Overview
This collection of chapters explores how history is created, shared, and contested in urban and marginalized spaces by examining memory, displacement, resilience, and community-driven historical interventions across Mexico. Bridging academic research with lived experiences, the book shows how public history is a powerful tool that both reflects on the past and projects more egalitarian futures of justice, representation, and cultural affirmation. Centred mainly around Mexico City, but also touching on the impact of migration at the northern border, it contributes to the debates around new forms of history construction and covers topics including territorial dispossession, deportation processes, the violence entailed in erased histories, and the reconfiguration of daily life during the COVID pandemic. Through diverse approaches and methodologies such as documentary film, digital storytelling, public art, museum interpretations, grassroots activism, and other collective or community work, it provides readers with valuable insights into how historical narratives shape identities, social movements, and public policies, as well as a deeper understanding of how communities engage with their past to reclaim space, resist erasure, and foster belonging. This book is a useful resource for all upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in urban history, public history, cultural studies, anthropology, and Latin American studies.
Full Product Details
Author: María Moreno Carranco (UAM Cuajimalpa, Mexico) ,
Akuavi Adonon Viveros (UAM Cuajimalpa, Mexico) ,
Mario Barbosa Cruz (UAM Cuajimalpa, Mexico) ,
Maite Zubiaurre (UAM Cuajimalpa, Mexico)
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint: Routledge
Weight: 0.700kg
ISBN: 9781032537184
ISBN 10: 1032537183
Pages: 274
Publication Date: 02 December 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
“This creatively crafted and wide-ranging book on public history showcases both archival methods and experiential practices to offer a new reading of Mexico’s past and present. Its contributors not only deploy more standard historical approaches, as in a cartographic accounting of the country’s first feminist congress of 1916 in the Yucatan. They also document ethnographic and workshop-based community encounters where a reckoning with the past unfolds in real time through communal dialogues, innovative cultural practices, and active efforts to discursively or visually create awareness of the past and its resonance in the present. Many of these happenings are structured around traumatic memories and events that have impacted a wide range of Mexican cities and its citizens, on scales as local as the neighborhood or plaza. Of perhaps most originality is the decision to frame the volume as a platform for documenting public history. This requires recognition of untold narratives from a plurality of citizen voices from all over the country, most of whose experiences are routinely relegated to the periphery of officially sanctioned historiography. By allowing those who have been excluded from national narratives to actively insert their presence in the collective Mexican imaginary, a public is born and a new history emerges. A powerful and emotional read.” Diane E. Davis, Harvard University, USA ""Public History in Mexico constitutes one of the most original and significant contributions to the field of memory studies in Latin America. Through a variety of political subjectivities and sites of memory, this volume forwards a new understanding of public history in the intersection of the political with the spatial, a first-of-its-kind intervention. Scholars across the humanities and the social sciences will find both bold methodological ideas and radical new understandings on the public in this volume."" Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
Author Information
María Moreno Carranco is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at UAM-Cuajimalpa. Her research focuses on urban megaprojects, the impact of neoliberal globalization on contemporary cities, the effects of earthquakes on Mexico City’s urban communities, and shifts in urban living during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Akuavi Adonon Viveros is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at UAM-Cuajimalpa. Her research focuses on legal anthropology studies, ethno-racial classifications, national building narratives, and urban and territorial memory. Mario Barbosa Cruz is a professor in the Department of Humanities at UAM-Cuajimalpa. His research focuses on social and urban history, history of labor, middle classes in Mexico, and the relationship between history and memory. Maite Zubiaurre is a professor in the Humanities at UCLA. She is the initiator and principal investigator of Forensic Empathy, a multi-pronged interdisciplinary endeavor that looks at migration, migrant death, the ecologies of migrant care, and material culture at the US-Mexico border. She is also an activist and a filmmaker.
