1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario

The article focuses on the 1910 centennial celebration of Mexico's war of independence in Mexico City in order to examine the notions of modernity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism that were held by the Porfirian elite. The article first maps the celebration and thus identifies an ideal city – of comfort, modernity, style, and patriotism – that the Porfirian elite created from the 1880s to the 1910s within Mexico City. Second, it takes tours around the ideal city in order to examine how ideal views of social order, material and cultural progress, nation-building and cosmopolitanism acquired spatial and graphic expressions in the city.