The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico by Joshua Lund (review)
Drawing from the essayistic and narrative production of Luis Alva, Ignacio Altamirano, Rosario Castellanos, and Elena Garro, Lund advances a critical examination of race in nineteenthand twentieth-century Mexico—a topic much studied in Mexico, to be sure. Lund's study nevertheless offers a critical departure from previous studies that take race as a self-evident reflection of human difference. Instead, and more productively, Lund takes up the question of race itself as a philosophical and political category, "a culturalpolitical problematic . . . that impinges on social relations" (p. xi). In other words, Lund goes beyond a mere duplication of the narratives ascribed to already existing racialized groups, and instead inquires into die ways in which the category of race itself became an agent of racialization and then enlisted existing naturalized identity positions into the very production of Mexican national history in the first instance. It is less a study of narratives of historical conflict and asymmetrical relations between and among distinct racial groups in Mexico than it is a critical examination of how race itself became integral— more accurately, indispensable—in plotting the narrative (always literary) of Mexican nation-state formation from the Porfiriato to the era of Lazaro Cardenas.