DIVThe first cultural history of post-1940s Mexico to relate issues of representation and meaning to questions of power; it includes essays on popular music, unions, TV, tourism, cinema, wrestling, and illustrated magazines./div
Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular readership. His comprehensive analysis of the miscelánea corrects long-standing misconceptions, starting from its poorly-understood terminology, and erects divisions between it and other related genres. His work illuminates the relationship between the Golden Age Spanish miscellany and those of the classical world and humanist milieu, and illustrates how the vernacular tradition moved away from these forebears. Bradbury examines in particular the later inclusion of explicitly fictional components, such as poetic compositions and short prose fiction, alongside the vulgarisation of erudite or inaccessible prose material, which was the primary function of the earlier Spanish miscellanies. He tackles the flexibility of the miscelánea as a genre by assessing the conceptual, thematic and formal aspects of such works, and exploring the interaction of these features. As a result, a genre model emerges, through which Golden Age works with fragmentary and non-continuous contents can better be interpreted and classified.
Mexico City’s staging of the 1968 Olympic Games should have been a pinnacle in Mexico’s post-revolutionary development: a moment when a nation at ease with itself played proud host to a global celebration of youthful vigour. Representing the Nation argues, however, that from the moment that the city won the bid, the Mexican elite displayed an innate lack of trust in their countrymen. Beautification of the capital city went beyond that expected of a host. It included the removal of undesirables from sight and the sponsorship of public information campaigns designed to teach citizens basic standards of civility and decency. The book’s contention is that these and other measures exposed a chasm between what decades of post-revolutionary socio-cultural reforms had sought to produce, and what members of the elite believed their nation to be. While members of the Organising Committee deeply resented international scepticism of Mexico’s ability to stage the Games, they shared a fear that, with the eyes of the world upon them, their compatriots would reveal Mexico’s aspirations to first world status to be a fraud. Using a detailed analysis of Mexico City’s preparations for the Olympic Games, we show how these tensions manifested themselves in the actions of the Organizing Committee and government authorities. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.
Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City traces the transformations that occurred between 1934 and 1968 in Mexico through the lens of childhood. Countering the dominance of Western European and North American views of childhood, Eileen Ford puts the experiences of children in Latin America into their historical, political, and cultural contexts. Drawing on diverse primary sources ranging from oral histories to photojournalism, Ford reconstructs the emergent and varying meanings of childhood in Mexico City during a period of changing global attitudes towards childhood, and changing power relations in Mexico at multiple scales, from the family to the state. She analyses children's presence on the silver screen, in radio, and in print media to examine the way that children were constructed within public discourse, identifying the forces that would converge in the 1968 student movement. This book demonstrates children's importance within Mexican society as Mexico transitioned from a socialist-inspired revolutionary government to one that embraced industrial capitalism in the Cold War era. It is a fascinating study of an extremely important, burgeoning population group in Mexico that has previously been excluded from histories of Mexico's bid for modernity. Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City will be essential reading for students and scholars of Latin American history and the Cold War.
Abandoning Their Beloved Land offers an essential new history of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers from 1942 to 1964. Using national and local archives in Mexico, historian Alberto García uncovers previously unexamined political factors that shaped the direction of the program, including how officials administered the bracero selection process and what motivated campesinos from central states to migrate. Notably, García's book reveals how and why the Mexican government's delegation of Bracero Program–related responsibilities, the powerful influence of conservative Catholic opposition groups in central Mexico, and the failures of the revolution's agrarian reform all profoundly influenced the program's administration and individuals' decisions to migrate as braceros.
At face value, the concept of modernity seems to reference a stream of social and historical traffic headed down a utopian one-way street named "progress." Mexico's Ruins examines modernity in twentieth-century Mexican culture as a much more ambiguous concept, arguing that such a single-minded notion is inadequate to comprehend the complexity of modern Mexico's national projects and their reception by the nation's citizenry. Instead, through the trope of modernity as ruin, author Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández explores the dilemma presented by the etymology of "ruins": a simultaneous falling down and rising up, a confluence of opposing forces at work on the skyline of the metropolis since 1968. He focuses on artists and writers of the generación de medio siglo, like Juan García Ponce, and envisions both the tales of modernity and their storytellers in a new light. The arts, literature, and architecture of twentieth-century Mexico are all examined in this cross-cultural and interdisciplinary book.
A concise overview of 20th- and 21st-century Mexico, this volume explores the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the world's largest Spanish-speaking country. From NAFTA to narcotics, from immigration to energy, the ties that bind our nation and Mexico are varied and strong. Mexico uncovers the real Mexico that lies behind the stereotypes of tacos, tequila, and tourist hotels. Compiled by leading scholars of Mexican history and society, its more than 150 entries examine the nation in all its fascinating contradictions and complexity. This concise yet thorough study, covering the last 100 years of Mexican history, is the only one volume, A–Z reference work available to students, scholars, and readers curious about one of the world's most diverse and dynamic societies. What was the Mexican Revolution all about? Who are the Zapatistas? And why do Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo? Mexicans are America's largest immigrant group and Mexico is America's favorite tourist destination. Yet we need to learn more and understand better our fascinating neighbor to the south. Mexico—comprehensive and accessible—is the best place to start.
With concern to Greek literature and particularly to 5th c. BCE tragic production, papyri provide us usually with not only the most ancient attestation but also the most reliable one. Much more so when the papyri are the only or the main witnesses of the tragic plays. The misfortune is that the papyri transmit texts incomplete, fragmentary, and almost always anonymous. It is the scholar’s task to read, supplement, interpret and identify the particular texts. In this book, five Greek plays that survived fragmentarily in papyri are published, four by Aeschylus and one by Sophocles. Three of them are satyr plays: Aeschylus’ Theoroi, Hypsipyle, and Prometheus Pyrkaeus; Sophocles’ Inachos belongs to the genre we use to call ‘prosatyric’; Aeschylus’ Laïos is a typical tragedy. The author’s scope was, after each text’s identification was secured as regards the poet and the play’s title, to proceed to textual and interpretative observations that contributed to reconstructing in whole or in part the storyline of the relevant plays. These observations often led to unexpected conclusions and an overthrow of established opinions. Thus, the book will appeal to classical scholars, especially those interested in theatrical studies.