Public History in Mexico

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"This creatively crafted and wide-ranging book on public history showcases both archival methods and experiential practices to offer a new reading of Mexico's past and present. Its contributors not only deploy more standard historical approaches, as in a cartographic accounting of the country's first feminist congress of 1916 in the Yucatan. They also document ethnographic and workshop-based community encounters where a reckoning with the past unfolds in real time through communal dialogues, innovative cultural practices, and active efforts to discursively or visually create awareness of the past and its resonance in the present. Many of these happenings are structured around traumatic memories and events that have impacted a wide range of Mexican cities and its citizens, on scales as local as the neighborhood or plaza. Perhaps most original is the decision to frame the volume as a platform for documenting public history. This requires recognition of untold narratives from a plurality of citizen voices from all over the country, most of whose experiences are routinely relegated to the periphery of officially sanctioned historiography. By allowing those who have been excluded from national narratives to actively insert their presence in the collective Mexican imaginary, a public is born and a new history emerges. A powerful and emotional read."

Diane E. Davis, Harvard University, USA

"Public History in Mexico constitutes one of the most original and significant contributions to the field of memory studies in Latin America. Through a variety of political subjectivities and sites of memory, this volume forwards a new understanding of public history in the intersection of the political with the spatial, a first-of-its-kind intervention. Scholars across the humanities and the social sciences will find both bold methodological ideas and radical new understandings on the public in this volume."

Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis, USA