Historias 97 – Technology and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico with David Dalton
Dr. David Dalton joined Steven to discuss his book entitled Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico.
After the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917, postrevolutionary leaders hoped to assimilate the country’s racially diverse population into one official mixed-race identity—the mestizo.
Dalton’s book shows that as part of this vision, the Mexican government believed it could modernize “primitive” indigenous peoples through technology in the form of education, modern medicine, industrial agriculture, and factory work. David Dalton takes a close look at how authors, artists, and thinkers—some state-funded, some independent—engaged with official views of Mexican racial identity from the 1920s to the 1970s.
