Venezuelan Beauties

Queen for a Day dazzlingly sashays from the tulle and satin dresses of the Miss Venezuela beauty contest to the very specific sites in Caracas where sex and desire transform, reimagine, and reorder the city. The spectacular story of modern Venezuela may not be familiar to many in the United States, more attuned to issues of revolution (Cuba), dictatorship (Argentina, Chile, and others), and US proxy wars in Central America and other parts of the region. But this fast-paced story, which begins in the 1950s, takes us to a time when a country looking at its present and past could see only a future of brilliant transformation in a city intended to be one of the modern centers of the continent. In Venezuela, the wealth produced by petroleum financed progress as an attainable dream: extraordinary abstract art and dazzling architectural feats; publishing houses that nurtured a continental, and not simply...