Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation
In Portrait of a Young Painter, the distinguished historian Mary Kay Vaughan adopts a biographical approach to understanding the culture surrounding the Mexico City youth rebellion of the 1960s. Her chronicle of the life of painter Pepe Zuniga counters a literature that portrays post-1940 Mexican history as a series of uprisings against state repression, injustice, and social neglect that culminated in the student protests of 1968. Rendering Zuniga's coming of age on the margins of formal politics, Vaughan depicts midcentury Mexico City as a culture of growing prosperity, state largesse, and a vibrant, transnationally-informed public life that produced a multifaceted youth movement brimming with creativity and criticism of convention. In an analysis encompassing the mass media, schools, politics, family, sexuality, neighborhoods, and friendships, she subtly invokes theories of discourse, phenomenology, and affect to examine the formation of Zuniga's persona in the decades leading up to 1968. By discussing the influences that shaped his worldview, she historicizes the process of subject formation and shows how doing so offers new perspectives on the events of 1968.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: United States, 1 December 2014
Format: Paperback / softback, 304 pages
Other Information: Illustrated
Dimensions: 22.9 x 15 x 1.8 centimeters (0.42 kg)
Writer: Mary Kay Vaughan
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Lupe's Voice 29
2. Enchanting City / Magical Radio 44
3. Pepe at School and with God, the Virgin, and the Saints 58
4. My Father, My Teacher 78
5. The Zuniga Family as a Radionovela 98
6. "How Difficult Is Adolescence!" 127
7. "Five Pesos, Two Pencils, and an Eraser!" 145
8. Exuberant Interlude: Painting at the Museo de Antropologia 173
9. Private Struggle / Public Protest: 1965-1972 184
10. Subjectivity and the Public Sphere: The Mature Art of Jose (Pepe) Zuniga 212
Notes 241
Bibliography 259
Index 279
About the AuthorMary Kay Vaughan is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-40, winner of both the Conference on Latin American History's Bolton Prize and the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Award, and a coeditor of Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico and The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940, both also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews"Portrait of a Young Painter is one of the most original and engaging books I have read in a long time. It is dazzling in its layers of perception, its textures, and its intimate insights. It is genuinely original in both argument and methodology, a remarkable work and a pleasure to read"