Visions of the Emerald City: Modernity, Tradition, and the Formation of Porfirian Mexico (review)
This work makes an important and engaging contribution to our understanding of peripheral modernity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Mexico, and especially the role of provincial cities like Oaxaca "in mediating the experience of modernity" (p. 6). As Overmyer-Velazquez carefully explains, modernity is a cultural construct that emerges out of the discursive interplay between things represented as "modern" and things represented as "traditional." Straightforward as this explanation might seem (a testimony to the author's cogent exposition of a complex and often convoluted body of theory), modernity's emergence is never simple. In Oaxaca, for example, "elites and commoners alike constructed modernity physically in the streets, plazas, neighborhoods, and buildings of the Emerald City . . . and discursively through notions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion as displayed in things like civic regulations, newspapers, and public rituals" (p. 2). This potent combination of multiple authorship and contentious social issues meant that although modernity might have promised Oaxacans "order and progress," it produced instead all manner of "anxieties."