This is an excellent overview of nation-building in Mexico during the crucial period between 1920 and 1940. It considers the arts (crafts, painting, music and architecture), emerging mass communications (roads, radio and cinema), key social policies (anticlericalism, schools and health) and the mobilisation of a wide variety of actors (state, Church, intellectuals, artists, businessmen, Catholics, workers, peasants, Indians and women). Its value lies less in offering new arguments than in presenting in a single volume different aspects of the social and cultural history of Mexico that have developed in the productive last decade. Indeed, most chapters are summaries of recently published first monographs by a new generation of US scholars. Implicitly or explicitly, most contributors share Mary Kay Vaughan's thesis that elite projects were not successful impositions from above; rather, they were inevitably transformed as citizens and consumers rejected them, or selectively appropriated them. Thus the ‘cultural revolution’ lay less in modernising projects than in the ensuing dialogue between elites and society. And if we include violent conflict (in particular, anticlericalism) within this ‘dialogue’, then all contributors share this thesis. With respect to national identity, the editors see it as a powerful construction resulting from socio-political upheaval, transnational modernism, the emergence of mass society and media linked to urbanisation, and the government's ability to harness these resources in its favour. The chapters do not generally elaborate the theoretical implications of the editors' theses, but provide a wealth of evidence to support them.
This volume neatly complements a previous anthology on state formation (Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (eds.), Everyday Forms of State Formation. Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Duke University Press, 1994). The Eagle and the Virgin shares with its companion the study of the interaction between elites and popular culture, but brings in crucial new topics including the role of gender, markets and transnational processes in the construction of a state-sponsored nationalism. It also overcomes the rural bias of the period's historiography with studies of urban Mexico. On the other hand, while the new work does not have the detail and depth of Joseph and Nugent's book, which admittedly set very high standards, it does provide an accessible bird's-eye view without losing sight of regional diversity (even if it inevitably focuses on the more studied places such as Tepoztlán and San José de Gracia, Guadalajara and Monterrey). It is ideal for teaching at undergraduate and master's level.
The section on aesthetics opens with López's rich account of the appropriation and promotion of popular arts by cosmopolitan nationalists who were imbued with a ‘modernist validation of authenticity’ (p. 32) and searched for an indigenous-based national identity. Then come two illustrated chapters on painting. First, an overview of muralists Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros (Rochfort) and second, a three-author chapter on women painters, including the ubiquitous Kahlo (Lowe), followed by the lesser known Izquierdo (Zavala) and the Greenwood sisters (Oles). This provides a counterpoint to the ever-present male muralists and interesting reflections on gender and Izquierdo's relation to the cosmopolitan Contemporáneos (who criticised the muralists' aesthetic conservatism). Next there is a chapter on architecture and street nomenclature in Mexico City (Olsen), and a thorough, stimulating essay on music (Velázquez and Vaughan) presenting previously unpublished research.
The section ‘Utopian Projects of the State’ starts with an outstanding summary of local conflicts unleashed by anticlericalism, which additionally explores what a utopian state project was, and concludes, in line with the editors, that society was stronger than the state (Bantjes). Next, Vaughan and Lewis review different local responses to schooling from peasants and Indians, respectively. This should inspire regional historians to join efforts to provide an overview of the varied national mosaic which avoids simplistic generalisations, but goes beyond listing local particularities and helps us to understand such diversity. Bliss's chapter on hygiene programmes is less rich on popular responses but incisive on the intentions and discourse of policy makers.
In the section on mass communications, I found Waters' chapter on road-building – including its relation to new markets such as tourism – to be the most innovative; Hayes' on radio the most detailed (and a good companion to the chapter on music); and both convincingly argue for their subjects' direct role in the formation of national identities. Finally, Hershfield considers the nationalisation of Hollywood and transnational cinema, which laid the basis of a Mexican film industry underpinned by a predominantly conservative nationalism.
Issues of national identity raised by Waters and Hayes receive further attention in the last section of the book. Here Meyer, long-time expert in western Mexico's Catholic mobilisation, surveys nationalist ideas in three movements: civic organisation, the armed multi-class uprising known as La Cristiada, and Sinarquismo, a blend of social Catholicism and nationalism that resembled European fascisms. Fernández's account of two female leaders in Guadalajara, a Catholic and a liberal revolutionary, is less directly connected to nationalism but good at showing how these activists opened a space for women within a patriarchal milieu, in the shadow of the Church and of the party respectively. The section closes with Snodgrass's multifaceted analysis of national identity (meshed with class, regional and masculine identities) among Monterrey workers.
I agreed with some of Lomnitz's ‘Final Reflections’, including his call to rethink our understanding of ‘culture’. But his misleading version of Alan Knight's distinction between orthodox and revisionist interpretations of the revolution, and his omission of the discussion on post-revisionism, inspired by Knight but developed by Vaughan and the authors of Everyday Forms of State Formation, among others, weaken his contribution. Had he considered this, he would not have presented the ‘subversion’ of the orthodox/revisionist dichotomy as the novelty it is not. Post-revisionism, of which this anthology is the latest expression, has now long recognised the popular character of 1910s mobilisation and the agency of subordinate groups throughout the period from 1920 to 1940, whilst acknowledging continuity with Porfirian modernisation and arguing that the emerging state was weaker than revisionists thought (even Meyer, renowned revisionist, fits in this book by focusing on mobilisation and excluding assessments of the state's strength). It is strange that Lomnitz recognises these post-revisionist theses in the anthology reviewed, but deforms or ignores the discussion from which they arise.
