Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations ed. by Stuart A. Day (review)

Day's edited collection surveys aspects of Mexican culture. Its definition of Mexican culture is vast, including print culture, such as novels, as well as visual culture, which encompasses art and film, and new media. Each chapter in Modern Mexican Culture centers around a single topic. Analisa Taylor's, for instance, focuses on "Milpa," Jacqueline E. Bixler's on "1968," and Dana A. Meredith and Luis Alberto Rodríguez Cortés on "Feminicide." The chapters also have subtitles that point to their dialogue with existing scholarship. In the case of "Milpa," Taylor has given the subtitle, "Mesoamerican Resistance to Agricultural Imperialism." This is followed by a list of primary materials, such as films, artwork or literary texts. The chapter then explains how these primary materials relate to Mexico's social, political and historical context.

Modern Mexican Culture includes contributions by well-known scholars, such as Jacqueline E. Bixler, Robert McKee Irwin, Ryan Long, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, and Emily Hind alongside of works by emerging scholars, like David S. Dalton. This variety of scholarship is one of its strengths. At the same time, even though several scholars received their early academic training in Mexico, all of these scholars are currently based in the US academy. This is likely because the approach to the collection is one primarily adopted by the US academy.

Day introduces the structure of the book and surveys Mexican history. He skillfully describes how he has already used these strategies in his classroom, and the ways that he has already made these topics come alive for his students by relating them to current social issues in the US. At the same time, Day tries to do justice to Mexican history in a few pages, and makes some remarks more appropriate to a specialized audience, such as jumping from the issue of impunity after the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 to impunity in Mexico in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

The work continues with Marta Caminero-Santangelo's chapter, titled, "DREAM-ers," subtitled, "Youth and Migration: American DREAMers and Mexico," and begins with a list of relevant novels, films, cartoons, and testimonies. She then offers a historical context of the failed DREAM act and elaborates on the problems with the narrative of the good immigrant. She discusses some of the primary materials, such as Julia Álvarez's novel, Return to Sender and Gabriela Adera et al.'s collection of testimonies of undocumented students at UCLA. She concludes by considering those DREAMers who have returned to Mexico, the increasing presence of unaccompanied minors in the US, and questions of how cultural production around immigration might develop following the election of the current president of the US.

The book then moves to Analisa Taylor's work on "Milpa. Mesoamerican Resistance to Agricultural Imperialism," which analyzes posters from resistance movements to agri-business. Christopher Conway's chapter on charros follows this intervention. He successfully demonstrates the ways that the charro has become a complex symbol of Mexican nationalism that relates to Mexican gender ideals. His notes at the end of the chapter are especially helpful to introduce the topic to scholars beginning to approach Mexico. The collection then focuses explicitly on earlier decades of the twentieth century. Ryan Long's chapter, "Print," for instance, discusses the Taller de Gráfica Popular and the circulation of images from this workshop from the 1930s to the 1950s. This chapter sheds light on an understudied art movement and includes several images. Long ties their linocuts and posters to famous Mexican muralists, and convincingly demonstrates that their work —although promoting Mexican state ideology—confronted global fascism.

Following Long's contribution, Dalton discusses the role of education in the Revolution, and, in a welcome departure from typical discussions on the topic, relates rural teachers and Juan Rulfo's short stories. Then, Fernando Fabio Sánchez analyzes murder and democracy in Mexico, expertly using key works to analyze specific periods in the twentieth century...