Mexican Suite

"Now this publication is available in English as Mexican Suite. Olivier Debroise and Stella de Sa Rego have revised this edition to include more current material and explanatory notes for an audience less familiar with Mexican history. They have also eliminated some of the general history of photography and added more of the early history of photography in Mexico, as well as many new, previously unpublished images. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically, which allows viewer/readers to follow the evolution of major photographic genres and styles. Debroise also examines the role of photography in the development of modern Mexico and the influence of prominent foreign photographers such as Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

In Looking for Mexico, a leading historian of visual culture, John Mraz, provides a panoramic view of Mexico’s modern visual culture from the U.S. invasion of 1847 to the present. Along the way, he illuminates the powerful role of photographs, films, illustrated magazines, and image-filled history books in the construction of national identity, showing how Mexicans have both made themselves and been made with the webs of significance spun by modern media. Central to Mraz’s book is photography, which was distributed widely throughout Mexico in the form of cartes-de-visite, postcards, and illustrated magazines. Mraz analyzes the work of a broad range of photographers, including Guillermo Kahlo, Winfield Scott, Hugo Brehme, Agustín Víctor Casasola, Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, Pedro Meyer, and the New Photojournalists. He also examines representations of Mexico’s past in the country’s influential picture histories: popular, large-format, multivolume series replete with thousands of photographs and an assortment of texts. Turning to film, Mraz compares portrayals of the Mexican Revolution by Fernando de Fuentes to the later movies of Emilio Fernández and Gabriel Figueroa. He considers major stars of Golden Age cinema as gender archetypes for mexicanidad, juxtaposing the charros (hacienda cowboys) embodied by Pedro Infante, Pedro Armendáriz, and Jorge Negrete with the effacing women: the mother, Indian, and shrew as played by Sara García, Dolores del Río, and María Félix. Mraz also analyzes the leading comedians of the Mexican screen, representations of the 1968 student revolt, and depictions of Frida Kahlo in films made by Paul Leduc and Julie Taymor. Filled with more than fifty illustrations, Looking for Mexico is an exuberant plunge into Mexico’s national identity, its visual culture, and the connections between the two.

Examines the introduction of Mexican muralism to the United States in the 1930s, and the challenges faced by the artists, their medium, and the political overtones of their work in a new society.

The years following Mexican independence in 1821 were critical to the development of social, racial, and national identities. The visual arts played a decisive role in this process of self-definition. Mexican Costumbrismo reorients current understanding of this key period in the history of Mexican art by focusing on a distinctive genre of painting that emerged between 1821 and 1890: costumbrismo. In contrast to the neoclassical work favored by the Mexican academy, costumbrista artists portrayed the quotidian lives of the lower to middle classes, their clothes, food, dwellings, and occupations. Based on observations of similitude and difference, costumbrista imagery constructed stereotypes of behavioral and biological traits associated with distinct racial and social classes. In doing so, Mey-Yen Moriuchi argues, these works engaged with notions of universality and difference, contributed to the documentation and reification of social and racial types, and transformed the way Mexicans saw themselves, as well as how other nations saw them, during a time of rapid change for all aspects of national identity. Carefully researched and featuring more than thirty full-color exemplary reproductions of period work, Moriuchi’s study is a provocative art-historical examination of costumbrismo’s lasting impact on Mexican identity and history. E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

With a cast ranging from Pancho Villa to Dolores del Río and Tina Modotti, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution demonstrates the crucial role played by Mexican and foreign visual artists in revolutionizing Mexico's twentieth-century national iconography. Investigating the convergence of cinema, photography, painting, and other graphic arts in this process, Zuzana Pick illuminates how the Mexican Revolution's timeline (1910–1917) corresponds with the emergence of media culture and modernity. Drawing on twelve foundational films from Que Viva Mexico! (1931–1932) to And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003), Pick proposes that cinematic images reflect the image repertoire produced during the revolution, often playing on existing nationalist themes or on folkloric motifs designed for export. Ultimately illustrating the ways in which modernism reinvented existing signifiers of national identity, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution unites historicity, aesthetics, and narrative to enrich our understanding of Mexicanidad.

The author offers a comprehensive study of Mexican photography from the early twentieth century to today, demonstrating how images have shaped identities in Mexico, the United States, and in the borderlands where the two nations and cultures intersect-the shared image environment. Cross-cultural expisodes that are contradictory, especially in terms of cultural and sexual difference are discussed. Analyzing such topics as territory, sexuality, and social and ethnic relations in image making, the author traces the connective thread that photography has provided between Mexican and U.S. American intellectual and cultural production, and in doing so, defines both nations.==Back cover.

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.

Dance and the Arts in Mexico, 1920–1950 tells the story of the arts explosion that launched at the end of the Mexican revolution, when composers, choreographers, and muralists had produced state-sponsored works in wide public spaces. The book assesses how the “cosmic generation” in Mexico connected the nation-body and the dancer’s body in artistic movements between 1920 and 1950. It first discusses the role of dance in particular, the convergences of composers and visual artists in dance productions, and the allegorical relationship between the dancer's body and the nation-body in state-sponsored performances. The arts were of critical import in times of political and social transition, and the dynamic between the dancer’s body and the national body shifted as the government stance had also shifted. Second, this book examines more deeply the involvement of US artists and patrons in this Mexican arts movement during the period. Given the power imbalance between north and south, these exchanges were vexed. Still, the results for both parties were invaluable. Ultimately, this book argues in favor of the benefits that artists on both sides of the border received from these exchanges.