The Eagle and the Virgin. Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 ed. by Mary Kay Vaughan, Stephen E. Lewis (review)

The Latin Americanist, Spring 2007 novelas, e informa las interrogantes que hilan las entrevistas de 10s autores. No cabe duda que el estudio es una excelente fuente para un primer encuentro con el genero de la novela moderna dominicana de posguerra. Ademas de ofrecer un estudio riguroso de 10s aspectos formales y tecnicos de cada novela, de apuntar las innovaciones que destacan cada una de las demas, y de desenredar las complejas relaciones entre personajes y niveles de lecturas y hasta la relacion entre autor y obra; la autora incluye entrevistas deslumbrantes por reveladoras, y un “addendumbibliografico” quecolumbra ocho obras acerca de la intervencion de 1965 para el curioso que quisiera seguir explorando el tema en su inflexion literaria. lost Manuel Batista Department of Languages and Culture Studies University of North Carolina at Charlotte THE EAGLEAND THE VIRGIN. NATION AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN MEXICO, 2920-2940. BY MARY KAYVAUGHAN AND STEPHEN E. LEWIS(EDS.). DURHAM: DUKE UP, 2006, P. 363, $23.95. The word “necessary” has been used to describe this book, and even though I often distrust such definite statements (nobook is really necessary), I cannot help but conclude after reading The Eagle and the Virgin that this one is truly necessary. It is necessary because, considering the presence and importance that Mexico has to the everyday life, economy, politics, culture, and even cuisine in the United States, the lack of academic studies aiming to understand a country that is also a neighbor with a complex mutual history, is nothing less than shocking. This book is therefore necessary because it is about Mexico, but also and most importantly because it is a very rich, coherent, and diverse collection of studies focused on that country’s modern culture -after the revolution of 1910. In a metaphorical way we could say that it is a window that precedes the infamous wall some want to build between the two nations. To understand contemporary Mexico, one has to look back to what happened after the revolution, and that is exactly what this collection of essays, put together by Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, does. Divided in four parts (“The Aesthetics of National Building,” ”Utopian Projects of the State,” ”Mass Communication and Nation Building,” and ”Social Constructions of Nation”), the book covers all the major areas of the politics of Mexican culture and national identity during the early 20th century, showing with great insight the origins of modern Mexico or more precisely of that elusive and helpful term- Mexicanness. Engaging and often surprising, these essays offer a clear picture of how the identity of that nation was constructed based on the indigenous and the popular, but filtered through the avant-garde and other forms of high culture. This interest in the indigenous and the popular, in other words, was not the spontaneous expression of some primal ”national” soul latent in the artistic expressions Book Reviews of the masses, but a calculated project directed from the highest circles of political and artistic power. It was not even exclusive to Mexico but ”the shared product in an ongoing transnational process of modern identity construction” (4). Nonetheless, the revision of the Mexican case in particular is welcome and relevant. Touching on three main reservoirs of Mexicanness-the indigenous, the popular, and the exotic other -these essays discuss painting, muralismo, radio, music, city life, cinema, official public health and hygiene programs, religion, and education as well as their relationship with social changes. They also analyze the role that women and other marginalized groups had in modifying the traditional image of Mexico. I consider this volume a very commendable project; I find all of its essays interesting, rigorous, and useful. Among the best, “Screening the Nation,” Joanne Hershfield’s insightful revision of Mexican cinema and its importance in the construction of national identity, is an extraordinary model of concision and insight. In her essay, Hershfield concludes that ”Mexican cinema in the 1930s may be defined as a national cinema because its audiences perceived it as such” (275), and that is an important point to consider because it is often ignored or forgotten. The cinematic images that ”populated the screen for more than twenty years” (275) were alsoproiected...