Textured lives

the long version

Mexican culture has long been the object of scholarly interest and popular curiosity, notably since the 1910 Revolution and most recently in the 1990 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries." During these eight decades in the evolution of the modern Mexican nation, shifting relations of power have constantly met with voices of opposition that have challenged the national vision of progress and unity. Textured Lives explores some of these. Cracks in the Mexican national edifice by examining the works of women in literature and the arts, with focus on individuals who represent crucial phases in Mexico's cultural history: Frida Kahlo and postrevolutionary nationalism, Rosario Castellanos and the promises of institutionalized revolution, Elena Poniatowska and the legacy of 1968, and Angeles Mastretta and the "golden age" of the oil boom. Schaefer argues that exploring the social context of cultural. Representation highlights the tensions between master narratives and these women's transgressive forays into those spaces of power. Combining literary theory, cultural analysis, gender study, and theories of artistic representation, her book embraces painting, literary journalism, the epistolary novel, and autobiographical narrative to question the traditional forms of these genres as well as to debate the boundaries between the self and the national identity.