Embodying Mexico examines two performative icons of Mexicanness--the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake Patzcuaro--in numerous manifestations, including film, theater, tourist guides, advertisements, and souvenirs. Covering a ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era to the present day, Hellier-Tinoco's analysis is thoroughly grounded in Mexican politics and history, and simultaneously incorporates choreographic, musicological, and dramaturgical analysis.Exploring multiple contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe, Embodying Mexico expands and enriches our understanding of complex processes of creating national icons, performance repertoires, and tourist attractions, drawing on wide-ranging ethnographic, archival, and participatory experience. An extensive companion website illustrates the author's arguments through audio and video.

Dance and the Arts in Mexico, 1920–1950 tells the story of the arts explosion that launched at the end of the Mexican revolution, when composers, choreographers, and muralists had produced state-sponsored works in wide public spaces. The book assesses how the “cosmic generation” in Mexico connected the nation-body and the dancer’s body in artistic movements between 1920 and 1950. It first discusses the role of dance in particular, the convergences of composers and visual artists in dance productions, and the allegorical relationship between the dancer's body and the nation-body in state-sponsored performances. The arts were of critical import in times of political and social transition, and the dynamic between the dancer’s body and the national body shifted as the government stance had also shifted. Second, this book examines more deeply the involvement of US artists and patrons in this Mexican arts movement during the period. Given the power imbalance between north and south, these exchanges were vexed. Still, the results for both parties were invaluable. Ultimately, this book argues in favor of the benefits that artists on both sides of the border received from these exchanges.

This interdisciplinary book explores human rights in the Americas from multiple perspectives and fields. Taking 1492 as a point of departure, the text explores Eurocentric historiographies of human rights and offer a more complete understanding of the genealogy of the human rights discourse and its many manifestations in the Americas. The essays use a variety of approaches to reveal the larger contexts from which they emerge, providing a cross-sectional view of subjects, countries, methodologies and foci explicitly dedicated toward understanding historical factors and circumstances that have shaped human rights nationally and internationally within the Americas. The chapters explore diverse cultural, philosophical, political and literary expressions where human rights discourses circulate across the continent taking into consideration issues such as race, class, gender, genealogy and nationality. While acknowledging the ongoing centrality of the nation, the volume promotes a shift in the study of the Americas as a dynamic transnational space of conflict, domination, resistance, negotiation, complicity, accommodation, dialogue, and solidarity where individuals, nations, peoples, institutions, and intellectual and political movements share struggles, experiences, and imaginaries. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of InterAmerican studies and those from all disciplines interested in Human Rights.

This book analyzes how national and international dancers contributed to developing Mexico's cultural politics and notions of the nation at different historical moments. It emphasizes how dancers and other moving bodies resisted and reproduced racial and social hierarchies stemming from colonial Mexico (1521-1821). Relying on extensive archival research, choreography as an analytical methodology, and theories of race, dance, and performance studies, author Jose Reynoso examines how dance and other forms of embodiment participated in Mexico's formation after the Mexican War of Independence (1821-1876), the Porfirian dictatorship (1876-1911), and postrevolutionary Mexico (1919-1940). In so doing, the book analyzes how underlying colonial logics continued to influence relationships amongst dancers, other artists, government officials, critics, and audiences of different backgrounds as they refashioned their racial, social, cultural, and national identities. The book proposes and develops two main concepts that explore these mutually formative interactions among such diverse people: embodied mestizo modernisms and transnational nationalisms. 'Embodied mestizo modernisms' refers to combinations of indigenous, folkloric, ballet, and modern dance practices in works choreographed by national and international dancers with different racial and social backgrounds. The book contends that these mestizo modernist dance practices challenged assumptions about racial neutrality with which whiteness historically established its ostensible supremacy in constructing Mexico's 'transnational nationalisms'. This argument holds that notions of the nation-state and national identities are not produced exclusively by a nation's natives but also by historical transnational forces and (dancing) bodies whose influences shape local politics, economic interests, and artistic practices.

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masquerade—the representation of Whiteness as Indigeneity—during the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Adopting a broad decolonial perspective while remaining grounded in the history of local racial categories, Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other. Close readings of twenty films and primary source material illustrate how Mexican cinema has mediated race, especially in relation to gender, in ways that project national specificity, but also reproduce racist tendencies with respect to beauty, desire, and protagonism that survive to this day. This sweeping survey illuminates how Golden Age films produced diverse, even contradictory messages about the place of Indigeneity in the national culture. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: https://www.openmonographs.org/. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7153

Together with the Olympics, world's fairs are one of the few regular international events of sufficient scale to showcase a spectrum of sights, wonders, learning opportunities, technological advances, and new (or renewed) urban districts, and to present them all to a mass audience. Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader breaks new ground in scholarship on world's fairs by incorporating a number of short new texts that investigate world's fairs in their multiple aspects: political, urban/architectural, anthropological/ sociological, technological, commercial, popular, and representational. Contributors come from eight different countries and represent affiliations in academia, museums and libraries, professional and architectural firms, non-profit organizations, and government regulatory agencies. In taking the measure of both the material artifacts and the larger cultural production of world's fairs, the volume presents its own phantasmagoria of disciplinary perspectives, historical periods, geographical locales, media, and messages, mirroring the microcosmic form of the world's fair itself.

Disability and racial difference in Mexico's early post-revolutionary period

Embodied Politics illuminates the influential force of public health promotion in indigenous migrant communities by examining the Indigenous Health Project (IHP), a culturally and linguistically competent initiative that uses health workshops, health messages, and social programs to mitigate the structural vulnerability of Oaxacan migrants in California. Embodied Politics reconstructs how this initiative came to exist and describes how it operates. At the same time, it points out the conflicts, resistances, and counter-acts that emerge through the IHP’s attempts to guide the health behaviors and practices of Triqui and Mixteco migrants. Arguing for a structurally competent approach to migrant health, Embodied Politics shows how efforts to promote indigenous health may actually reinforce the same social and political economic forces, namely structural racism and neoliberalism, that are undermining the health of indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico and the United States.

This book is an innovative work that takes a fresh approach to the concept of race as a social factor made concrete in popular forms, such as film, television, and music. The essays push past the reaffirmation of static conceptions of identity, authenticity, or conventional interpretations of stereotypes and bridge the intertextual gap between theories of community enactment and cultural representation.