Mexican Public Intellectuals


Book Description

In Mexico, the participation of intellectuals in public life has always been extraordinary, and for many the price can be high. Highlighting prominent figures that have made incursions into issues such as elections, human rights, foreign policy, and the drug war, this volume paints a picture of the ever-changing context of Mexican intellectualism.




The Shadow of Ulysses


Book Description

Written by one of the most promising young scholars on the Mexican intellectual scene, The Shadow of Ulysses attempts to reconnect the American and Mexican intellectual experiences by exploring historical as well as contemporary issues in both countries. The book's first chapters discuss the relationship between American and Mexican intellectuals in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and offer a sociological comparison of the 1960s intellectual generations in the United States and Mexico. Later chapters provide a critical assessment of two prominent Mexican public intellectuals well known to the American reader: Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Castaneda. The Shadow of Ulysses, the Mexican edition of which was awarded the Alfonso Reyes National Prize, offers a rare glimpse into the development of contemporary Mexican thought and reveals the under-recognized intellectual ties that existed between our two countries in the first half of the twentieth century.




Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico


Book Description

In developing countries, the extent to which intellectuals disengage themselves in state activities has widespread consequences for the social, political, and economic development of those societies. Roderic Camps’ examination of intellectuals in Mexico is the first study of a Latin American country to detail the structure of intellectual life, rather than merely considering intellectual ideas. Camp has used original sources, including extensive interviews, to provide new data about the evolution of leading Mexican intellectuals and their relationship to politics and politicians since 1920.




In Defense of My People


Book Description

One of the most influential Mexican Americans of his time, Alonso S. Perales (1898-1960) is the subject of this engrossing collection of scholarly essays. A graduate of George Washington University School of Law, he was one of the earliest Mexican-American attorneys to practice law in Texas and was sworn into the bar in 1926. Perales helped found the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), served his country in several diplomatic capacities and was a prolific writer.In Defense of My People sheds light on Perales' activism and the history of Mexican-American and Latino civil rights movements. The essays, written by scholars representing a number of disciplines from the U.S. and Mexico, touch on a variety of topics, including the impact of religion on Latinos, the concept of "race" and individual versus community action to bring about social and political change.Edited and with an introduction and chapter by law scholar Michael A. Olivas, In Defense of My People is the first full-length book available on this trailblazing Mexican-American leader. Scholars were able to take advantage of Perales' never-before-accessible personal archive, which his family donated to the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and is now housed at the University of Houston's Special Collections Department of the M.D. Anderson Library. Originally presented at a conference on Alonso S. Perales at the University of Houston in 2012, this volume is required reading for anyone interested in the history of civil rights organizations, public intellectuals of the early 20th century and Mexican-American political development in Texas.




In Defense of My People


Book Description

One of the most influential Mexican Americans of his time, Alonso S. Perales (1898-1960) is the subject of this engrossing collection of scholarly essays. A graduate of George Washington University School of Law, he was one of the earliest Mexican-American attorneys to practice law in Texas and was sworn into the bar in 1926. Perales helped found the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), served his country in several diplomatic capacities and was a prolific writer. In Defense of My People sheds light on Perales' activism and the history of Mexican-American and Latino civil rights movements. The essays, written by scholars representing a number of disciplines from the U.S. and Mexico, touch on a variety of topics, including the impact of religion on Latinos, the concept of "race" and individual versus community action to bring about social and political change. Edited and with an introduction and chapter by law scholar Michael A. Olivas, In Defense of My People is the first full-length book available on this trailblazing Mexican-American leader. Scholars were able to take advantage of Perales' never-before-accessible personal archive, which his family donated to the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and is now housed at the University of Houston's Special Collections Department of the M.D. Anderson Library. Originally presented at a conference on Alonso S. Perales at the University of Houston in 2012, this volume is required reading for anyone interested in the history of civil rights organizations, public intellectuals of the early 20th century and Mexican-American political development in Texas.







