ABSTRACT
When reading histories of early Mexican modernist architecture, one constantly finds negative references to neocolonial architecture, a style that borrowed forms in an attempt to evoke images of the Spanish colonial past. However, one cannot help wondering whether the relationship between the two has been over-simplified: in the construction of Latin American identities, modes of expression that reinforced nationalism through familiar images (such as the neocolonial) were as modern as those more in tune with the technological impulse (such as modernism) that championed an internationalist abstraction.
