Mexico Unveiled: Resisting Colonial Vices and Other Complaints

Carlos Pereda’s Mexico Unveiled is a fresh, idiosyncratic synthesis of twentieth-century Mexican philosophy that puts contemporary debates about Mexican identity politics into a critical perspective. This edition—translated, edited, and introduced by Noell Birondo—brings the Mexican thinker’s ideas to a new English-language audience.

In three engaging essays written in a peerless prose style, Pereda considers the persistent influence of European colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of inclusion, and the changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. He identifies three “vices”—social habits, customs, and beliefs inherited from European colonialism—that have influenced the development of Mexican national identity: subaltern fervor, craving for novelty, and nationalist zeal. Pereda demonstrates that these three tendencies have led Mexican intellectuals, and Mexican society more generally, to uncritically adopt a politics of exclusion and destructive nationalist attitudes.

Using a strategy he calls “nomadic” thinking—the act of moving beyond our cultural preconceptions and habits of thinking—Pereda guides readers through a number of examples drawn from Mexican philosophy and culture that illustrate these tendencies. At its core, Mexico Unveiled is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the philosophical themes that have long occupied Pereda’s life and work and Mexican philosophy more generally.

Carlos Pereda is professor emeritus at the Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Two of his books, Lessons in Exile and Practical Holism and Nomadic Thought, have previously been translated into English by Sean Manning.

Noell Birondo is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. His previous books are The Moral Psychology of Hate and Virtue’s Reasons: New Essays on Virtue, Character, and Reasons.