Colonial-era Mexican poetry presents a complex interweaving of several genres; this chapter explores two of its major forms: epic poetry and lyric poetry. The epic, often understood as a propaganda instrument for colonial interests, is also constitutive of colonial historical narrative, as is illustrated by works by Bernardo de Balbuena, Antonio de Saavedra Guzmán, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Arias de Villalobos and others examined in this chapter. Lyric poetry captured the creative virtuosity of colonial Mexico. While past critique has framed this opus in relation to European sources, more contemporary readings focus instead on its interplay with the literary, political, and societal elements of its environment. This chapter explores the scope of this genre and the challenge that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing practices pose to twenty-first-century readers.

This chapter deals with another group of modernistas, mostly from the Catholic cities of Western Mexico, who are quite different from those examined in Chapter 6. Although they often met with the other group in Mexico City or shared the pages of the Revista Moderna, their approach to modernity is so different that it deserves a separate analysis. Modernismo can be defined by its able incorporation of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Parnassianism, but in the case of this group, there is a scepticism towards several aspects of these aesthetic movements, which always acts as a path that leads back to provincial life, landscape, and a national (and again Catholic) decorum. The authors studied in this chapter include Luis G. Urbina, Enrique González Martínez, Francisco González León, Manuel José Othón, and, in pride of place, Ramón López Velarde.

This chapter considers cultural institutions as major shapers of the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. Here Octavio Paz is once again crucial, as a cultural broker, the editor of Plural and later Vuelta, and the force behind the creation of major cultural institutions. The roles of poetic institutions are reflected in the careers of major poets like José Emilio Pacheco and Eduardo Lizalde, among the first winners of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize. This award opened a poetic period that eventually slowly declined, beginning with the closing of Vuelta to what Malva Flores has termed the “twilight” of the intellectual poets. The chapter also examines the cultural ecology emerging from the subsidies, fellowships, and privileges instituted by the Mexican State.

This chapter proposes that the most enduring contribution of the ill-fated second generation of Romanticism – whose members included the suicidal Manuel Acuña and syphilitic Manuel M. Flores, to name but two – was not that they exhibited traits associated with European Romanticism. Rather, this chapter posits that they gave rise to a longue durée Romantic sensibility that lasted well into the twentieth century. Furthermore, we here argue that this important legacy belongs to mostly female authors, starting with Laura Méndez de Cuenca and María Enriqueta, who begin their successful careers in the nineteenth century. The work of these and other female authors, widely read by their contemporaries but then omitted from scholarly attention, demands examination, in particular as scholarly interest in their work intensifies.

Although the first anthology of Mexican poetry dates from 1833, Alejandro Higashi argued in his seminal volume PM-XXI-360 that the primary role of the anthology in Mexico changed in 1966. Traditionally a genre that presents a selection of previous work shaped by a certain notion of taste, the anthology took on an overtly prescriptive role with the first edition of Poesía en movimiento, edited by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Pacheco, and Homero Aridjis. This text has remained in print ever since, and has privileged a practice of “demanding poetry” that has been taken up by later anthologies. The chapter also discusses the “cloning lab” of the anthology and how this phenomenon can be discerned in the profusion of anthologies published since the 1980s.

In the same way as the popular returns to poetic discourses, as studied in Chapter 14, so does the Baroque – an aesthetic which, as Bolívar Echeverría has taught us, is not a passing phase, but rather one of modernity’s faces. In this chapter, a panoply of authors – some of them included in the seminal Medusario anthology, some of them readers of it – are considered in the light of the Neobaroque and postpoetry. The authors discussed include Gerardo Deniz, David Huerta, Coral Bracho, Myriam Moscona, Luis Felipe Fabre, Ricardo Cázares, and Alejandro Tarrab.