The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage


Book Description

Explores the wide-ranging impact of the Mexican Revolution on global cinema and Western intellectual thought. The first major social revolution of the twentieth century, the Mexican Revolution was visually documented in technologically novel ways and to an unprecedented degree during its initial armed phase (1910–21) and the subsequent years of reconstruction (1921–40). Offering a sweeping and compelling new account of this iconic revolution, The Mexican Revolution on the World Stage reveals its profound impact on both global cinema and intellectual thought in and beyond Mexico. Focusing on the period from 1940 to 1970, Adela Pineda Franco examines a group of North American, European, and Latin American filmmakers and intellectuals who mined this extensive visual archive to produce politically engaged cinematic works that also reflect and respond to their own sociohistorical contexts. The author weaves together multilayered analysis of individual films, the history of their production and reception, and broader intellectual developments to illuminate the complex relationship between culture and revolution at the onset of World War II, during the Cold War, and amid the anti-systemic movements agitating Latin America in the 1960s. Ambitious in scope, this book charts an innovative transnational history of not only the visual representation but also the very idea of revolution. Adela Pineda Franco is Professor of Latin American Literature and Film at Boston University. She is the coeditor (with Jaime Marroquin Arredondo and Magdalena Mieri) of Open Borders to a Revolution: Culture, Politics, and Migration.




Reality in Movement


Book Description

In the last couple of decades there has been a surge of interest in Octavio Paz's life and work, and a number of important books have been published on Paz. However, most of these books are of a biographical nature, or they examine Paz's role in the various intellectual initiatives he headed in Mexico, specifically the journals he founded. Reality in Movement looks at a wide range of topics of interest in Paz's career, including his engagement with the subversive, adversary strain in Western culture; his meditations on questions of cultural identity and intercultural contact; his dialogue with both leftist and conservative ideological traditions; his interest in feminism and psychoanalysis, and his theory of poetry. It concludes with a chapter on Octavio Paz as a literary character—a kind of reception study. Offering a complex and nuanced portrait of Paz as a writer and thinker—as well as an understanding of the era in which he lived—Reality in Movement will appeal to students of Octavio Paz and of Mexican literature more generally, and to readers with an interest in the many significant literary, cultural, political, and historical topics Paz wrote about over the course of his long career.




Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico


Book Description

In Mexico, as elsewhere, the national space, that network of places where the people interact with state institutions, is constantly changing. How it does so, how it develops, is a historical process-a process that Claudio Lomnitz exposes and investigates in this book, which develops a distinct view of the cultural politics of nation building in Mexico. Lomnitz highlights the varied, evolving, and often conflicting efforts that have been made by Mexicans over the past two centuries to imagine, organize, represent, and know their country, its relations with the wider world, and its internal differences and inequalities. Firmly based on particulars and committed to the specificity of such thinking, this book also has broad implications for how a theoretically informed history can and should be done. An exploration of Mexican national space by way of an analysis of nationalism, the public sphere, and knowledge production, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico brings an original perspective to the dynamics of national cultural production on the periphery. Its blending of theoretical innovation, historical inquiry, and critical engagement provides a new model for the writing of history and anthropology in contemporary Mexico and beyond. Public Worlds Series, volume 9




Responding to Crisis in Contemporary Mexico


Book Description

Regarded as among modern Mexico’s foremost creative writers, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis, and Elena Poniatowska are also esteemed as analyzers of society, critics of public officials, and both molders and mirrors of public opinion. This book offers a reading of Mexican current affairs from 1968 to 1995 through a comparative study of these four writers’ political work. In hundreds of articles, essays, and comments published in the Mexican press—Excélsior, La Cultura en México, La Jornada, Proceso, and many other publications—these writers tackled current affairs as events unfolded. Yet the lack of detailed examination of their contributions in the press has left a gap in our understanding of their vital role in raising awareness of national concerns as they were happening. Claire Brewster has mined direct quotations from a host of publications to illustrate the techniques that they used in combating government and editorial restraints. Brewster first addresses the Student Movement of 1968—the violent suppression of which was a watershed in the relationship between the Mexican government and people—and illustrates the ways in which the student crisis affected the writers’ relationships with presidents Luis Echeverría Alvarez and José López Portillo. She next considers the profound social and political repercussions of the 1985 earthquake as described by Poniatowska and Monsiváis and the consequent emergence of Mexican civil society. She then outlines Paz’s and Monsiváis’s vociferous responses to the 1988 presidential election campaigns and their highly contentious result, and lastly she examines the Chiapas rebellion from January to July 1994. The eloquent Zapatista spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, challenged Mexican writers to a duel of words, and Brewster analyzes the ways in which the four writers took up the gauntlet—and in so doing reveals the development of their political thoughts and their relationships with the Mexican people and the federal government. The work of these four authors charts an important historical era, and a close examination of their essays reveals their maturation as writers and provides an understanding of the development of Mexican society. By bringing their opinions and attitudes to light, Brewster unearths a rich lode of insight into the inner workings of Mexican intellectuals and invites observers of contemporary Mexico to reconsider their role in reflecting social change.