Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz

"Concise and beautifully crafted, Dancing on the Sun Stone provides a fresh and timely appreciation of the gendered dynamics of modern Mexican life. Imaginatively straddling literary genres and academic disciplines, Becker's volume deserves a place in both scholarly libraries and the undergraduate classroom."--Gilbert M. Joseph, coeditor of The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics

"Marjorie Becker gives us a new language, historical and metaphorical, to reframe not only the history of Mexican women and girls, but also Mexican temporalities and the poetry of Octavio Paz. A creative mixed-genre experiment, this important book blends historical analysis, poetics of history, and memoir. The result is a bold, deeply original, and beautifully written work. This book will engage many kinds of readers: historians, literary scholars, and anyone seeking fresh insight on women's voices in history."--Steve J. Stern, author of The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico

"At the heart of Dancing on the Sun Stone is a daring and subversive juxtaposition. Becker sets several heretofore little-known Mexican women dancing in a church one evening in 1937 alongside one well-known literary giant, Octavio Paz. Through the eyes and experience of the women, we see Paz's poetics and politics anew. The result is a luminous hybrid of history, memoir, literary analysis, gender studies, and penetrating political critique, written in a poet's lyrical prose."--James Goodman, author of But Where Is the Lamb? Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac

"This unique and thought-provoking book is at once a marvelous social history of gender in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico, an invitation to break down disciplinary barriers, and an autobiographical reflection of a great historian at work."--Jürgen Buchenau, editor of Mexico OtherWise: Modern Mexico in the Eyes of Foreign Observers