Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

David S. Dalton

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
Format
Hardback
Publisher
University Press of Florida
Country
United States
Published
28 August 2018
Pages
240
ISBN
9781683400394

Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

David S. Dalton

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After the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, post-revolutionary leaders hoped to assimilate the country’s racially diverse population into one official mixed-race identity-the mestizo. This book shows that as part of this vision, the Mexican government believed it could modernize primitive indigenous peoples through technology in the form of education, modern medicine, industrial agriculture, and factory work. David Dalton takes a close look at how authors, artists, and thinkers-some state-funded, some independent-engaged with official views of Mexican racial identity from the 1920s to the 1970s. Dalton surveys essays, plays, novels, murals, and films that portray indigenous bodies being fused, or hybridized, with technology. He examines Jose Vasconcelos’s essay The Cosmic Race and the influence of its ideologies on mural artists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. He discusses the theme of introducing Amerindians to medical hygiene and immunizations in the films of Emilio El Indio Fernandez. He analyzes the portrayal of indigenous monsters in the films of El Santo, as well as Carlos Olvera’s critique of post-revolutionary worldviews in the novel Mejicanos en el espacio. Incorporating the perspectives of posthumanism and cyborg studies, Dalton shows that technology played a key role in race formation in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. This cutting-edge study offers fascinating new insights into the culture of mestizaje, illuminating the attitudes that inform Mexican race relations in the present day.

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