In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the Mexican state advanced its efforts to integrate indigenous populations into mainstream modern society, viewing mestizaje, or racial mixing, as key to the nation's social and economic development. A complex and often contradictory construct of race in Mexico, mestizaje has been studied extensively. For example, how popular culture, especially cinema, expressed an intense cultural nationalism predicated on entering modernity by way of mestizaje has been a primary subject of inquiry. In this monograph, Dalton focuses on the ways in which “technology interfaced with the postrevolutionary body” (1). The author considers examples of literary and cultural texts produced between the 1920s and the 1970s to show how the development of racially and ethnically diverse populations are “coded as mestizo as they assimilate to the modernity-driven state through the use of technology” (7).

Dalton suggests that state-sanctioned modernity was both a genetic and cultural process that required indigenous populations to meld their bodies with technologies, which he broadly defines as immunizations, factory work, education, and general hygiene. Specifically, the project traces “representations of cyborg and posthuman imageries in state-sponsored literary and cultural production … and discuss[es] their ramifications on racial identity in Mexico” (27). This imaginative approach reexamines not only mestizaje, but also “theories of hybridity in Latin America” (5). By focusing on posthuman cyborgs, Dalton redefines “hybridity” to include, “technological modifications of the body to redraw the reigning body politic” (22). He explores multiple theories to redefine terms that have deep and complex histories in Latin America.

The comprehensive and ambitious introduction provides an overview of how Mexican intellectual and political classes constructed race, mestizaje, and modernity. It also provides and explicates the theories and concepts––technological hybridity, performativity, biopolitics, and cyborg discourses––needed to give shape to the author's argument. Dalton aligns with other scholars such as Donna Haraway, Gareth Williams, and Giorgio Agamben who work on posthuman identity. However, given the broad scope of the project and the range of concepts used to build the foundations of the argument, a clearer sense of periodization as well as references to key historical moments would have clarified shifts in the discourse on mestizaje.

The argument proposed in the introduction takes shape and indeed comes to life more fully in the subsequent chapters, which move from literary to visual texts. Chapter 1 presents the author's overall premise of the role of technology on the indigenous body. A “posthuman” reading of the Mexican author José Vasconcelos's paradigmatic essay La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race) and his lesser-known play Prometeo vencedor (1920) asserts the importance of scientific discourse in Vasconcelos's “philosophy of aesthetic monism, which subordinates human knowledge to an overriding aesthetic imperative” (27). Chapter 2 provides a close reading of some of the state-sponsored murals by the world-renowned artist Diego Rivera and his contemporary José Orozco Clemente. Acknowledging that both artists have been studied exhaustively, the author's analysis illustrates that “the two men communicated contradictory racial discourses as they disagreed about the proper place of the nation's European and indigenous heritage within the official ideology” (28).

Chapter 3 identifies the ways Emilio “El Indio” Fernández’s films Río Escondido, María Candelaria, Enamorada, and The Torch endeavor to “modernize indigenous peasants by exposing their bodies to modern medicine” (28). Finally, Chapter 4 examines the campy films of El Santo and Carlos Olvera's 1968 novel Mejicanos en el espacio to “show how the political discourses of [the 1960s and 1970s] were grounded in the country's contradictory, racially charged history.

Like other scholars, Dalton demonstrates how an examination of literary and cultural products brings to the surface the complex historical and cultural development of racial identity. The author's research furthers our understanding of the legacy and enduring success of mestizaje as sponsored and promoted by the state by melding indigenous bodies with technology. Dalton also effectively shows how technologies of power served as an organizing principle that moved indigenous bodies into modernity. This monograph will engage any reader who is interested in examining the postrevolutionary period in Mexico, and mestizaje in particular.