Gallo, Rubén. Mexican Modernity; The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution.(Reseña de libro)

Gallo, Rubén. Mexican Modernity; The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution. Cambridge: MIT P, 2005. 268 pp., illus. ISBN 0-262-07264-5

Gallo is well of his way to becoming the preminent Mexican cultural studies authority in the United States. Still and Assistant Professor at Princeton University, he has already published an impressive array of notable monographs: México, D.F., lecturas para paseantes (2005) is a superb anthology, with excellent introductions, of some of the most important writing on the Mexican capital, from personal chonicles to sociocultural analyses; it was first issued in English translation by the University of Wisconsin Press as The Mexico City Reader 2004). New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s (2004) is part of a series on Latin American art issued by Palgrave Macmillan. Mexican Modernity joins this excellent inventory of scholarship, and it is one of the most original studies I have yet to see in the area of Latin American cultural studies.

Mexico has had several phases of modernity: that of the Porfiriato and científicos in the late nineteenth century; that of the period of the retroactive forging of the ideology of the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s; that of the post-World War II period as a consequence of Mexico's …