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

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

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