The new urban heroes: Representations of cultural modernity in 1960s and 1970s Mexican literature and film

"The New Urban Heroes: Representations of Cultural Modernity in 1960s and 1970s Mexican Literature and Film" examines how Mexican film and literature engage the discourse of the heroic in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that the politics of hero representation are a key to understanding the ideological underpinnings of Mexican society in its relationship to notions of masculinities provided by the state as a result of the Mexican revolution (1910-1920). In this dissertation the sixties and seventies are explored as the era when the new national project of modernization, begun during the sexenio of Miguel Aleman (1946-1952), posed a serious challenge to the cohesive sense of national identity propagated by the Revolution. The discourse of urban cultural modernity that arose as a result of Mexico's modernizing project stood in sharp ideological contrast to the agrarian mestizo identity celebrated by the State. As a result, new protagonists emerged on the cultural horizon of late-twentieth-century Mexico to challenge both the national stereotypes of the Revolution and the insufficiency of the discourses of the modernizing state.; "The New Urban Heroes: Representations of Cultural Modernity in 1960s and 1970s Mexican Literature and Film" centers on three figures---the superhero wrestler, the youth of "La Onda," and the criminal. In three distinct chapters, the way in which these new "heroes" negotiate the discourse of urban cultural modernity is analyzed. Particular attention is paid to how they either mask (or unmask), transplant, or contain the contradictions inherent in Mexico's new urban contexts. The wrestler masks the uneven, non-participatory quality of the project of modernization, the youth foregrounds modernity's transplanted nature (in literature) and reveals---particularly in film---the patriarchal state's desire to contain expressions of the modern, while the criminal unmasks the superficial appropriation of the discourses of modernity, revealing, as well, their transplanted nature.; Cultural studies provides the central critical approach that allows for a deconstruction of these new "hero" configurations within the social and political transitions of the decade. It also allows us to examine them as cross-mediated phenomena, for they appear in literature, film and popular culture. In fact, the wrestler, the youthful rebel, and the criminal foreground the normative aim of Mexican society to become "modern" while they also dismantle the myths of the emerging modern state.