Mexico as the unfolding of, and a protagonist in, global historical phenomena cannot be a new discovery, but a recovery, a restitution of the past's own terms. Thus, there have long been variegated cosmopolitanisms that have seen Mexico's past more than Mexicanly—from Bernal Díaz del Castillo to Francisco Xavier Clavijero, from Edmundo O'Gorman to Erika Pani. New Directions in Transnational Mexican History is a collection of unrelated essays connected by a new transnationalism unconnected to prior cosmopolitanisms.
The editors’ introduction sets the book's approach: to study “Mexico as a recipient nation of material and cultural production that may have originated in Europe, the United States, Asia, or Africa but transformed into Mexican versions very much different from the originals” (p. 10). Not much thought is given to the when, how, and what of calling “recipient” a large modern nation-state that for more than five centuries has been part of whatever...
