In this chapter, we consider how power was centralized within multiple Southeastern societies and the ways such pretensions were challenged. These contests were waged as people employed a diverse array of things secured from various sources to accomplish their distinct aims. Efforts to concentrate power and build hierarchies generally involved the creation of plazas, surrounded by monumental platforms, that served as venues for communal gatherings. The rituals and feasts held within these locales helped instill in the participants a sense of belonging to a group that encompassed and transcended earlier loyalties to individual households. Such events also promoted the preeminence of those who hosted them, planned the raising of these impressive arenas, and lived in the buildings bordering them. Resistance to these political projects relied on the majority’s efforts to remain economically self-sufficient, thus stymieing the emergence of hierarchies in most parts of the Southeast. The resulting political formations varied in their degrees of power concentration and the creation of invidious distinctions based on the shifting outcomes of these power competitions.

This chapter discusses the importance of collaborative relationships in civic life, and how the relationships that people would value do not always arise on their own. Instead, there can be an unmet desire to collaborate. It underscores why it’s important to distinguish between two types of goals for collaborative relationships: informal collaboration oriented toward knowledge exchange, and formal collaboration oriented toward projects with shared ownership, decision-making authority, and accountability. It also introduces the book’s main argument, which is that in addition to commonly cited factors such as resource constraints and a lack of organizational incentives, unmet desire arises because potential collaborators (who often begin as strangers) can be uncertain how to relate to each other. Uncertainty about relationality is a key barrier to new collaborative relationships. Last, the chapter also connects a rich understanding of the science of collaboration to several other topics: the nature of democratic agency, how to strengthen the link between science and society, the nature of discursive participation as a form of civic engagement, and how we conceptualize civic competence.

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution and its long aftermath, a distinguished lineage of Mexican poets that were also – and perhaps more importantly – outstandingly gifted essayists, made a sustained effort to reconstitute a national tradition fully inserted in Occidentalism. This chapter examines this great synthesis of the critical poets, beginning with Alfonso Reyes, followed by the Contemporáneos group, and arriving at the major accomplishments of Octavio Paz. The chapter focuses on Paz, establishing the different sources of his ideas on critical poetry and then examining some of his most significant compositions in this vein, with a particular focus on “Himno entre ruinas.”

This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book, and then presents a tool called an unmet desire survey (designed based on those findings) that potential collaborators and organizational leaders can use in order to form new collaborative relationships. It also briefly discusses how the findings are helpful for forming new research partnerships, a type of formal collaboration discussed in greater detail in one of the appendices. Last, it includes several policy recommendations for how organizational leaders can put the results into practice, as well as science policy recommendations for valuable future research on the unmet desire to collaborate in civic life.

This chapter discusses the question of cosmopolitanism and its role in the formation of the poetry of Modernismo, with a focus on the work of three major writers: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Amado Nervo, and José Juan Tablada. Using the notion of “strategic Occidentalism” – the deliberate and critical engagements of writers with the Western tradition – the chapter discusses the ways in which poets in the Modernismo tradition used specific literary genealogies to transition Mexican poetry into the twentieth century. The chapter also comments on the various available editions of the work of these poets.

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.