Luis M. Castañeda's Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics, offers a fascinating cultural study of the years leading up to the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City: it is the latest – and the most original – in a series of recent re-readings of Mexico City's urban culture in the post-revolutionary period (another notable book is Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900–1939 by Ageeth Sluis, University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Additionally, in recent years Tlatelolco and the 1968 student massacre have received much critical attention, and a number of books have been published on this topic – most recently Samuel Steinberg's Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968 (University of Texas Press, 2016). Amongst these studies, Castañeda's is the most serious and the most original: it focuses on architecture, urban planning and graphic design projects launched in the months leading up to the 1968 Olympics to examine the image of Mexico the Díaz Ordaz administration sought to present to the world. Central to Castañeda's study is a reflection on ‘image economies’ – ‘sites where the cultural capital invested by the makers and patrons of official design projects could yield a number of different returns – bureaucratic and professional esteem, critical acclaim, political influence, or financial gain’ (p. xxi). Indeed the Díaz Ordaz administration spent so much money on exporting a modern image of the country that Castañeda labels Mexico during this period ‘an exhibitionist state’.

Castañeda's book opens with an overview of the works designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, one of the most important architects of the mid twentieth century – he wielded such influence that Castañeda calls him as ‘an architect-politician’ – and the author of the former Foreign Ministry in Tlatelolco. Ramírez Vázquez was also in charge of constructing an image of Mexico designed for export: he designed the Mexican pavilions for Expo ’58 in Brussels and for the World Fairs in Seattle and New York.

Castañeda devotes his second chapter, ‘Archaeologies of Power’, to examining the cultural politics implicit in the design of the museums inaugurated during President Adolfo López Mateos's tenure (1958–64), of which the most monumental and ambitious was the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, designed by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and opened to the public in 1964. Castañeda shows that the message conveyed in its museography is more complex than previous critics – including Octavio Paz – had thought, since it is part of an entire network of buildings and public projects which includes the Tlatelolco housing project and the Plaza of the Three Cultures, that aimed to present a continuity between the Aztec past and the PRI-led twentieth century. In his discussion, Castañeda exposes the complex interests linking architects such as Ramírez Vázquez and Mario Pani to political power and financial interests, showing that many of these urban projects emerged out of political-financial-urbanistic deals. ‘The state's exhibitionist apparatus operated not only as an all-powerful propaganda force, but also as a more strategically flexible, if fundamentally authoritarian, set of forces’ (p. 100). Castañeda's nuanced analysis offers a model for acknowledging and analysing financial irregularities while recognising the architectural and design merit of many of the projects launched in the 1950s and 1960s, a period characterised by an economic boon along with a virtually unregulated intermingling of political and business ventures.

Two fascinating chapters explore the architecture and design projects created specifically for the 1968 Olympics, including Felix Candela's Sports Palace (at the time, Candela ‘was singled out as the primary builder of Mexico's economic “miracle”, and his architecture in concrete, especially his hyperbolic paraboloids, were widely understood as a “Mexican” architectural sensation’, p. 38), Ramírez Vázquez's Aztec Stadium, Mathias Goeritz's Route of Friendship, and even the Camino Real Hotel, designed by Ricardo Legorreta to house foreign dignitaries during the sports event. Castañeda is extremely attentive to the role of the state in these projects, noting the ‘direct intersection between Olympic designs and the exercise of state surveillance’. He argues, for instance, that Ramírez Vázquez placed ‘his practice as Olympic organiser squarely within the biopolitical domain’ (p. 107). The discussion of the Camino Real Hotel focuses on the entanglement between public projects and private, for-profit developments: ‘The alignment between the agendas of private corporate patrons and those of the state's cultural apparatus was long-standing in the Mexican tourist industry. The exclusionary nature of this compact was also long-standing, and in the case of the Camino Real Hotel's construction, this exclusionary logic was literally manifested in the displacement of mostly middle-income residents of the area east of Chapultepec Park, where the hotel was built, as a result of its construction’ (p. 196).

A final chapter analyses the construction of the Mexico City metro, inaugurated in 1969, one year after the Olympics, and focuses on the visual graphics created by Lance Wyman to make the system accessible to illiterate users by privileging icons and images over text. Here Castañeda argues that the late 1960s saw a clash between two competing visions and two total design projects: one that targeted the city above ground and a second one focusing on the underground spaces built for the metro, which, unlike the transportation systems built in other countries, included shops, museums, cultural spaces, libraries, and even pre-Columbian exhibits. ‘Here again’, concludes Castañeda, ‘the clashing point of ancient and modern surfaces becomes the site from which Mexico's culturally specific modernity can be articulated’ (p. 221).

In his conclusion, Castañeda stresses the importance of design for the consolidation of Mexico as a modern state in the late 1960s, as well as its inscrutable entanglements with business ventures: ‘designers could take on increasingly prominent roles in the midst of the geopolitical and economic transformations of the mid-twentieth century […] While motivated by political interests, these works also aimed to spur economic gains, stimulating tourism, industrial, and real-estate investments through strategic incisions into the expanding fabric of the capital city as well as through broader overhauls of its infrastructures’ (p. 247).

Out of the many recent publications on Mexican cultural studies, Castañeda's is certainly the most ambitious: it features extensive archival research and includes many photographs, architectural plans and other visual material made available for the first time for a North American readership; he quotes from numerous official memoranda highlighting the intricate connections between government officials and developers; and he writes in an eloquent, theoretically-informed style that will make these materials accessible to scholars and students of disciplines beyond architecture and Latin American studies.