Review of Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico's Revolution by Mónica Salas Landa

Abstract

.This text offers a critical review of Visible Ruins (2024), written by historical and political anthropologist Mónica Salas Landa and published by University of Texas Press. The work is situated in the Totonac region of northern Veracruz, Mexico, and analyses the production of Mexican state ruins as devices of political, heritage, and touristic visibility throughout the twentieth century. Across four chapters organised around documents, infrastructures, pre-Hispanic remains, and ethnographic photographs, the author examines how the institutionalisation of the Mexican Revolution consolidated hegemonic structures of perception that render invisible the social, ecological, and cultural contradictions of the region. The theoretical framework draws on Jacques Rancière's distribution of the sensible, Ann Laura Stoler's processes of ruination, and Walter Benjamin's figure of the ragpicker. The review highlights the work's substantial historiographical and ethnographic contribution, its engagement with local and family archives, and its capacity to articulate a nuanced critique of the capitalist and colonial dynamics underlying the construction of Mexican national heritage and identity.