This is a study of the reciprocal relationship between Mexican muralism and the three major Mexican museums&—the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum.

In this comprehensive collection of essays, three generations of international scholars examine Mexican muralism in its broad artistic and historical contexts, from its iconic figuresÑDiego Rivera, JosŽ Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro SiquierosÑto their successors in Mexico, the United States, and across Latin America. These muralists conceived of their art as a political weapon in popular struggles over revolution and resistance, state modernization and civic participation, artistic freedom and cultural imperialism. The contributors to this volume show how these artistsÕ murals transcended borders to engage major issues raised by the many different forms of modernity that emerged throughout the Americas during the twentieth century.

In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, Stridentism (estridentismo) burst on the scene in the 1920s as an avant-garde challenge to political and intellectual complacency. Led by poets Manuel Maples Arce, Germ n List Arzubide, and Salvador Gallardo, prose writer Arqueles Vela, painters Ferm n Revueltas, Ram n Alva de la Canal, Leopoldo M ndez, and Jean Charlot, and sculptor Germ n Cueto, the Stridentists rejected academic conservatism, celebrated modernity and technological novelties such as the radio, cinema and the airplane, and sought to transform not only written and visual language but also everyday life through the creation of new aesthetic spaces and new approaches to the urban environment. From 1921 to 1927, they issued manifestos, published magazines and books, organized performances, and served as a critical force in Mexican art and literature that was known and admired in intellectual circles throughout the Americas. Initially active in Mexico City and Puebla, Stridentism reached its peak in Xalapa, Veracruz, where its members collaborated with the state government to the extent that critics accused them of "stridentizing" the state. By 1928 the movement had dispersed, but its iconoclastic spirit lived on in other forms, merging into and influencing other movements of the 1930s and beyond. This book is a history of Stridentism as a multifaceted cultural movement deeply imbued with the spirit of 1920s Mexico. Bringing together original interdisciplinary research and critical analysis, it explores the ways in which the Stridentists pushed the limits of the collective imagination in an era of conflict and change.

In the wake of the Mexican-American War, competing narratives of religious conquest and re-conquest were employed by Anglo American and ethnic Mexican Californians to make sense of their place in North America. These "invented traditions" had a profound impact on North American religious and ethnic relations, serving to bring elements of Catholic history within the Protestant fold of the United States' national history as well as playing an integral role in the emergence of the early Chicano/a movement. Many Protestant Anglo Americans understood their settlement in the far Southwest as following in the footsteps of the colonial project begun by Catholic Spanish missionaries. In contrast, Californios--Mexican-Americans and Chicana/os--stressed deep connections to a pre-Columbian past over to their own Spanish heritage. Thus, as Anglo Americans fashioned themselves as the spiritual heirs to the Spanish frontier, many ethnic Mexicans came to see themselves as the spiritual heirs to a southwestern Aztec homeland.

"A groundbreaking look at avant-garde art and literature in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, illustrating Mexico City's importance as a major center for the development of modernism"--Provided by publisher.

American and British Writers in Mexico is the study that laid the foundation upon which subsequent examinations of Mexico’s impact upon American and British letters have built. Chosen by the Mexican government to be placed, in translation, in its public libraries, the book was also referenced by Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in an article in the New Yorker, “Reflections—Mexico and the United States.” Drewey Wayne Gunn demonstrates how Mexican experiences had a singular impact upon the development of English writers, beginning with early British explorers who recorded their impressions for Hakluyt’s Voyages, through the American Beats, who sought to escape the strictures of American culture. Among the 140 or so writers considered are Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Langston Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Anne Porter, Hart Crane, Malcolm Lowry, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Ray Bradbury, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. Gunn finds that, while certain elements reflecting the Mexican experience—colors, landscape, manners, political atmosphere, a sense of the alien—are common in their writings, the authors reveal less about Mexico than they do about themselves. A Mexican sojourn often marked the beginning, the end, or the turning point in a literary career. The insights that this pioneering study provide into our complex cultural relationship with Mexico, so different from American and British authors’ encounters with Continental cultures, remain vital. The book is essential for anyone interested in understanding the full range of the impact of the expatriate experience on writers.