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  • Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) by Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M.
  • Sebastiaan Faber
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959). West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2009. 321 pp.

If we have learned anything from Marx, Gramsci, and Stuart Hall, it's that few notions are as ideological as the conception of high culture as an autonomous, independent space disconnected from social, political, or economic reality. And yet one has to be careful with trivializing or condemning outright any attempt to create a cultural space of those characteristics. It's one thing to ignore or disguise the fact that any intellectual or artistic product is born within, and conditioned by, its social environment; it's quite another to work toward the creation of institutional structures - universities, ateneos, academies, but also disciplines, fields, schools of thought - that allow intellectuals, artists, professors, and students to discover and pursue their vocations with relative independence from the political and economic powers that be. (For Gramsci himself, after all, it was life in prison that paradoxically granted this kind of space.)

As we know, the cultural history of twentieth-century Mexico - the Mexico of the Institutionalized Revolution par excellence - is marked by a lively interest from the State in the development of a Mexican high culture; by the relatively tight relationship, and high level of overlap, between the national intelligentsia and the state apparatus; and, as Roderic Camp has shown, by persistent patterns of patronage and cooptation. And yet, as Ignacio Sánchez Prado argues in this fascinating and important book, Mexican cultural history also shows examples of successful collective and individual attempts to mobilize notions of national identity in order to wrest a measure of autonomy from the padrinazgo of the PRI - if not always institutionally, then at least intellectually. In the course of this study, Sánchez Prado not only corrects or nuances commonly held views of the relationship between Mexican intellectuals and the 70-year period of PRI hegemony, but also of the relationship of Mexican (and, by extension, Latin American) culture to the European metropolis (particularly the Spanish intellectual and literary tradition). In the process, he dislodges some of the most persistent conceptual paradigms, myths, and stereotypes [End Page 105] that continue to loom large in popular and scholarly visions of Mexican identity and intellectual history.

While most scholars have seen the relationship between the Mexican intelligentsia and the revolutionary state primarily in terms of cooptation and complicity, Sánchez Prado argues that groups of Mexican intellectuals in fact conceived of alternative visions of the nation as embodied in both its pueblo and its high-cultural production (the naciones intelectuales in the title). The relationship between these alternative visions of Mexican culture and those embraced and propagated by the revolutionary regime was not always free of tension, at times directly counter-hegemonic, and always complicated by intellectuals' desire for institutional legitimacy and "distinction" (in Bourdieu's sense). Sánchez Prado focuses on two key moments in Mexican intellectual history: first, the foundation, between 1917 and the late 1930s, of a "literary field," defined, following Bourdieu, as a relatively autonomous realm within the wider social fabric; and, second, the foundation and consolidation of a series of key cultural institutions in the 1940s and '50s. Naciones intelectuales, in other words, aims to investigate "los usos de la literatura en la producción de estrategias intelectuales contrahegemónicas y de narraciones culturales de nación distintas a las sustentadas por el Estado" (5).

The book's four chapters follow a chronological order. Chapter 1 covers the years following the Revolution, and the first attempts by intellectuals to create a measure of independence from the emerging revolutionary state. Chapter 2 is fully dedicated to Jorge Cuesta, whom Sánchez Prado helps recover as a crucial voice in a key moment of Mexican cultural history, focusing in particular on his Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna (1928) and the 1932 debate about national Mexican literature. Chapter 3 analyzes the consolidation of high-cultural institutions (El Colegio Nacional, El Colegio de México), and the emergence within them of...

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