizona Press
Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Time: 3-4 p.m., CDT
Register: Online here
Pablo Zavala, author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968, will join the Mexican Studies Research Collective for an online talk about his book, which offers a new lens on conceptions of the Mexican state and the people. 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, and the link to register for the online talk can be found here.
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.
