Visible Ruins

Visit the University of Texas Press website to pre-order my book. Promo code UTXS24, grants 30% off your book order! Click here.

You can also order through Amazon.

Praise

This book is a fascinating and wide-ranging study of state projects in post-revolutionary Mexico. Salas Landa takes us to the lowlands of northern Veracruz to reveal how the Mexican government’s practices left behind legacies of violence against humans and the environment. Theoretically sophisticated, eloquent, and well-researched, her book is a model for conceptualizing the process of state-making both within Mexico and beyond. ~Christina Bueno, Northeastern Illinois University, author of The Pursuit of Ruins: Archaeology, History, and the Making of Modern Mexico

Visible Ruins is an engaging and important contribution to the understanding of the visual orders of post-revolutionary Mexico. Through a rich montage that weaves together pre-Hispanic ruins, oil infrastructures, land regimes, environmental ruination, photographs, murals, and violence, Mónica Salas Landa demonstrates how political regimes are produced and challenged through practices of visibility and invisibility. She shows that the tension between what is made visible and what is concealed by an aesthetics of neoliberal-state governance creates landscapes regularly disrupted by that which cannot be fully hidden. ~Gastón R. Gordillo, University of British Columbia, author of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction

Image Credit: Benjamin Blaisot