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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 127-128



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The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson. The Latin American Readers Series. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Photographs. Plates. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Index. x, 792 pp. Cloth, $84.95. Paper, $24.95.

Some 20 years ago, Dirk Raat edited an eclectic, two-volume set of documents examining the Mexican nation-state. Mexico: From Independence to Revolution, 1810- 1910 (University of Nebraska Press, 1982) and (with William Beezley) Twentieth-Century Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 1986) included entries ranging from Agustín de Iturbide's Plan of Iguala to a comic strip by Abel Quezada, and for many years the volumes were a staple in undergraduate study. Raat and Beezley's choice of documents also captured a historiographical moment in Mexican studies. Taken as a whole, the selections conveyed a somewhat traditional understanding of the Mexican nation-state as a bounded, nationalist project forever struggling to overcome the odds of foreign intervention and economic and cultural imperialism.

We are now at a very different historiographical moment, to which the present collection is excellent testimony. As Gilbert Joseph and Timothy Henderson state early on, they chose these readings to "call into question linear notions of modernization as an inexorable and overwhelming historical current" (p. 2). There is an impressive, even passionate, commitment to excavating the embedded cultural, political, and economic reference points that arguably constitute something called a Mexican nationalist imaginary. At the same time, the editors have methodically sought out the contradictions of that imaginary, offering both official, and many unofficial, voices. The result simultaneously exposes and subverts the nation's foundational fictions. "In the process the anthology unpacks the enduring images of Mexican political economy and culture that many foreigners nurture of Mexico—images that are themselves an important dimension of Mexican history and in whose shaping both Mexicans and outsiders have often colluded" (pp. 2-3).

Indeed, there is a lot of unpacking to do. With some one hundred documents, the volume offers a vast, eclectic, and comprehensive accounting of several thousand years of history. From Aztec and Mayan creation stories to Guillermo Gómez Peña's treatise on the "New World Border," this anthology offers more than a mere survey of writings by and about the inhabitants of a place called Mexico. It aims to remind readers of the importance of origins, while questioning the processes that mythologize those origins; it validates the political significance of national boundaries while simultaneously revealing their lived permeability. They convey this broader aim from the very beginning in the section entitled "The Search for 'Lo Mexicano,'" which contains readings that range from excerpts by Joel Poinsett (the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico) to Roger Bartra and ranchera songs. An intellectual preamble of sorts, this first section sets the tone for the volume as a whole by challenging the reader to think about what Mexico "is" and "means"—to Mexicans, to the reader, and to others. [End Page 127]

There are a number of impressive features to this anthology. First and foremost is the sheer array of materials presented. While it includes many of the standard documents one would expect to find in such a collection—such as Iturbide's Plan of Iguala or John Reed's description of Pancho Villa—there are also many, many sources that one will be delighted to find for the first time in English. For example, there is the complete address to the nation by Benito Juárez (containing his famous phrase "peace means respect for the rights of others"), an excerpt about peasant struggle from Rubén Jaramillo's autobiography, James Creelman's interview with Porfirio Díaz, and letters to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas from the 1988 elections. In addition to these wonderfully varied primary sources (which include poems, song lyrics, and excerpts from novels), the collection includes well-chosen excerpts from secondary materials: Enrique Florescano on the colonial hacienda, for example, or Daniel Cosío Villegas on the stagnation of the revolutionary project. There are...

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