Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (review)

In this book, Ruben Gallo casts off all sorts of analytical constraints endemic to the history of technology and the history of art. If nothing else, the author’s amalgamation of chapters on cameras, typewriters, radio, cement, and stadiums in Mexico after 1920 suggests a willingness to bypass disciplinary boundaries. The book’s subject matter fits neatly into neither historical sub-field, but its creative hybridity is evident on other levels. Throughout, Gallo describes both mechanical systems (such as photography, mechanized printing, sound broadcasting, telegraphy, and building methods) and the expressive products of these mediums as reflective of cultural agendas. The materiality of each medium and matters of content or design are treated as inseparable, as Gallo combines interpretive priorities of both the histories of technology and art. Finally, the book as a whole reminds us that the conventional scholarly expectation that the building materials and poems, public spaces and radio lectures, advertisements and paintings of a single era demand separate critical or historical address is entirely arbitrary, itself a historically contingent cultural choice.

Other cultural historians have tried to track the priorities of a particular age by lending this kind of equivalence to diverse mediums and artifacts. This seems to have become an especially attractive strategy for those who study the first three or four decades of the twentieth century in industrialized settings, perhaps because so many cultural workers of the so-called “Machine Age” themselves sought to break down divisions between utilitarian and aesthetic activity. The products of industrial designers, engineers, and fine artists typically share space in such accounts. But Gallo’s book goes further than many of those studies by revealing diverse reasons that “new” was felt to be “better” in this time and place, across a truly heterogeneous range of commercial, artistic, and political projects. Readers of recent histories of Modernist movements in Europe and the United States, some of which Gallo draws on to good effect, will not be surprised to learn that this was not always a matter of progressive ideology. In one of the book’s most compelling passages, we learn that the Remington Company advertised its 1907 sale of 50 new typewriters to the Mexican government with derisive comments about the porters who hand-delivered the machines to their new owners. Ads referred to the men as “tattered objects” presenting a stark contrast to the modern machines they toted (p. 89). Modernity was thus deployed for a very old-fashioned purpose: the reassertion of class and racial distinctions. This kind of observation can help us see commonalities between quotidian embraces of modernizing change, such as Remington’s, and the social conservatism of more celebrated Modernist thinkers who loftily dismissed indigenous or vernacular cultures as shallow and backward.

Pivotal to the book’s success is Gallo’s attention to the variable ideologies that even a single technology can reflect: a camera in the 1920s could embody nostalgic pictorial yearning or a radical challenge to art markets and the political establishment, depending on who was using it. He scrupulously avoids technological determinism. Gallo is also expert at testing his subjects’ rhetoric for underlying intention, never assuming transparency. This may be an obvious thing to do in the case of a racist, nationalist government minister who publicly claims to want to bring to Mexicans “a life based on love” (p. 208), but it is a more challenging task in the case of a novelist who uses a typewriter to create texts condemning the spread of commerce and mechanization (pp. 76–80). Gallo handles such ambiguities with care and nuance. Perhaps because of Gallo’s eagerness to identify “discourse networks” that might serve to sort his subjects into ideological categories, the book does occasionally argue from cause, ascribing meanings that selectively support only the desired analytical point. The embrace of cement, for example, may well have represented a “postrevolutionary” commitment among Mexican architects eager to find a material that embodied “unity, strength...