liberalism and the narrative construction of the nation …
TRANSCRIPT
LIBERALISM AND THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NATION IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEXICO
by
WILLIAM RIORDAN
B.A., University of Washington, 1987
A dissertation submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of History
2013
This dissertation entitled: Liberalism and the Narrative Construction of the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
written by William Riordan has been approved for the Department of History
Dr. Robert Ferry, Chair
_____________________________________ Dr. John Willis
Date
The final copy of this dissertation has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.
iii
Riordan, William (Ph.D., History) Liberalism and the Narrative Construction of the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico Dissertation directed by Associate Professor Robert Ferry The object of this study is national histories written by Mexican liberals in the second
half of the nineteenth century, which are treated as a complex set of historical and
narrative relations between liberalism, nationalism and the emergence of history as a
rigorous discipline in Mexico. The figures treated in the study include José Fernando
Ramírez (1804-1871), Guillermo Prieto (1818-1897), Manuel Payno (1820-1894), José
María Vigil (1829-1909), Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834-1893), Alfredo Chavero
(1841-1906), and Justo Sierra (1848-1912). The general thesis is that the emergence of
Mexican history as an official discipline is the product of nineteenth-century political and
ideological struggles among liberal intellectuals occupying disparate factions vying for
state power. It argues that the disciplinization of Mexican history, as a scientific practice,
is synonymous with the narrative construction of a privileged historical subject and
protagonist: the Nation. Central to the argument of the thesis is that the achievement of an
official state narrative of the nation constituted an act of de-politicization that effectively
erased the intelligibility of the political struggles within Mexican liberalism. As a result
of the success of this process of de-politicization, it has become difficult to understand
the historical dynamics of nineteenth century Mexican liberalism and the nature of
political struggles within and among competing liberal visions. This study argues that
examining and critically engaging with a set of historical narratives and ideas about
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history by these prominent Mexican liberals provides a conducting thread to a
reconsideration of Mexican liberalism and a more dynamic and nuanced understanding of
its history, one that might contribute to a re-politicizing of the nineteenth century. This
restoration of political dynamics allows us to see Mexican history as composed of a
dispersal or multiplicity of various competing factions and visions that cannot be
contained within a representational space defined by the binary of modernity and
tradition.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. OF MEXICAN LIBERALISM AND THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NATION ....................................................1 Introduction.........................................................................................1 Conservative and Liberal Conceptions of “Impartial” History ..........3 The Historical Setting .......................................................................15 A Typology of Mexican Liberalism .................................................23 On Method ........................................................................................30 The Mexican National Historical Imagination .................................37 II. EIGHT MEN OF MEXICO’S NINETEENTH CENTURY ..................41 José Fernando Ramírez (1804-1871) ................................................42 Guillermo Prieto (1818-1897) ..........................................................47 Manuel Payno (1820-1894) ..............................................................52 José María Vigil (1829-1909)...........................................................56 Vicente Riva Palacio (1832-1896)....................................................59 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834-1893) .........................................62 Alfredo Chavero (1841-1906) ..........................................................66 Justo Sierra (1848-1912)...................................................................68 III. TOCQUEVILLE, MICHELET AND RANKE WRITE THE MEXICAN NATION: THREE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATIONAL HISTORICAL NARRATIVES ..............................................................72
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Payno’s Tragic Vision: El Libro Rojo ..............................................74 Altamirano’s Historical Romance: Historia y Política de México ...85 Sierra’s Comic Synthesis: Evolución Política del Pueblo Mexicano.......................................................................................90 IV. “THE DREAM OF ANARCHY”...........................................................98 Manuel Payno: The Anxieties of Democracy.................................100 Guillermo Prieto: Independence, Morelos and the Emergence of the Nation ...............................................................................115 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: The Priest from Dolores ...................128 Vicente Riva Palacio: The Martyrs of Independence .....................135 V. AYUTLA AND THE WRITING OF THE HOMELAND ..................141 The Cataclysm ................................................................................141 Manuel Payno: Civilization vs. Chaos............................................146 Guillermo Prieto: Romancing la Patria...........................................159 Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: The Victory of the People ................168 VI. HISTORY AS A NARRATIVE SCIENCE: THE DISCURSO INTEGRADOR.................................................................................179 Introduction.....................................................................................179 Vigil’s Poet King ............................................................................182 Ramírez: Setting the Record Straight .............................................189 Riva Palacio’s Eulogy to Alvarado.................................................193 Chavero’s Scientific Romance........................................................197 Sierra’s Evolución del Pueblo Mexicano........................................202 VII. CONCLUSION .........................................................................................214
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REFERENCES ..........................................................................................................216
CHAPTER I
OF MEXICAN LIBERALISM AND THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NATION
Introduction
The object of this study is national histories written by Mexican liberals in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The 1854 Mexican liberal Revolution of Ayutla,
overthrew the dictatorship of Antonio López de Santa Anna and opened a period in
Mexican history of warfare between factions of liberals and conservatives competing for
state power. This period came to a definitive end in 1867 with the complete triumph of
the liberals. Liberal presidents, most notably Benito Juárez (1858-1872) and Porfirio Díaz
(1877-1910) would build the national institutions of state and rule over the nation until
the Mexican Revolution of 1910. It would thus be liberals, through an explosion in the
publications of formal histories and personal memoirs, who would preside over the
“invention of tradition” in the narrative construction of national history.1
What I am proposing in this work is to follow a complex set of historical and
narrative relations between liberalism, nationalism, and the emergence of history as a
rigorous discipline in Mexico. My general thesis is that the emergence of Mexican history
as an official discipline is the product of nineteenth century political and ideological
struggles among liberal intellectuals within disparate factions vying for state power. This
1 Hobsbawm’s phrase on national historical narratives. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
2
disciplinization of Mexican history, as a scientific practice, is in effect synonymous with
the narrative construction of a privileged historical subject and protagonist, the Nation.
Between 1884 and 1889, under the directorship of the liberal statesman and intellectual
Vicente Riva Palacio, the five-volume work, México a través de los siglos (Mexico
through the Centuries), brought to fruition liberal attempts at a synthetic narrative
construction of the national past. The contemporary Mexican historian, Enrique
Florescano, has described the work as “the greatest achievement of historiography in the
nineteenth century" for, among other reasons, successfully uniting into a single
integrative narrative the pre-Hispanic past with the colonial period, and connecting both
with the wars of independence and the history of the republic.2
Central to my argument is that this achievement of an official state narrative of
the nation constituted an act of de-politicization that effectively erased the intelligibility
of the political struggles within Mexican liberalism. This act of de-politicization was
largely successful and has made it difficult to understand the historical dynamics of
nineteenth century Mexican liberalism, and the nature of political struggles within and
among competing liberal visions. We thus find ourselves trapped in a formalistic, and
therefore a-historical, understanding of nineteenth century Mexican liberalism that has
effectively removed from our historical vision the complex dynamism and polysemy
inherent in liberalism as a historical movement. It is my argument that by examining and
critically engaging with a set of historical narratives and thoughts on history by different
Mexican liberals, these texts can act as a conducting thread to a re-examination of
Mexican liberalism, and a more dynamic and nuanced understanding of its history, one
2 Enrique Florescano, Historia de las historias de la nación mexicana (México, D.F.: Taurus, 2002), p. 353.
3
that would add to a re-politicizing of the nineteenth century. This restoration of political
dynamics would see Mexican history as composed of a dispersal or multiplicity of
various competing factions and visions that cannot be contained within a representational
space defined by modernity and tradition.
In my conclusion I will argue that an engagement with these historical narratives
provides evidence against a dominant argument on Mexican liberalism: the idea that the
differences between radicals and moderates were not political so much as practical, with
the differing factions agreeing on what needed to be done, but disagreeing on the pace of
change. The texts suggest instead a deeper conflict, one centered around who would be
the historical agent to bring about the renovation and institutionalization of the Mexican
nation: Whether it would be the sovereign people, an alliance of Indians, artisans, small
farmers, and urban middle class professionals, or the hombres de bien, the landed elites in
alliance again with urban middle class professionals. The depoliticizing narrative of all
liberals wanting the same thing was in fact a narrative representation by the winners in
this struggle, and came about only after the fact, to erase the multiplicity of liberal
imaginings and political visions.
Conservative and Liberal Mexican Conceptions of “Impartial” History
The question of narrating the national past emerged quickly in the Mexican
Republic. Shortly after Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1821 the
conservative politician and intellectual, Lucas Alamán, argued for the construction of a
national history as a political and cultural imperative. In his new post as head of the
Office of Government and Foreign Affairs, Alamán gave a presentation before the
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Mexican Congress in 1823.3 Alamán’s Memoria recommended, among other things, that
the new nation develop the fields of statistics and history. Statistics, argued Alamán, was
necessary for an adequate administration of the national territory and economy. History,
on the other hand, had an eminently ideological calling for the new nation. History, the
statesman argued, was necessary for the educational development of a citizenry conscious
of its individual freedoms and obligations. Alamán also promoted the creation of
institutions dedicated to the “administration of the national memory,” and the new state’s
construction of a general historical archive.4 The conservative public intellectual and
politician would himself go on to become one of the new nation’s most outstanding early
historians. Alamán’s two major historical works, the five-volume work on Independence,
Historia de Méjico (1840-1852), along with his three-volume work on the Colonial past,
Disertaciones (1844-1849), would become the key historical narratives against which
liberals would construct their own national tradition.5
Alamán had a significant and far more positive influence on a later generation of
conservative Mexican historians, notably Joaquín García Icazbalceta. The younger
conservative’s understanding of the historical enterprise was representative of the
conservative historical imagination, and especially its Hispanicist project that
differentiates them from liberal historians. Icazbalceta’s reflections on both his
understanding of impartiality, as well as his attempts to link this notion with rescuing the
3 Guillermo Zermeño Padilla, “Apropiación del pasado, escritura de la historia y construcción de la nación en México,” in Guillermo Palacios, coord., La nación y su historia: América Latina, siglo XIX (Mexico D.F.: El Colegio de México, 2009), p. 86. 4 Zermeño Padilla, “Apropiación del pasado,” p. 86. 5 Alamán’s spelling, “Méjico,” was itself indicative of a political/historical stance. The spelling, “México” with an “x” signified an indigenous past, while “j” was preferred by those who saw Mexico’s national identity as founded on Spain and reflected a fundamentally European self-understanding.
5
Spanish legacy in Mexico serve as an example of the narrative practices against which
later liberal national narratives will define themselves. Both Icazbalceta and his mentor,
Alamán, carried on a relationship with the American Hispanist historian, William
Prescott. Alamán had worked on a Spanish translation of Prescott’s The History of the
Conquest of Mexico, and Icazbalceta translated Prescott’s The History of the Conquest of
Peru. The two conservatives eventually participated in a ten-volume work, Diccionario
universal de historia y geografía, published in Mexico between 1853 and 1856. The
Mexican historian Guillermo Zermeño Padilla has called the Diccionario the “immediate
precedent for a new historiographic project” in Mexico, one in which “…the political
elaboration of the nation goes hand in hand with the reworking of the past.”6 According
to Padilla, this mid-century reworking of the past is one that anticipates the later liberal
construction of a scientific historiography in Mexico. In an essay looking back on his
historical practice, Icazbalceta wrote,
I wanted, in a word, to possess something of the spirit of the Prophet held captive in Babylon, to infuse life into the innumerable bones, so dry in the extreme, that covered the immense field of long dead antiquity…The historian is obligated to present the facts such as they were, attempting to write with impartiality, even though I know too well that this is easier said than done. History is much too lofty an enterprise than to listen to the crying tumult and to serve hollow rhetoric. With the most strict impartiality the historian moves to the scene; he prepares the case; he calls the witnesses, whose backgrounds he scrutinizes before taking their testimony, and as an honorable investigative magistrate, he examines the evidence, he listens to the defense, he differentiates the time periods and considers the spirit of each, the position of the agents, the motives for their behavior, or the reasons that obligated them to pursue it. Nothing makes him act on emotion, nothing causes him to lose his critical judgment. The
6 Guillermo Zermeño Padilla, La cultura moderna de la historia: Una aproximación teórica e historiográfica (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 2002), p. 155.
6
only aim of History is to find the Truth; he who is incapable of searching for it dispassionately, should not dare to write it.7
This quote contains an aspect of nineteenth century Mexican historiography that
Zermeño Padilla has described as one in which, “The seminal phase of Mexican scientific
historiography could be described as a space in which justice is imparted on the past in
the manner of a Republican tribunal.”8 Republican because, according to Zermeño, the
new discipline consists in the emergence of a “historian-judge enclosed in the legal
framework of a Republican citizenry that is no longer religious but rather secular.” This
new and republican historiographic project carried with it both a critical demand and a
narrative one. Critically, Icazbalceta demanded criteria such that, as Zermeño notes,
“insofar as history aspires to universality, to representing all Mexicans, over and above
their regional, linguistic, or ethnographic conditions, he [Icazbalceta] will demand of his
collaborators that they will be guided by an impartial judgment.”9 The narrative demand,
on the other hand, will consist of both stylistic and epistemological considerations on
what time periods and objects might be most appropriate to the new history. Zermeño
follows this line of thought and writes,
In that framework political and military events, as we saw in the case of Ranke, will acquire greater relevance for history, insofar as it becomes a question of identifying the reasons some peoples triumph and others are defeated. García Icazbalceta presents an excellent case to observe the guidelines that regulate the selection of historical periods and the writing of history in general…In his opinion the colonial period that spans three centuries is of less interest to a “general readership,” since it does not present the reader with great conflicts.10
7 Joaquín García Icazbalceta, “Estudio histórico,” in Obras, Tomo VI (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), p. 25. 8 Zermeño Padilla, La Cultura moderna, p. 154 9 Zermeño Padilla, La Cultura moderna, p. 157. 10 Zermeño Padilla, La Cultura moderna, p. 159.
7
Mexican independence thus provided the historian the dramatic events that would lesson
his narrative labor. Zermeño’s two key points, that the nineteenth century Mexican
historian will function as a republican magistrate dispensing justice on the past, and that
he will seek the reasons why some triumph while others are defeated, are significant and
illuminating. The most important of his insights, however, is the demand for impartiality,
a theme that would become increasingly prominent in nineteenth century Mexican
historiography. The conception of la imparcialidad was, as Zermeño notes, “the
antinomy of partiality or the inclination to favor one of the sides in a conflict.”11
Virtually every Mexican historian of whatever political stripe identified with the ideal of
an impartial history, one that transcended partisanship in order to arrive at the full truth.
A question immediately presents itself. Is Icazbalceta faithful to the criteria that Zermeño
identifies as essential to the young conservative’s understanding of the historical
enterprise?
To begin with, Icazbalceta’s own historical practice was precisely the colonial
period, and specifically the sixteenth century. His most finished historical narrative was a
biography of Juan de Zumárraga, the first Catholic bishop in Mexico City.12 Icazbalceta
was also a political conservative and colleague of Alamán at a time when conservatives
were attacking republicanism and promoting the cause of monarchy in Mexico. Although
Zumárraga was more conciliatory than Alamán’s generation of conservatives, it
nonetheless seems doubtful that the deeply religious and self-taught erudite would have
determined to judge history in the manner of a republican magistrate.
11 Zermeño Padilla, La Cultura moderna, p. 159. 12 Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, primer Obispo y arzobispo de México (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1929).
8
Late in his work on Zumárraga, Icazbalceta suddenly turned to comment on the
laws of the liberal Reform period and the influence of liberal president, Benito Juárez.
