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"Monuments Mexico History."
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Constructing Community
In central New Mexico, tourists admire the majestic ruins of old Spanish churches and historic pueblos at Abo, Quarai, and Gran Quivira in Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. The less-imposing remains of the earliest Indian farming settlements, however, have not attracted nearly as much notice from visitors or from professional archaeologists. InConstructing Community, Alison E. Rautman synthesizes over twenty years of research about this little-known period of early sedentary villages in the Salinas region.Rautman tackles a very broad topic: how archaeologists use material evidence to infer and imagine how people lived in the past, how they coped with everyday decisions and tensions, and how they created a sense of themselves and their place in the world. Using several different lines of evidence, she reconstructs what life was like for the ancestral Pueblo Indian people of Salinas, and identifies some of the specific strategies that they used to develop and sustain their villages over time.Examining evidence of each site's construction and developing spatial layout, Rautman traces changes in community organization across the architectural transitions from pithouses to jacal structures to unit pueblos, and finally to plaza-oriented pueblos. She finds that, in contrast to some other areas of the American Southwest, early villagers in Salinas repeatedly managed their built environment to emphasize the coherence and unity of the village as a whole. In this way, she argues, people in early farming villages across the Salinas region actively constructed and sustained a sense of social community.
eBook
Altera Roma : art and empire from Mâerida to Mâexico
\"Altera Roma explores the confrontation of two cultures--European and Amerindian--and two empires--Spanish and Aztec. In an age of exploration and conquest, Spanish soldiers, missionaries, and merchants brought an array of cultural preconceptions. Their encounter with Aztec civilization coincided with Europe's rediscovery of classical antiquity, and Tenochtitlâan came to be regarded a 'second Rome, ' altera Roma. Iberia's past as the Roman province of Hispania served to both guide and critique the Spanish overseas mission. The dialogue that emerged between the Old World and the New World shaped a dual heritage into the unique culture of Nueva Espaنna. In this volume, 10 eminent historians and archaeologists examine the analogies between empires widely separated in time and place, and consider how monumental art and architecture created 'theater states, ' a strategy that links ancient Rome, Hapsburg Spain, preconquest Mexico, and other imperial regimes\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
On the Street Corner where Stereotypes are Born: Mexico City, 1940–1968
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Modern Architecture in Mexico City
Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Invigorated by insights drawn from the first published histories of Mexican colonial architecture, which suggested that Mexico possessed a distinctive architecture and culture, beginning in the 1920s a new generation of architects created profoundly visual modern buildings intended to convey Mexico's unique cultural character. By midcentury these architects and their students had rewritten the country's architectural history and transformed the capital into a metropolis where new buildings that evoked pre-conquest, colonial, and International Style architecture coexisted.Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers' park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragán, Kathryn O'Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform. This book demonstrates why creating a distinctively Mexican architecture captivated architects whose work was formally dissimilar, and how that concern became central to the profession.
eBook
Monumental architecture at Aguada Fénix and the rise of Maya civilization
Archaeologists have traditionally thought that the development of Maya civilization was gradual, assuming that small villages began to emerge during the Middle Preclassic period (1000–350
bc
; dates are calibrated throughout) along with the use of ceramics and the adoption of sedentism
1
. Recent finds of early ceremonial complexes are beginning to challenge this model. Here we describe an airborne lidar survey and excavations of the previously unknown site of Aguada Fénix (Tabasco, Mexico) with an artificial plateau, which measures 1,400 m in length and 10 to 15 m in height and has 9 causeways radiating out from it. We dated this construction to between 1000 and 800
bc
using a Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates. To our knowledge, this is the oldest monumental construction ever found in the Maya area and the largest in the entire pre-Hispanic history of the region. Although the site exhibits some similarities to the earlier Olmec centre of San Lorenzo, the community of Aguada Fénix probably did not have marked social inequality comparable to that of San Lorenzo. Aguada Fénix and other ceremonial complexes of the same period suggest the importance of communal work in the initial development of Maya civilization.
