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Humboldt in Mexico : the Aleph in Latin America -- Désiré Charnay in Mexico : between politics and science -- Fanny Calderón in Mexico : objects and identity -- John Reed in Mexico : between comedy and epic -- Gabriela Mistral in Mexico : teacher, mother, and saint -- Antonin Artaud in Mexico : the economy of failure -- The Beats in Mexico : vagabond poets William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac -- An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom : Mexico in Roberto Bolaño. "Travelers from Europe, North, and South America often perceive Mexico as a mythical place onto which they project their own cultures' desires, fears, and anxieties. Gómez argues that Mexico's role in these narratives was not passive and that the environment, peoples, ruins, political revolutions, and economy of Mexico were fundamental to the configuration of modern Western art and science. This project studies the images of Mexico and the ways they were contested by travelers of different national origins and trained in varied disciplines from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It starts with Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist whose fame sprang from his trip to Mexico and Latin America, and ends with Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean novelist whose work defines Mexico as an "oasis of horror." In between, there are archaeologists, photographers, war correspondents, educators, writers, and artists for whom the trip to Mexico represented a rite of passage, a turning point in their intellectual biographies, their scientific disciplines, and their artistic practices"--
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