Rubén Gallo – författare

The Mexico City Reader is an anthology of ""cronicas"" - short texts that are a cross between literary essay and urban reportage - about life in Mexico City today. This is not the ""City of Palaces"" of yesteryear, but the vibrant, chaotic, anarchic city of the 1980s and 1990s - the city of garbage mafias, corrupt ex-presidents, and spectacular crime. Taken together in all their variety, these texts form a mosiac of life in Mexico City. Like the visitor wandering through the city streets, the reader should expect to be constantly surprised. Mexico City is one of Latin America's cultural capitals, and one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the world. Like the streets of the city, The Mexico City Reader is brimming with life, crowded with flaneurs, flirtatious students, Indian dancers, food vendors, fortune tellers, political activists, and peasant protesters. The writers include expert theorists - a panoply of writers from Carlos Monsivais and Jorge Ibaguengoitia to Fabrizio Mejia Madrid and Juieta Garcia Gonzalez - brought together precisely because they are experienced practitioners of the city.

The Mexico City Reader is an anthology of ""cronicas"" - short texts that are a cross between literary essay and urban reportage - about life in Mexico City today. This is not the ""City of Palaces"" of yesteryear, but the vibrant, chaotic, anarchic city of the 1980s and 1990s - the city of garbage mafias, corrupt ex-presidents, and spectacular crime. Taken together in all their variety, these texts form a mosiac of life in Mexico City. Like the visitor wandering through the city streets, the reader should expect to be constantly surprised. Mexico City is one of Latin America's cultural capitals, and one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the world. Like the streets of the city, The Mexico City Reader is brimming with life, crowded with flaneurs, flirtatious students, Indian dancers, food vendors, fortune tellers, political activists, and peasant protesters. The writers include expert theorists - a panoply of writers from Carlos Monsivais and Jorge Ibaguengoitia to Fabrizio Mejia Madrid and Juieta Garcia Gonzalez - brought together precisely because they are experienced practitioners of the city.

Part biography, part cultural history, part literary study, Ruben Gallo's book explores the presence of Latin America in Proust's life and work. The novelist lived in an era shaped by French colonial expansion into the Americas: just before his birth, Napoleon III installed Maximilian as emperor of Mexico, and during the 1890s France was shaken by the Panama Affair, a financial scandal linked to the construction of the canal in which thousands of French citizens lost their life savings. It was in the context of these tense Franco-Latin American relations that the novelist met the circle of friends discussed in Proust's Latin Americans: the composer Reynaldo Hahn, Proust's Venezuelan lover; Gabriel de Yturri, an Argentinean dandy; Jose-Maria de Heredia, a Cuban poet and early literary model; Antonio de La Gandara, a Mexican society painter; and Ramon Fernandez, a brilliant Mexican critic turned Nazi sympathizer. Gallo discusses the correspondence - some of it never before published - between the novelist and this heterogeneous group and also presents insightful readings of In Search of Lost Time that posit Latin America as the novel's political unconscious.Proust's speculation with Mexican stocks informed his various fictional passages devoted to financial transactions, and the Panama Affair shaped his understanding of the conquest of America in a little-known early text. Proust's Latin Americans will be of interest to scholars of modernism, French literature, Proust studies, gender studies, and Latin American studies.

Durante los noventa, el arte exhibido en México integró obras que fueron definidas como "conceptuales" o experimentales, pero que, para Rubén Gallo, están particularmente marcadas por la irreverencia y el humor. Una visión personal sobre esa generación creativa y fecunda llevó al autor, crítico y participante de ese auge, a ensayar en este libro sobre temas y obras de su interés: el orientalismo de los jóvenes artistas mexicanos, el voyerismo fotográfico de la serie Ricas y famosas, la radiodifusión pirata y el programa Sin Cabeza, las representaciones de la ciudad de Francis Alÿs, Minerva Cuevas, Santiago Sierra, Teresa Margolles y Jonathan Hernández, así como la creación de museos propios, dentro de la comodidad del hogar. Publicado originalmente como New Tendencies in Mexican Art: the 1990s, el texto de Rubén Gallo está dedicado a los críticos del futuro, unos que "sabrán hacer de la crítica un terreno plural, polifónico y abierto".

Durante los noventa, el arte exhibido en México integró obras que fueron definidas como "conceptuales" o experimentales, pero que, para Rubén Gallo, están particularmente marcadas por la irreverencia y el humor. Una visión personal sobre esa generación creativa y fecunda llevó al autor, crítico y participante de ese auge, a ensayar en este libro sobre temas y obras de su interés: el orientalismo de los jóvenes artistas mexicanos, el voyerismo fotográfico de la serie Ricas y famosas, la radiodifusión pirata y el programa Sin Cabeza, las representaciones de la ciudad de Francis Alÿs, Minerva Cuevas, Santiago Sierra, Teresa Margolles y Jonathan Hernández, así como la creación de museos propios, dentro de la comodidad del hogar. Publicado originalmente como New Tendencies in Mexican Art: the 1990s, el texto de Rubén Gallo está dedicado a los críticos del futuro, unos que "sabrán hacer de la crítica un terreno plural, polifónico y abierto".

A visual and scholarly deep dive into Cuba's modernist gems of the postwar eraIn the decades after World War II, from just prior to the revolution and into the mid-1980s, modernist architecture blossomed in Cuba, attracting both native talent and leading international architects from Europe. Havana Modern examines Cuban modernism’s highlights with a wealth of archival materials, photos and new scholarship. Edited by Rubén Gallo—author of Mexican Modernity (2005), Freud’s Mexico (2010) and Proust’s Latin Americans (2014)—the volume is arranged in 10 chapters authored by current and former Princeton faculty members and graduate students. These essays, which arose from seminars organized by Gallo and historian Beatriz Colomina, examine Max Abramovitz’s American Embassy; Richard Neutra’s De Schultess House; Martín Domínguez Esteban, Miguel Gastón and Emilio del Junco’s Radiocentro; Mies van Der Rohe’s office building for Ron Barcardí S.A.; Vittorio Garatti, Roberto Gottardi and Ricardo Porro’s National Art Schools for Havana; Mario Girona’s Coppelia Ice-cream parlor and park; Vittorio Garatti, Hugo D’Acosta and Sergio Baroni’s Cuban Pavilion at Expo 67; Antonio Quintana and Alberto Rodriguez’s "Edificio Experimental"; and Aleksandr Grigorievich Rochegov’s USRR Embassy. Havana Modern draws on history, politics, culture, literature and film to elucidate this outstandingly rich era in architectural history.