Friday December 5, 2025 | 3:45PM-4:45PM

CELT/ILC Suite, Room 306

Session Abstract

Forging a Mexican People traces the methods by which different sectors of society – including photographers, graphic artists, printmakers, cartoonists, political militants, activists, writers, journalists, intellectuals, and State actors – printed collective subjectivities that simultaneously negotiated with phenomena like State-formation, modernization, urbanization, political ideologies, socio-popular movements, State repression, and corporative exploitation. I argue that printed cultural productions that circulated in the country and beyond after the Mexican Revolution constructed varieties of a people that challenged hegemonic conceptions of State-guided discourses of el pueblo. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, I maintain that artists produced competing versions of what constituted a citizen, raising contradictions and tensions within the processes of official nationalization. My study contributes to scholarship that has recently re-examined the construction of postrevolutionary nationalism by moving away from the focus on State formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions by cultural producers from non-State actors and grassroots political sectors. The title of the book, “Forging a Mexican People,” is a nod to the fact that forging a people has been a multifarious enterprise, with mixed results, producing different “people” whose visual manifestations I explore in the book.

Presenters

• Pablo Zavala (Loyola University, autor),
• Nathan Henne (Loyola University, moderator)