Looking for Mexico

Modern Visual Culture and National Identity

Autor: Mraz, John
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822344292
eISBN Pdf: 9780822392200
Lugar de publicación: Durham , Estados Unidos
Año de publicación digital: 2009
Mes: Junio
Páginas: 360
DDC: 305.868/72
Idioma: Ingles

Descripción

In Looking for Mexico, a leading historian of visual culture, John Mraz, provides a panoramic view of Mexico’s modern visual culture from the U.S. invasion of 1847 to the present. Along the way, he illuminates the powerful role of photographs, films, illustrated magazines, and image-filled history books in the construction of national identity, showing how Mexicans have both made themselves and been made with the webs of significance spun by modern media. Central to Mraz’s book is photography, which was distributed widely throughout Mexico in the form of cartes-de-visite, postcards, and illustrated magazines. Mraz analyzes the work of a broad range of photographers, including Guillermo Kahlo, Winfield Scott, Hugo Brehme, Agustín Víctor Casasola, Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Héctor García, Pedro Meyer, and the New Photojournalists. He also examines representations of Mexico’s past in the country’s influential picture histories: popular, large-format, multivolume series replete with thousands of photographs and an assortment of texts.

Turning to film, Mraz compares portrayals of the Mexican Revolution by Fernando de Fuentes to the later movies of Emilio Fernández and Gabriel Figueroa. He considers major stars of Golden Age cinema as gender archetypes for mexicanidad, juxtaposing the charros (hacienda cowboys) embodied by Pedro Infante, Pedro Armendáriz, and Jorge Negrete with the effacing women: the mother, Indian, and shrew as played by Sara García, Dolores del Río, and María Félix. Mraz also analyzes the leading comedians of the Mexican screen, representations of the 1968 student revolt, and depictions of Frida Kahlo in films made by Paul Leduc and Julie Taymor. Filled with more than fifty illustrations, Looking for Mexico is an exuberant plunge into Mexico’s national identity, its visual culture, and the connections between the two.

Contents
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One: War, Portraits, Mexican Types, and Porfirian Progress (1847-1910)
Two: Revolution and Culture (1910-1940)
Three: Cinema and Celebrities in the Golden Age
Four: Illustrated Magazines, Photojournalism, and Historia grafica (1940-1968)
Five: New Ocular Cultures and the Old Battle to Visualize the Past and Present (1968-2007)
Notes
Bibliography
Index