Fragments of a Golden Age

Gilbert M. Joseph is Farnam Professor of History at Yale University and the coeditor of Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico and Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations, both published by Duke University Press.Anne Rubenstein is Associate Professor of History, York University, Toronto and author of Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation, also published by Duke University Press.Eric Zolov is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook and the author of Refried Elvis: the Rise of the Mexican Counterculture and coeditor of Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History.

• List of Illustrations Foreword / Elena Poniatowska Acknowledgements I. Reclaiming the History of Postrevolutionary Mexico Assembling the Fragments: Writing a Cultural History of Mexico Since 1940 / Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov Making It Real Compared to What? Reconceptualizing Mexican History Since 1940 / Arthur Schmidt II. At Play Amongst the Fragments Mexico’s Pepsi Challenge: Traditional Cooking, Mass Consumption, and National Identity / Jeffrey M. Pilcher The Selling of Mexico: Tourism and the State, 1929–1952 / Alex Saragoza Today, Tomorrow, and Always: The Golden Age of Illustrated Magazines in Mexico, 1937–1960 / John Mraz Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema / Seth Fein Bodies, Cities, Cinema: Pedro Infante’s Death as Political Spectacle / Anne Rubenstein Discovering a Land “Mysterious and Obvious”: The Renarrativizing of Postrevolutionary Mexico / Eric Zolov Toiling for the “New Invaders”: Autoworkers, Transnational Corporations, and Working-Class Culture in Mexico City, 1955–1968 / Steven J. Bachelor El Santos and the Return of the Killer Aztecs! / Jis y Trino Masked Media: The Adventures of Lucha Libre on the Small Screen / Heather Levi CorazÓn del Rocanrol / RubÉn MartÍnez Cultural Industries in the Free Trade Age: A Look at Mexican Television / Omar HernÁndez and Emile McAnany Cablevision(nation) and Rural YucatÁn: Performing Modernity and Mexicanidad in the Early 1990s / Alison Greene The Aura of Ruins / Quetzil E. Castaneda III. Final Reflections Transnational Processes and the Rise and Fall of the Mexican Cultural State: Notes from the Past / Mary Kay Vaughan Contributors Index

“This innovative and important book is one of the first to focus on the history of Mexico since 1940. A pioneering volume of cultural studies that will show the field how far we have come.”-John Tutino, Georgetown University “This marvelous book is an antidote to a generation’s worth of simplifications, romantizations, and folklorizations of Mexican culture. Throughout the book the authors always take the close view, so that we become intimate with the unfolding complexities and contradictions of Mexican culture, rather than being intimidated by them. By the end, we have come to understand Mexican culture as politics, politics as art, and art as only one of the multiple acts of creation Mexicans engage in daily to interpret, embellish, and survive their own lives. This is scholarship at its best.”-Alma Guillermoprieto