Pineda Publishes New Book, Steinbeck y Mexico
Adela Pineda, Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently published Steinbeck y Mexico: Una Mirada Cinematografica en la Era de la Hegemonia Norteamericana.
In the book, Pineda presents a study of U.S.-Mexico relations through the lens of Steinbeck, film, and literature on both sides of the Rio Grande between the 1930s and the 1960s.
“I spent several years conducting archival research in Mexico and the US to complete this book. In the archives, I discovered the many facets of Steinbeck as a novelist, scriptwriter, film collaborator, and public intellectual,” Pineda said. “More importantly, Steinbeck provided me with the opportunity to reconstruct a cultural history of US-Mexico relations from the 1930s to the 1960s.”
Pineda said she found that Steinbeck’s intellectual anxieties from the Great Depression through the beginning of the Cold War were inextricably linked to Mexico.
“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,” Pineda said. “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 my travels with Steinbeck through Mexico.”
In 2017, Pineda won the Premio Bellas Artes de Ensayo Literario Malcolm Lowry (Malcolm Lowry Fine Arts Literary Essay Award) from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes for her manuscript Las Travesías de John Steinbeck Por México, El Cine y Las Vicisitudes Del Progreso. The essay approaches several works by Steinbeck, including the novella The Pearl,(1947), the novel The Wayward Bus (1947); the travelogue The Log of the Sea of Cortez,(1941), as well as three cinematographic productions: The Forgotten Village, directed by Herbert Kline (1941), the adaptation of The Pearl, directed by Emilio Fernández (1948), and Viva Zapata!, directed by Elia Kazan (1952).
“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,” Pineda said. “Hence, this is a book on Steinbeck going global from the vantage point of Mexico.”
Pineda’s research interests focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish American literature, culture, and film and on the relationship between politics and culture. Learn more about her here.