Having defended the sixteenth century Mexican bishop, Zumárraga, from critics who
attacked his destruction of indigenous religious documents and stone carvings, the
Catholic historian wrote, “the men of the Reform who in the middle of the nineteenth
century, when we were all the more scandalized by the barbarity and ignorance of
[sixteenth century] missionaries, leveled to the ground not crude stone monuments
(masas de material), the theaters of abominable crimes, but our churches and convents,
and even the asylums for the poor founded on Christian charity.”13 This sudden political
interlude in which the conservative Icazbalceta attacked the liberal assaults on church
property during the War of the Reform (1858-1861) takes us to the heart of his notion of
imparcialidad and why I believe that Zermeño’s characterization of him is a mistaken
one. To begin with, it is decidedly not because of the historian’s hostility to the liberal
Reform’s attacks on the church and its wealth. Such a statement could have been written
by a moderate liberal of the period. It is rather in the description of indigenous temples as
“theaters of abominable crimes” that we find Icazbalceta’s distance from liberal national
historiography, and from a distinctly liberal understanding of impartiality.
Icazbalceta was very clear on the reasons for his research and the meaning that the
notion of imparcialidad held for him. Born in Mexico City to a Spanish father and
Mexican mother, Icazbalceta’s family was forced to move to Spain following an 1829
decree expelling the Spanish from the newly independent Mexico.14 After the decree was
13 Icazbalceta, Don Fray Juan Zumárraga, p. 416 14 Manuel Guillermo Martinez, Don Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta: His Place in Mexican Historiography (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1947), pp. 3-4
9
revoked, the family was allowed to return to Mexico in 1836. In his historical biography
of Zumárraga he wrote, “Critical thought no longer allows for the repeating of those
absurd accusations against the missionaries and especially against Señor Zumárraga; he
who insists on still defending such vulgarity will show that he is as lacking in education
as he is filled with passion.”15 The nineteenth century Mexican notion of imparcialidad
was, as noted by Zermeño, equivalent to the rejection of partisanship. In this context it is
also repeatedly identified with being ruled by passion, synonymous with irrationality and
only a partial view of the whole. At the time of Icazbalceta’s writing, and still to this day,
Zumárraga was generally represented as the embodiment of the Christian spiritual
conquest of indigenous societies that followed on the heels of the military conquest. The
representation of the conquest and the colonial past as a history of Spanish imperialism
and oppression were prominent in the narratives of the leaders and ideological spokesman
for Mexican independence. The most obvious political and institutional expression of this
was the 1829 expulsion of the Spanish from the newly created Mexican republic.
Icazbalceta’s use of the notion of imparcialidad was for him an instrument to
advance his Catholic and Hispanicist historical project and to defend the Spanish expelled
in 1829. In this regard, the contextualist rigor of his historical narratives was secondary to
his intellectual enterprise, which was to restore honor to Catholic Spain and its colonial
past by arguing against the “partial” interpretations of Spanish colonization by European
scholars and Mexican nationalists. It was to wage combat against the infamous “Black
Legend” of Spanish conquest and rule in the Americas. The work was translated into
many languages and distributed widely among Catholics in Europe and Latin America.
15 Icazbalceta, Don Fray Juan Zumárraga, p. 449.
10
On the death of the author in 1894, the Bishop of Mexico City delivered a public
memorial address in the following words,
How beautifully, how magnificently he presents to all of us the figure of Fray Juan de Zumárraga! Not without reason did the biography, so beautifully written, wing its way over the entire globe. Attracting the attention of the highest dignitaries of the Seraphic [Franciscan] Order to which the first Bishop of Mexico belonged, it was translated by one of them into Italian and circulated in that language in Vatican circles and throughout the entire Italian peninsula.16
In writing of his interest in the sixteenth century Icazbalceta described it as “the most
interesting period in our annals, in which one people would disappear and a new one was
formed; the very same which exists today and of which we form a part.”17 We find here
apparent support for Zermeño’s thesis on the reasons for the defeats and triumphs of
different peoples. The Catholic historian, however, exhibited neither the tragic pathos
diplayed by moderate liberal writers nor the scientific dispassion of later liberal
positivists with regard to the disappearing indigenous peoples. Zumárraga’s greatest
infamy, in the eyes of his critics, was his oppression of the Indians. Yet Icazbalceta
professed a belief in a providential “right to conquest” and wrote,
Allowing in principle such a right, as brutal as it may seem, how can one not also allow for what appears a law of providence, recognized through events consummated and repeated over a long series of centuries, with general acquiescence, that can ask of no exceptions, but rather one must accept its sorrows and its opportunities.18
These “sorrows” of providence were themselves compromised by Icazbalecta’s
characterization of the struggle between the Spanish and the indigenous societies. In
analyzing the great events of the conquest he wrote,
16 Guillermo Martinez, Don Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, p. 49. 17 Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Colección de documentos para la historia de México, V. 1 (México: J.M.Andrade, 1858-1866), p. VIII. 18 Icazbalceta, Don Fray Juan Zumárraga, p. 201.
11
The victories of the Spanish were due in large part to the Indian way of fighting. As their greatest desire was not to kill, but to take prisoners for their sacrifices, the battle, after the first attack, would turn into a collection of personal combats with neither order nor organization. Their bloody religion was their ruin…The Spanish, to the contrary, always fought united, attentive to the command of their leader. It was a struggle between intelligence and brute force.19
Icazbalecta went on to complain,
But after all, I cannot manage to understand what laudable purpose it can have today that determination to record in writings, paintings, statues, and crude reliefs the worst deeds of the Spaniards and that artificial enthusiasm for everything Aztec which is flaunted by those people who know so little about history. It does not seem to be for any other purpose than to aspire to glorify paganism and to put down those who brought us Christian civilization.20
Icazbalceta, his conciliatory attitude notwithstanding, was himself aware of his distance
from liberal historians. When asked to work on the colonial period volume of México a
través de los siglos, he declined and later wrote in a letter to a friend upon the publication
of the volume,
I have read nothing of the part written by Riva Palacio for the work, México a través de los siglos, but I have heard many complaints against it. In no way would I get involved in a controversy because I abhor literary conflicts which generally result in no more than annoyances and with nothing of benefit for the public. As I understand it, the best refutation of a bad work is to write another good one on the same subject.21
I would argue that there was another reason Icazbalceta did not accept the offer to
collaborate on México a través de los siglos. He was, simply, not capable of writing a
large historical synthesis. The wherewithal to construct a discurso integrador was
something that Mexican historians would not achieve until the generation that followed
19 Joaquín García Icazbalceta, “Estudio Histórico,” in Obras, Tomo VI (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), p.15. 20 Icazbalceta, “Estudio Histórico,” p. 40. 21 Icazbalceta, Cartas, pp. 42-43.
12
Icazbalceta. His talents were constrained to the relato, the biographical portrait that was
his greatest success, Don fray Juan de Zumárraga, primer obispo y arzobispo de México.
One of the major differences between conservatives such as Alamán and
Icazbalceta and their liberal opponents was precisely the conservative identification with
and defense of the Hispanic past. According to conservatives, the source of much of
Mexico’s ills was precisely the rejection of Catholicism and Spanish political and cultural
traditions.22 Yet this promotion of the Spanish foundations of Mexican nationality carried
with it also a rejection of the indigenous past as formative for the Mexican nation. It was,
thus incapable of establishing a single synthetic narrative that might tie Mexico’s
indigenous past to its colonial period, and both to the history of the republic.
By the turn of the century, the project of a synthetic history of the Mexican nation
found its most acclaimed success in the 1902 work by Justo Sierra, Evolución política del
pueblo mexicano. Sierra’s work has established a pride of place in any historical
understanding of both Mexican history and Mexican liberalism. Describing Sierra’s
narrative achievement in Evolución política del pueblo mexicano as a model of historical
synthesis, the contemporary historian Andrés Lira calls it a “starting point for reflections
on 20th century Mexico,” concluding
In this sense we can say that Justo Sierra is the first historian of Mexico’s twentieth century, since he gathered together for us the national historiography of the nineteenth century, resolving the problems that polemical ardor had imposed on the treatment of themes in past works and reducing these problems to reasonable dimensions in his more benevolent version in the Evolución política del pueblo mexicano…23
22 Will Fowler, Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821-1853 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 75. 23 Andrés Lira, “Justo Sierra: La historia como entendimiento responsible,” in Enrique Florescano y Ricardo Pérez Montfort, eds., Historiadores de México en el siglo XX (México,D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), p. 23.
13
This description of Sierra’s narrative as a “more benevolent” one points precisely to a
political olive branch that the liberal historian was offering to conservatives in
representing the national past. As Lira writes, “Sierra, a republican and supporter of
[president Benito] Juárez, had to come up against not so much the conservatives, but
traditional liberals, the ‘Jacobins’ who exalted the dogmas of the Constitution of 1857,
the enemies of strong executive power, and supporters of a single house legislature.”24 It
is within this context of a growing rift between Sierra and his liberal compatriots that he
eventually felt the need to write a unifying national history that would seek a more
conciliatory stance toward the conservative rivals of the liberal party.
Sierra’s Evolución and Alamán Historia de Méjico are the two most famous and
influential works by nineteenth century Mexican historians. The works are separated by
fifty years and by political affiliations. Yet there is a strong tendency to telescope them
together and read them as comparable narratives. In a critical assessment, Zermeño
Padilla locates both within the power-seeking project of a hegemonic state. He argues
that while severely critical of Alamán, Sierra “built himself up on the ashes of his
presumed adversary,” and so “Liberal historiography will do no more than continue the
conservative historiographic model while at the same time trying to erase these traces.”25
Zermeño Padilla never actually articulates just precisely what the “conservative
historiographic model” consists of. The last section of Sierra’s work is worth quoting at
some length,
Others, who will have access to a greater store of more scientifically refined data, will again do what we have attempted to do and with greater
24 Lira, “Justo Sierra,” p. 30. 25 Guillermo Zermeño Padilla, “Apropiación Del Pasado,” pp. 94, 104.
14
success. But our efforts, nevertheless, will not have been in vain. For if we have tried to study without prejudice the dynamics of our society, we have not done so without a system. This is not the place for us to explain it in a rigorous fashion. The title of our book alone should indicate that even if we might disagree about the scientific laws of social development, with some following the Spencerian [Herbert Spencer] school, viewing them as biological laws; while others in agreement with Giddings, would consider them essentially psychological; and the majority considering them perhaps essentially historical in nature, in accord with August Comte and [Emile] Littre, all of us have started from this premise; that society is a living being and therefore that it grows, develops, and is transformed. This perpetual transformation is all the more intense when in sync with the internal energy by which the social organism reacts on external elements in order to assimilate them and to make them serve in its progress. Science, converted into a prodigiously complex and efficient tool, has accelerated a hundredfold the evolution of certain human groups.26
This scientific evolutionary discourse, with Sierra’s references to the British theorist,
Herbert Spencer, and the French writer, August Comte, designates it as a considerably
different kind of narrative than the Catholic moralizing histories of Alamán and
Icazbalceta.27 What is missing within the fifty-year interlude that separates the works of
Alamán and Sierra is all reference to the “Jacobins” Lira refers to, those classical liberals
who identified with the Mexican Constitution of 1857. If Sierra succeeded where
Catholic conservatives could not in constructing a national narrative, it was in part due to
the liberal’s ability to embrace the indigenous past. He did so under the sign of a
historical science. The Indians were not conquered, so much, as assimilated to and
merged with the Spanish, in a way that created a new social organism evolving over time,
the Mexican nation. For this to happen, Sierra and later conservatives had to reject some
26 Justo Sierra, Evolución política del puebla Mexicana (México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1940), p. 414. 27 On Sierra’s relation to Comte and French positivism see William D. Raat, El positivismo durante el Porfiriato (1876-1910) (México, D.F.: Sep/Setentas, 1975).
15
of the major conceptions that their “Jacobin” counterparts held concerning both the
indigenous and the colonial pasts of Mexico.
The Historical Setting
Mexican liberal historians of the nineteenth century faced the political and
narrative challenge of constructing a national history that would explain the continual
political instability and disastrous losses of territory that had occurred since independence
was achieved in 1821. These dual challenges addressed them in the form of conservative
narratives that appeared following Mexico’s defeat in its war with the United States,
narratives that blamed the failures of the Mexican Republic precisely on the attempts by
political leaders to reject Spanish political and cultural traditions and embrace the secular
and liberal institutions of the United States, England, and France.
This conservative critique acquired a strengthened urgency with the cataclysmic
military occupation of Mexico by United States troops. On September 15, 1847, the eve
of the thirty-seventh anniversary of Miguel Hidalgo’s famous call to struggle for Mexican
national independence, United States military forces occupied Mexico City in the
culmination of the Mexican-American war. The great chronicler of Hidalgo’s rebellion
and the movement of Independence was Carlos María de Bustamante. The aging
chronicler was present at the city’s fall and wrote in his diary,
Today, thirty-seven years ago, on the night of that great day, the happy voice of Independence was proclaimed in Dolores. But today a wounded cry is occurring throughout the entire Republic, but principally in Mexico, owing to the disastrous evils that ineffable great deed [bien] is now producing for us because those who were entrusted with leading us on that path did not know how to conduct themselves.
16
Bustamante concluded, “…it was finished, the Mexican Republic, its independence and
liberty, it was over because of foolishly imitating the institutions of the very one who
enslaved it.”28 For years Bustamante had joined with the conservative, Lucas Alamán, in
blaming Mexico’s ills after independence on the attempts to install a US style federalist
government in the nation. While Bustamante remained a committed republican, this
moment constituted a watershed for Mexican conservatives who, following the lead of
the editors of a new conservative periodical, El Universal, openly rejected Republicanism
and began to promote the cause of monarchy in Mexico.29 After the defeat, a series of
negotiations took place and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by the Mexican
congress on May 30, 1848, recognizing the Mexican loss of over half of its national
territory.30
In the face of a humiliating defeat, liberal leader Mariano Otero wrote, “In
Mexico there is not, nor could there be, that which goes by the name of ‘national spirit,’
simply because there is no nation.”31 The radical liberal intellectual Ignacio Altamirano,
in his historical synthesis of nineteenth century Mexican politics, recounted how in the
winter of 1845, with US troops under the command of Zachary Taylor mobilized on the
Texas border and a war imminent, the Mexican military commander charged with
28 Quoted in Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “México y la Guerra Con Estados Unidos,” in the collection edited by the same author, México al tiempo de su guerra con Estados Unidos (1846-1848) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), p. 17. Bustamante’s use of the phrase “wounded cry” (“grito herido”) is a rhetorical reference to Hidalgo’s famous 1810 “cry from Dolores” (“grito de Dolores”) that is generally considered the spark of the Mexican movement for independence from Spain. 29 Elías José Palti, La política del disenso: La “polémica en torno al monarquismo” (México, 1848-1850)…y las aporías del liberalismo (México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1998), pp. 22-29 30 Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Lorenzo Meyer, México frente a Estados Unidos (Un ensayo histórico, 1776-1993) (México: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1995) pp. 59-63. 31 Palti, La política del disenso, p. 19
17
defending the border, Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, instead led his troops in an
insurrection and declared himself president in January 1846. He, too, eventually fell from
power in August under a similar mutiny led by Mariano Salas.32 With such political
intrigues occurring during the opening of the war with the United States, there seemed
little to argue with in Otero’s lament. The defeat was the lowest moment of a twenty-
seven year period following independence that was marked by political anarchy,
territorial fragmentation, and economic stagnation.
