The Contemporáneos Group : Rewriting Mexico in the Thirties and Forties

Description

In the years following the Mexican Revolution, a nationalist and masculinist image of Mexico emerged through the novels of the Revolution, the murals of Diego Rivera, and the movies of Golden Age cinema. Challenging this image of a rural, patriarchal, and unchanging Mexico were the Contemporaneos, a group of writers whose status as outsiders (sophisticated urbanites, gay men, women) gave them not just a different perspective, but a different gaze, a new way of viewing the diverse Mexicos that exist within Mexican society. In this book. Salvador Oropesa offers original readings of the works of five Contemporaneos -- Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Agustin Lazo, Guadalupe Marin, and Jorge Cuesta -- and their efforts to create a Mexican literature that was international, attuned to the realities of modern Mexico, and flexible enough to speak to the masses as well as the elites. Oropesa discusses Novo and Villaurrutia in relation to neo-baroque literature and satiric poetry, showing how these inherently subversive forms of writing provided the means of expressing difference and otherness that they needed as gay men. He explores the theatrical works of Lazo, Villaurrutia's partner, who offered new representations of the closet and of Mexican history from an emerging middle-class viewpoint. Oropesa also looks at women's participation in the Contemporaneos through Guadalupe Marin, the sometime wife of Diego Rivera and Jorge Cuesta, whose novels present women's struggles to move from being the object of the masculine and heterosexual gaze to having a view and a voice of their own. He concludes the book with Novo's self-transformation from private intellectual into public celebrity, which fulfilled the Contemporaneos' desire to merge high and popular culture and create a space where those on the margins could move to the center. Book jacket.