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Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 309 though there existed a wide variety of circumstances that shaped the religious atmosphere of colonial Mexico, Elisa Sampson Vera Tudek finds and traces the common link of hagiography, thus offering a solid standpoint from which to analyze these texts. What we learn from this book adds to the cultural richness of colonial Mexico and to the woiks written by women during this time peiiod. Sarah E. Owens CoUege of Charleston Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999 By Selma Reuben HoIo The museum is not an institution that exhibits objects. It does that, certainly, but only in pursuit of other goals. Nor is the museum's role limited to cataloging and interpreting such cultural artifacts. The most interesting thing on display in the museum, Selma Reuben HoIo suggests , is the museum itself. To entei its galleries is to gain a frame for interpreting contemporary identity construction and cultural politics, dynamic processes in which the museum is both witness and participant. And in democratic Spain, where social transformations have been astoundingly rapid and complex, the museum offers perhaps a unique vantage for understanding the emergence of a decentralized democracy from the tuins of autocracy. Selma Reuben Holo's Beyond the Prado is an intriguing meditation on the museum as agent foi social change, in which Spain's many repositories of patrimony became exemplars of plural modernity , but could simultaneously shekel adherents to Fiancoist nostalgia. While Reuben HoIo recognizes that the "vitality and diversity of museums in Spain could not exist without a sustaining democratic movement," she proposes that the "vitality and diversity of present-day Spain itself owes something to the contributions its museums have made to the active reconstruction ofthe various identities of its citizens" (2). And by looking at the museum as a widei cultural institution, where individual museums in such diverse places as Badajoz and Barcelona have roles in a shared, "porous web of meaning," this concisely-written book makes the daring leap beyond the Piado to the refiguring of Spain itself. Spain's emeigence from dictatoiship began a peiiod when transformation, "el cambio" in the political lexicon of socialist ascendance to national powei in 1982, was the order ofthe day. Reuben HoIo carefully documents how each of Spain's majoi museums and art foundations were themselves transformed to meet this imperative, by either tiumpeting cultural innovation oi merely rejecting Francoist notions of homogeneity foi a plurality reflecting that of Spain itself. At the level of the nation-state, the socialists used museums as a platform to construct a new Spanish identity. The Prado, which reflected an old-guard notion of Spanish artistic patrimony, was conspicuously neglected (to the scandalous point where its roof had begun to leak). Instead, the socialists focused on the new Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofÃ-a, the ambitious museum of modem art where Spain could be showcased as a forward-looking nation. At the Museo SefardÃ- in Toledo, the state sought to simultaneously recover the nation's Jewish heritage and thus its divetsity. But transforming society was more subtle than merely substituting the plural for the autocratic. A stunning example is the socialists' permissiveness towards the Museo de Ejército and Museo de Alcázai, where military history remained a one-sided paean to Fianco, fascism, and the destiuction of the Republic . "By granting the ultralight wing theit coiners of space and allowing the time its adherents need to adjust to theii unexpected fate," Reuben HoIo suggests, the socialists "contributed to the calm and constructive atmosphere of rhe transition " (90). While the symbolic reconstruction ofthe nation-state was occulting in Madrid, the regions were creating (or expanding) museums to emphasize theii autonomy. In die Extremaduran capital of Badajoz, the regional government made the dramatic gesture of renovating a Franco-era prison for the new Museo Extremeño e Iberoamerican de Arte Contempoiáneo. The spectacular gamble 310 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies by the Basque regional government on the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao is just one conspicuous example of daring attempts to assert cultural autonomy in die regions. From AndalucÃ-a to Catalu ña, Valencia to Asturias, museums...

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