This summary chapter focuses on the tensions that characterized the political histories of Southeast Mesoamerica. At the heart of these contradictions are the majority’s strategies to protect their autonomy in the face of those who sought to centralize power and build hierarchy by promoting the rank and file’s dependence on them for essential goods, symbols, and practices. Schemes to concentrate power by reconfiguring extant social nets and the movement of resources through them were met by countermeasures of the intended victims, who redirected needed assets to their projects by working within social networks of their own making. Oscillations between centralizing and decentralizing tendencies occurring at multiple scales resulted from these contests. Shifts in the availability of resources among competitors presented opportunities for the formation of new political arrangements comprised of novel social webs enacted through unprecedented practices. Thus, as diverse agents sought their often contradictory aims, assets derived from multiple origins came to constitute the lives of people of all ranks living across wide swaths of Southeast Mesoamerica.

This chapter is devoted to the long poem which, after failed attempts to create an epic of the new nation, was reconceived in the twentieth century in the lyrical vein and remains a crucial consecratory instance in the Mexican canon. The chapter examines the nature and weight of the long poem’s trajectory, including the Contemporáneo José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin (1939), work by Octavio Paz, and Sara Uribe’s Antigona González (2012). The discussion also considers the new forms of the long poem, such as those by David Huerta, Maricela Guerrero, Isabel Zapata, Balam Rodrigo, Ricardo Cázares, and others.

Relationality captures how people want others to relate to them, and how they will relate to diverse others, yet as this chapter shows “relating to others” may include many different elements and be person- and/or context-specific. This chapter uses interviews with nonprofit practitioners and researchers, and also national surveys of policymakers and AmeriCorps program leaders, to lay out some of the ways in which different kinds of people who seek change in civic life express uncertainty about relationality.

The Naco and Middle Chamelecón’s political histories continued to diverge from patterns seen elsewhere in the Southeast during the ninth through tenth centuries. Political fragmentation in the Naco valley was accompanied by the proliferation of craft specialization. Specialized manufacture, though still pursued at La Sierra, was no longer restricted to the capital. Just about every known rural homestead was engaged in one or more forms of manufacture, exchanges of surpluses constituting a matrix of social networks that bound all valley residents together in relations that were more heterarchical than hierarchical. Differences in the scales and intensities of production did contribute to variations in the material well-being of producers; those who made more of a greater variety of goods accumulated more valuables than those who made less. Community-wide specialization in pottery production continued at Las Canoas even as signs of centralized power vanished there. Las Canoas’ potters exchanged their output with the Naco valley’s residents, though they were seemingly disadvantaged in those dealings. This vital system of production and exchange ended by CE 1000.

We review here the scant evidence pertaining to the early arrival of people in Southeast Mesoamerica and what is presently known about the timing and nature of the first efforts to domesticate plants in the area. Most of the chapter summarizes the different forms that sociopolitical complexity took in the Southeast during 1600–400 BCE. It was during this period that the first monumental platforms were raised in the area, suggesting the emergence of leaders who could plan these projects and command the labor to complete them. While such constructions speak to a modicum of political centralization, they did not necessarily signify the existence of hierarchies. People in different areas thus used similar things, such as large buildings, to craft different, locally specific power relations. Such variety sets the stage for the different political histories that will take shape in the coming centuries.

This chapter considers processes of political centralization, hierarchy building, and social differentiation that were initiated and sustained by agents who, from CE 600–800, operated in realms that were not in direct contact with representatives of the Copán state. In general, the creation of sociopolitical complexity in each case involved the selective acquisition and use of goods and ideas from various sources, including but not limited to the Maya lowlands, in strategies designed to advance the interests of a few elites over those of their immediate subordinates. The latter, in turn, transformed their domestic arrangements as they sought to maintain as much autonomy as they could in the face of these threats. The resulting changes often involved increased involvement in craft production and possibly market exchanges as those facing onerous elite demands for tribute sought novel means to counter them. The outcome was a dynamic set of political relations that operated at multiple spatial scales and which were animated by people of all ranks who mobilized diverse resources secured through overlapping social networks from various sources to exercise power in all its forms.