If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a crumbling pyramid or a rusty maze of oil pipelines or an aged set of laws and 1940s portraits of indigenous people? Visible Ruins invites the reader to consider what some physical remnants of the Mexican revolutionary project reveal about it. Coming out of anthropology, the book is highly theoretical, the kind of text that earns tenure for the author. But historians can also gain new perspective on the ruins, both literal and figurative, of the Mexican revolution.
The monograph is an incisive critique of the revolutionary project and its legacy. It focuses on two topics, indigenous people and oil, in northern Veracruz, specifically the area of Papantla. Those topics are further broken down by looking at, quite literally, agrarian reform, the oil industry, the pyramid at El Tajín, and indigenismo. The “looking at” is the heart of this book, the question of perception and aesthetics as deployed by the state. The author analyzes both how and what postrevolutionary governments saw and tried to get the Mexican people to see, and how and what that same government obscured and hid in the process. In other words, the exercise of power entails the usage and display of an aesthetic that also unwittingly reveals the ugly side of an undemocratic praxis. The author’s trained eye unearths hidden scripts that the Mexican government concealed, making visible the inequities that persisted despite the revolution or were reenacted by its leadership throughout the twentieth century.
This book represents an exciting journey through Mexican politics through four cases. Salas Landa re-views agrarian reform laws and the agrarista movement in Veracruz first, reappraising state efforts to return lands to those who had been dispossessed in the nineteenth century. But in this case, the author focuses on locals who rejected the ejido as a mode of ownership. The archives show the state’s incapacity to see that collective land ownership was not a one-size-fits-all scheme.
In the case of oil, Salas Landa examines Poza Rica, the richest oil field at the time of the nationalization of the industry in 1938, and its ruins, a legacy that is a mess of abandoned metal and toxicity. She does this by decoding the mural about Poza Rica painted by Pablo O’Higgins in 1958 and the propaganda work that Mexico’s state oil company, PEMEX, carried out for the rest of the century. While O’Higgins did not hide the massive transformation in the landscape that oil extraction signified—however masked by the vision of progress and high modernity that most states shared in the 1950s—the view of the beneficence of the nationalized oil industry in Veracruz could only exist in PEMEX’s world. As Salas Landa demonstrates, the local population bore the burden of pollution and poor safety practices on their bodies, and in silence, as no news outlet dared to make visible the local cost of extraction.
The third case is the reconstruction of El Tajín, which took over forty years and became a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site in 1992. Meant to fulfill the state’s dual vision of recovering Mexico’s pre-Columbian grandeur and developing the area through tourism, the work was plagued by conflict between the state and the Totonaca population—the same folks the restoration was supposed to benefit. Salas Landa documents how issues of land tenure, land use, and commercial benefits from the tourist trade have not been resolved to this day.
The final case Salas Landa analyzes is “the aesthetics of indigenismo,” the photographs that American anthropologist Isabel T. Kelly took of the Totonacas in the mid-1940s (138). She argues that Kelly’s work became iconic in the way that the Mexican postrevolutionary state made indigenous people visible, and presumably legible, for the larger project of assimilating the population into the great mainstream of Mexican society. Here again, the historian will find a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a famous body of anthropological photography.
From a historian’s perspective, this book is not for the uninitiated. The theoretical framework would pose challenges for the undergraduate classroom, but the argument is quite clear. It does not take much excavating to see that the Mexican revolutionary project lies in ruins. That suggests that there is some intriguing thinking to do at a time when aesthetics has become a focus in Washington, D.C., as well.
