In 1956 the iconoclastic Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas published his article “La cortina de nopal” (“The Cactus Curtain”), famously satirizing all forms of postrevolutionary official dogmatism including social realist painting. Cuevas’s parable follows Juan, an artist curious about international art-world currents who buckles under art-world conformism to become an ardent purveyor of the clichés—thematic and stylistic—of Mexican-school painting. Through Juan, Cuevas renders explicit the links between postrevolutionary nationalism and politics. Crucially, he also thematizes the limits of official culture: he recounts that Juan’s working-class family had never even seen a mural and if they had they expressed “appreciation” by defacing Mexico’s hallowed painted walls. Yet according to Cuevas, Juan and his peers hypocritically embraced postrevolutionary culture, including “golden age” films but also crime tabloids, radio melodramas, boxing, and industrial consumer goods that flooded the Mexican market in the 1940s. Cuevas was the paragon of the 1950s Ruptura generation who declared war against art-world officialdom, and the polemical tone and imagery of “The Cactus Curtain” serves to obscure the heterogeneity of Mexico City’s rebel generation.Mary Kay Vaughan’s biography of the painter Pepe Zuñiga is a masterful corrective not just to Cuevas’s amusing bombast but also to overdetermined accounts that work backward from the events of 1968 to focus solely on the negative effects of the collapse of the Mexican miracle. Zuñiga and his cohort, many of them hailing from the working class satirized by Cuevas, have been forgotten because they were “sandwiched” between the affluent and better known iconoclastic Ruptura artists and the post-1968 radicalized collectives known as “los grupos” (216–18). In her richly historicized account Vaughan gives complexity to Zuñiga’s coming of age during Mexico’s opportunity moment.Zuñiga’s family migrated from Oaxaca City to Mexico City’s Colonia Guerrero in 1943. There they gradually acquired the social capital that urban denizens enjoyed as a result of Mexico’s World War II–era prosperity. Vaughan offers a textured account of the minimal impact of postrevolutionary dogma on the Zuñiga family, whose upward mobility was highly individualized yet enabled by political stability, economic growth, and state investment. As Vaughan shows, Pepe’s experience intersects with a generalizable understanding of the burgeoning “humanist cosmopolitanism” (147) of Mexico’s rebel generation. Vaughan’s analysis unfolds across ten chapters that range in focus from Pepe’s parent’s individual stories to his adolescence and education at La Esmeralda art school; a chapter on the affirmative value of Pepe’s participation in the creation of exhibits at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología; and chapters that examine his experience of the struggles of 1968, his success in Europe in the 1970s, and how life in Colonia Guerrero changed after the 1985 earthquake.Vaughan grounds her analysis in four intersecting processes that forged in Zuñiga and many in his cohort a hopeful, “freedom-seeking, affective subjectivity” (212) significantly different from the “corporatism” of the postrevolutionary era (51). The first process, the “mobilization for children” resulted from state investment in public education and child welfare (9). Thus “healthy, productive, disciplined workers and their consuming families” were nurtured, as was the notion that children had the right to be happy and free from privation. The second was mass entertainment—from radio programs and films to lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) and primary school textbooks. This facilitated the “formation of a more critical and demanding subjectivity and a new notion of rights” (13). The third entails the “feminization of male sensibility” (17) that inspired youth to critique oppressive patriarchy and in Pepe’s case, enabled him to express tenderness in his painted nudes, female and male, such that “sexuality [is] shorn of objectification and abjection” (224). The fourth culminating process was a “critical public of youth” (22) that rose up to challenge the state and then demand a more democratic public sphere post-1968 (205).Zuñiga may not be the best-known artist to emerge from the long 1960s but Vaughan’s analysis will surely draw attention to his oeuvre. Along the way she reveals midcentury Mexico City to be as much a place of growing prosperity, of vibrant public culture, and of idealistic and rebellious youth culture as of frustration with official dogmatism, economic hardship, betrayal, and outright repression.