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Rather than treating cultural processes as isolated from national and international historical events, 21st Century Mexican Poetry Between Cultural Policy and Autonomy places cultural production back within the context of the real economy by tracing changes in Mexican cultural policy from the 1970s through the 2020s. Following this materialist framework, this dissertation aims to disrupt conceptions of culture that would treat it as a purely ideological phenomenon. The poets within this study interrogate poetry and culture’s place within society through questions such as: “What is the relationship between the poet’s role within society and labor? What is the status of the poem with respect to the commodity? How can we think of changes in cultural policy not only in terms of distribution within artistic fields (who wins who loses), but as part of large-scale political transformations in political economy, military policy, immigration policy…? In 21st Century Mexican Poetry: Between Cultural Policy and Autonomy, I reframe these problems of distribution as problems of production and of the abstract forms of domination that are constituted by capitalist relations. That is, by refusing the accepted framework of austerity and funding distribution promulgated by cultural producers, public intellectuals, and scholars of cultural policy, I place these poets and their poems into the social and historical contexts of poetic production. By beginning with material conditions, this study hopes to answer questions about the instrumentalization of art in late capitalism, the role of art institutions in the event of total ecological collapse, and how Mexican art institutions are integrated into these global processes.