Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution

摘要

Since the opening in 2006 of Mexico City's Museo de Arte Popular (MAP), scholars, artists and tourists have delighted in the museum's modern style, professional presentation and beautiful exhibits. Visitors impressed by this slick staging of Mexico's popular arts would be surprised to learn of the museum's place in a long line of failed institutions intended to present the artistic creations that are a widely acknowledged centrepiece of Mexico's cultural patrimony. It is perhaps fitting that the art deco former fire hall which houses the collection dates to the period in which the symbols of Mexican national identity became established. These fraught institutional and intellectual histories are the subject of Rick A. Lopez's Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution. Bridging several literatures, places and periods, this volume is an excellent contribution to the scholarship on state formation and the construction of national identity. Readers may be familiar with Lopez's work on the India Bonita contest of 1926 and the Noche Mexicana and Exhibition of Popular Arts of 1911, but here he expands his analysis beyond the 1920s and into new territory.