Snag Your Copy Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, And The State After The Revolution Crafted By Rick A. Lopez Conveyed In Interactive EBook

opening chapters gave a fascinating glimpse into the arts, indigineity, and the formation of Mexican national identity, The history of the India Bonita contest subtly referenced in the recent film Roma was engrossing, Some chapters, however, focused more on the bureaucracy of changes in foundations and organizations, and these are less likely to interest a general audience.
This is a wonderful indepth account of the development of Mexican craft in theth century, with a particular focus on lacquerware.
Many of the issues I thought were recent turn out to be endemic in modern Mexican craft, such as the flood of Chinese imports.
The books ends a little abruptly in the modern period, Where did our modern notions of Mexicos national identity come from Its identity was not, as most people might guess, simply passed down from one generation to the next.
Rather, certain aesthetic values were perpetuated by the intersecting forces of nationalist policies and transnational intellectuals who sought to ethnicize the people of Mexico in a modern nation.
In Crafting Mexico, Rick Lopez shows how changes in aesthetic values, encouraged by intellectuals, artisans, and the government after the Mexican Revolution, were the main force in the building of and changes in Mexicos national identity and culturethe so called “mexicanidad.
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Before Mexicos postrevolutionary nationalists embraced indigenous culture, their predecessors despised it, ignored its complexities, and blindly attempted to impose Europeanstyle modernity on itnot so unlike the “modernization” in the United States against Native Americans or the imperialist domination of Africa.
The popular class retaliated against their political exclusion and a revolution occurred, giving rise to a new nationalist leadership that wanted to unify Mexicos disparate regions and languagesby setting up national highways and a system of educationand establish a new inclusive national identity.
The identity could not be formed through language, as Mexico was divided into many languages, and consequently nor could it be formed through the printing press or mass media.
Art was the tangible property left for the new elite to unite the country under a new identity, Further, these changes in Mexicos identity had implications at the locallevel, such as how the demand for particular styles of art impacted the practices of local artists and their relationship to the state in order to supply the increased demand for “authentic” works.
Taken together, these changes which took place before the rise of mass media occurred in a very short time period and they were the basis for Lopezs examination of a cultural revolution in Mexico and the formation of a modern nationstate.

Part I

of the book explored examples of how “cosmopolitan” intellectuals those influential persons who returned to Mexico after the revolution with ideas from abroad about nationbuilding and the government promoted the formation of a new aesthetic.
The first example centered on abeauty competition, the “Indian Bonita”, that was run by an influential newspaper, Their selection of fifteenyearold Maria Bibiana Uribe, who exemplified the image of the “authentic” Indian aesthetic, sent a new message to popular classes: you could be both Indian and beautiful.
The second example dealt with a stateoperated public exhibition of popular art, organized by cosmopolitan intellectuals, The selection of art reflected a new criteria for what represented “authenticity” in popular art and demonstrated that not all indigenous art was looked upon favorably by the state or intellectuals.
The main attraction of the event turned out to be a highly staged and choreographed routine “in which over a hundred by some accounts, as many as six hundred colorfully adorned chinas poblanas and charros burst into modernized renditions of the jarabe tapatio and other folk dances.
” Lopez reveals that the event, while marketed as an exhibition of authentic Mexican art, was not much more than an amusing act.
This chapter revealed the flaws inherent in trying to come up with such a criteriathat the boundaries between what was “indigenous” and what wasnt were unclear.
“Returners looked upon their homeland through a novel intellectual prism that reveled in national distinctiveness,” states Lopez, The returners did not respect the indigenous population, but rather tried to coopt it into their own image of authenticity.
The remaining examples in Part I showed how the intellectuals, foreign nationals, and the state further expanded the aesthetic revolution through support of popular art in museums, the Ministry of Education, and investment in cultural programs.

Whereas Part I gives a macro perspective on the changing aesthetics in Mexico, Part II gives a bottom to top perspective through an indepth investigation of how the state and markets for indigenous art impacted the community of Olinala, Guerrero.
While space does not permit a full discussion of this section, an explanation of one of the major findings is given below.

Crafting Mexico is undeniably an academic book, It is an exhaustive study that draws on both modern ethnographic and sociological research as well as primary accounts of individuals and the writings of social critics during the postrevolutionary period.
While Lopez is a historian, he also takes on the roles of anthropologist comparing the indigenous culture of Mexico with the culture of cosmopolitan intellectuals and art historian uncovering the history of the Olinaltecan lacquer.
Hundreds of references are included in the bibliography including archival collections, newspapers and periodicals, and published scholarly works,
Lopezs evidence is compelling and is used effectively to support his theses, For example, in the last chapter, “The Road to Olinala,” Lopez claims that artisans in Olinala, Guerrero were able to circumvent the elite brokers dealing in “authentic” art and establish their own economic ties to Mexico City.
It would have been straightforward to show this through trading and property records, but the municipal archives in Olinala, representingyears of records, were destroyed in thes.
Through interviews with Olinaltecos, Lopez discovered that these records were destroyed to cover up corruption in which oligarchs at the time unfairly acquired the land of artisans, leading to political instability and inequality.
Lopez uses secondary sourcesrecords from the Ministry of Education and a report from a state anthropologist Maurilio Munozto show that unequal access to land caused major inequalities in nutrition, access to water, education, and housing.
Through his interviews, Lopez was able to reconstruct the first ties between Olinala artisans and Mexico Citystarting with a hotelier in the mids who transported items with burros in secret collusionto the growing solidarity among artisans in thes when they became connected to museum officials and later the Bank for the Development of Cooperation, which relieved the artisans dependence on merchants and moneylenders.
The reconstruction of these eventswhich provide crucial evidence of how nationalist policies promoting the production of “authentic” art disadvantaged lacquer production in Olinalawould not have been possible without these extensive interviews combined with the observations of the late ethnologist Alejandro Wladimiro, who made detailed observations about various aspects of daily life in the region.
Elsewhere in Crafting Mexico, Lopez uses rigorous scholarly sources as evidence for historical information,
We observe that indigenous cultures cannot be understood by placing them into categories and trying to impose foreign values upon them.
Integration of cultures cannot be forced without conflict and inequality, This is particularly true as greater numbers of indigenous cultures around the world feel pressure to conform to their states imposition of neoliberalism.

One of the fundamental assumptions in Crafting Mexico is that national identity is socially constructed, In the case of Mexico, aesthetics were the shared social practice and source of knowledge that changed peoples ideas about what it meant to be Mexican.
But Lopez differed from sociologist Benedict Anderson who developed the concept of “imagined communities” in that he did not consider language and print to be a significant aspect of Mexicos transformation because differences in language between regions would have made it difficult for Spanish texts of the Creole, for example, to have made a broad impact on rural communities.
Andersons work on nationalism has been widely cited in the literature and has enabled the significant work of Latin American historian Serge Gruzinski.
Lopezs departure from the idea that language is the only path to nationalism should provide future anthropologists with a starting point for studying nationbuilding in regions where language barriers and shared practices, such as art, coexist.
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