Around 1919 & in Mexico City

20 May 2008

Professor Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

Mexico furnished the era of social and cultural change that started ‘right around 1910’ with its first popular revolution. By 1919 Mexico City had become a refuge for the world’s radicals. To a despairing world, it offered a unique site to safely experiment with all sorts of enchantments.

In this culturally promiscuous capital not only the meaning of Mexico was at stake, but also the meanings of major modernist concepts –revolution, the popular, avant-garde, authenticity, race and desire. In Arabian Nights of 1919, Mexico City Professor Tenorio, tells a series of interconnected tales of an urban world that included Mexican poets and artists; radical foreigners plotting revolution; love and betrayal; experimentation in art, poetry, sexuality and politics; well-known luminaries such as Frida Kahlo and Ramón del Valle Inclán; less well-known Anita Brenner and José Vasconcelos; a Bengal Braham who founded the Mexican Communist Party and a Colombian bohemian who broke all literary and moral canons.

Allan Martin (1926-2002) was an intellectual, institutional, and social pioneer whose career as a historian spanned the second half of the 20th Century. When most Australians went to England for their postgraduate work, he chose ANU, where he was the first doctoral student in History in the Research School of Social Sciences. He accepted the Foundation chair in History at LaTrobe University in 1966 and returned to RSSS as a senior fellow in 1973.

This was the 2008 Allan Martin Memorial Lecture.

Broad Topics: Arts and Social Sciences

Sub-topics: History & Archeology, Society & Culture

Areas: ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences

Professor Tenorio-Trillo is Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Profesor Asociado, División de Historia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, Mexico City. A graduate of Stanford University, his wide ranging work on Mexican and US transnational history and modernity includes Mexico at World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (1996), ‘Stereophonic Scientific Modernism in The Nation and Beyond’, Journal of American History, 1999, and ‘The Cosmopolitan Mexican Summer, 1920-1949’, Latin American Research Review, 1997. He has recently completed City upon a Lake: A History of Mexico City, 1880-1930 and Mexico Demexicanized: Echoes and Voices in Making of a National Image (1870-1940).

Part of the 2008 Toyota-ANU Public Lecture Series