Forging a Mexican People

Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968

Pablo Zavala

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9780816553464
  9780816556113
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816556120
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art
• Index: Social Sciences

A new lens on conceptions of the Mexican state and the people

Forging a Mexican People shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of "a people" in postrevolutionary Mexico.

Through meticulous research, Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to challenge hegemonic conceptions of state-guided narratives and forge alternative collective subjectivities. This book offers a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical landscape of postrevolutionary Mexico, revealing how cultural artifacts simultaneously crafted and reflected the people vis-à-vis different political and social categories. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, Zavala's research contributes to scholarship that has recently reexamined the construction of nationalism by moving away from the focus on state formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions in products by cultural producers from nonstate and grassroots political sectors.
 
Zavala examines the conceptual parameters of el pueblo by analyzing El Universal Ilustrado, El Machete, the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the protest graphic art used in Mexico City's 1968 popular student movement, and graphic art used in California's Chicano farmworkers' struggle. Based on in-depth archival research, the work includes primary sources that have never been digitized, offering readers unique insights into the visual manifestations of Mexico's postrevolutionary identity and their enduring significance.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Marking Modernity: The Aesthetics of Sanitized Exposed Subjectivities in El Universal Ilustrado, 1917–1925
• 2. Seeing Red: The Armed Communist Agrarian People and the Treacherous Mexican State in El Machete, 1924–1927
• 3. The Masses in the Prints of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, 1930s to 1960s
• 4. Mexican and Chicano Political Collective Subjectivities and Protest Graphic Art in the 1960s and 1970s
• Conclusion. Cruda realidad: The People and Technology
• Notes
• References
• Index