New York in the 1920s and 1930s was a modernist mecca that drew artists, writers, and other creators of culture from around the globe. Two such expatriates were Mexican artist and Renaissance man Miguel Covarrubias and Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray. Their lifelong friendship gave Muray an entrée into Covarrubias's circle of fellow Mexican artists—Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Juan Soriano, Fernando Castillo, Guillermo Meza, Roberto Montenegro, and Rafael Navarro—whose works Muray collected. This outstanding body of Mexican modernist art, now owned by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, forms the subject of this beautifully illustrated volume. Produced in conjunction with the Ransom Center's exhibition "Miguel Covarrubias: A Certain Clairvoyance," this volume contains color plates of virtually all the items in Nickolas Muray's collection of twentieth-century Mexican art. The majority of the works are by Covarrubias, while the excellent works by the other artists reflect the range of aesthetic shifts and modernist influences of the period in Mexico. Accompanying the plates are five original essays that establish Covarrubias's importance as a modernist impresario as influential in his sphere as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Cocteau were in theirs. Likewise, the essays reestablish the significance of Nickolas Muray, whose success as a master of color photography, portraiture, advertising imagery, and commercial illustration has made him difficult to place within the history of photography as a fine art. As a whole, this publication of the Nickolas Muray Collection vividly illustrates the transgression of generic boundaries and the cross-fertilization among artists working in different media, from painting and photography to dance and ethnography, that gave modernism its freshness and energy. It also demonstrates that American modernism was thoroughly infused with a fervor for all things Mexican, of which Covarrubias was a principal proponent, and that Mexican modernists, no less than their American and European counterparts, answered Pound's call to "make it new."

At the center of an artistic milieu as vital and exciting as the Left Bank of Paris or Greenwich Village, Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias knew almost everyone in the limelight of the 1930s and 1940s—Langston Hughes, Carl Van Vechten, John Huston, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, to name just a few. As fascinating themselves as any of their friends, the couple together fostered a renaissance of interest in the history and traditional arts of Mexico's indigenous peoples, while amassing an extraordinary collection of art that ranged from pre-Hispanic Olmec and Aztec sculptures to the work of Diego Rivera. Written by a long-time friend of Rosa, this book presents a sparkling account of the life and times of Rosa and Miguel. Adriana Williams begins with Miguel's birth in 1904 and follows the brilliant early flowering of his artistic career as a renowned caricaturist for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker magazines, his meeting and marriage with Rosa at the height of her New York dancing career, and their many years of professional collaboration on projects ranging from dance to anthropology to painting and art collecting to the development of museums to preserve Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage. Interviewing as many of their friends as possible, Williams fills her narrative with reminiscences that illuminate Miguel's multifaceted talents, Rosa's crucial collaboration in many of his projects, and their often tempestuous relationship.

In A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 Paul Bevan explores how the cartoon (manhua) emerged from its place in the Chinese modern art world to become a propaganda tool in the hands of left-wing artists. The artists involved in what was largely a transcultural phenomenon were an eclectic group working in the areas of fashion and commercial art and design. The book demonstrates that during the build up to all-out war the cartoon was not only important in the sphere of Shanghai popular culture in the eyes of the publishers and readers of pictorial magazines but that it occupied a central place in the primary discourse of Chinese modern art history.

Culture, Communication, and Cooperation treats a broad topic_communication and effectiveness in organizations_in a very concrete way. Patricia Covarrubias presents an engaging and original ethnographic study of approximately 550 workers in a Mexican industrial organization in Veracruz. She studies the complex interpersonal networks formed and destroyed by language subtleties, specifically terms of personal address (to and usted), and draws larger conclusions about language, culture, and social interaction in businesses and organizations_and also about beliefs and values that are central to Mexican culture. While the book specifically targets students and scholars of organizational communication, those with an interest in Mexican language and culture will also want to read Culture, Communication, and Cooperation_now available in paperback.

