Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams uses Elena Garro’s eccentric life and work as a lens through which to examine mid-twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals' desire to reconcile mexicanidad with modernidad. The famously scandalous first wife of Nobel Prize winner poet Octavio Paz, and an award-winning author in her own right, Garro constructed a mysterious and often contradictory persona through her very public participation in Mexican political conflicts. Herself an anxious and contentious Mexican writer, Elena Garro elicited profound political and aesthetic anxiety in her Mexican readers. She confused the personal and the public in her creative fictions as well as in her vision of Mexican modernity. This violation of key distinctions rendered her largely illegible to her contemporaries. That illegibility serves as a symptom of unacknowledged desires that motivate twentieth-century views of national modernity. Taken together, Garro's public persona and critical perspective expose the anxieties regarding ethnicity, gender, economic class, and professional identity that define Mexican modernity. Blending cultural studies and detailed literary analysis with political and intellectual history, Mexico's Modern Dreams argues that, in addition to the intriguing gossip she elicited in literary and political circles, Garro produced a radical critique of Mexican modernity. Her critique applies as well to the nation's twenty-first-century crisis of globalization, state power, and pervasive violence.

This volume of essays explores what it is that has brought marginalized and often exiled writers, seen as treacherous, alienated, and/or queer by their societies and nations together by way of Paris. Spanning from the inter-war period of the late 1920s to the present millennium, this volume considers many seminal questions that have influenced and continue to shape the realm of exiled writers who have sought refuge in Paris in order to write. Additionally, the volume’s essays seek to define alienation and marginalization as not solely subscribing to any single denominator -- sexual preference, gender, or nationality-- but rather as shared modes of being that allow authors to explore what it is to write from abroad in a place that is foreign yet freed of the constrictions of one’s home space. What makes Paris a particularly fruitful space that has allowed these authors and their writings to cross national, ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic boundaries for over a century? What is it that brings together writers such as Moroccan Abdellah Taïa, Americans James Baldwin, Richard Wright and, most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Shay Youngblood, Algerian Nabile Farès, Franco-Algerian Leila Sebbar, Canadian Nancy Huston, French Jean Genet and French-Vietnamese Linda Lê? How do their representations and understanding of transgression and marginalization transcend national, linguistic and ethnic boundaries, leading ultimately to revolution, both literary and literal? How does their writing help us to trace the history of Paris as a literary and artistic capital that has been useful for authors’ exploration of the Self, race and home country? These are but a few of the many questions explored in this volume. This book relies on an inherently intersectional approach, which is not based in reified identities, whether they be LGBT, postcolonial, ethnic, national, or linguistic. Instead, we posit that, for example, queer theory, and a “politics of difference”i can help us investigate the dynamics of these multiple identity positions, and hence provide a broader understanding of the lived experiences of these writers, and, perhaps, their readers from the early 1940s to the present.

This single volume reference resource offers students, scholars, and general readers alike an in-depth background on Mexico, from the complexity of its pre-Columbian civilizations to its social and political development in the context of Western civilization. How did modern Mexico become a nation of multicultural diversity and rich indigenous traditions? What key roles do Mexico's non-Western, pre-Columbian indigenous heritage and subsequent development as a major center in the Spanish colonial empire play the country's identity today? How is Mexico today both Western and non-Western, part Native American and part European, simultaneously traditional and modern? Modern Mexico is a thematic encyclopedia that broadly covers the nation's history, both ancient and modern; its government, politics, and economics; as well as its culture, religion traditions, philosophy, arts, and social structures. Additional topics include industry, labor, social classes and ethnicity, women, education, language, food, leisure and sport, and popular culture. Sidebars, images, and a Day in the Life feature round out the coverage in this accessible, engaging volume. Readers will come to understand how Mexico and the Mexican people today are the result of the processes of transculturation, globalization, and civilizational contact.

In Citizens of Scandal, Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions—between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy—that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century.

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.

In Mexico, during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and as a direct result of his 'war' on drugs, at least 60,000 people were killed, tens of thousands were 'disappeared' and countless more were subjected to kidnapping and sexual violence. This book analyses how artists and filmmakers, alongside affected citizens, attempted to navigate, articulate and contend with this unparalleled escalation in brutality. In Mexico, during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and as a direct result of his 'war' on drugs, at least 60,000 people were killed, tens of thousands were 'disappeared' and countless more were subjected to kidnapping and sexual violence. This book analyses how artists and filmmakers, alongside affected citizens, attempted to navigate, articulate and contend with this unparalleled escalation in brutality. The texts studied here provide a critical visual archive of this first phase in the drug war and show how artists including Pedro Pardo, Fernando Brito, Mónica González and Natalia Almada attempted to challenge official narratives, foster emerging nodes of resistance and seek justice for citizens. Bringing together works of photography, photojournalism, documentary and short fiction cinema, the book argues for the vital role of cultural production in documenting institutional corruption, human rights abuses and narco-related violence in Mexican society and providing a space to grieve and remember the victims. As Mexico's socio-political landscape continues to deteriorate, the book shows how its visual cultural legacy provides a means of understanding and responding to the violence.

Every major Peruvian author of the twentieth century has written a narrative focused on childhood or coming of age. Mining Memory argues that Peruvian narratives of the twentieth century re-imagine childhood not only to document personal pasts, but also to focus on national identity as a dynamic and incomplete process. Mining Memory shows how 20th-century narratives and films reimagine the self and the nation by representing child and adolescent protagonists and their evolution, using the remembrance of childhood as part of a nation-making project. The book demonstrates how, in the context of Peru, fictions focusing on childhood become vehicles for the national reimagining and collective remembering central to much of Latin American literature. The figure of the child, as emblem of both a collective memory and an always deferred utopian project, holds special promise for twentieth-century Peruvian writers as they write from a national context rife with cultural, racial and political conflict. The book intervenes in debates internal to Peruvian cultural studies as well as wider conversations in Latin American Studies and post-colonial studies. Mining Memory provides a new understanding to both the Latin American and Anglo-American traditions regarding the representations of national subjectivities through the voices of the child and adolescent. Such a representational strategy performs a very particular kind of hybridity and temporal balancing act capable of addressing the very issues of cultural memory and fractured identities so relevant to multi-cultural, post-colonial cultural contexts.