Portrait of a Young Painter

Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation

Mary Kay Vaughan author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:19th Dec '14

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Portrait of a Young Painter cover

In Portrait of a Young Painter, the distinguished historian Mary Kay Vaughan adopts a biographical approach to understanding the culture surrounding the Mexico City youth rebellion of the 1960s. Her chronicle of the life of painter Pepe Zúñiga counters a literature that portrays post-1940 Mexican history as a series of uprisings against state repression, injustice, and social neglect that culminated in the student protests of 1968. Rendering Zúñiga's coming of age on the margins of formal politics, Vaughan depicts midcentury Mexico City as a culture of growing prosperity, state largesse, and a vibrant, transnationally-informed public life that produced a multifaceted youth movement brimming with creativity and criticism of convention. In an analysis encompassing the mass media, schools, politics, family, sexuality, neighborhoods, and friendships, she subtly invokes theories of discourse, phenomenology, and affect to examine the formation of Zúñiga's persona in the decades leading up to 1968. By discussing the influences that shaped his worldview, she historicizes the process of subject formation and shows how doing so offers new perspectives on the events of 1968.

"The last several years have revealed the start of a remarkable ferment among historians of postrevolutionary, and especially of post-1945, Mexico....Mary Kay Vaughan’s beautifully written, masterful new book, Portrait of a Young Painter, is situated precisely at the interstices of this historiographical revisionism." -- Eric Zolov * Hispanic American Historical Review *
"Mary Kay Vaughan’s Portrait of a Young Painter is an extraordinary contribution to the literature on the Latin American sixties.... It will be mandatory reading on the sixties, an era of transforming subjectivities worldwide." -- Valeria Manzano * American Historical Review *
"Scholars will gain much from reading this smartly written, imaginative study. Skillfully revealing the complex, multilayered worlds that Zúñiga inhabited, Vaughan opens the door to a greater understanding of Mexico's 1960s youth rebellion. This powerful analysis will contribute significantly to the field, but also should point to new ways of writing history." -- Stephanie J. Smith * The Americas *
"Vaughan’s book suggests that the roots of political resistance in Mexico can be profitably explored at the level of individual subjectivity, and her work should influence future scholarship by Mexicanists and historians of youth movements in Latin America and beyond." -- Rachel Grace Newman * Journal of Latin American Studies *
"Mary Kay Vaughan’s biography of Mexican painter Pepe Zúñiga is a labor of love and friendship." -- Robert M. Buffington * EIAL *
“Vaughan writes a lively, inspired, and extremely detailed cultural history of Mexico City’s urban culture between 1940 and 1970. . . . She writes with empathy, intelligence, and humor.” -- Rubén Gallo * Latin American Research Review *

ISBN: 9780822357650

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 549g

304 pages