Rebeca Villalobos Álvarez's El culto a Juárez is a lucid, innovative, and closely reasoned analysis of the rhetoric around the figure of Benito Juárez during the century after his death. Three extensive chapters cover the history of the cult, a rhetorical analysis of its elements, and an exploration of the “sublime” in two artistic representations. Informed by a deep reading of visual culture, Villalobos Álvarez's work goes beyond the manipulation of Juárez's image on behalf of particular interests to explore the relationship between politics and aesthetics. She argues that Juárez “se ha constituido no sólo en un emblema político, sino en un verdadero símbolo cultural y esto se debe, en gran medida, a la implementación de estrategias que integran rasgos estéticos y argumentativos en una misma forma de representación” (p. 19).
Chapter 1 tracks the image of Juárez through the century that followed his 1872 death. The first of three...
