In the early 2000s, during my first trip to Mexico City, I recall going with my friend Alberto to the Ghandi bookstore off the Quevedo metro station in the Coyocán district. At that stage of our disciplinary training, a book was simply a curio site, a prosthetic affective landscape, and a weapon to deflect and temper nativist and culturalist claims one inexorably encounters during fieldwork. Among Alberto's book suggestions, which would leave a trace and eventually trigger a long-term dialogue, was polemical Mexican anthropologist Roger Bartra's The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis of the Mexican, an experimental book that diagnoses the nationalist trope of “Lo Mexicano” through an eroticized and voyeuristic mise-en-scène of an anthropologist gazing, not from the perspective of the “balcony of the nation” (Lomnitz, 2001) as late nineteenth-century dictator and enthusiast modernizer Porfirio Díaz had once proudly called his great capital city, but through the keyhole of an imagined post-nationalist peep show. Little did I know that, less than a year later, I would be conducting fieldwork in Mexico City and would initiate a sustained dialogue with Bartra who is, in my view, one of contemporary Mexico's most sophisticated and incisive public intellectuals, above all an anthropologist with a tongue dipped in the most caustic of acids. To many, including the interlocutors whose work is featured in this book, he has been emblematic of a rupture with the Franz Boas-inspired and state-official indegenista anthropology of Manuel Gamio, the “father” of Mexican nationalist anthropology. By diagnosing what he calls a “post-Mexican condition,” Bartra extended the initial revolt of 1968 marked by the notorious manifesto written by a group of angry anthropologists known as the Magnificos under the title That Which they Call Mexican Anthropology.2 The Magnificent Seven had inaugurated what ought perhaps to be approached as nothing less and nothing more than a disarticulation of the connections between the culturalist aesthetics of the historical avant-garde(s), Mexican nationalism, and what a perceptive art historian has called “the role of Manuel Gamio's anthropology as a tool of social engineering.”