The military defeat and catastrophic loss of territory in 1848 was the culmination
in a series of crises that liberal historians would have to address in their national
narratives. Along with this catastrophe the most pressing issue liberal historians faced
was the continual collapse of the Mexican constitutional order and the endless series of
governments that came to power by coups d’etat, or golpes de estado, right up to the
moment of the Mexican-American War. No issue was more resistant to a coherent
historical narrative than the culmination of independence itself and the immediate
political instability that followed it. When independence was finally achieved in 1821 it
was not under the leadership of a Republican priest inspired by the French Revolution, a
la Miguel Hidalgo, but rather under the command of a monarchist and former royalist
army officer, Agustín de Iturbide.33 The former royalist had himself proclaimed emperor
only to be overthrown by republicans and eventually executed. This inauspicious
beginning was followed by the first successful golpe de estado against a constitutional
regime, the Acordada Rebellion in 1828, in which radicals refused to recognize the
32 Ignacio M. Altamirano, Historia y Politica de Mexico, 1821-1882 (Mexico D.F.: Empresas Editoriales, 1947), pp. 51-52. Originally published 1883. 33 Ignacio M. Altamirano, Historia y Politica de Mexico, 1821-1882, p. 4.
18
outcome of the presidential elections, overturned the results in an armed uprising and had
the radical republican and hero of independence, Vicente Guerrero, installed as
president.34 When Guerrero was himself overthrown and executed, Mexico’s long
descent into political anarchy and successive golpes de estado resulted in the Republic’s
experience with forty-two different governments in the period between 1824 and 1847.35
During these decades the country was, in theory at least, ruled by three different
constitutional orders: the Federalist Constitution of 1824, the Constitutional Bases and
Laws of the Mexican Republic, or Siete Leyes, of 1836, and the Bases of the Political
Organization of the Mexican Republic, or the Bases Orgánicas, of 1843. Then in 1847,
during the war with the United States, the Federalist Constitution of 1824 was re-
established as the law of the land.36 Thus, with the denouement of the Mexican
cataclysm, Mexican liberals in 1848 found themselves in a polity lacking national
cohesion and stability, while conservatives blamed them for all the disasters experienced
by the patria during the decades following independence.
It was precisely at this moment of military defeat that Mexican liberals began to
argue the need for historical texts that would narrate the story of the Mexican nation.
Liberal intellectuals hoped that through public education a spirit of loyalty to the nation,
notably lacking during the war, might be cultivated among future citizens of the republic.
Beginning in 1852, with the publication of Compendio de historia de México by Epitacio
34 Michael P. Costeloe, La primera república federal de México (1824-1835) (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), pp. 205-210. 35 Humberto Musacchio, coord., Milenios de México, Tomo III (Milan: Diccionario Enciclopédico de México, 1999), pp. 2390-2391. 36 Luis Medina Peña, Invención del sistema politico mexicano: Forma de gobierno y gobernabilidad en México en el siglo xix (México,D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007).
19
de los Ríos, Mexican liberals began a decades-long obsession with the historical
construction of the Mexican nation.37 However, what Otero, his fellow liberals, and their
conservative opponents could not possibly have foreseen during the years immediately
following Mexico’s disastrous war with the United States was the stunning string of
military victories that would be achieved by liberal armies in the decades ahead.
As Guy Thomsen has written, “Even without adopting a social perspective, or a
regional or local approach, the student of the period cannot help but be moved (given the
liberal bias of most Mexican historiography) by the heroic, almost Homeric, quality of
political and military events.”38 In short order, the liberals would launch a successful
overthrow of Santa Anna’s last dictatorship with the Revolution of Ayutla, 1854-1855;
they would achieve a victory over conservative armies in the War of the Reform, 1858-
1861; and in 1867 the erstwhile Emperor Maximilian, placed on his Mexican throne by
the French troops of Louis Napoleon and supported by Mexican conservatives, was
executed by firing squad under the orders of liberal leader, Benito Juárez. The last act
was to serve as a message to foreign powers foolish enough to consider future imperial
adventures in Mexico. The result would be, as Elías José Palti reminds us, that “Even
though similar processes took place in all of Latin America at the end of the last
[nineteenth] century, only in México did the liberal party emerge victorious from a war in
which their conservative opponents allied themselves with a foreign power and supported
the military occupation of the country.”39
37 Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “Don Manuel Payno Y La Enseñanza De La Historia,” Historia Mexicana, (Vol. xliv: 1, pp. 167-181, 1994), p. 169. 38 Guy P.C. Thomsen, “Popular Aspects of Liberalism in Mexico, 1848-1888,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, (Vol. 10: 3, pp. 265-292, 1991), p. 269. 39 Palti, La política del disenso, p. 8
20
What was truly finished in 1867 was not, as Bustamante had predicted, the
Mexican Republic, but rather Mexican conservatism as a political force. Support for
European intervention by conservatives made their political project synonymous with
betrayal of the patria, while liberals would become equated with that very “national
spirit,” the lack of which had been lamented by Otero. The ongoing obsession that
liberals would have with the construction of the narrative of the nation through history
texts and personal memoirs would become a story of liberalism’s ultimate triumph. A
new narrative challenge, however, emerged following the liberal victory over Santa Anna
in the Revolution of Ayutla in 1855.40 The very conflicts that had pitted liberals against
conservatives irrupted among the liberals themselves. The conflicts had already been
revealed during the war with the United States. In 1847 the radical liberal government of
Valentín Gómez Farías had attempted to raise emergency funds to support the war effort
by expropriations of church wealth. The attempt sparked a clerical reaction and led to the
rebellion of Los Polkos that attempted to overthrow the regime.41 Many moderate
liberals, as well as the progressive liberal, Guillermo Prieto, supported the rebellion. In
the twenty years between the triumph of the Revolution of Ayutla and the rise to power
of the Porfirio Díaz regime in 1877, the conflicts between liberals would become more
extreme.
In 1857 liberals would split into those who, like historian Manuel Payno,
conspired to overthrow the new liberal Constitution of 1857, and those like historians
Guillermo Prieto and Ignacio Altamirano, who would defend it in the three-year-long
40 Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 235-237. 41 Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico, pp. 263-265.
21
War of the Reform. After the victory of the radicals in the war, Payno and the liberal
historian José Fernando Ramírez worked for the Empire of Maximilian, who was
installed by French troops who occupied Mexico in 1862. Altamirano, in turn, again
served as a military commander fighting French troops, as did the liberal historian
Vicente Riva Palacio. After the retreat of French troops and the re-establishment of the
Republic in 1867, liberals split into those factions supporting the liberal president, Benito
Juárez, and radicals who backed Porfirio Díaz and his failed Rebellion of La Noria in
1871. The political conflicts were not decisively resolved until military forces loyal to
Porfirio Díaz won a three-way liberal power struggle against forces loyal to the then
liberal president, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejado, and forces loyal to the head of the Supreme
Court, José María Iglesias. It was only through Díaz’s decisive victory in the 1876
Tuxtepec Rebellion that Mexican political stability was finally achieved.42 Among the
historians I will study, José María Vigil backed Lerdo de Tejada, while Justo Sierra
favored Iglesias, and Alfredo Chavero and Riva Palacio backed Díaz. The challenge of
how to historically represent the various political struggles and remain loyal to the idea of
an impartial history was a daunting, if not impossible, narrative task.
In 1869, only two years after Maximilian’s defeat, Ignacio Altamirano published
what is perhaps his angriest novel, Clemencia (Clemency).43 The novel offers privileged
insights into the divisions then irrupting among different liberal factions. The story takes
place in 1863 during the early phases of the war against French occupation. In the novel a
beautiful women, Clemencia, initially expresses romantic interest in a poor but honest
42 Laurens Ballard Perry, Juárez and Díaz:Machine Politics in Mexico (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1978). See especially chapter 12. 43 For an overview of Clemencia see Chris N. Nacci, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (New York, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970), pp. 51-62.
22
dark-skinned army officer, but ultimately leaves him for a wealthy blond military
commander who will in the end betray the patria. The novel was a biting critique of the
government of the Restored Republic and its president, Benito Juárez. Altamirano was
essentially accusing the liberal Juárez regime of betraying militant liberals and their
followers who fought for the Republic, while granting clemency and political power to
members of the elite who betrayed the Republic under Maximilian’s rule. Among those
Juárez granted clemency was Manuel Payno.44
After the establishment of liberal hegemony and the appearance of the state
sponsored work, México a través de los siglos in 1889, the liberal positivist, Justo Sierra,
reviewed the multi-volume history. Insofar as the work ended by covering the nation’s
history up to the victory over Maximilian in 1867, the Iglesias supporter Sierra was
perhaps able to avoid more disquieting questions of political partisanship. In his generally
glowing review, however, the positivist intellectual noted a weakness in the otherwise
brilliant fifth volume by the liberal historian, José María Vigil. Vigil’s volume treats the
history of the Republic, especially the 1858-1861 War of the Reform and the war against
the French Intervention from 1862-1867. This was, of course, a history that Vigil had
lived through and Sierra faults him for being unable to overcome a “spirit of
44 Altamirano’s attitude towards Payno was complex. During the War of the Reform he called for his execution (“¡Que le cortan la cabeza!” or “Off with his head!”). He remained hostile to Juárez and critical of this period throughout his life, as can be seen in his 1883 historical narrative, Historia y Politica de Mexico, 1821-1882 (Mexico D.F.: Empresas Editoriales, 1947), especially pp. 177-183. Yet immediately after the War against Maximilian he co-founded, with Payno, the newspaper, El Federalista (The Federalist), and collaborated with him on the literary journal, El Renacimiento (The Renaissance). On “Off with his head” see Carlos Monsiváis, Las Herencias Ocultas de la Reforma Liberal del Siglo XIX (México, D.F., Random House Mondadori, 2006), p. 291. On their collaborations see José Luis Martínez, “México en busca de su expression,” pp. 1047-1049, in Daniel Cosío Villegas, coordinador, Historia general de México, Volumen 2 (México, El Colegio de México, 1999), pp. 1017-1071.
23
partisanship” (“espíritu de partido”).45 Vigil had framed the wars as a continuation of the
battles of clerical reaction, supported by the upper classes, against the secularizing
democracy of the masses. Sierra ends his review of the volume calling for a synthetic
history written by a conservative historian that might balance the accusative tone of
Vigil’s narrative. Yet if Sierra had wanted a narrative counter to Vigil’s, he need not have
called for a conservative historian and, just as clearly, Vigil’s accusations were not
merely intended for conservatives. Manuel Payno, still alive at the time, was a liberal
who had not only backed the overthrow of the Reform, but was the author of the Plan de
Tacubaya that had initiated the war. Payno subsequently served in the government of
Maximilian. If Sierra had wanted a narrative representative of the views of the defeated,
he could well have called upon the liberal writer, Manuel Payno.
A Typology of Mexican Liberalism
The pedagogical challenge to construct historical narratives that would inculcate
national loyalty and patriotism among Mexicans was synonymous in the liberal historical
imagination with the promotion of liberal institutions and practices. In order to foster
patriotism and identification with the nation and its state, it would be necessary to remove
any loyalties to institutions and social collectives that competed with national loyalty.
This could only be done through the elimination of the plurality of juridical statutes and
corporate privileges inherited from the pre-independence Old Regime, and their
45 Justo Sierra, “México A Través De Los Siglos” in Obras Completas, Tomo IX (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma De México, pp. 181-190, 1948), pp.187-189. The review was originally published in 1889.
24
replacement with abstract individual citizens equal under the law.46 In practice, this
meant an attack on corporate privileges still enjoyed by the church and the military, as
well as an attack on corporate entailed properties.
While the need to reform Mexican society through the promotion of liberal
economic and legal institutions is a starting point to discern the various factions within
Mexican liberalism, it is not always sufficient. Josefina Vázquez, a noted historian of the
nineteenth century, has said, “It is necessary to remember that the terms ‘conservative’
and ‘liberal’ are in themselves vague and difficult to define.”47 One of the most noted
historians in the field, Alan Knight, has identified three essential types of liberalism in the
nineteenth century: constitutional liberalism, institutional liberalism, and what he calls
“developmentalist liberalism” or positivism.48 Knight defines constitutional liberalism as
restricted to promoting political reforms, as opposed to social ones. He identifies these
reforms with the promotion of representative government, juridical rights, a balance of
political power between the central government and state governments, and a
commitment to federalism. Identifying its emergence in the decade of the 1820s, Knight
cites the historian Charles Hale’s comment that “a faith in the magic of constitutions held
sway,” and identifies the Mexican Constitution as representative of the hopes of early
constitutionalists.
46 Beatriz Rojas, “Los privilegios como articulación del cuerpo politico: Nueva España, 1750-1821,” pp. 45-84, in Beatriz Rojas, coord., Cuerpo politico y pluralidad de derechos: Los privilegios de las corporaciones novohispanas (México, D.F.: Instituto Mora, 2007). 47 Quoted in Elias José Palti, La Invención De Una Legitimidad: Razon y retórica en el pensamiento mexicano del siglo xix (Un estudio sobre las formas del discurso politico) (México: Fondo De Culura Económico, 2005) p. 25 n. 3 48 Alan Knight, “El Liberalismo Mexicano Desde La Reforma Hasta La Revolución (Una Interpretación),” Historia Mexicana, Vol. XXXV, num. 1, (1985, pp. 59-91), pp. 59-61.
25
Institutional liberalism, according to Knight, promoted more radical social and
economic changes. In the decades of the 1830s and 1840s, liberals such as José María
Luis Mora viewed the still existing institutional and political aspects of colonial society
as the source of Mexico’s social stagnation. Mora was the most famous ideological
spokesman of early Mexican liberalism, and in turn would become the greatest theorist of
institutional liberalism. As an early leader of the constitutionalist liberals, according to
Hale, Mora based his thinking on the philosophy of the French liberal, Benjamin
Constant. Constant’s political theory is most famous for his distinction between what he
called “ancient” and “modern” liberty.49 Writing in the aftermath of the French
Revolution, Benjamin Constant sought to repudiate Rousseau’s theory of democracy as a
vehicle of the general will. He did so by distinguishing modern liberty, seen as composed
of a guaranteed sphere of personal independence and individual freedom from arbitrary
governmental power, from “ancient” liberty, with sovereignty conceived of as a right to
participation in the collective decision making of a community. Regarding modern liberty
Constant wrote, “Liberty is every man’s right to be subject to the law alone, the right of
not being arrested, tried, put to death or in any way molested, by the caprice of one or
more individuals.” Ancient liberty, in contrast, “…consisted in the collective but direct
exercise of many privileges of sovereignty, deliberating upon public welfare, upon war
49 Constant wrote his essay on ancient and modern liberty in 1819. See “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Political Writings of Benjamin Constant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Pp. 309-328. On Constant’s liberalism see John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 20-22.
26
and peace, voting upon laws, pronouncing judgment, examining accounts and so forth.”50
John Gray writes of Constant’s distinction,
Its principal significance is the role it plays in Constant’s thought, and in the activities of the Guarantists whom he inspired, in illuminating the fact, centrally important for all classical liberals, that individual liberty and popular democracy are contingently but not necessarily related.51
Thus in Mora’s early phase of constitutionalism he conceived of the state’s primary
responsibility as a limited one—that of the guarantee and protection of the natural rights
of the individual. This theory entailed the need for a weak state, synonymous with the
Mexican Constitution of 1824 that created a weak executive, along with strong state
legislatures. Mora, however, eventually viewed the greatest impediments to the
fulfillment of natural rights in Mexico as the social institutions remaining from the old
regime. The chief obstacles for early institutional liberals were the corporate juridical
bodies of the church and the military, as well as the entailed properties of large landed
elites, church lands, and the lands of corporate Indian villages.52 Mora thus came to
identify the primary cause of Mexico’s continual crises as “the corporate spirit.” As long
as people identified with smaller corporate units, Mora wrote, “to engage with such a
person on the national interest would be like talking to him in Hebrew; he would not, nor
could not, understand anything beyond the body or bodies to which he belonged and for
which he would have sacrificed himself for their support over the rest of society.”53
Mora’s solution, which led him to the institutional liberalism identified by Knight,
was to expropriate church property, abolish religious tithes, create secular universal
50 Gray, Liberalism, p. 21. 51 Gray, Liberalism, p. 21. 52 Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). See especially chapter 4. 53 José María Luis Mora, Obras sueltas (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1963), pp. 169-170.
