The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (review)

This anthology comprises several outstanding essays on Mexico's revolutionary cultural campaigns during the years from 1920 to1940, as distinct from the more widely discussed agrarian reforms and labor issues. As with all anthologies, the essays are uneven in quality, but the best articles make significant contributions to the historiography and provide interesting and important information. Certainly the authors writing on music, public health, movies, muralists, architecture, and teachers provide insightful, often innovative discussions of the individuals who tried to implement the revolutionary renovation of the national culture. A critical issue emerges from the best essays and provokes Claudio Lomnitz in the Conclusion: This is the question of the continuity of cultural forms and practices from the Porfiriato into the revolutionary reform period. Nevertheless, it is not that these cultural practices continued in some vestigial or traditional manner. The issue is that these practices were exactly the ones that the Porfirian leadership, driven by the desire to identify with cosmopolitan cultural fashions, tried to eliminate, exclude, or elide as backward, indigenous, rural activities. This anthology has brought this question to the surface and it merits further discussion.

The editors, Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen Lewis, in their thoughtful Introduction and in the essays they have assembled, raise two other pertinent issues. These are the ways that the cultural goals (the creation of the New Man, the New Woman, and the New Generation) were influenced by the rise of the mass media and inflected by the changing audience (the growing urban population). As the authors show, the cultural expressions took on new forms through technology (movies, photograph records, radio) and through audience (city people, for example, who saw artisanry as art, not utensils). These concerns, found in several well-written essays, inspired Lomnitz to raise a series of provocative questions about the nature of the revolution, and, particularly, its cultural campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. While I disagree with his sketch of the historiography (for example, it compresses Alan Knight's interpretations into unrecognizable generalizations), nevertheless he asks challenging questions about revolutionary social and cultural change.

Unfortunately many of the central points in this anthology are obscured by two major weaknesses, both of which demonstrate the absence of editing by the publisher. First, the publisher apparently has accepted the view that Mexico is an exotic place, as repeatedly the reader is told that this is a book about Mexico. The table of contents lists nineteen selections—nine with "Mexico" or "Mexicans" in the title. Are the others not about Mexico? Furthermore, the text of the essays is shot through with many superfluous and redundant reminders that the authors are writing about Mexico; one could conclude that some authors see Mexico as the Other, something the press should have required they fix.

Equally as disturbing is a pervasive contradiction: Are the years from 1920-1940, years of "cultural revolution" or are they the years of "postrevolution"? This is a fundamental contradiction, if the words are to mean anything at all. Despite numerous references to "postrevolution," it becomes clear that each of the authors writes about aspects of cultural and social revolutionary campaigns. Postrevolution cannot be applied to these two decades without dismissing these campaigns and ignoring the revolutionary efforts of the three major revolutionary presidents (Alvaro Obregón, Plutarco Calles, and Lázaro Cárdenas). The use of "postrevolution" is a sinister (and now safe) political attack on the revolution and the revolutionaries, perhaps because authors oppose the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional that the revolution became after 1946. Certain authors elsewhere have adopted this language in an effort to be historiographically fashionable. Here again editing could have eliminated this contradiction.

The book's contributions outweigh these concerns about the lack of editorial oversight. Readers should examine the essays ready to take notes to add to their lectures (Patrice Olsen...