A 1925 book by Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican cartoonist. The book features several dozen black-and-white caricatures of famous American (mostly New York-based) personalities from the 1920s. Many of the drawings were originally published in Vanity Fair magazine, which employed Covarrubias as a staff cartoonist. Cartoons of people including: Florence Mills, Otto Kahn, Willa Cather, Jack Dempsey, Charlie Chaplin, Calvin Coolidge, H.L. Menchen, George Jean Nathan, John D. Rockefeller, Ann Pennington, Al Smith, Jascha Heifetz, Mary Pickford, Theodore Dreiser, Harold Lloyd, Alfred Stieglitz, Ed Wynn, George Gershwin, George Horace Lorimer, Rudolph Valentino, Leopold Stokowski, Babe Ruth, Carl Van Vechten, Eddie Cantor, Alexander Woollcott, Mrs. Fiske, Joseph Hergesheimer, Emily Lewis.

José Limón (1908-1972) was one of the leading figures of modern dance in the twentieth century. Hailed by the New York Times as "the finest male dancer of his time" when the José Limón Dance Company debuted in 1947, Limón was also a renowned choreographer who won two Dance Magazine Awards and a Capezio Dance Award, two of dance's highest honors. In addition to directing his own dance company, Limón served as artistic director of the Lincoln Center's American Dance Theater and also taught choreography at the Juilliard School for many years. In this volume, scholars and artists from fields as diverse as dance history, art history, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, Mexican American studies, music studies, and Mexican history come together to explore one of José Limón's masterworks, the ballet La Malinche. Offering many points of entry into the dance, they examine La Malinche from various angles, such as Limón's life story and the influence of his Mexican heritage on his work, an analysis of the dance itself, the musical score composed by Norman Lloyd, the visual elements of props and costumes, the history and myth of La Malinche (the indigenous woman who served the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés as interpreter and mistress), La Malinche's continuing presence in Mexican American culture, and issues involved in a modern restaging of the dance. Also included in the book is a DVD written and directed by Patricia Harrington Delaney that presents the ballet in its entirety, accompanied by expert commentary that sets La Malinche within its artistic and historical context.

Honorable Mention, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities A Revolution in Movement is the first book to illuminate how collaborations between dancers and painters shaped Mexico’s postrevolutionary cultural identity. K. Mitchell Snow traces this relationship throughout nearly half a century of developments in Mexican dance—the emulation of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the 1920s, the adoption of U.S.-style modern dance in the 1940s, and the creation of ballet-inspired folk dance in the 1960s. Snow describes the appearances in Mexico by Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and Spanish concert dancer Tortóla Valencia, who helped motivate Mexico to express its own national identity through dance. He discusses the work of muralists and other visual artists in tandem with Mexico’s theatrical dance world, including Diego Rivera’s collaborations with ballet composer Carlos Chávez; Carlos Mérida’s leadership of the National School of Dance; José Clemente Orozco’s involvement in the creation of the Ballet de la Ciudad de México; and Miguel Covarrubias, who led the “golden age” of Mexican modern dance. Snow draws from a rich trove of historical newspaper accounts and other contemporary documents to show how these collaborations produced an image of modern Mexico that would prove popular both locally and internationally and continues to endure today.

The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature emphasizes the importance of understanding Latina/o literature not simply as a US ethnic phenomenon but more broadly as an important element of a trans-American literary imagination. Engaging with the dynamics of migration, linguistic and cultural translation, and the uneven distribution of resources across the Americas that characterize Latina/o literature, the essays in this History provide a critical overview of key texts, authors, themes, and contexts as discussed by leading scholars in the field. This book demonstrates the relevance of Latina/o literature for a world defined by the migration of people, commodities, and cultural expressions.

This classic collection of great blues songs, arranged for piano and voice, was originally published in 1926. Considered the most famous blues collection in history, it includes historical notes, tunes and arrangements, notes for each song, a bibliography, and a chart of guitar chords. Illustrated by renowned Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias.

In the 1930s, the acclaimed Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias and his wife Rose made two trips to Bali, the results of which would impact the world's understanding of the island thereafter.