Visions of the Emerald City extends the terrain of modernity outside the relatively well-trodden space of Mexico City, during the porfiriato (the presidential regime of Porfirio Dísaz, 1876–1911). As historians reviewing this study have pointed out, Overmyer-Velázquez's shift of analytical focus from capital/center to state/periphery brings into view a complex system of pulsing tensions among local social groups, institutions, and spaces in Oaxaca, specifically Oaxaca City. It refuses a simplistic representation of Oaxaca's modernization as merely the yield of one-way pressures from the capital, or of the quest to overcome discursive relegation to pre-modernity—to tradition.

This cultural history will be of great interest to my colleagues in art history and to social scientists concerned with the vital role of visual images in nineteenth-century Mexican state formation. Central to the book's argument is the question of representation, especially in the context of an emerging culture of visuality and its effectiveness in the Porfirian scopic regime. Overmyer-Velázquez probes the impact of mechanically reproduced images—primarily photography—as well as what might be characterized as systems of replication (e.g., urban planning, government publications, and mass production of consumer goods). He addresses the thicket of problems raised by the interdisciplinary use of the photograph, fully aware of its capacity to beguile the researcher into seeing it only as a transparently legible document or illustration. He acknowledges that the photograph implicates not only other images—for example, the nineteenth-century lithographic social type—but also a dynamic relationship between sitter, photographer, technology, and administrative intentionality.

A case in point is official photographs of prostitutes in Oaxaca, one index of modernity's regulatory apparatus in the construction and management of the racialized, female, working, urban body. The context in which these official images of women laborers drew their meaning can be extended beyond the institutional and geographic boundaries of Oaxaca. Both the medium and the subject matter resonate in the interplay between the two centers of nineteenth-century artistic training: trade schools (artes y oficios) and fine art academies (bellas artes). Most notable among these are the Escuela de Artes y Oficios and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (formerly the Academia de San Carlos) in Mexico City. Photography was understood as a manual art, in effect, artless, and its use by certain Mexico City artists as a foundation for academic painting was the subject of great controversy in the late nineteenth century. With regard to subject matter, the depiction of women and labor in photographs is profitably viewed against the lithographs of social types addressed by Overmyer-Velázquez; and also against high art renditions—oil paintings of multiple or single figures whose presence in public academy exhibitions in the capital increased dramatically toward the end of the century. This cultural historical study of late-nineteenth-century Oaxaca is rich in its implications for the depiction of women and labor across media, institutions, and geography. It is a welcome invitation for multiple disciplines to engage images as active producers of, rather than mere receptacles for, their subjects.