27
education, and end church and military corporate privileges that exempted them from the
jurisdiction of the civilian state. These social reforms, however, required the strong state
that constitutional liberalism sought to avoid, so as to protect modern liberty. Mora
attempted to argue the need for a stronger state by appropriating the thought of Jeremy
Bentham and his doctrine of social utility. Bentham, however, had rejected constitutional
liberalism’s doctrine of natural rights and the right to property as pre-existing society.
Mora could never give up his commitment to a natural rights theory. Mora thus carried
within him a lingering tension between his natural rights conception of modern liberty,
and a utilitarian requirement for a strong state to bring about the reforms needed in
Mexico to secure these modern freedoms.54
In Knight’s characterization, the third form of Mexican liberalism,
developmentalist liberalism, or positivism, while “although less obviously liberal—is
more original and competitive.”55 Describing it as having an evolutionist schema and
technocratic emphasis, developmentalist liberalism emerged in the last 25 years of the
nineteenth century to become the official state ideology of the regime of Porfirio Díaz.
Using language almost identical to Justo Sierra’s justification for positivist promotions of
less democratic state institutions, Knight writes “…developmentalist liberals were
prepared to differ for the moment on constitutional practices and civil rights to the benefit
of [political] stability and [economic] development.”56 The achievement of political
stability would free up productive resources of the country. Positivists sought to achieve
54 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora. On Constant’s influence see pp. 73-77. On Bentham, Pp. 148-150, 153-154. 55 Knight, “El Liberalismo Mexicano,” p. 60. 56 Knight, “El Liberalismo Mexicano,” p. 61.
28
this through changes to the political system that would strengthen the power of the
president over the congress and that of the central government over state governments.
Justo Sierra was the principle ideological promoter of developmentalist
liberalism. Hale identifies the origins of Sierra’s philosopny in the thought of Auguste
Comte and the policies of the French Third Republic after 1870 under Adolphe Thiers.
According to historian Johan Heilbron, Comte’s work “provided a new theoretical
orientation for the social sciences.”57 In particular, Heilbron argues, “Comte can be
viewed as the very first to develop a historical and differential theory of science.” In it,
“he [Comte] relinquished the idea that the validity of knowledge could be ascertained
with the help of a non-historical and universally valid principle. He thus rejected virtually
all the classical theories.”58 In Comte’s system, all knowledge had to be about historical
developments and not about abstract universals.
Mexican positivists like Sierra would reject the previous generation of liberal
radicals and their embrace of the idea of government as a defender of the natural rights of
man. The older liberal thesis conceived of society as a social contract between free
individuals embodied in a constitution. Mexican constitutionalists had considered the
state to be outside of and apart from, society—its function limited to protection and
preservation of individual rights. These ideas informed the Mexican Constitution of 1857,
with its provisions for a unicameral legislature, a weak president, and the popular election
of judges. Sierra rejected all of these conceptions and in 1878 unleashed a public attack
on the Constitution. Sierra agreed with Comte and the French positivists that “the
57 Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 197. 58 Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, pp. 200-201.
29
metaphysical spirit, as seen for example in the abstract doctrines of equality, the rights of
man, and freedom of conscience, are now radically hostile to all true social
organization.”59 Positivists argued that French Rationalism and the doctrine of natural
rights constituted an abstract metaphysics that was responsible for the Jacobin terror.
Classical liberalism, according to Sierra, had based its political project on an
ahistorical metaphysical conception of man to which government was forced to conform.
Against this natural rights doctrine, positivists argued that the only correct method for
understanding society was a historical one. They conceived of society as a social
organism evolving over time according to laws susceptible to scientific discovery. The
fundamental unit of analysis was the social organism and not the individual. According to
Sierra the state was not outside of society, but one of its fundamental organs. The
solution to the problems of Mexico was to reform the constitution and make it conform
scientifically to what the social organism functionally needed. Sierra proposed to
lengthen the presidential term of office, give the executive veto power, and endow the
president with legislative authority.
There is a curious moment in Knight’s typography of Mexican liberalism in
which he writes, “Not all liberals had an advanced and progressive vision (the populist
liberals and some members of the elite looked backwards, towards the past).”60 Knight
never identifies who these populist liberals were, nor what their backward beliefs
consisted in. But the statement does point to the need for a further distinction within what
Knight has called institutional liberalism. In an earlier essay the historian Moisés
59 Quoted in Charles Hale, The Transformation of Mexican Liberalism in Late-Nineteenth Century Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 30. 60 Hale, The Transformation of Mexican Liberalism, p. 64.
30
González Navarro made a pertinent distinction within liberalism that fills in this hole in
Knight’s essay. Navarro distinguished between what he called “individualist” and
“social” liberalism, arguing that “the first places liberty at the service of property,” while
the latter “means freedom in the service of the dominated class in order to free it from the
slavery achieved…through [peonage] debts going back eight generations.”61 Among
social liberals, Navarro includes the leader of the 1854 Revolution of Ayutla, Juan
Álvarez, and two radical liberal members of the 1856/57 Constitutional Convention,
Ponciano Arriaga and Ignacio Ramírez. The latter was the mentor for one of the
historians to be treated here, the militant intellectual Ignacio Altamirano.
Navarro notes Álvarez led an assault in 1856 on large Spanish estates in Morelos
to free the debt peons. He also refers to Arriaga’s proposals in the Constitutional
Convention that alarmed many moderate liberals. This is a reference to Arriaga’s famous
proposal for the large scale expropriation of large estates and their distribution to the
peasantry. Arriaga believed that Mexico’s social and economic troubles could not be
resolved without land redistribution, arguing that “Our people will never be free, or
republican, or even prosperous, despite hundreds of constitutions and thousands of laws
proclaiming abstract rights and beautiful theories…because of our absurd economic
system.”62 At the same Constitutional Convention, Ignacio Ramírez, argued that public
61 Moisés González Navarro, “Tipología De Liberalismo Mexicano,” Historia Mexicana, Vol. XXXII, num. 2, Octubre-Deciembre, (1982, pp. 198-225), p. 201, 203. 62 Quoted in Richard N. Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 1855-1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-Building (Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1979), p. 170.
31
power should be founded on privileging the interests of the poor, the ignorant, and the
weak; state power should be a form of “organized charity.”63
On Method
The distinctions Knight makes between constitutional, institutional, and
developmentalist liberals have their counterparts in the forms of narrative strategy that
different liberal historians used to construct the national narrative. Navarro’s conception
of a social liberalism, however, allows us to see a deeper political dimension to the splits
between competing liberal factions. The Jacobin radical, Ignacio Altamirano, narrated the
history of the Mexican people conquering their sovereignty in a partisan fashion that his
student, Justo Sierra, rejected in favor of a more benign narrative of the Mexican social
organism evolving over time. I propose that a formal critical engagement with these
narrative and explanatory strategies can serve as a conducting thread by which to discern
more deeply the profound political differences that separated an Altamirano from a
Sierra.
In the opening of his work, The Names of History, Jacques Rancière quotes
Fernand Braudel, “For more than a century, those interested in history—and they are
many—have struggled with the word.”64 The author goes on to note that modern social-
scientific proponents of history found themselves caught in an epistemological quandary.
If, as Rancière noted, previous generations of chroniclers could realistically lay claim to
narrating the events that pertained to individuals, such as kings and generals, the new
63 González Navarro, “Tipología De Liberalismo Mexicano,” p. 206. 64 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p.1.
32
scientific subjects studied by historians had stretched the rules of inference to the
breaking point. Rancière thus asked,
But how will the rigor of statistical series ever even allow the historian to support, without risk, a claim that the bourgeoisie has experienced some state, that the proletariat has known some evolution, or that the Mediterranean has undergone some event? To distance ourselves from the traditional subjects of history and from the means of verification attached to their visibility is to penetrate a terrain where the very meaning of a subject or an event is shaken, along with the manner in which we may make reference to the first and draw an inference from the second…the more certain science that he [the historian] claims is also a more improbable history, a history that pushes to the limit the indeterminacy of the referent and the inference that belong to all history.65
The author is unsparing in his description of the dilemma and notes there is no alternative
for the historian, who must in the last analysis name subjects and construct a narrative in
which these subjects experience states and undergo events. Rancière proposes to engage
in a “Poetics of Knowledge,” a procedure he describes as “a study of the set of literary
procedures by which a discourse escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science, and
signifies this status.”66
If one were to push Rancière’s analysis a bit further, I believe it would be
appropriate to locate a simultaneous emergence of modern history as a science in the
nineteenth century, along with its privileged subject: the nation. History as a professional
65 Rancière, The Names of History, pp. 2-3. 66 Rancière, The Names of History, p. 8. A word of caution is appropriate here. Rancière does not wish to destroy the scientific status of history. He argues that history is composed of a three-fold contract: a scientific; a narrative contract; and a political contract. The new history—as opposed to the old chronicling tradition—is in fact mandated for Rancière as necessary in the age of democracy, the age of the masses and collective subjects. In his “Poetics of Knowledge” he seeks a historical discourse which accepts the challenge of this three-fold contract and that articulates an appropriate narrative—and thus will construct an appropriate regime of truth—for the age of democracy. And while I find Rancière’s solution to be an inadequate one, he is by no means opposed to history as a science.
33
practice came into existence, in effect, as the act of naming the “nation” and attributing to
it the undergoing of events and the experiencing of states-of-being. From the very
moment of its birth, modern history was constructed around an epistemological dilemma
concerning the questions of the linguistic referent and logical rules of inference so
assiduously pointed out by Rancière. In what follows I want to pursue an investigation of
the “Poetics of Knowledge” that informs the narratives of nineteenth century Mexican
liberals as they attempt to “name” the nation and construct its history. To do so, I will
utilize the formalist approach to historical narratives articulated by Hayden White in his
work on nineteenth century historical narratives, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination
in Nineteenth-Century Europe.67
White elaborated a historical poetics by which to construct a typology of
historical narratives in the nineteenth century European “historical imagination.”
Utilizing a structural analysis of historical narratives, he articulated what he took to be
the key conceptual and pre-conceptual aspects of any work of history. On the conceptual
level White identified three forms or “strategies” of explanation: explanation by
emplotment or narrative; explanation by formal argument; and explanation by political
implication. Insofar as the key texts I will be treating are all self-identified as liberal, I
will limit myself to the first two levels.
For his analysis of explanation by emplotment, White appropriated the categories
of the literary theorist, Northrop Frye, and applied them to the works of historians. In
particular he took from Frye the plot forms of Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire.
These forms give the historical work the kind of story that it tells. In Romance the story is
67 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
34
one of a triumph over evil and “the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in
which he was imprisoned by the Fall;” while Satire is its opposite, and tells the story of
how man is dominated by the world and the recognition that “human consciousness and
will are always inadequate to the task of overcoming the dark force of death, which is
man’s unremitting enemy.” Comedy and Tragedy both offer partial victories over the
conflicts that divide men. Thus in Comedy, “hope is held out for the temporary triumph
of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play
in the social and natural world.” In Tragedy the conflicts are far more terrible than in
Comedy, but the failure of the protagonist brings “a gain in consciousness” for those who
survive the events.68
White defines his explanation by formal argument as an explanation of the story
by a “nomological-deductive argument.” This argument can take the form of a syllogism
in which the major premise constitutes a universal causal law, the minor premises would
consist of the conditions in which the law would apply, and “a conclusion in which the
events that actually occurred are deduced from the premises by logical necessity.”69 The
kinds of formal arguments are, like the plot forms, reduced to four: “formist,”
“organicist,” “mechanistic” and “contextualist.” A formist argument will be an
identification of the unique characteristics of the historical moment studied and the
explanation will be complete when “a given set of objects has been properly identified,
its class, generic, and specific attributes assigned, and labels attesting to its particularity
attached to it,” in short a descriptive history.70 The point of the explanation is, then, to
68 White, Metahistory, pp. 8-9. 69 White, Metahistory, p. 11. 70 White, Metahistory, p. 14.
35
show the uniqueness and particularity of the place and time studied. Organicist arguments
are favored by idealists and represent the historical moment as part of a larger synthetic
process. In this form, “Organicist historians will tend to be governed by the desire to see
individual entities as components of processes which aggregate into wholes that are
greater than, or qualitatively different from, the sum of their parts.”71 Such explanations
will be teleological, and the story will be explained as a process heading towards a final
end or goal.
Mechanistic explanations, unlike organicist ones, are reductive rather than
synthetic. Mechanistic explanations search for causal laws that determine the outcome of
the events in the narrative. Contextualism provides a “‘functionalist’ conception of the
meaning or significance of events discerned in the historical field.”72 In this form of
explanations events are located within a “context” and are explained by the discernment
of the specific relationships they have with other events within the context. The
explanation will consist, then, in the inter-relationships that the events and objects have
with each other within a specifically determined space and time. The conceptual levels of
White’s formalism are rather traditional, but it is precisely within what he calls the pre-
conceptual level that his originality lies. In his deep structure account, there is a pre-
conceptual (unconscious?) level that consists of what he calls a “linguistic protocol” that
“sanctions” what occurs at the conceptual level.73
The pre-conceptual level is defined as a linguistic one, indeed a “Poetic” one,
insofar as it will be defined and governed by the figurative language, or poetic tropes,
71 White, Metahistory, p. 15. 72 White, Metahistory, pp. 17-18. 73 White, Metahistory, p. 36.
36
that are employed within the narrative. At this pre-conceptual level, White utilizes the
ideas of Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives to construct what might be viewed as
the grammatical elements of the historical field prior to its elaboration, and—at the level
of the word—the poetic figures of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony to
construct a sort of syntax for the historical field.74 Together these grammatical and
syntactical organizations of the field will “pre-figure” the historical field prior to its
elaboration by the historian. Thus White’s historical representations, like literary
representations, will be composed of five grammatical elements: scene, agent, act,
agency, and purpose. Once these elements have been established, they will be brought
into relations with each other through the use of the figurative language of the narrative.
One of the four major figurative tropes will, according to White, be dominant in
any historical narrative. Thus metaphor characterizes phenomena in terms of similarity or
difference from other phenomena, such as, “My love is a rose.”75 Metaphor, in effect, is
“the use of a word to express a meaning resembling, yet differing from, its habitual
meaning.”76 Metonymy, as described by White, is “the name of part of a thing may be
substituted for the name of the whole,” such as “the roar of the thunder.” It might perhaps
be a bit clearer here to define metonymy as “the use of a word to designate an object or a
property occurring in an existential relationship with the habitual reference of the same
word.”77 Metonymy is essentially a reductive cause/effect linguistic trope. If metonymy
is reductionist, than synecdoche is “integrative.” It uses a part of a the phenomenon to
74 White, Metahistory, pp. 31-38. 75 White, Metahistory, p. 34. 76 Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 278. 77 Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary, p. 278.
37
characterize a quality that is essential of the totality such as “He is all heart,” or “the use
of a word in a broadened sense that includes the ordinary meaning as one aspect.”78
Synecdoche thus renders itself appropriate for the teleological narratives of organicist
explanations. Finally there is irony—which White describes as “negational”—in which a
word is used to deny on a figurative level what is affirmed at the literal level. Once the
historical field has been pre-figured grammatically and syntactically, it will form a
“linguistic protocol” that will in some sense govern, or determine, what happens on the
conceptual level, and White defines these “protocols” by the dominant poetic trope that
configures them.
The syntactical and grammatical elements of the pre-conceptual pre-figuring of
the historical field, and the conceptual levels of explanatory strategies, allow White to
make a taxonomy of what he calls the nineteenth century European historical
imagination. He applies the mix of the various levels of the historical work to access the
narratives of the leading practitioners of history in Europe: Jules Michelet, Leopold von
Ranke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt. In what follows I will apply White’s
formal analysis to the historical writings of representatives from three generations of
Mexican historians.
