Adela Pineda Franco Publishes “Steinbeck y México”
Adela E. Pineda:
Adela E. Pineda spent several years conducting archival research in Mexico and the US to complete this book. In the archives, she discovered the many facets of Steinbeck as a novelist, scriptwriter, film collaborator, and public intellectual. More importantly, Steinbeck provided her with the opportunity to reconstruct a cultural history of US-Mexico relations from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Steinbeck’s intellectual anxieties (the importance of popular culture to shape a national imaginary during the Great Depression, the waning of community in a context of technological development during World War II, and the questioning of revolutionary purpose during the Cold War) were irremediably linked to Mexico. The rise and fall of Mexican nationalism, import substitution industrialization, and the emergence of insurrectionary movements in the countryside reclaiming the legacy of the Mexican Revolution, is the context of her travels with Steinbeck through Mexico.
Steinbeck’s engagement with the history and the cinematic archive of revolutionary Mexico took place in an embattled field of political and cultural activity on both sides of the Río Grande, hence it could not be but complex and contradictory. Hence, this is a book on Steinbeck going global from the vantage point of Mexico.