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El Pelado Y ‘La Desnudez De México:’ Reading Urban Poverty With Salvador Novo And Agustín Yáñez, Stephen Buttes

Stephen M Buttes

The paper examines the role that urban poor played in discourses of national identity in the post-revolutionary period in Mexico (1920-1950). As Mexico emphasized its indigenous, rural past while at the same time becoming increasingly urban during its process of modernization, the underpinnings of a “proper” or “autochthonous” national identity were also necessarily questioned. These tensions are perhaps best exemplified in what Guillermo Sheridan has called the “dilemma” of “formative” and “speculative” models of the “national soul” (57). While the former saw itself as prescriptive, this “speculative” model of national identity, in which “la nacionalidad se convierte … en una …