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Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity by John Mraz (review)
- The Latin Americanist
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 54, Number 3, September 2010
- pp. 109-111
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Book Reviews it provides the reader a well-rounded perspective on Martı́nez Peláez and the reception of the text itself. Lovell and Lutz also take pains to give the reader a thorough historical background of the author and the politics that so dramatically affected his life, information that greatly enriches one’s understanding of the text. Martı́nez Peláez himself saw his ideal audience as being “educated but non-specialist” (xxii), and this translation of his monumental La patria del criollo certainly holds appeal for a non-specialist public interested in learning more about Guatemala, Central America, or Latin America in general. However, the book’s detailed analysis of both ideological and material aspects of Guatemala’s colonial legacy will likewise appeal to specialists already well-versed in the field. Paul Worley Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures University of North Dakota LOOKING FOR MEXICO: MODERN VISUAL CULTURE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY. By John Mraz. Durham: Duke UP, 2009, p. 360, $84.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. In Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity, John Mraz provides a masterful analysis of visual representations of Mexico from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on the author’s expertise as both a scholar of visual culture and contributor to the contemporary arts scene, Looking for Mexico represents Mraz’s accumulation of an unmatched breadth of knowledge, and provides an excellent analytical synthesis of the development of modern visual culture. Boldly entering what the author fully acknowledges is a “potential minefield” (1)—the question of mexicanidad and lo mexicano in constructions of national identity—Mraz emerges unscathed, and indeed triumphant. Mraz defines modern visual culture as that genre of images the technical production of which both lends an aura of credibility to, and creates the possibility of, mass production and consumption. His analysis begins with the introduction of the daguerrotype to Mexico and the subsequent and more significant popularity of the mass-produced and comparatively affordable carte-de-visite. Also integral to Mraz’s definition is modern visual culture’s capacity for the production of celebrities whose fame derives from their appearance in widely-available images. The Empress Carlota, who collected assiduously and appeared in tarjetas de visita, provides a telling example of the genre’s early importance. Mraz follows the development of these images of Mexico and Mexicans through the arrival of picture postcards, photojournalism, cinema, illustrated magazines, and digital imagery. The expansiveness of his topic necessarily dictates some selectivity on the part of the author, but the diversity of examples he chooses is nevertheless admirable. The analysis is accompanied by an excellent series of images, including everything from the “Mexican types” of 109 The Latin Americanist, September 2010 the Cruces y Campa studio and the digital manipulations of photographer Pedro Meyer to frame enlargements taken from films such as Fernando de Fuentes’s El compadre Mendoza and Francisco Vargas’s El violı́n, providing ample material for Mraz’s critical eye and illustrating his provocative arguments. A simultaneous line of analysis is Mraz’s central focus upon the picturesque and anti-picturesque in the development of mexicanidad. Here, Mraz also begins in the nineteenth century, with images of Mexico’s defeat by the United States and the occupation of Mexico City by the forces of Winfield Scott. Although the tension between these two constructions often overlaps with the differences between foreign and national representations of Mexico, as in Hugo Brehme’s exotic photographs of the Mexican countryside, Mraz shows in his analysis of the works of Tina Modotti and the Hermanos Mayo that foreign image-makers sometimes chose the more challenging anti-picturesque path. Conversely, he suggests that Mexican nationals have also produced images that employ a picturesque gaze, as in Graciela Iturbide’s photographs of the women of Juchitán, for whom the photographer was just as much an outsider as if she had hailed from a foreign country. Although both types of images have played a role in shaping lo mexicano, Mraz demonstrates that anti-picturesque visual culture is filled with images that take a more critical approach to understanding both the past and the present. He argues that the...