Description: Exploring the role of performance in tourist and nationalist contexts, Embodying Mexico analyzes the making of icons in twentieth-century Mexico, as local dance, music, and ritual practices are transformed into national and global spectacles. Drawing on extensive ethnographic, archival, and participatory experience this interdisciplinary study makes an important contribution to an understanding of Mexican cultural politics.
Review Quotes: "Hellier-Tinoco focuses on two iconic folk performances to reveal how contemporary Mexican cultural practices emerge from locally rooted traditions, individual agency, and the demands of international touristic representation. Refreshingly observant of each element in the equation, this genuinely interdisciplinary account touches concerns shared by many studying the manifestation of artistic process in the modern-day world." -- Jonathan P. Stock, Department of Music, University of Sheffield, Editor, The World of Music
"Embodying Mexico serves as a single case study that nonetheless illuminates similar processes in other world contexts. This makes the text a good one for undergraduate as well as graduate students in disciplines like Ethnic Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Anthropology."--Brenda Romero, Associate Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, University of Colorado at Boulder"A wonderful book! With Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead, Ruth Hellier-Tinoco shows the insights two performances representing postrevolutionary Mexico offer on nationalism, neoliberalism, and other contemporary issues."--Helena Wulff, Stockholm University"A solid case study of two iconic traditional practices of Michoacán's P'urhépecha region that can serve as an introduction for undergraduate students learning about Latin American, and particularly Mexican, festivals, dance, music, and cultural/national embodiment." --Journal of Folklore Research"Hellier-Tinoco deftly and convincingly demonstrates her central thesis...This book is essential reading for those interested in Mexico, nationalism and the arts, Latin American studies as pertaining to folklore and indigenous peoples, and indigenous studies in relation to processes of cultural appropriation. It will also be of particular use to those interested in embodiment, performance studies, and tourism. As a well-performed interdisciplinary study, the book is a solid contribution to scholarship of many stripes."--Notes"Does a good job in bringing out the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in Mexican cultural production."--Dance Research Journal"Hellier-Tinoco offers a brilliant analysis of layered ethnographic performance, and her exemplary methodology stands as the signature feature of the text."--Ethnomusicology