The Mexican National Historical Imagination
Liberal historians in the nineteenth century would partake of various narrative and
formal strategies to construct the tradition of Mexican national history. The eight writers I
will deal with in this study engaged in romantic, tragic and comedic strategies of
78 Ducrot and Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary, pp. 278-279.
38
emplotment, as well as formist, mechanistic, contextualist and organicist modes of
argument. They made use of the figurative linguistic tropes of metaphor, metonymy and
synecdoche. Notably lacking from the nineteenth-century Mexican historical imagination
was a satiric narrative and its linguistic figurative counterpart, the trope of irony. My
argument will be that the moderate use of tragedy and the militant narratives of romance
contained both narrative constraints and political demands upon their readers that could
neither construct a synthetic narrative out of the three periods of Mexico’s past, nor fulfill
the nationalist and scientific imperative of impartiality.
Both tragic and romantic narratives posited an irreconcilable conflict between the
indigenous and Spanish pasts. Tragic narratives, such as those of Manuel Payno, could
only see in the conquest the loss of a glorious indigenous civilization that no longer had
any contemporary relevance for the Mexican nation. Romantic narratives, like those of
Ignacio Altamirano, responded to the conservative Hispanicist challenge by resurrecting
the legacy of “Creole Patriotism,” which saw in the indigenous past the glory of a patria
crushed under the weight of a terroristic Spanish empire. As opposed to the tragic vision,
romantics could find no place for Spain and its legacy in the national narrative. I will
argue that the successful construction of the national narrative could only be achieved
through the mediation of a liberal contextualist accounting of the indigenous and colonial
legacies, such as that represented by the work of José Fernando Ramírez. This
contextualist strategy provided later positivists with the lynchpin by which to construct a
historical science of the Indian past that could appropriate both indigenous civilizations
and the colonial enterprise into a single narrative, and also give both their due in the
emergence of Mexican national identity.
39
I will argue that it was not, however, just the narrative constraints of tragic and
romantic plot structures that prevented the moderate and radical liberals from
successfully navigating the demands of a national narrative. The political demands placed
upon the reader in these works were simply not acceptable to the demands of a
modernizing Mexican nation-state. In romance, the fundamental history of the republic is
defined, as in Altamirano, as a struggle to the death between oligarchy and democracy.
The political demands placed upon the reader are such that political conflict is defined by
an oligarchy bent on obstructing the political liberation of the sovereign people and that
this oligarchy must be destroyed in the interests of the nation. Such texts place
irresolvable contradictions within the very heart of the republic and command the people
to fight the enemy, an internal enemy identified with a political and cultural elite who still
exists within the nation. This social contradiction and political demand carries with it the
threat of continued strife and the pronunciamiento.79 The tragic narrative, on the other
hand, carries within it the warning of a providential nature to the historical process, one
that is beyond the capacities of men to fully divine. In such a narrative, all change
threatens the undoing of historical institutions and traditions that are necessary to
maintain political order. The reader is commanded to distrust human intervention to
change society and to seek only the smallest of reforms so as not to fall into anarchy. This
narrative too, I will argue, is inadequate for the demands of a new liberal state attempting
to intervene and bring about large institutional and social change.
It will only be with the later positivist embrace of a comedic plot structure and
organicist formal argument, as represented in the works of Alfredo Chavero and Justo
79 Literally the “pronouncement.” It is the publically declared rebellion against the government that precedes an attempted coup d’etat, or golpe de estado.
40
Sierra, that the narrative and political demands of Mexican national history will be
successfully navigated. Chavero, for example, will argue that the beginning of the
Mexican nation is Cortes’s conquest of the Aztec Empire. He will, however, undervalue
the role of Cortes and the Spanish and give pride of place to the indigenous armies that
ally with Cortes in the final overthrow of the Aztec empire and highlight how it was a
joint venture, in contrast to the story of a few hundred Spaniards who toppled an empire.
But Chavero’s accomplishment will carry with it overtones of decidedly romantic traces,
ones that will be noted and criticized by positivists such as Vicente Riva Palacio and
Sierra. It is with Justo Sierra’s narrative, Evolución política del pueblo mexicano, that the
search for a synthetic national narrative will achieve its greatest success. It is with
Sierra’s work, I will argue, that the political commands of the Mexican state and the
discursive demands of national history speak in one and the same voice.
CHAPTER II
EIGHT MEN OF MEXICO’S NINETEENTH CENTURY
In examining the liberal historical imagination in nineteenth century Mexico, I
will be looking at a select group of writings from eight liberal Mexican historians. Seven
of these writers are representatives of three generations of Mexican liberals, along with
the eighth, José Fernando Ramírez, who was born prior to the 1810 outbreak of the
movement for independence. The eight individuals chosen represent a spectrum of the
political positions within Mexican liberalism, as well as of the narrative and interpretive
strategies employed to narrate the nation’s past. The three more “radical” examples—
Ignacio Altamirano, José María Vigil and Guillermo Prieto—relied predominately on a
romantic narrative strategy to depict the emergence of the sovereign people. Their formal
explanatory strategies veered between formist and mechanistic interpretations.
The two more conservative liberals—José Fernando Ramírez and Manuel
Payno—tended more towards the narrative strategies of tragedy or comedy and to formal
arguments that included mechanistic and formist explanations, but they also made use of
contextualist arguments. Vicente Riva Palacio, a member of the second generation, along
with Altamirano and Vigil, would make the intellectual journey from romance to tragedy
to comedy, and from contextualism to organicism, and finally embrace positivism at the
end of his life. The two representatives from the last generation—Alfredo Chavero and
Justo Sierra—are identified with the positivism of the era of Porfirio Díaz, but much like
42
Díaz himself, Chavero, as I will attempt to show, might be considered an unhappy
positivist. His narratives will veer from romantic to comedic, and from formist to
organicist. This will be due, I argue, to the subject matter of his historical practice—the
indigenous past. Sierra, who will criticize the romantic tendencies of Chavero, will be the
only consistent positivist, writing always with a comedic plot structure and an organicist
interpretive framework. What follows are brief biographical sketches of each of the
writers treated in this study, organized chronologically by their age.
José Fernando Ramírez (1804-1871)
In 1847, as Mexican resistance to the invading forces of the US army was
collapsing, Mexico City was on the verge of being occupied by US forces. The moderate
liberal Mexican lawyer, José Fernando Ramírez, was present in the capital at the time and
wrote of his wartime experiences in a collection of diary entries and letters on the war,
México durante su guerra con los Estados Unidos. Ramírez somehow found time at that
dramatic moment to publish a manuscript on the Spanish’s crown’s investigation of
Pedro de Alvarado, lieutenant to Hernán Cortéz, titled Proceso de residencia contra
Pedro Alvarado, as well as a biography of the head of the first Spanish high court, or
Audiencia, in Spain’s new Mexican colony, Noticias históricas de Nuño Guzmán.1 Days
before the city fell, Ramírez also saved important historical documents from the National
Archive and the National Museum, which he managed to hide in the houses of various
1 For a contemporary introductory narrative on Alvarado and Guzmán see Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, Historia del Nuevo Mundo (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1996), pp. 285, 312-313.
43
friends.2 Ramírez, like Manuel Payno, would be a liberal supporter of the presidency of
Ignacio Comonfort in 1857. Also like Payno, he would later serve in the administration of
Maximilian’s Mexican empire. Following the defeat of Maximilian and the withdrawal of
French troops, Ramírez was forced into exile in Europe, where he died in Germany in
1871.3 After his death, his family gave his collection of historical documents and his
own writings from Europe to the liberal historian, Alfredo Chavero.4 Ramírez would
ultimately play a significant role in the liberal appropriation of the indigenous and
colonial past, as well as in the liberal construction of a national narrative articulated as a
rigorous scientific discipline that would reject the nationalist romantic narrative of Creole
Patriotism.
José Fernando Ramírez was born in 1804 in Parral, Chihuahua. His father, José
María Ramírez, was a military commander for insurgent forces in the war for Mexican
independence. According to historical accounts, the elder Ramírez was a wealthy
member of the colony’s mining elite. The younger Ramírez studied law first at the
Colegio de Durango and then continued his studies at Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga de
Zacatecas.5 He went on to the more prestigious Colegio de San Ildefonso in 1823 in
Mexico, where he stayed with his uncle, a member of the first Mexican Congress. The
death of his father delayed Ramírez’s studies, but he eventually received his law degree
in 1828. In 1827, the young liberal founded the Escuela Festiva, which was dedicated to
2 Luis González Obregón, Vida y obras de don José Ramírez (México D.F.: Imprenta del Gobierno Federal el ex-Arzobispado, 1901), p. 7. 3 Ernesto de la Torre Villar, “Vida y obra de José Fernando Ramírez,” in José Fernando Ramírez, Obras históricas I, Época prehispánica (México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001), pp. 70-71. 4 De la Torre Villar, “Vida y obra de José Fernando Ramírez,” pp. 70-71. 5 González Obregón, Vida y obras de don José Ramírez, p. 2.
44
fostering a publically engaged citizenry, and also became the editor of the periodical, La
Antorcha Liberal (The Liberal Torch). In 1828 he served as the public prosecutor for the
State court of Chihuahua, and went on to become a judge in the Court of Justice for
Durango. He later served as rector of the Colegio de Abogados.6
Ramírez, like the other liberal historians in this study, had an extensive political
career. He was on numerous occasions elected to the national Congress. In 1842 he was
elected to the Congress that was dissolved by the government, and afterwards he was
named to the Junto Nacional Legislativa, a committee comprised of 78 notable
individuals given the task of writing the so called Bases Orgánicas. After the work was
completed, however, he refused to sign the document because of his disagreements with
its final conservative and centralist form.7 In 1845 Ramírez was elected senator from the
state of Durango, which took him to Mexico City where he would write his thoughts on
the war with the US and the internal political divisions of the time. As a senator in 1848,
Ramírez went to the city of Querétaro, where the Mexican Congress was meeting during
the US occupation, and worked on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that formally ended
the war. While there he made copies of important historical manuscripts from the convent
of San Francisco and the Franciscan library of Guanajuato.8 In 1851, when he was named
to the Supreme Court, he moved permanently to Mexico City and sold his library of more
than seven thousand volumes to the state government, a collection that formed the basis
for the State Public Library. He also held onto many other volumes and is said to have
6 González Obregón, Vida y obras de don José Ramírez, p. 3. 7 González Obregón, Vida y obras de don José Ramírez, p. 4. 8 Ernesto de la Torre Villar, “Vida y obra de José Fernando Ramírez,” p. 79.
45
possessed a library by 1858 that numbered eight thousand volumes. In 1852 he accepted
the post of director of the National Museum.
During the 1854 liberal Revolution of Ayutla, Ramírez was sent into exile by
Santa Anna. While in Europe he visited the major libraries of France, Italy, Austria,
England and Germany where he made copies of indigenous and colonial codices and
hieroglyphic paintings that he took back to Mexico.9 Back in Mexico in 1856, Ramírez
continued as the director of the National Museum and also became president of the
governing board of the Academia de Bellas Letras. In 1864 he accepted a cabinet post in
the administration of Maximilian and the following year was named president of the
Imperial Academy of Science and Literature.10 In 1867 he published the first volume of
the sixteenth century Franciscan Diego Durán’s Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y
Islas de Tierra Firme, That same year, Ramírez recognized the imminent collapse of the
regime of Maximilian and left for European exile. In Europe he again pursued his
historical research in the archives of Italy, France, and Spain and eventually moved to
Germany. Meanwhile, the government of Benito Juárez, newly established in Mexico,
confiscated Ramírez’s land and wealth and refused to allow him to return to the country.
He died in Bonn, Germany in 1871.
Although Ramírez held a variety of public posts, he most remembered for his
studies in history and archaeology. The moderate liberal formed bonds with a younger
generation of conservative historians led by Manuel Orozco y Berra and Joaquín García
Icazbalceta around a shared interest in the indigenous and colonial past. In 1844 two
Spanish translations of the US historian William Prescott’s work, History of the Conquest
9 Ernesto de la Torre Villar, “Vida y obra de José Fernando Ramírez,” p. 79. 10 Ernesto de la Torre Villar, “Vida y obra de José Fernando Ramírez,” p. 68.
46
of Mexico, appeared in Mexico City. Prescott represented the Conquest as a victory of
civilized European Christianity over essentially barbaric hoards.11 The work renewed
interest in the pre-Hispanic and colonial past among Mexican intellectuals and was
warmly received by conservatives such as Lucas Alamán and Joaquín García Icazbalceta.
Prescott’s work strongly influenced Ramírez. The liberal lawyer wrote a critical review
of the book and composed notes for the second of the Spanish editions of the History of
the Conquest of Mexico.12 Ramírez’s praise for the work, however, was also accompanied
by a more critical response than that of the unqualified support of the work by Alamán.
After elevating Prescott to the same level of brilliance as eighteenth century Creole
Patriot historian Francisco Clavijero, and comparing both to the Roman historian Tacitus,
Ramírez criticized the author for his “instinctive indifference to matters of race” and the
“heights of his enthusiasm for Hernán Cortés.”13 The interest he shared with Icazbalceta
and Orozco y Berra for Prescott and the indigenous past resulted in the liberal’s
contributions in the 1850s to the massive ten-volume work, Diccionario universal de
historia y geografía, to which he contributed several brief biographical sketches on
ancient indigenous kings of Mexico (Tomo 4, p. 317).14 In 1859 he published a
sympathetic historical biography of the sixteenth century Franciscan missionary,
Motolinía.
11 Jongsoo Lee, The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetic (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), p. 10. 12 González Obregón, Vida y obras de don José Ramírez, p. 9. 13 José Fernando Ramírez, “Notas y esclarecimiento a la Historia de la Conquista de México del señor W. Prescott” in Obras historicas II: Época colonial (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001), p. 231. 14 See González Obregón, Vida y obras de don José Ramírez, pp. 30-31 for a complete list.
47
Ramírez’s contextualist accounts of early Spanish missionaries along with his
sympathetic narratives of Spanish colonial administrators, such as Guzmán, made him the
first significant liberal historian of the ancient past and the old regime. The significant
break that later liberal historians would make with the historical understanding of
thinkers like Ignacio Altamirano and José María Vigil would pass, via Ramírez, through
the appropriation of the Indigenous and colonial pasts.
Guillermo Prieto (1818-1897)
As US troops were entering Mexico City in 1847, Guillermo Prieto, a member of
the Mexican Congress, had gone to Querétaro with the fleeing Mexican government. In
his memoirs he wrote,
Coarse chairs made of cattails, as if imbedded in the wall, a wide wooden beam, functioning as a table with maps, papers, and books, glasses of water, plain candle sticks with extinguished candles. Here are the furnishings of Fidel and the local gathering spot for fervent political leaders in the making, military experts in threadbare and filthy uniforms, generous and distinguished, who were kindly attending that gathering of shining intelligence and were giving off the most tender feelings of patriotism.15
The meetings and discussions at Prieto’s home resulted in the collected essays published
as Apuntes para la historia de la guerra entre México y los Estados Unidos. The work is
a collection of essays by fifteen liberal writers that analyze the events of Mexico’s war
with the United States. The threat of political reprisals, especially from Santa Anna, led
the writers to take collective responsibility for the content. None of the essays were
signed, and instead the members of the group referred to themselves collectively as “La
15 Guillermo Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, 1840-1853 (Mexico: Libreria de La Vda. De C. bouret, 1906), pp. 261, 263-264. This is Tomo II of Prieto’s memoirs. Fidel was Prieto’s political pen name.
