Mexican Modernity

In Mexican Modernity, Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. Gallo tells the story of this other revolution by focusing on five artifacts that left a deep mark on the literature and the arts of the 1920s and 1930s: the camera and its novel techniques for seeing the modern world; the typewriter and its mechanization of literary aesthetics; radio and poetic experiments with wireless communication; cement architecture and its celebration of functional internationalism; and the stadium and its deployment as a mass medium for political spectacle.

Rubén Gallo is an award-winning writer and scholar. He is the author of Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (2005), an essay about machines and modern culture in early twentieth century Mexico. He has also published two books about Mexico City's urban art and visual culture: New Tendencies in Mexican Art (2004) and The Mexico City Reader (2004). He is currently at work on a new book: Freud in Mexico: The Neuroses of Modernity. He teaches at Princeton University and lives in New
York City.