Spurring unprecedented urbanization and industrialization, Mexico's mid twentieth-century economic 'miracle' brought about a wide range of innovations in architecture and design, especially in Mexico City, where these processes were primarily concentrated. No urban artifact emerged at the time as a better showpiece for these processes than the capital's underground transit system, originally slated to open in time for the 1968 Summer Olympics celebrated in the city, but which only opened a year later, to great fanfare. Allowing visitors and residents of the city to traverse the archaeologically rich and intricate entrails of the Mexican capital, the subway was simultaneously promoted as patent proof of Mexico's arrival to the 'developed' world. Inscribing the subway system's design process within the broader context of mid twentieth-century official culture in Mexico, this talk will examine the numerous discursive contradictions and social conflicts that defined the actual completion of this ambitious work of urban infrastructure, linking its promotion and reception as a technological and cultural wonder to longer histories of modernist experiments.

Luis Castañeda is an assistant professor of Art History at Syracuse University. His work explores the mid-twentieth-century intersections between art, architecture, media and cultural display in Mexico and Latin America. Professor Castañeda will be in residence spring 2012 with the Design, Architecture, and Culture group of Quadrant - http://www.quadrant.umn.edu

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