Neoliberalism in Mexico - characterized by free markets, by the privitization of thousands of State enterprises, and by influence from Washington and Wall Street - has forever changed the political climate, making it necessary to theorize new paths for the future. Indeed, liberal ideology champions not only economic freedom but individual liberty as well: In the canon of liberal texts, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations coexists with John Stuart Mill's The Subjugation of Women, a biting commentary on gender inequality. The debate over neoliberalism in Mexico is not exclusively a left-right conflict. Many leftists see ties with the U.S. as a means to promote social change even though they oppose neoliberal economics; many on the right, while supporting neoliberalism, fear social influences from the North. This volume focuses on the neoliberal debate in plays by four Mexican authors: Sabina Berman, Vicente Lenero, Victor Hugo Rascon Banda, and Alejandra Trigueros. These playwrights stage the complexity of neoliberalism, providing insight into a global trend and its manifestation in Mexico. Stuart A. Chapel Hill.
Staging Words presents new perspectives on Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela and their theater, by postulating that nation can be imagined and reconstructed through the deliberate performance of intertexts. The book shows how past artistic texts - other plays, stories, newspaper articles, songs, or paintings - can be manipulated and translated to create a new theatrical script, and that this new script can expose an innovative space for interpreting the nation. The introduction reviews theories of intertextuality, nation, and nationalism and applies them to Latin America. Each chapter studies two to three plays and shows how the intertexts open up hidden connections and border spaces within texts and between texts that the new writer and reader fill with significance, replacing the meaning of the pretext with their own. This new textual voice permits texts to be restaged, reconfigured, and imagined in a way that is purely Latin American.
Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives examines twenty‐first‐century documentary theater in Latin America, focusing on important plays by the Argentine director Vivi Tellas, the Argentine playwright and director Lola Arias, the Mexican theater collective Teatro Línea de Sombra, and the Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón. Paola S. Hernández demonstrates how material objects and archives—photographs, videos, and documents such as witness reports, legal briefs, and letters—come to life onstage. Hernández argues that present-day, live performances catalog these material archives, expanding and reinterpreting the objects’ meanings. These performances produce an affective relationship between actor and audience, visualizing truths long obscured by repressive political regimes and transforming theatrical spaces into sites of witness. This process also highlights the liminality between fact and fiction, questioning the veracity of the archive. Richly detailed, nuanced, and theoretically wide-ranging, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater reveals a range of interpretations about how documentary theater can conceptualize the idea of self while also proclaiming a new mode of testimony through theatrical practices.
Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages? In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.
Compares a range of Mexican food policy reforms, focusing on the SAM (Mexican Food System), a program in place from 1980-82, designed to shift subsidies and privileged access from large private farmers and ranchers to peasants and small producers. In this context, Fox (political science, MIT) examines the limits and possibilities of political reform, and its history and future in the Mexican state. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico explores the Passion plays performed in Nahuatl (Aztec) by Indigenous Mexicans living under Spanish colonial occupation. Though sourced from European writings and devotional practices that emphasized the suffering of Christ and his mother, this Nahuatl theatrical tradition grounded the Passion story in the Indigenous corporate community. Passion plays had courted controversy in Europe since their twelfth-century origin, but in New Spain they faced Catholic authorities who questioned the spiritual and intellectual capacity of Indigenous people and, in the eighteenth century, sought to suppress these performances. Six surviving eighteenth-century scripts, variants of an original play possibly composed early in the seventeenth century, reveal how Nahuas passed along this model text while modifying it with new dialogue, characters, and stage techniques. Louise M. Burkhart explores the way Nahuas merged the Passion story with their language, cultural constructs, social norms, and religious practices while also responding to surveillance by Catholic churchmen. Analytical chapters trace significant themes through the six plays and key these to a composite play in English included in the volume. A cast with over fifty distinct roles acted out events extending from Palm Sunday to Christ’s death on the cross. One actor became a localized embodiment of Jesus through a process of investiture and mimesis that carried aspects of pre-Columbian materialized divinity into the later colonial period. The play told afar richer version of the Passion story than what later colonial Nahuas typically learned from their priests or catechists. And by assimilating Jesus to an Indigenous, or macehualli, identity, the players enacted a protest against colonial rule. The situation in eighteenth-century New Spain presents both a unique confrontation between Indigenous communities and Enlightenment era religious reformers and a new chapter in an age-old power game between popular practice and religious orthodoxy. By focusing on how Nahuas localized the universalizing narrative of Christ’s Passion, Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico offers an unusually in-depth view of religious life under colonial rule. Burkhart’s accompanying website also makes available transcriptions and translations of the six Nahuatl-language plays, four Spanish-language plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material. Comments restricted to single page plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material
In 1968, Mexico prepared to host the Olympic games amid growing civil unrest. The spectacular sports facilities and urban redevelopment projects built by the government in Mexico City mirrored the country’s rapid but uneven modernization. In the same year, a street-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in the city. Throughout the summer, the ‘68 Movement staged protests underscoring a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement. Just ten days before the Olympics began, nearly three hundred student protestors were massacred by the military in a plaza at the core of a new public housing complex. In spite of institutional denial and censorship, the 1968 massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary Mexican culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia. In this highly original study of the afterlives of the ’68 Movement, George F. Flaherty explores how urban spaces—material but also literary, photographic, and cinematic—became an archive of 1968, providing a framework for de facto modes of justice for years to come.
Since achieving independence from Spain and establishing its first constitution in 1824, Mexico has experienced numerous political upheavals. The country's long and turbulent journey toward democratic, representative government has been marked by a tension between centralized, autocratic governments (historically depicted as a legacy of colonial institutions) and federalist structures. The years since Mexico's independence have seen a major violent social revolution, years of authoritarian rule, and, finally, in the past two decades, the introduction of a fair and democratic electoral process. Over the course of the thirty-one essays in The Oxford Handbook of Mexican Politics some of the world's leading scholars of Mexico will provide a comprehensive view of the remarkable transformation of the nation's political system to a democratic model. In turn they will assess the most influential institutions, actors, policies and issues in its current evolution toward democratic consolidation. Following an introduction by Roderic Ai Camp, sections will explore the current state of Mexico's political development; transformative political institutions; the changing roles of the military, big business, organized labor, and the national political elite; new political actors including the news media, indigenous movements, women, and drug traffickers; electoral politics; demographics and political attitudes; and policy issues.
Tracing the key themes and dynamics of a century of political development in Mexico, David Shirk explores the evolution of the party that ultimately became the vehicle for Fox's success.
