The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940

Contributors explore the nation-building efforts of the government, artists, entrepreneurs, and social movements; their contradictory, often conflicting intersection; and their inevitably transnational nature. Scholars of political and social history, communications, and art history describe the creation of national symbols, myths, histories, and heroes to inspire patriotism and transform workers and peasants into efficient, productive, gendered subjects. They analyze the aesthetics of nation building made visible in murals, music, and architecture; investigate state projects to promote health, anticlericalism, and education; and consider the role of mass communications, such as cinema and radio, and the impact of road building. They discuss how national identity was forged among social groups, specifically political Catholics, industrial workers, middle-class women, and indigenous communities. Most important, the volume weighs in on debates about the tension between the eagle (the modernizing secular state) and the Virgin of Guadalupe (the Catholic defense of faith and morality). It argues that despite bitter, violent conflict, the symbolic repertoire created to promote national identity and memory making eventually proved capacious enough to allow the eagle and the virgin to coexist peacefully.

Contributors. Adrian Bantjes, Katherine Bliss, María Teresa Fernández, Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Joanne Hershfield, Stephen E. Lewis, Claudio Lomnitz, Rick A. López, Sarah M. Lowe, Jean Meyer, James Oles, Patrice Olsen, Desmond Rochfort, Michael Snodgrass, Mary Kay Vaughan, Marco Velázquez, Wendy Waters, Adriana Zavala

• Mexico, From Mestizo to Multicultural: National Identity and Recent Representations of the Conquest
• San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition (Texas Pan American Series)
• The Shadow of the Strongman
• Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge Latin American Studies)
• Mexican Lives
• Mexico's Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century
• The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution (Penguin Classics)
• Zapata and the Mexican Revolution
• The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The Latin America Readers)
• The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel (FSG Classics)