During the twentieth century the Mexican government invested in the creation and promotion of a national culture more aggressively than any other state in the western hemisphere. Fragments of a Golden Age provides a comprehensive cultural history of the vibrant Mexico that emerged after 1940. Agreeing that the politics of culture and its production, dissemination, and reception constitute one of the keys to understanding this period of Mexican history, the volume's contributors--historians, popular writers, anthropologists, artists, and cultural critics--weigh in on a wealth of topics from music, tourism, television, and sports to theatre, unions, art, and magazines.
Each essay in its own way addresses the fragmentation of a cultural consensus that prevailed during the "golden age" of post-revolutionary prosperity, a time when the state was still successfully bolstering its power with narratives of modernization and shared community. Combining detailed case studies--both urban and rural--with larger discussions of political, economic, and cultural phenomena, the contributors take on such topics as the golden age of Mexican cinema, the death of Pedro Infante as a political spectacle, the 1951 "caravan of hunger," professional wrestling, rock music, and soap operas.
Fragments of a Golden Age will fill a particular gap for students of modern Mexico, Latin American studies, cultural studies, political economy, and twentieth century history, as well as to others concerned with rethinking the cultural dimensions of nationalism, imperialism, and modernization.

Contributors. Steven J. Bachelor, Quetzil E. Castañeda, Seth Fein, Alison Greene, Omar Hernández, Jis & Trino, Gilbert M. Joseph, Heather Levi, Rubén Martínez, Emile McAnany, John Mraz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Elena Poniatowska, Anne Rubenstein, Alex Saragoza, Arthur Schmidt, Mary Kay Vaughan, Eric Zolov

About the Author:

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.