Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico's Revolution Available to Purchase

In Visible Ruins, Mónica Salas Landa examines the aesthetic dimension of state building in the lowlands of Veracruz through the rise and fall of Mexico's revolutionary project. Tracing the intertwined histories of three state interventions—agrarian reform, economic nationalism, and indigenismo—she shows how the postrevolutionary state established a new visual order, which rendered “certain qualities, forms, and features” visible by concealing, and thereby sustaining, the material inequalities that the state claimed to alleviate (p. 6). As the state's revolutionary project faded so too did its governing aesthetic, leaving behind a set of visible ruins that Salas Landa uses as both “remnants of a defunct regime” and a reflection of “the politics of the present” (p. 10). On the one hand, this book probes the historical discontinuities between the state's visual configuration of the revolutionary project and its local implementation, deconstructing the state's initial acts of occlusion and their symbolic...