The Aztec palimpsest
Subtitle: Mexico in the modern imagination
By: Daniel Cooper Alarcón.
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Tucson
Language: eng
Number of pages: 224
Subjects: American literature -- History and criticism.; American literature -- Mexican American authors -- History and criticism.; Mexican Americans -- Ethnic identity.; Tourism -- Government policy -- Mexico.; Mexican Americans -- Intellectual life.; Mexican Americans in literature.; Publicity.; Mexico -- Foreign public opinion.; Mexico -- Description and travel.; Mexico -- In literature.
Description: Mexico is more than a country; it is a concept that is the product of a complex network of discourses as disparate as the rhetoric of Chicano nationalism, English-language literature about Mexico, and Mexican tourist propaganda. The idea of "Mexicanness," says Daniel Cooper Alarcon, has arisen through a process of erasure and superimposition as these discourses have produced contentious and sometimes contradictory descriptions of their subject.

By considering Mexicanness as a palimpsest of these competing yet interwoven narratives, Cooper offers a paradigm through which the construction and representation of cultural identity can be studied.

He shows how the Chicano myth of Aztlan was constructed upon earlier Mesoamerican myths, discusses representations of Mexico in texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, and analyzes the content of tourist literature, thereby revealing the economic, social, and political interests that drive the production of Mexicanness today.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-218) and index.
Table of contents: title: Toward a new understanding of Aztlán and Chicano cultural identity; title: Mexico as infernal paradise; title: "Where do you get your ideas about Mexico?"; title: If a tree falls ... tourism and Mexicanness.