This engaging collection offers some of the best recent scholarship on race and ethnicity in Mexico and Mexican America. The volume originated in a 2004 symposium arranged in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 2004 casta paintings exhibit. William B. Taylor writes in his perceptive and topical preface, “Casta paintings were a monologue; the Mexican America of these essays is a murmur of many voices. It affirms what casta paintings denied — that identity is a moving target” (p. xvii). Mexico’s multiracial and multicultural colonial landscape serves merely as a unifying point of departure as the authors grapple with a host of topics, including the complexities of colonial identity, shifting representations of Moctezuma and Indians generally, eugenic thought and practice in the United States and Mexico, and even contemporary “photo-performances” that defy both the commodification and the simplification of Mexican identities in popular culture. As these...

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