48
familia de Renepont.”16 A few years later, with the outbreak of hostilities between
competing liberal factions over the Constitution of 1857, Prieto would describe the time
he was living as “the first ideological revolution” in Mexico.17
Prieto was born in Mexico City in 1818. His father, the manager of a bakery, died
when he was only thirteen and the family was financially ruined. He then moved in with
two women whose father had worked for the Prieto family. At the time Andrés Quintana
Roo, a minister in the Department of Justice, got the young man a job apprenticing in the
Customs Office.18 He also sent him to study at the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán, where
Prieto along with other leading liberals of his day, founded the prestigious Academia de
Letrán.19 The Academia would become a center for the development of national culture
and literature. Prieto described its mission as “the regeneration of literature in Mexico”
and the academy’s “decided tendency to Mexicanize literature, freeing it from imitating
all others, and giving to it its own particular character.”20
In 1837 after Prieto spoke publicly against the Mexican president Anastasio
Bustamante, the president called him in for a conversation and then put the young liberal
under his guidance at the presidential palace and made him a personal secretary. When
Santa Anna took power in 1841, Prieto was forced to abandon the capital and went to the
16 Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, p. 265. The 15 authors are listed alphabetically in the opening of the work. Prieto lists the authors of the introduction (which Prieto wrote) and 21 of the works 34 essays in his memoir. Prieto writes that he was unaware of the authors of the rest of the essays because Manuel Payno took over the project from him at the mid-point. 17 Ernesto de la Torre Villar, “Prólogo,” pp. 9-22, in José María Iglesias, El estudio de la historia (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), p. 9. 18 Malcolm D. McLean, Vida y obra de Guillermo Prieto (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1998), p. 13. 19 McLean, Vida y obra de Guillermo Prieto, p. 17. 20 Guillermo Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, 1828-1840 (México: Libreria de la Vda de C. Bouret, 19060), p. 180.
49
liberal stronghold state of Zacatecas. After attacking the government, however, Prieto
was forced to leave the state. He returned to Mexico City where he became the editor of
the liberal periodical, El Siglo XIX, and took on the pseudonym of “Fidel.” In 1845 he
and radical liberal Ignacio Ramírez started the satirical liberal journal, Don Simplicio. 21
The periodical was forced to close during the US occupation of Mexico in 1847. In the
first months of that year the Mexican government attempted to expropriate wealth from
the Catholic church to pay for the war effort, an attempt that sparked the clerical-led
rebellion of los polkos in which the government was engaged in street fighting with
rebelling troops supported by the clergy, conservatives and some moderate liberals.
Prieto supported los polkos at the time, a decision that he later regretted, as he wrote in
his memoirs,
Now it is left to understand the unsuccessful denouement of the polkos movement and the disgrace and humiliation that should cover those of us who spewed out that shame on our history during the days of the greatest anguish for our patria…I tell you that was a great offence…that appears each time more horribly before my eyes whenever I look upon it 22.
Afterwards he enlisted in a division of the Northern Army to fight the invading army. As
a member of Congress during the war, Prieto engaged in discussions about whether to
continue the war or seek a peace treaty. The committed nationalist liberal defended to the
end military resistance against US forces, an attitude that would align him with later puro
militants.
After the war in 1852 he accepted the post of Secretary of the Treasury. When
Santa Anna returned to power for the last time in 1853, Prieto returned to writing for El
21 Carlos Monsiváis, Las herencias ocultas de la Reforma liberal del siglo XIX (México, D.F.: Random House Mondadori, 2006), p. 101. 22 Guillermo Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, 1840-1853 (México: Libreria de la Vda de C. Bouret, 19060), p. 204.
50
Monitor Republicano, openly attacking the government. Forced yet again to flee the
capital, he returned to Mexico City after the Revolution of Ayutla and accepted the post
of a minister in the Treasury Department under the liberal government of Ignacio
Comonfort.23 In 1856 he became a member of the Constitutional Convention where,
perhaps to make up for his support of los Polkos, he argued for the need for the
disentailment of church property. After the convention, he worked in the national post
office until he resigned in protest when Comonfort dissolved the Congress and repealed
the Mexican constitution.24 Prieto then joined Juárez and his forces in the War of the
Reform, recognizing Juárez as president and joining his cabinet in exile in Guanajuato.
According to his memoirs he prevented conservative soldiers from executing Juárez in
Guadalajara in 1858. With the triumph of liberal forces under Juárez, Prieto returned to
the capital. When French forces invaded Mexico in 1862, Prieto again accompanied
Juárez as the government left the capital. After this retreat, he broke with Juárez,
accusing him of violating the constitution by not holding elections, remaining in office,
and not handing over power to the president of the Supreme Court, Jesús González
Ortega.25 Prieto then crossed the border into Texas, from where he launched and edited a
liberal journal, La Bandera de México, in support of Mexican resistance to French troops.
When the war ended in 1867, he returned to Mexico City and was elected to
Congress. In 1876 the head of the Supreme Court, José María Iglesias, declared the re-
election of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada fraudulent and declared himself president. Prieto
supported Iglesias and left with him as he fled the capital and crossed over into the
23 McLean, Vida y obra de Guillermo Prieto, p. 30. 24 McLean, Vida y obra de Guillermo Prieto, p. 31. 25 McLean, Vida y obra de Guillermo Prieto, p. 37.
51
United States.26 When Prieto returned to Mexico in 1877, he again wrote for the liberal
journal, El Siglo XIX. Throughout his career, Prieto would collaborate on several liberal
periodicals besides El Siglo, including El Monitor Republicano, La Libertad and El
Federalista. Over the course of his life Prieto would serve in the National Congress
eighteen times and as secretary of the treasury six times between 1852 and 1876.
Prieto is perhaps the nineteenth century Mexican liberal most identified with
nationalism. His literary production made him Mexico’s most popular poet and his epic
poem, El romancero nacional, became the most widely read work of Mexican poetry
during the century.27 In the prologue to the work, his militant comrade Ignacio
Altamirano wrote, “The old singer of the glories and hopes of Mexico, the most popular
and prolific of our poets, Guillermo Prieto, has crowned his literary life, bringing together
in one collection of romances all the historical and traditional memories of national
independence.”
Among his most significant historical work, Prieto collaborated with
conservatives to write in the Diccionario universal de historia y geografiá between 1853
and 1856. Besides his historical memoirs and his writings on the Mexican-American
War, Prieto also published biographical accounts on subjects ranging from Morelos to
Ignacio Comonfort. The latter, a brief account that praised Comonfort at the moment of
his death in 1863, noted Comonfort’s actions in the Revolution of Ayutla and his heroic
defense of the patria against the invading French, leaving aside the fallen hero’s actions
in the Plan de Tacubaya and the collapse of the 1857 Constitution. Prieto’s 1886 work,
Lecciones de historia partria, was his most significant historical narrative. Written in
26 McLean, Vida y obra de Guillermo Prieto, p. 41. 27 Monsiváis, Las herencias ocultas de la Reforma liberal, pp. 117-120.
52
1886, the work would eventually replace Payno’s as the most popular historical textbook
in Mexico.
Manuel Payno (1820-1894)
The liberal Manuel Payno is generally characterized in the historiography as a
standard bearer for the moderados, or moderate faction of Mexican liberalism. Payno
himself described the social base of the moderates as
All those peaceful people who come out in the streets and on their balconies during the day to hear the ringing of the Cathedral bells, and hide themselves and hermetically close their doors and windows as soon as they hear a shot fired…all the rich and the hacienda owners who on election day go to their country houses or go to bed; in a word, all those who are absolutely uninterested in politics, for whom all government is a matter of complete indifference.28
Payno’s mother taught him Catholicism and prepared him for the priesthood. His father,
on the other hand, was a cousin of the Mexican general and president, Anastasio
Bustamante, and sought a career for his son in government service. As Payno would
recount of himself, however, he never lost his religious faith.29
Payno was born in Mexico City. Early in his life he served as an accountant in the
Office of Customs where he met and became life-long friends with Guillermo Prieto. He
later served as a secretary for Mariano Arista, a former royalist army officer who joined
the cause of independence and served briefly as president. He also served as an
administrator in the State Tobacco Monopoly. Early in his career in service to the
28 Marcos T. Águila Medina, “Manuel Payno: Partidario y víctima de la moderación,” in Manuel Payno, Memorias de México y el mundo, obras completas VIII (México, D.F.: Conaculta, 2000), p. 18. 29 Barbara A. Tenenbaum, “Manuel Payno y los bandidos del erario mexicano, 1848-1873,” in Historia Mexicana, Vol. 44, #1, p. 74.
53
government he traveled to the United States where he studied the prison systems of New
York and Philadelphia. In 1847 Payno fought against the US invasion of Mexico, leading
combat in the area around Puebla. During the war he established a secret communication
network between Mexico City and Veracruz. A career bureaucrat, Payno served as
Secretary of the Treasury for presidents Joaquín de Herrera and Mariano Arista. He was
sent into exile by Santa Anna in 1853 but returned after the triumph of the Revolution of
Ayutla and again served as Secretary of the Treasury for Ignacio Comonfort.
Payno took part in two political struggles that would eventually marginalize him
within the liberal party. The first was the 1857 coup d’etat or golpe de estado backed by
conservatives, the church and the military that overthrew the liberal Constitution of 1857.
It was this event that was the topic of a famous 1861 speech by Ignacio Altamirano
before Congress in which he denounced the granting of amnesty to conservatives and
their allies behind the coup, and instead called for hanging them.30 Payno himself
justified his support and authorship of the coup’s published justification, the Plan de
Tacubaya, before the Congress by arguing such actions were necessary to prevent
revolution. He compared himself to Galileo before the Inquisition, saying “I was
suffering a judgment not unlike that of Galileo before the Inquisition: E pur si muove
(And yet it moves).”31 In a later narrative defense of his actions the moderate liberal posed
the rhetorical question:
30 D.A. Brading, “Liberal Patriotism and the Mexican Reforma,” in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, May, 1988, p. 31. 31 Manuel Payno, “Defensa que hace el ciudadano Manuel Payno en la causa que se le ha instruido por la sección del gran jurado del congreso nacional por el participio que tomó en los sucesos de deciembre de 1857,” in Payno, Memorias de México y el mundo, p. 99. “And yet it moves,” of course, being Galileo’s statement that in spite of his recanting, the earth did still continue to move around the sun.
54
What is preferable? A gradual reform, that goes about slowly correcting [social] abuses, diminishing political influence and establishing a prudent social equilibrium, or a complete absolutist reform that would annihilate the good along with the bad, that would destroy the ripe corn along with the weeds, in order to plant later in an entirely empty field. Is it better to repair the old building or to demolish it, at the risk of possibly not being able to build a better one?32
A radical liberal rival, Francisco Zarco, saw things in a less noble light. Zarco said of
Payno and his fellow plotters, “The eighteenth Brumaire of these gentlemen is nothing
more than a game of craps by a few men without faith, without a plan, without
convictions; the chance risked by rogues lacking any sense of duty.”33
In 1863 at the time of the French occupation of Mexico, Payno wrote a letter to
the French military commander, General Forey, in which he criticized the French
invasion. For this he was briefly imprisoned until the arrival of Maximilian. After
recognizing Maximilian’s government, he accepted a ministry post in the Empire—a
decision that further marginalized him among the liberal ruling faction after Maximilian’s
fall in 1867.34 Payno would receive clemency from the Juárez regime, however, and have
success in reintegrating himself back into Mexico’s liberal factions by publishing an
essay in 1868 arguing that Mexico should refuse to recognize or pay any foreign debts
owed to Spain, France and England.35 Payno would then serve in the National Congress
on three occasions between 1867 and 1875 and was elected senator in 1880. He was sent
to Paris in 1882 by the government to try and attract European immigrants to come to
32 Manuel Payno, “Memoria sobre la revolución de diciembre de 1857 y enero de 1858,” Pp. 33-97 in Obras Completas, Vol. VIII (México, D.F.: Conaculta, 2000), p. 92. 33 Quoted in Águila Medina, “Manuel Payno: Partidario y victima,” p. 20. 34 Nicole Giron, “Manuel Payno: Un liberal en tono menor,” in Historia Mexicana, Vol. 44, #1, pp. 28-29. 35 Tenenbaum, “Manuel Payno y los bandidos del erario mexicano,” pp. 94-95.
55
Mexico and became Mexican consul to Spain. When he returned to Mexico he again
served in the senate in 1892. Following the death of Francisco Zarco, his old nemesis,
Payno replaced his old nemesis as the editor of the liberal periodical El Siglo XIX. At the
same time he worked with Guillermo Prieto on the journal, la Revista Científica y
Literaria de México and was a member of the Sociedad de Geografía y Estadística.36
Payno began his interest in historical writing with the essay he co-wrote with
Prieto, Polkos y puros, on the rebellion of los polkos during the war with the United
States. After the war, Payno pursued his historiographic practice working on various
entries in the Diccionario universal de historia y geografía. During Maximilian’s
Mexican Empire in 1865 he published the memoirs of the independence era writer and
republican, Servando Teresa de Mier. In the field of history Payno is best known as the
co-author of El libro rojo (1871) and for his participation on Apuntes para la historia de
la guerra entre México y Los Estados Unidos (1848). He is also famous for his defense of
his actions against the Constitution of 1857, Memoria sobre la revolución de diciembre
de 1857 y enero de 1858 (1860). His textbook of Mexican national history, Compendio
de la historia de México (1870), went through multiple editions in the last third of the
nineteenth century. Payno is perhaps best remembered, however, as one of Mexico most
outstanding literary figures, having written multiple novels, the most famous of which
Los bandidos de Río Frío (1889), is still read today.
36 Águila Medina, “Manuel Payno: Partidario y victima,” p. 14.
56
José María Vigil (1829-1909)
José María Vigil was chosen by Vicente Riva Palacio to write the last volume of
México a través de los siglos and thus to present the liberal historical representation of
the 1858-1861 War of the Reform and the 1862-1867 war against Maximilian and French
intervention into Mexico.37 The work utilized the romantic narration of the sovereign
nation defeating its enemies, composed of the clergy and the upper classes (las clases
privilegiadas). As such it came in for criticism in Justo Sierra’s review of the work, with
the cientifico accusing Vigil of partisanship (espíritu de partido).38 In the narrative, Vigil
represented the clergy and the institutional church as the enemy of the nation since its
origins in the Conquest. In his narrative interpretation, the wars of the Reform and the
French intervention were treated as the culmination and ultimate victory of the liberal
State against a clerical reaction that had exploded into full blown rebellion after
Independence, with the liberal Constitution of 1824.
Vigil is best know, ironically, for a series of articles in which he engaged in a
public debate against Sierra and his positivist views. The irony being that Vigil, the
radical anti-clerical historian, was a committed Catholic who was appalled at what he saw
as the historical and moral relativism inherent in Sierra’s positivism (Annino). Shortly
before his death in 1909 he would say, “At this hour one feels more than ever the
emptiness of all secular philosophies and the uselessness of all systems of thought.”39
37 José Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente: Vicente Riva Palacio ante la escritura de la historia (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), p. 271. 38 Justo Sierra, “México A Través De Los Siglos,” pp. 181-190 in Obras Completas, Tomo IX (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma De México, 1948), pp. 187-189. The review was originally published in 1889. 39 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 271.
57
Vigil was born in Guadalajara in 1829 and died in Mexico City in 1909. He thus
not only saw, but also participated in the major events of the nineteenth century;
Mexico’s historic defeat in the Mexican-American War; the War of the Reform; the war
against French intervention; and the emergence to power of Porfirio Díaz by armed
rebellion in 1876/77. After the War of the Reform, he served as the director of the Public
Library for the state of Jalisco where he supplied the library with the books from
religious convents abolished by the liberal government40. Beginning in 1880 he assumed
the post of head of the National Library, a post he held until his death.41 Vigil had an
extensive career in journalism, politics, literature, and teaching.
