Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-revolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton (review)

In his study of race formation in the years following the Mexican Revolution, David Dalton's Mestizo Modernity explores how state officials and the community at large shape and perceive distinctions between race and mestizaje and how these issues are represented, reinforced, and critiqued in Mexican cultural production. Building upon Joshua Lund's description of the mestizo state as a political entity that conflates mixed-race identity and Western-style modernity, Dalton poses that the use of technology in the postrevolutionary period was an essential component of assimilation to modernity and thus to official mestizaje (1–2). Throughout the book, Dalton engages in a deliberately avant la lettre dialogue with cyborgian and posthuman theory to frame a nuanced critical reading of the representations of "technology as a means for modernizing and assimilating the masses" in officialist and state-sponsored art, film, narrative, and theater (3).

Mestizo Modernity is divided into four chapters that date from roughly 1920 to 1968. The first chapter addresses José Vasconcelos's notions of racial utopia by reading his 1925 essay La raza cósmica alongside his lesser-known play Prometeo vencedor (c. 1916). Dalton proposes that the play offers greater insight into Vasconcelos's understanding of race and eugenics and suggests that "Vasconcelos viewed science—when subordinated to aesthetics—as key to producing an improved humanity, or even posthumanity" (32). Although the technical demands of the play (characters appearing out of mid-air, etc.) would have rendered it unstageable, Dalton suggests that the medium of a scripted play encourages Vasconcelos's audience to engage in their own mental staging of the events within. It is in this medium, and not in an essay, that Vasconcelos proposes a vision that goes beyond the already utopic concept of the cosmic race. By using science and technology to metaphysical ends, the mestizo raza cósmica is able to attain the ultimate evolution and redemption of humanity: "the erasure and the superation of the body" (44). Read in such a way, mestizaje is not the ultimate objective of Vasconcelos's utopian aims, but rather the means to a truly cosmic (and posthuman) race that transcends embodiment and, by extension, any notion of a racial or racialized body.

The second chapter focuses on the dialogues and tensions formed between statist policies of official mestizaje and the representations of racial hybridity and modernity in the murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. While both artists embrace Marxist ideology in their works, they could still be contradictory in terms of representation and subject matter. Dalton poses that the artists' differing notions of mestizaje are most evident in their representations of technologized bodies. In his readings of Cortés y la Malinche and the panels of the La conquista de México, Dalton argues that Orozco's mechanoid conquistadors and naked, often abject Amerindian bodies reflect the artist's view that Indigenous assimilation to official mestizo society through technology was not only necessary but inevitable. Rivera, meanwhile, operates on a different binary, with a tendency to align the United States with symbols related to technology and Mexico to spiritual and/or Indigenous imagery. Dalton observes that Rivera's frequent pairing of science and technology with pre-Colombian or Christian deities was the muralist's way of reminding his audience that Indigenous spirituality and ways of knowing were vital contributions to a modern and modernizing society (82–83). In the 1953 Historia de la medicina en México, for example, Dalton notes that both the Aztec curandero and the modern doctors are working with the same medical herbs. Furthermore, modern medicine is not portrayed as entirely or automatically superior: on the pre-Colombian side, the healers are all tending to someone, while the modern side portrays bureaucrats blocking the entrance to the hospital, with crowds of sick patients waiting outside. Dalton recognizes that Rivera's viewpoints could be problematic (as when he describes Indigenous spirituality as "innocent," 82) but...