Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory, and the Making of Modern Mexico by Horacio Legrás (review)

Horacio Legrás asks how this happened: "Whole areas of Mexican life that were invisible or idealized before the revolution—including indigenous people, laboring women, homosexuals, children, peasants—acquired rights of visibility" during the 1920s and 1930s (4). This newfound visibility, he argues, resulted from a "surge of textuality as a modeling force" that linked "art and culture . . . with the process of state formation" (9). The author's treatment of "society as a text" yields some rich insights.

Legrás begins by identifying 1921 as the starting point for the transformation, then describes the "extension" and "depth" of the postrevolutionary transformation. The first part of the book mostly reiterates arguments that other authors have developed; yet, it also offers some novel insights. For two examples, Legrás proposes that the postrevolutionary state introduced a novel and "intense attention to childhood" (36), and he shows how the literature of the era constructed male heroes as "idiots of destiny" pulled along by history (88). As an alternative to this "primordially. . . male ideology" (88) of heroic destiny, Legrás looks to Frida Kahlo and Amelia/o Robles Ávila for narratives that developed around women and transgender individuals.

The book offers compelling reinterpretations of some of the most prominent figures of the era. After touring Vasconcelos's massive oeuvre, including some lesser-known texts, Legrás intriguingly argues that "Vasconcelos's utopia" was much more progressive than we typically acknowledge. Equally intriguingly, he argues that Diego Rivera became dominant over José Clemente Orozco because he represented history in a manner that was more conducive to immortalizing certain "fantasies" of the Revolution.

The last chapters consider how film and photography narrated the Revolution. Legrás discusses images by figures such as Edward Weston and Hugo Brehm without showing us the photographs, but the few images he does provide result in two important insights. First, in his discussion of "Venustiano Carranza arriving at Cuernavaca with his Comitiva," he notes that this chaotic and unintelligible image takes on meaning only when we know its caption, which helps us begin to understand the proliferation of captions that we find scratched into photographs from the era (155). Second, Legrás suggests that despite scholars' tendency to focus on a relatively small number of iconic images, it is blurry images such as this one of Carranza with his Comitiva, showing confusing groups of people in uncertain activities, that perhaps best represent the reality, rather than the "fantasy," of the Revolution.

The book offers intriguing insights, but also has problems. It comes across as a collection of uneven meditations that do not coalesce into a sustained analysis or argument. A conclusion could have brought its various meditations together as a sustained argument. Historians and art historians might find themselves frustrated by the extended use of discourse analysis of "textuality" without social grounding or visual analysis. And the author grants ideas such as "nationalism" and "culture" agency as though they were people, arguing, for instance, that "nationalism sought to overcome textuality and to replace it with its own identitarian operations" (14), and that in 1921 "culture invented the nation for the Mexican Revolution" (1).

Most importantly, the virtues of the book are undermined by its lack of clear attributions. For example, it borrows heavily from my book Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) without acknowledging this. The first half of Legrás's book analyzes the same events as the first part of my book, in the same order: the 1910 Porfirian centennial celebration, the 1921 India Bonita contest, the Exposition of Popular Arts, Dr Atl's catalog of popular art, Adolfo Best Maugard's Noche Mexicana, the role of popular theater in the construction of the idea of "the Mexican Indian," and a critical comparison of the visions of Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos. He reaches the same conclusions, including...