His political career included his service as an alternate deputy in the
Constitutional Congress of 1857. When war against Maximilian and French intervention
ended in 1867, Vigil became a political supporter of Benito Juárez’s ally, Sebastián
Lerdo de Tejado until Lerdo’s political/military defeat by the forces of Porfirio Díaz in
the Tuxtepec Rebellion of 1876. Vigil’s political support for Lerdo differentiated him
from the other writers of México a través de los siglos, especially the two who will be
treated in this this work, Vicente Riva Palacio and Alfredo Chavero, both supporters of
Díaz. During the Lerdo regime Vigil served for a time as the director of the National
Archives, while serving on the Supreme Court. During his political career he also served
five terms as a deputy in the National legislature (3731).42
Vigil’s work in journalism began in 1855 when he became the editor of the paper,
La Revolución, a periodical formed as an ideological organ to support the liberal
40 Musacchio, coord., Milenios de México, Tomo III, p. 3219. 41 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 272. 42 Diccionario porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México (México, D.F.: Editorial Porrúa, 1995), p. 3731.
58
Revolution of Ayutla that toppled the last regime of Santa Anna and led to the
Constitution of 1857 and the Liberal Reform. During the Reform he became the editor of
the official government newspaper of the state of Jalisco, El País. When Napoleon sent
French troops to occupy Mexico in 1862, Vigil fled to San Francisco where he founded a
short lived paper, El Nuevo Mundo, dedicated to defending Mexico in the press against
French invasion.43 After the withdrawal of French troops and Maximilian’s execution in
1867, Vigil edited some of the leading liberal papers during the Restored Republic and
later in the Porfiriato, including El Siglo XIX, El Porvenir, and El Monitor Republicano.
He also served as the editor of the journal, Revista Filosófica, where he wrote critically
on French positivism, eventually resulting in the famous 1878 public debate with his
fellow liberal intellectual, Justo Sierra.44
Vigil also served as a member of the Supreme Court in 1875, during the Lerdo
regime and later had a teaching career including being named a professor at the
prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and the Escuela Normal de Profesores.45 His
is most remembered for his literary endeavors and cultural histories. Among the later are
his Poetisas mexicanas (1893), Antología de poetas mexicanos (1894), and Reseña
histórica de la literatura Mexicana (1894).46 His own literary output included the
theatrical works Dolores o una passion (1851), La hija del carpintero (1854), Flores de
Anáhuac (1867), and Un demócrata al uso (1872).
In his historical practice, Vigil is best known as the author of the fifth volume of
México a través de los siglos. (1889), but also published Ensayo histórico del Ejército de
43 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 272. 44 Raat, El positivismo durante el Porfiriato, pp.98-103. 45 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 272. 46 Musacchio, coord., Milenios de México, Tomo III, p. 3220.
59
Occidente (1874). In this work, however, I want to treat two smaller works of Vigil’s
historical writing; his historical biography of the fifteenth century King of the Aztec City-
State of Texcoco, Nezahualcóyotl, El rey poeta (Nezahualcóyotl, The Poet King) and his
prologue to a publication he made of the work by the sixteenth century Dominican priest
Bartolome de las Casas, Historia de las Indias.47 Vigil was a representative of the radical
school of classical liberals who closely identified with the legacy of the French
Revolution and the Mexican liberal Constitution of 1857. In his synthetic overview of
Mexican history, Vigil read the past as one long continuous struggle, always the same
struggle, against the clergy and entrenched despotic authority that continually crushed
what the author saw as the natural rights inherent to the individual. His brief interludes
into Indigenous and Colonial history are representative of a radical liberal understanding
of the distant Mexican past in the framework of a Romantic narrative explanatory
strategy.
Vicente Riva Palacio (1832-1896)
Vicente Riva Palacio, the editor of México a través de los siglos has,
unquestionably, the most prestigious family background among the liberal historians I am
treating here. Riva Palacio’s grandfather was the hero of independence and radical
republican president Vicente Guerrero. His father, Mariano Riva Palacio was a
prestigious moderate liberal who served as the legal defense for Maximilian after the War
Against French Intervention. Riva Palacio was born in Mexico City and received his law
degree in 1854. He was a member of the Mexico Municipal Council in 1855 and a
47 Diccionario porrúa, p. 3731.
60
member of Congress in 1861. He was twice taken prisoner by conservative forces during
the War of the Reform, first in 1858 and again the following year.48
In 1861 he received orders from Benito Juárez to retrieve the historical archives
of the Inquisition in Mexico from the archdiocese.49 He took the records to his house and
from there would use them both for his historical novels and his research. When French
troops invaded Mexico the following year, Riva Palacio led guerrilla fighters (Chinacos)
in the war against French intervention and participated in the siege of Puebla in 1863. He
accompanied the Juárez government as it fled Mexico City, and was later designated
governor of the state of Mexico by Juárez. He gathered together troops and took the city
of Zitácuaro in the state of Michoacán from the French. Following this he was named
governor of Michoacán and general and chief of the Army of the Central Zone (Ejército
del Centro).50 In 1867, with a force of irregulars, he took Toluca and engaged in the siege
of Querétero. At the beginning of the war he edited the satirical periodical, El Monarca.
After the war, Riva Palacio used his collection of archives from the Inquisition to
write literary works, producing seven historical novels in a five-year period. He also
served on the Supreme Court from 1868-1870. During the regime of Juárez’s successor,
Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, he severely criticized the president in the periodicals El
Radical and El Ahuizote (“The Pain in the Neck”). In 1876 he supported Porfirio Díaz in
the Tuxtepec Rebellion and was immediately made Secretary of Development in the Díaz
regime.51 In 1884, Riva Palacio was sent to prison for attacking the government of
Manuel González during the four-year period that Díaz did not serve as president after
48 Diccionario porrúa, p. 2960. 49 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 71. 50 Musacchio, coord., Milenios de México, Tomo III, p. 2568. 51 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 84.
61
1876.52 He has been credited with writing much of his historical work on the colonial
period while in prison. After Díaz returned to power in 1885 he became the Mexican
ambassador to Spain and Portugal.
Riva Palacio’s historical practice consisted of his novels, all of which, with the
exception of Calvario y Tabor, dealt with the colonial period and the Inquisition. The one
exception was a literary recounting of his experiences in the war against French
occupation. Among his better-known non-fiction works is a collection of biographical
sketches of leading liberal figures and contemporary men of letters, Los ceros (1882). His
most widely known historical works are his collaboration on El libro rojo (1870) and the
second volume of México a través de los siglos that covers the colonial period. He also
wrote numerous historical essays, which have been collected together and published
under the title Ensayos históricos.
More than any of the other writers I will treat, Riva Palacio is a roadmap for the
fragmentations and changes in Mexican liberalism. His experiences in the War of the
Reform and the War Against French Intervention led him to join with the puro radicals in
his youth. Yet by the time he wrote his essays in El libro rojo, he appears to have adopted
a more moderate position in line with the moderate liberalism of his father. In 1876,
however, he supported the Tuxtepec Rebellion of Porfirio Díaz, which again would seem
to align him with the radicals. His writings in El libro rojo suggest a mechanistic vision
of history, yet as his historical investigations continued he appears to have adopted a
more contextualist analysis. By the end of his career, however, he was a convert to
positivism and its organicist explanation of the laws of history.
52 Diccionario porrúa, p. 2960.
62
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834-1893)
Ignacio Altamirano, was born in the village of Tixtla in 1834 in today’s state of
Guerrero and died in Italy some six decades later.53 The son of indigenous parents, he
spoke Náhuatl as his first language. Around the time of his birth, Indians in the region
were involved in land conflicts and the main defender of indigenous land claims was the
future leader of the Revolution of Ayutla, Juan Álvarez.54 Altamirano would later serve
as secretary for Álvarez in the Revolution. The radical liberal recalled how in his youth,
Indians were separated at school from mestizos and Creoles. While the Creoles and
mestizos were taught various subjects, the Indians were forced to memorize catechism
lessons.55 Altamirano’s father, although an Indian, was the alcalde [mayor] of the village
and due to this Altamirano was allowed to study with the Creoles. The puro intellectual
later remembered the catechism as “a monstrous code of immorality, of fanaticism, of
stupidity.”56
Altamirano received a scholarship for deserving Indian students and became a
student of the radical puro Ignacio Ramírez at the Instituto Literario de Toluca. Ramírez,
along with fellow liberals Manuel Payno and Guillermo Prieto, had been arrested in 1846
and saw his satirical political journal, Don Simplicio, closed down by the government for
53 Altamirano’s ethnicity has been debated since the nineteenth century. As recently as 1992, Jesus Sotelo Inclán has written his mother was a mestiza. Whatever may have been the biology of his background, he was raised with an Indian identify and was a native Náhuatl speaker. 54 Edith Negrín, “Evocación de un escritor liberal,” pp.13-59, in Edith Negrín, ed., Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Para leer la patria diamantina (México,D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006), p. 19. 55 Negrin, “Evocación de un escritor liberal,” p. 19. 56 Negrin, “Evocación de un escritor liberal,” p. 20.
63
its critiques of the church and the military.57 After Mexico’s defeat in the war with the
United States, Ramírez was instrumental in reopening the institute and it was then that he
started the program of scholarships for poor students of Indian descent.58 Following his
studies, Altamirano served for a period as the librarian at the Instituto, but then left to
study law at the Colegio de Letrán. After serving in the Revolution of Ayutla in 1854 he
became a military commander who led Mexican troops in battle during the War of the
Reform from 1858-1860. At the end of the war he served in the Mexican Congress where
he gained a reputation as a militant and radical. He again served as a military leader
against the French occupation during Maximilian’s empire and led troops in the battle of
Querétero, one of the most important of the war.
During the decade of civil war and French occupation, Altamirano claimed his
authority to speak for the nation, “Because I am an authentic man of the people,
descendent of twenty unfortunate races who have bequeathed to me, together with their
love of liberty, all the sufferings of their ancient humiliations.”59 Altamirano would later
achieve notoriety in 1861 when he called for the execution of members of the clergy who
had supported the overthrow of the Constitution of 1857 and sparked the War of the
Reform. In the transcription of his speech before the Congress, the puro radical wrote,
“The nineteenth century is not the fifteenth. France showed us the way in 1793, and its
example is contagious all over the world. For the people make the Pope tremble in the
57 Liliana Weinberg, “La palabra de la Reforma en la República de las Letras,” pp. 15-67 in Liliana Weinberg, ed., Ignacio Ramírez, La palabra de la Reforma en la República de las Letras (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009), p. 24. 58 Weinberg, “La palabra de la Reforma,” p. 25. 59 Ignacio Altamirano, Discursos 1 in Obras completas T.1 (México D.F., Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1949), p. 49
64
Vatican and the old Catholicism of the monks is in agony.”60 After the speech he became
known as the “Marat of Mexico.”61
Altamirano did more than perhaps any other nineteenth century thinker to
construct a pantheon of national heroes. Appropriating an eighteenth century tradition of
what David Brading has called “Creole Patriotism,” which founded Mexican identity on
the indigenous past and completely rejected the three hundred years of Spanish colonial
rule, Altamirano described the ancient past as in one in which,
There existed a great family of nations in an unknown continent…Spain with its appetite for war subjugated the people of [the Aztec Empire of] Anáhuac, tormented them and sacrificed the noble and valiant Cuauhtémoc and, with the pretext of evangelizing, planted their bloody cross on a mountain of rubble and cadavers into which they had converted the ancient metropolis.62
The romantic puro was one of the first to promote the conversion of the last Aztec
Emperor, Cuauhtémoc, into a symbol of national identity and resistance to foreign
oppression. In the 1880s the anti-clerical militant discovered the newly republished
chronicles of the sixteenth century Christian missionaries Motolinía and Mendiata and
was greatly impressed by their accounts of the efforts by religious orders to defend the
Indians. He wrote movingly of the early Franciscans, “On recovering these old books of
our history, grandiose and almost divine figures are raised up to our vista. Of these heroic
defenders of the Indians we can do no less than pay them a special tribute of adoration.”63
60 Altamirano, Discursos 1, p. 51. 61 D.A. Brading, “Liberal Patriotism and the Mexican Reforma,” in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 20, No.1, May, 1988, p. 31. 62 Brading, “Liberal Patriotism and the Mexican Reforma,” p.13 63 Ignacio Altamirano, Paisajes y leyendas. Tradiciones y costumbres de México (México,D.F.: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1949), p. 192.
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Following Maximilian’s execution and the end of his Mexican Empire,
Altamirano became a co-founder, along with Ignacio Ramírez and Guillermo Prieto, of
the periodical El Correo de México (1867), as well as sole founder of the literary review,
El Renacimiento (1869). At El Renacimiento, while remaining a political radical,
Altamirano softened his former demands for suppression of supporters of Maximilian and
sought out former enemies to work on issues of cultural education. In a spirit of national
reconciliation the journal invited conservatives such as Manuel Orozco y Berra, Joaquín
García Icazbalceta and Francisco Pimentel to contribute essays and stories. The purpose
of the review was an eminently nationalist one. It was, according to Altamirano, “to
vindicate our beloved Patria against the attempts by French writers to defame it with
accusations of barbarism.”64 He became a hostile critic of the liberal President Benito
Juárez, however, and along with his mentor, Ignacio Ramírez, became a leader of the
political opposition.
While becoming the chief spokesperson for the cultivation of a national arts and
literature, Altamirano also became a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y
Estadística in 1870. He taught history and law at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria.
During the rule of Porfirio Díaz, he served on the Supreme Court and in the Ministry of
Development. He also served as a deputy in the National Congress. At the end of his life
he served as a diplomat in Europe, first as a consul in Spain, and then representing
Mexico at international summits in Switzerland and Italy. Along with his political and
historical writings, Altamirano wrote poetry, cultural essays, plays and novels, including
64 Nicole Giron, “Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: el “campeon” de la literatura nacional,” Pp. 215-252 in Nicole Giron, ed., La consrucción del discurso nacional en México, un anhelo persistente (siglos XIX y XX) (México, D.F.: Instituto Mora, 2007), pp. 230-231.
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three of the most well known novels of the nineteenth century, Clemencia (considered the
first modern Mexican novel), La Navidad en las montañas, and his most famous work, El
Zarco (The Blue-Eyed Bandit). Between 1880 and 1886 Altamirano published three
historical biographies of the independence leader, José María Morelos. He also wrote a
brief biographical essay on Miguel Hidalgo. In 1882 he published his most complete
political history, his Revista Histórico y Político (1821-1882).
Alfredo Chavero (1841-1906)
Chavero remains one of the lesser-known liberal intellectuals of the nineteenth
century, yet it would not be an overstatement to view him as the effective creator of the
institutional history of the indigenous, pre-Colombian past. Chavero was the author of the
first volume of México a través de los siglos and is best known for his analysis of the
Aztec Calendar Stone, or the Sun Stone, and his narrative of the conquest of the Aztecs in
1521. His narrative privileges the role of Indians in the Conquest and effectively
downplays the exploits of Cortés and the Spanish, of whom he wrote, “few Spanish
soldiers would lead or give assistance at the critical moments; and he, the new God of the
new and still unknown theogony, would shoot rays of fire from his terrifying artillery so
as to illuminate the lakes filled with the blood of the Indian armies struggling to bring
victory to the audacious Spanish.”65
Chavero was born in Mexico City in 1841 and is the second youngest of the
historians I will examine. He studied at the Colegio de San Juan de Letrán and eventually
received a law degree in 1861, at the moment of the liberal triumph in the War of the
65 Alfredo Chavero, “Las naves de Cortés,” pp. 313-323 in Obras, Tomo I (México: Tipografía de Victoriano Agüeros, 1904), p. 317. Diccionario porrúa, p. 2960.
