Luis M. Castañeda
From 2011 to 2016, I was an Assistant Professor of Art History at Syracuse University. This is a legacy site for my scholarly contributions. I am the author of "Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda and the 1968 Olympics" (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). In the book, I examine the ways in which design operated as a tool for propaganda and urban transformation in the context of the 1968 Summer Olympics celebrated in Mexico City. My interests range widely within and beyond the urban, visual, and design culture of the Americas. My essays and reviews have appeared in Art Journal, ArtMargins, Modernism/modernity, Grey Room, Pidgin, the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, the Journal of Design History, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. I have received awards from such institutions as the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Pinta Fund for Latin American Art, and the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota.
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Books by Luis M. Castañeda
The book examines the deployment of design artifacts as instruments of propaganda by Mexico’s single-party state between the late 1950s and the late 1960s. At this time, the state apparatus attempted to construct the spurious notion that Mexico was experiencing an economic and cultural ‘miracle.’ My book is the first exploration of the intersecting histories of five sets of projects crafted by a handful of politically involved designers in support of this claim: pavilions presented at world’s fairs, museums of national culture, venues for large sports events, the temporary urban spectacle of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, and the implementation of a subway system in this city. Inscribing the developmentalist notion of the Mexican ‘miracle’ within a global matrix of Cold War geopolitical interactions, my book also advances a theoretical model to understand the exchanges of cultural capital that the production of these projects facilitated. Defining the sites of these exchanges as 'image economies,' I demonstrate that they could yield a variety of returns for the bureaucrats and designers involved - professional esteem, financial gain, and, not least, political influence."
Papers by Luis M. Castañeda
(Mexico City: UNAM, 2014), pp. 189-197.
Book Reviews by Luis M. Castañeda
The book examines the deployment of design artifacts as instruments of propaganda by Mexico’s single-party state between the late 1950s and the late 1960s. At this time, the state apparatus attempted to construct the spurious notion that Mexico was experiencing an economic and cultural ‘miracle.’ My book is the first exploration of the intersecting histories of five sets of projects crafted by a handful of politically involved designers in support of this claim: pavilions presented at world’s fairs, museums of national culture, venues for large sports events, the temporary urban spectacle of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, and the implementation of a subway system in this city. Inscribing the developmentalist notion of the Mexican ‘miracle’ within a global matrix of Cold War geopolitical interactions, my book also advances a theoretical model to understand the exchanges of cultural capital that the production of these projects facilitated. Defining the sites of these exchanges as 'image economies,' I demonstrate that they could yield a variety of returns for the bureaucrats and designers involved - professional esteem, financial gain, and, not least, political influence."
(Mexico City: UNAM, 2014), pp. 189-197.
the interrelation between diplomatic efforts and exhibition practices that defined this episode of cultural translation, inscribing it within the Cold War image economy and design culture of the mid-twentieth century.