In A City on a Lake Matthew Vitz tracks the environmental and political history of Mexico City and explains its transformation from a forested, water-rich environment into a smog-infested megacity plagued by environmental problems and social inequality. Vitz shows how Mexico City's unequal urbanization and environmental decline stemmed from numerous scientific and social disputes over water policy, housing, forestry, and sanitary engineering. From the prerevolutionary efforts to create a hygienic city supportive of capitalist growth, through revolutionary demands for a more democratic distribution of resources, to the mid-twentieth-century emergence of a technocratic bureaucracy that served the interests of urban elites, Mexico City's environmental history helps us better understand how urban power has been exercised, reproduced, and challenged throughout Latin America.

Cultural and natural heritage are central to ‘Europe’ and ‘the European project’. They were bound up in the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they were used to justify differences over which border conflicts were fought. Later, the idea of a ‘common European heritage’ provided a rationale for the development of the European Union. Now, the emergence of ‘new’ populist nationalisms shows how the imagined past continues to play a role in cultural and social governance, while a series of interlinked social and ecological crises are changing the ways that heritage operates, with new discourses and ontologies emerging to reconfigure heritage for the circumstances of the present and the uncertainties of the future. Taking the current role of heritage in Europe as its starting point, Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe presents a number of case studies that explore key themes in this transformation. Contributors draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives to consider, variously, the role of heritage and museums in the migration and climate ‘emergencies’; approaches to urban heritage conservation and practices of curating cities; digital and digitised heritage; the use of heritage as a therapeutic resource; and critical approaches to heritage and its management. Taken together, the chapters explore the multiple ontologies through which cultural and natural heritage have and continue to intervene actively in redrawing the futures of Europe and the world' Praise for Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe 'Filled with many fascinating and diverse chapters, this book vividly demonstrates the dynamism and breadth of critical heritage study of, in, and entangled with Europe today' Sharon Macdonald, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 'Far from being restrictive, let alone chauvinistic, the multiscalar European focus of this book confirms the breadth and relevance of current critical heritage studies. With contributions addressing such topical issues as climate emergencies, urban landscapes, cultural industries, new media and identity politics – be they written by established scholars or by emerging researchers – it is "Europe" with all its shared grounds and recurrent divergences that comes into sharper relief. From this vantage point, readers of this compelling book will be better positioned for reflecting on and eventually influencing and challenging our heritage futures.' Nathan Schlanger, Professor of Archaeology, École nationale des chartes, Paris. 'This book addresses European heritage realities and futures through new voices, paradigms, and methods. It is a collage of tensions – practically a representation of Europe itself – through which to comprehend contemporary intersections of time, place, things, and meaning. It contributes to new vistas in heritage studies: the offer of design and imagination as methods; reckonings with data and climate change as seemingly uncontrollable actors; and the ongoing negotiation of ‘criticality’ in the making of our responsibilities for the past in the present' Christopher Whitehead, Professor of Museology, Newcastle University.

LASA Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Winner, Arthur P. Whitaker Prize, Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, 2019 In the 1930s, the artistic and cultural patronage of celebrated Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas transformed a small Michoacán city, Pátzcuaro, into a popular center for national tourism. Cárdenas commissioned public monuments and archeological excavations; supported new schools, libraries, and a public theater; developed tourism sites and infrastructure, including the Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares; and hired artists to paint murals celebrating regional history, traditions, and culture. The creation of Pátzcuaro was formative for Mexico; not only did it provide an early model for regional economic and cultural development, but it also helped establish some of Mexico’s most enduring national myths, rituals, and institutions. In Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, Jennifer Jolly argues that Pátzcuaro became a microcosm of cultural power during the 1930s and that we find the foundations of modern Mexico in its creation. Her extensive historical and archival research reveals how Cárdenas and the artists and intellectuals who worked with him used cultural patronage as a guise for radical modernization in the region. Jolly demonstrates that the Pátzcuaro project helped define a new modern body politic for Mexico, in which the population was asked to emulate Cárdenas by touring the country and seeing and embracing its land, history, and people. Ultimately, by offering Mexicans a means to identify and engage with power and privilege, the creation of Pátzcuaro placed art and tourism at the center of Mexico’s postrevolutionary nation building project.

Emotion and the Seduction of the Senses, Baroque to Neo-Baroque examines the relationship between the cultural productions of the baroque in the seventeenth century and the neo-baroque in our contemporary world. The volume illuminates how, rather than providing rationally ordered visual realms, both the baroque and the neo-baroque construct complex performative spaces whose spectacle seeks to embrace, immerse, and seduce the senses and solicit the emotions of the beholder.

"Collection covers wide range of topics on western Mexico, including archaeology, ecology, Teuchitlán architecture, the colonial hacienda, prehispanic bronze metallurgy, linguistics, archaeology of the Cuenca de Sayula, the work of Isabel Kelly, and ceramic ecology"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

The most important political entity in pre-Spanish Mesoamerica was the Tenochca Empire, founded in 1428 when the three kingdoms of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan formed an alliance that controlled the Basin of Mexico and other extensive areas of Mesoamerica. In a unique political structure, each of the three allies headed a group of kingdoms in the core of the Empire. Each capital possessed settlements of peasants both in its own domain and in those of the other two capitals; in conquered areas nearby, the three capitals had their separate tributaries. In The Tenochca Empire Pedro Carrasco incorporates years of research in the archives of Mexico and Spain and compares primary sources, some not yet published, from all three of the great kingdoms. Carrasco takes in the total tripartite structure of the Empire, defining its component entities and determining how they were organized and how they functioned.