Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)

This intriguing study of Mexico's participation in world's fairs from 1889 to 1929 explores Mexico's self-presentation at these fairs as a reflection of the country's drive toward nationalization and a modernized image. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo contrasts Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair—where its display was the largest and most expensive Mexico has ever mounted—with Mexico's presence after the 1910 Mexican Revolution at fairs in Rio de Janeiro in 1922 and Seville in 1929. Rather than seeing the revolution as a sharp break, Tenorio-Trillo points to important continuities between the pre- and post-revolution periods. He also discusses how, internationally, the character of world's fairs was radically transformed during this time, from the Eiffel Tower prototype, encapsulating a wondrous symbolic universe, to the Disneyland model of commodified entertainment. Drawing on cultural, intellectual, urban, literary, social, and art histories, Tenorio-Trillo's thorough and imaginative study presents a broad cultural history of Mexico from 1880 to 1930, set within the context of the origins of Western nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism. "Cosmopolitan approach frames the issue within a more international setting than is common in works about a single Latin American country. Recommended"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58. Mexico's participation in world's fairs from 1889 to 1929 is explored in this study. It considers Mexico's self-presentation at these fairs as a reflection of the country's drive towards nationalization and a modernized image, both before and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910.