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U. of New Mexico Press

Titles appearing in Reference — Research Book News — August 2011
Arrangement is by title.

Cuauhtémoc's bones; forging national identity in modern Mexico.

Gillingham, Paul.
U. of New Mexico Press, ©2011    338 p.    $28.95    F1210
978-0-8263-5037-4

When it was announced in 1949 that the tomb and remains of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, had been discovered buried beneath the altar of a parish church in a remote village in central Mexico, it sparked an intense nationalist fervor across the country, although the country's professional archaeologists were later to determine that the tomb and the body did not, in fact, belong to Cuauhtémoc, setting off "the greatest scandal in the cultural politics of twentieth-century Mexico," according to Gillingham (U. of Pennsylvania), who treats the incident as a means of interrogating the construction of popular nationalism and its relationship to elite nationalism. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The Maya of modernism; art, architecture, and film.

Lerner, Jesse.
U. of New Mexico Press, ©2011    214 p.    $45.00    F1435
978-0-8263-4981-1

Asking what place, if any, the Maya have in the modern world, Lerner (media studies, Claremont Colleges, California) explores what the astonishing ruins scattered across southeastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras reveal about the living Maya and their potential to enter into modernity. Might their past aesthetic and architectural accomplishments form the basis for a uniquely American modernism, he ponders. His themes are the vegetative Maya, Mayan modernism with the Maya, progressing toward a Maya modernity, the aoristic Maya, and the Maya absolute. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The Society of Equality; popular republicanism and democracy in Santiago de Chile, 1818-51.

Wood, James A.
U. of New Mexico Press, ©2011    333 p.    $29.95    F3095
978-0-8263-4941-5

The Sociedad de la Igualdad (Society of Equality) was founded in Chile in April of 1850 by a small group of men determined to press more radical democratic-republican demands than the meeker Society of Reform. Wood (history, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State U.) argues that the Society of Equality represents the culmination of a wave of popular republicanism in which the artisanal class successfully asserted itself in the public sphere (in contrast to many portrayals of the politics of the period as being an exclusively elite affair). Examining the newspapers seeking to mobilize the artisanal perspective, he considers how tropes of class and gender identity were constructed in relation to political citizenship and Latin American republicanism. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)