Crafting Mexico

Crafting Mexico
Author: Rick A. López
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2010-09-09
Genre: Art
ISBN:

After Mexico’s revolution of 1910–1920, intellectuals sought to forge a unified cultural nation out of the country’s diverse populace. Their efforts resulted in an “ethnicized” interpretation of Mexicanness that intentionally incorporated elements of folk and indigenous culture. In this rich history, Rick A. López explains how thinkers and artists, including the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, the composer Carlos Chávez, the educator Moisés Sáenz, the painter Diego Rivera, and many less-known figures, formulated and promoted a notion of nationhood in which previously denigrated vernacular arts—dance, music, and handicrafts such as textiles, basketry, ceramics, wooden toys, and ritual masks—came to be seen as symbolic of Mexico’s modernity and national distinctiveness. López examines how the nationalist project intersected with transnational intellectual and artistic currents, as well as how it was adapted in rural communities. He provides an in-depth account of artisanal practices in the village of Olinalá, located in the mountainous southern state of Guerrero. Since the 1920s, Olinalá has been renowned for its lacquered boxes and gourds, which have been considered to be among the “most Mexican” of the nation’s arts. Crafting Mexico illuminates the role of cultural politics and visual production in Mexico’s transformation from a regionally and culturally fragmented country into a modern nation-state with an inclusive and compelling national identity.

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil
Author: Rafael de la Dehesa
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-05-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822392747

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the historical development and contemporary dynamics of LGBT activism in Latin America’s two largest democracies. Rafael de la Dehesa focuses on the ways that LGBT activists have engaged with the state, particularly in alliance with political parties and through government health agencies in the wake of the AIDS crisis. He examines this engagement against the backdrop of the broader political transitions to democracy, the neoliberal transformation of state–civil society relations, and the gradual consolidation of sexual rights at the international level. His comparison highlights similarities between sexual rights movements in Mexico and Brazil, including a convergence on legislative priorities such as antidiscrimination laws and the legal recognition of same-sex couples. At the same time, de la Dehesa points to notable differences in the tactics deployed by activists and the coalitions brought to bear on the state. De la Dehesa studied the archives of activists, social-movement organizations, political parties, religious institutions, legislatures, and state agencies, and he interviewed hundreds of individuals, not only LGBT activists, but also feminists, AIDS and human-rights activists, party militants, journalists, academics, and state officials. He marshals his prodigious research to reveal the interplay between evolving representative institutions and LGBT activists’ entry into the political public sphere in Latin America, offering a critical analysis of the possibilities opened by emerging democratic arrangements, as well as their limitations. At the same time, exploring activists’ engagement with the international arena, he offers new insights into the diffusion and expression of transnational norms inscribing sexual rights within a broader project of liberal modernity. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a landmark examination of LGBT political mobilization.

El Monstruo

El Monstruo
Author: John Ross
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1568586116

John Ross has been living in the old colonial quarter of Mexico City for the last three decades, a rebel journalist covering Mexico and the region from the bottom up. He is filled with a gnawing sense that his beloved Mexico City's days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the western world are doomed, and the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and blight will be globalized into one more McCity. El Monstruo is a defense of place and the history of that place. No one has told the gritty, vibrant histories of this city of 23 million faceless souls from the ground up, listened to the stories of those who have not been crushed, deconstructed the Monstruo's very monstrousness, and lived to tell its secrets. In El Monstruo, Ross now does.

Five Families

Five Families
Author: Lewis Wilson
Publisher: Signet
Total Pages:
Release: 1971-02-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780451606587

Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation

Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation
Author: Anne Rubenstein
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1998
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 9780822321415

A history of Mexican comic books, their readers, their producers, their critics, and their complex relations with the government and the Church that discusses cultural nationalism, popular taste, and social change.