Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (review)

During the 1970s I began my career as a historian of the Mexican revolution and I was a revisionist. During the 1990s a new generation of re-visionists have rejected the "revisionist metanarrative" and seek to not only rethink modern Mexican history but to rethink the nature of history itself. The new re-visionists reject "modernizing historical narratives" and "old analyzes that concentrated on elite visions of state power and official nationalism" (p. 55). They are interested in subjects and issues that this obsolete revisionist did not know were serious scholarly subjects and issues until a few years ago. They seek to deconstruct, decenter, and unpack discourses, narratives, representations, identities, subjectifications, and resignifications as well as re-vision the past. The new re-visionists are represented in the collection of essays Fragments of a Golden Age.

This volume is an excellent example of the new cultural history, the history of the production and reproduction of socially constituted meanings, or how people make sense of themselves and the world. To outsiders, the new cultural history appears to bespeak more of present-day intellectual fashion than of substantive historical grounding; it has been described as a historiographical revolution rooted in subjectivity that transforms the obvious into the profound and does so in dense, ambiguous, jargon-laden language. To the cognoscenti, on the other hand, all of the decentering, deconstructing, and unpacking reveals past worlds (formerly invisible) in all of their complexity—their hybrid, indeterminate, and multivalent complexity. Fernando Coronil is quoted more than once explaining: "the critique of modernist assumptions should lead to a more critical engagement with history's complexity . . ." (pp. 7, 24). On the back cover of this book Alma Guillermoprieto praises the book as "an antidote to a generation's worth of simplifications of Mexican culture." In this volume food, tourism, cinema, professional wrestling, television and other topics are rendered complex. With regard to food, Jeffrey M. Pilcher attempts "to untangle the complex negotiations of identity and markets" (p. 86). Seth Fein seeks a "more comprehensive understanding of the interaction of images, ideas, and entertainment with political economy in the story of transnationalization" (p. 162). Eric Zolov contends that a "complex cultural dialectic evolved in which referents of 'cosmopolitan' progress and 'folkloric' authenticity served as signposts for interpreting a new vision of Mexican nationhood" (p. 235). As seems clear, complexity arises from new combinations of subjects: food and identity, tourism and representation, cinema and transnationalization. For Anne Rubenstein, the examination of the death of a movie star reveals much about "intersections of class and gender" (p. 200). For Heather Levi, professional wresting "dramatizes and parodies the idea of struggling for power" (p. 331).

What is one to think about the meanings assigned to these essays? From my admittedly outmoded and unfashionable perspective, I had a hard time understanding the significance claimed by several contributors. The editors and contributors claim they "form a discursive community" (the frequency and density of jargon in this volume certainly shows this to be true) and they appear to be interested in communicating only within the community of like-minded professors and graduate students. Is Latin American history writing becoming unintelligible to undergraduates and general readers? If this volume is any indication, the answer is yes and no. The authors of these essays seem to begin and conclude their pieces with overly complicated and jargon-laden arguments. If one can skip the introductions and ignore some of the terminology and conceptionalization, however, what follows are often quite interesting, straightforward, and readable analyzes and explanations of past worlds that demonstrate excellent research and make sense even to me. Pilcher provides a good summary of cooking and the food industry in twentieth century Mexico; for Alex Saragoza its a good summary of the...