Lidar survey of the Maya lowlands uncovers the monumental site of Aguada Fénix, which dates to around 1000–800
bc
and points to the role of communal construction in the development of Maya civilization.
Journal Article
Spectacular Mexico
In the wake of its early twentieth-century civil wars, Mexico strove to present itself to the world as unified and prosperous. The preparation in Mexico City for the 1968 Summer Olympics was arguably the most ambitious of a sequence of design projects that aimed to signal Mexico's arrival in the developed world. InSpectacular Mexico, Luis M. Castañeda demonstrates how these projects were used to create a spectacle of social harmony and ultimately to guide the nation's capital into becoming the powerful megacity we know today.
Not only the first Latin American country to host the Olympics, but also the first Spanish-speaking country, Mexico's architectural transformation was put on international display. From traveling exhibitions of indigenous archaeological artifacts to the construction of the Mexico City subway,Spectacular Mexicodetails how these key projects placed the nation on the stage of global capitalism and revamped its status as a modernized country. Surveying works of major architects such as Félix Candela, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Ricardo Legorreta, and graphic designer Lance Wyman, Castañeda illustrates the use of architecture and design as instruments of propaganda and nation branding.
Forming a kind of \"image economy,\" Mexico's architectural projects and artifacts were at the heart of the nation's economic growth and cultivated a new mass audience at an international level. Through an examination of one of the most important cosmopolitan moments in Mexico's history,Spectacular Mexicopositions architecture as central to the negotiation of social, economic, and political relations.
eBook
Early Ceremonial Constructions at Ceibal, Guatemala, and the Origins of Lowland Maya Civilization
The spread of plaza-pyramid complexes across southern Mesoamerica during the early Middle Preclassic period (1000 to 700 BCE) provides critical information regarding the origins of lowland Maya civilization and the role of the Gulf Coast Olmec. Recent excavations at the Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, documented the growth of a formal ceremonial space into a plaza-pyramid complex that predated comparable buildings at other lowland Maya sites and major occupations at the Olmec center of La Venta. The development of lowland Maya civilization did not result from one-directional influence from La Venta, but from interregional interactions, involving groups in the southwestern Maya lowlands, Chiapas, the Pacific Coast, and the southern Gulf Coast.
Journal Article
Shedding Light on Labor: Photography, Archaeology, and the Making of Monumentality in Tajín, Mexico
This visual essay focuses on the visual documentation of the reconstruction of the archaeological site of Tajín from the late 1930s to the 1970s. During this period, the Mexican post-revolutiory state, motivated by the desire to forge a coherent tiolity and boost mass tourism, actively supported and funded the monumental reconstruction of the Tajín pyramid and other pre-Hispanic structures across Mexico. Although the workers involved in the reconstruction of the pyramid appear in several on-site photographs, their labor remained ‘underexposed:’ their presence is rarely acknowledged in image labels, they are depicted in subordited positions vis-à-vis the figure of the archaeologist or used as human scales or ethnic markers. Filly, these photographs, once consigned and buried in the archives, have rarely come into view. As a result, labor-related images are missing from the prevailing visual economy, which tends to prioritize and celebrate grandiose representations of pre-Hispanic ruins while overlooking the monumental process of their physical reconstruction.To counter this ‘underexposure’ of workers and labor, I unearth a selection of images from the archives and altered them by adding my own captions and descriptions, drawing from limited yet valuable information found in technical reports that shed light on the labor conditions at the site. This approach serves a dual purpose. Firstly, it aims to emphasize the significant role that Totoc workers played in the tion-building process by physically constructing Mexico’s ancient heritage. Secondly, it aims to bring attention to the persistent inequalities perpetuated, reinforced, and concealed by the field of archaeology throughout the construction process.
Journal Article
Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture
Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects.
Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world-in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.
eBook