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Reform. A year later he was elected to the liberal Congress. When the French began their
invasion, Chavero accompanied Benito Juárez in the government’s retreat from Mexico
City.66 He fought against the French intervention and was taken prisoner by French
forces.67 Following the victory of liberal forces in 1867, Chavero served in multiple
governmental positions as a judge, a member of the Mexico City auyuntamiento, or city
council, a three-term member of Congress, and the governor of the Federal District.68 An
opponent of the regime of Lerdo, he served in Porfirio Díaz’s first government as an
official in the Ministry of External Relations.
Like other liberal historians of the century, Chavero practiced journalism. He was
the director of El Siglo XIX during the Restored Republic following the defeat of
Maximilian. Chavero was considered one of the leading playwrights of his time and
wrote theatrical works dealing with the indigenous and colonial past, including the plays
Xóchitl (1877) and Quetzalcóatl (1878)69. He also wrote a comic opera, El duquesito y La
Gitana (The Young Duke and the Gypsy). The liberal lawyer cultivated an interest and
expertise in archaeology and indigenous languages. His distinction as an intellectual
resulted in his permanent post as secretary of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y
Estadística, as well as membership in the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua.70
Besides being the author of the first volume of México a través de los siglos,
Chavero published many scholarly essays and shorter works, most notably Calendario
66 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 225. 67 Musacchio, coord., Milenios de México, Tomo I, p. 573. 68 Diccionario porrúa, P. 733; Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 225. 69 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, P. 226; Diccionario porrúa, p. 733; Musacchio, coord., Milenios de México, Tomo I, p. 573. 70 Diccionario porrúa, p. 733.
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Azteca (1876), Calendario de Palemke (1902), and El Monolito de Coalinchan (1904).71
In 1873, after the death of José Fernando Ramírez, Chavero was given Ramírez’s
extensive collection of indigenous codices (including the Codex Ramírez), as well as the
moderate liberal’s extensive library, a gift Chavero used to initiate the collection of the
State library in Mexico City.72 While I will make reference to his volume in México a
través de los siglos, I will primarily be analyzing various essays he wrote between 1876
and 1900 on the Calendar Stone, the Conquest, and the colonial period. Chavero has
been called a romanticist and nationalist and both true to an extent. However, he also
constitutes a transitional figure in the process of the development of positivism and a
scientific historical practice.
Justo Sierra (1848-1912)
Sierra, as I have already noted, was the most articulate proponent of French
positivism and its embrace by Mexican intellectuals. Sierra was born in Yucatán as the
son of a lawyer, writer and liberal politician.73 Yucatán had at the time declared its
independence from Mexico and his father had conducted diplomatic relations in the
United States, where he gave assurances to the James Polk administration that the state
would remain neutral in Mexico’s war with the United States.74 Upon his father’s death
Sierra moved to Mexico City and enrolled in the Liceo Franco-Mexicano at the age of
71 Diccionario porrúa, p. 733. 72 Dr. N. Leon, “Noticia biográfica del autor,” Pp. VII-XXV in Chavero, Obras, Tomo I, p. XX. 73 Blanca Estela Treviño, “Justo Sierra: una escritura tocada por la gracia,” pp. 15-46, in Justo Sierra: Una escritura tocada por la gracia, Una antología general (México,D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2009), p. 17. 74 Treviño, “Justo Sierra: una escritura tocada por la gracia,” p. 17.
69
thirteen. An early Francophile, he was fluent in French and read the historical works of
Michelet and Lamartine’s History of the Gerondins in the original French.75 His interest
in the French Revolution had made him an ardent republican in his youth. When he
arrived in Mexico City at the age of thirteen he attended Altamirano’s fiery Jacobin
speech before Congress following the War of the Reform and adopted the radical puro as
his early mentor. Sierra’s cultural horizons always looked to France. Later in life he
noted,
The generation I belonged to adhered increasingly to the French Revolution, at the same time as it abhorred the [French] intervention. If patriotism imposed on us a duty to hate the armed France of Napoleon III, patriotism united us in our identification with the spirit of France beaten and muzzled by the very same Napoleon. And it would be an understatement to say that this spirit France held on the Mexican intellect survived the test (salió intacto de la prueba). In fact it only grew all the greater.76
He studied law at the Colegio de San Ildefonso, where he got his law degree in
1871. Afterwards he became a teacher at the prestigious Escuela Nacional Preparatoria,
as well as a journalist writing in the leading liberal periodicals, El Renacimiento, el
Monitor Republicano and El Siglo XIX. In 1875, however, Sierra began his break with
Mexican Jacobin liberals by engaging in a public defense of positivist education against
attacks on it by Guillermo Prieto.77 The following year, during the three-way struggle for
power in 1876, Sierra backed the forces behind the head of the Supreme Court, José
María Iglesias. When the struggle ended with Porfirio Díaz in power, Sierra founded the
75 Treviño, “Justo Sierra: una escritura tocada por la gracia,” p. 24. 76 Quoted in Fausta Gantús, “Justo Sierra: El proyecto de una identidad integradora,” pp. 107-127, in Carlos Marichal y Aimer Granados, eds. Construcción de las Identidades Latinoamericanas. Ensayos de historia intelectual, siglos XIX y XX (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 2004), p. 110. 77 Treviño, “Justo Sierra: una escritura tocada por la gracia,” p. 23.
70
periodical La Libertad in 1878 and used it to promote the cause of positivism. From the
moment of the founding of the journal, Sierra would finalize his break with the old
classical liberalism of Altamirano and engage in very public debates with, and criticisms
of his older comrades.
Sierra came to see the French rationalism of classical liberals as inadequate to
address the continual social and political crises that Mexico had experienced since its
independence. To replace it he looked to the positivism of Auguste Comte as
appropriated by Emile Littre and French liberals in the French Third Republic after 1870.
Particularly appealing to the Mexican liberal was the positivist focus on “order and
progress” and the analysis of nineteenth century French political instability as a legacy of
the negative effects of revolution. Since the Revolution France had, according to Littré
and Comte, oscillated between “negative” phases of political revolution and “positive”
phases of attempts to end the era of revolutionary destruction. Only the “positivist slogan
of ‘order and progress’ could…offer the solution to the revolutionary crisis which had
destabilized Europe since the late eighteenth century.”78 In place of classical liberalism’s
emphasis on the individual, Sierra and Mexican positivists argued that the fundamental
unit of analysis was the social organism evolving over time according to laws susceptible
to scientific discovery.
Focusing his attack on the Constitution of 1857, Sierra argued for the need to
reform the document and make it conform to the needs of the Mexican social organism.
This meant lengthening the presidential term in office and giving the executive veto
power as well as legislative authority. Hostile to nations of equality and universal
78 Treviño, “Justo Sierra: una escritura tocada por la gracia,” p. 29.
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suffrage, Sierra and his positivist allies sought to impose the rule of a technological elite.
Sierra and the positivists would eventually achieve a hegemonic position within Mexican
liberalism with their formation of the National Liberal Union in 1892, organized around
the promotion of Porfirio Díaz’s re-election.
Sierra would go on to serve on the Supreme Court in 1894 and as Under-
Secretary of Public Education in 1901. From 1905 until the beginning of the Mexican
Revolution in 1911 he was the secretary of Public Education and Fine Arts. It was under
his leadership and through his efforts that the Universidad Nacional de México opened in
1910. Before his death in 1912, Sierra served as a representative in Spain for the new
revolutionary Mexican government. He was the author of numerous works of poetry,
short stories, novels and cultural essays. As a historian his best known works are
Evolución política del pueblo mexicano (1902) and Juárez, su obra y su tiempo (1905).
CHAPTER III
TOCQUEVILLE, MICHELET AND RANKE WRITE THE MEXICAN NATION: THREE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NATIONAL HISTORICAL NARRATIVES
In his study of the emergence of modern history in the nineteenth century, Hayden
White has argued that the European founders of the new institutional historical discipline
were responding to a growing sense of skepticism about the possibility of historical
knowledge that the eighteenth century Enlightenment had engendered. In the period
between 1821 and 1868, White argues, the leading European practitioners of history
produced the modern models for the discipline of history. These efforts revealed a new
optimism concerning the possibility of a historical science that replaced the increasingly
ironic style of an earlier time. In the works of Michelet, Tocqueville, Ranke and
Burckhardt, White identifies what he sees as the historians most committed to the
construction of a realist historiography.
While Tocqueville is somewhat of an exception to the rule, the historical models
that White treats offer up so many examples in which the formal explanation in the texts
are never in the foreground, but rather must be drawn by implications from the plot
structure. Thus, one of the most notable features of the early works of modern history
was the use of emplotment to carry the weight of historical explanation. According to
White,
When, in the manner of Ranke, they purported to be simply ‘telling what actually happened” and to be explaining the past by telling its ‘story,’ they were all explicitly embracing the conception of explanation by description but were actually practicing the art of explanation by emplotment. Each
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told a different kind of story—Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, or Satire—or at least presupposed one or another of these story forms.
Continuing in this vein White goes on to write,
…But even more important than the mode of emplotment, they chose to give the form to the stories they told is the mode of consciousness in which they prefigured the historical field as a domain, the posture they assumed before this structure, and the linguistic protocol in which they characterized it. The four master historians of the nineteenth century represent different solutions to the problem of how to write history, having chosen the modes of Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire to emplot it.1
What is notable about Mexico’s nineteenth century “historiographic language” is
that it participates in this Atlantic-wide construction of a discipline and does so in both its
rigor and its response to moral imperatives. Liberal positivists were no less engaged in a
pedagogical enterprise than was Leopold von Ranke in his project of narrating the past as
the development of two key institutions for the advance of humanity: the church and the
state. As White noted, Ranke’s histories were profoundly conservative and his historical
“grammar” related the historical process as one in which the church and the state: “…
constitute the sole ordering principles in historical time; it is through them that a ‘people’
can direct its spiritual and physical energies toward the constitution of itself as a nation.”2
If the emergence of history as a rigorous discipline is located in the nineteenth century,
then the advent of this science is itself contemporary with the emergence of one of
history’s central protagonist, the nation.
White has provided vivid descriptions of the Romance that was Jules Michelet’s
historical ode to the people in History of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville’s
1 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 143. 2 White, Metahistory, p. 169.
74
tragic narrative of the dichotomy between democratic and aristocratic principles in
Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution, and Ranke’s comedic
emplotment of his Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations.3 What is striking about
some of the most significant representatives of nineteenth century Mexican
historiography is how comfortable they appear when put into relation with their European
counterparts. I would like to consider three nineteenth century historical texts and their
explanatory strategies of narrating the place and significance of Independence in Mexico:
El Libro Rojo by Manuel Payno and Vicente Riva Palacio published in 1870; Historia y
Politica de México by Ignacio Altamirano published in 1883; and Evolución Política del
Pueblo Mexicano by Justo Sierra published in 1902.4
Payno’s Tragic Vision: El Libro Rojo
Manuel Payno’s political orientation and his participation in the movement to
overthrow the liberal Constitution of 1857, which lead to civil war, led him in his literary
endeavors to a fundamentally tragic vision. His historical narratives and the linguistic
protocol that informs them make his style a Mexican parallel to that of Tocqueville. In
1870 Payno published a collection of historical essays, El libro rojo, which he wrote with
fellow liberal Vicente Riva Palacio.5 Payno’s historical consciousness, as was
Tocqueville’s, is what White calls a metonymic one that sanctions a tragic narrative. In El
3 White, Metahistory, Chapters 3, 4, and 5. 4 Manuel Payno and Vicente Riva Palacio, El Libro Rojo (México, D.F.: Conaculta, 2005); Ignacio M. Altamirano, Historia Y Politica De Mexico, 1821-1882 (Mexico, D.F.: Empresas Editoriales, 1947); Justo Sierra, Evolución Política del Pueblo Mexicano (Mexico: Fondo De Cultura Economica, 1940). 5 The liberal, Juan Antonio Mateos also contributed four essays. In a surprise conclusion, Rafael Martínez de la Torre, one of the defense lawyers for Maximilian, wrote the final essay on the executed former Emperor.
75
libro rojo, unlike in Payno’s other historical works, there is an extensive dominance of
metaphoric figures. The work is highly literary and can be considered a hybrid genre that
approaches the artifice of historical fiction. It remains, nevertheless, a work of history.
What White says of Ranke and his relation to metaphor and synecdoche can also be said
of Payno and metonymy. Payno’s narrative in this collection of historical portraits
utilizes metaphor as its dominant trope, but his vision of change remains a metonymic
one.6 Metaphor here functions as a thick synchronic description of the subject treated in
an effort to reveal its fundamental essence, its identity. At the moment of change,
however, the author will revert to a fundamentally cause/effect account that is sanctioned
by a metonymic consciousness to establish the intelligibility of diachronic depth. The
fundamentally synchronic, albeit historical, nature of these portraits will bring to the
forefront the recurrence to metaphor.
The extent to which Payno differed from Tocqueville is due to his fundamentally
Catholic vision and recourse to the theme of providence in history. The Mexican liberal
shares a conception of a dualistic antagonism in history comparable to Tocqueville’s
analysis of the competing social forms of aristocracy and democracy that the Frenchman
narrated in his historical works. With Payno, however, this dualistic antagonism is best
understood as an eternal struggle between nature and culture, between chaos and society,
and between barbarism and civilization. His work is a morality play in which the forces
of man’s base nature struggle against his efforts at redemption. The protagonist implied
by all of these essays—over and above the multiplicity of individual subjects—and one
so richly described and apprehended by means of metaphor, is the Mexican nation.
6 White, Metahistory, p. 167.
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El Libro Rojo, especially the essays by Manuel Payno, is neither a positive
science nor a nationalist romance. The work is characterized by Carlos Montemayor as a
narrative of death in Mexico.7 This is no doubt true, but I would argue the work is better
described as a narrative of murder: a history of the violent crimes committed over the
centuries by a singularly guilty criminal: the Mexican nation. It is a history of Mexico as
a history of its crimes. Payno’s vision is a dark one that narrates humanity as composed
of a dual nature. What White wrote of Tocqueville could apply equally well to Payno:
“Man remains, as Tocqueville put it, ‘on the verge between two abysses,’ the one
comprised of that social order without which he cannot be a man, the other comprised of
that demonic nature within him which prevents his ever becoming fully human.”8 This
dualism at the heart of human beings continually threatens to rain down chaos without the
stabilizing intervention of society. Thus, for example, in Payno’s history—as opposed to
the narratives of the militant Altamirano or the cientifico Sierra—Independence is,
surprisingly, another among the many crimes and moments of violent chaos that are
continually carried out by the nation, which is both the victim and the perpetrator. Here
the reader will be hard pressed to find any narrative efforts to enhance the grandeur of the
nation. Each chapter of the work bears the name of an individual, one who is destined to
become a victim, a killer, or both. I will focus on three essays that reveal a conceptual
unity to the diverse collection of historical portraits: Payno’s chapters on the Aztec
emperor Moctezuma; his account of the murder of a family in Mexico City in 1789; and,
most importantly, his narrative of the death of a leader of the movement for
independence, Ignacio Allende.
7 Carlos Montemayor, “Prólogo,” in Payno and Riva Palacio, El Libro Rojo, p. 9. 8 White, Metahistory, p. 193.
77
The opening chapter, titled “Moctezuma II,” is an historical drama in which the
Aztec emperor is burdened by reports of horrible visions and dreams that portend a
coming disaster, one that in the following chapters becomes an endless repetition of
violence both committed and suffered by the accused nation. The portrait that Payno
gives is one that effectively offers the reader the origin of the nation, an originary
coming-into-being through violence. The portrait begins with the announcement of a
coming chaos whose figurative description leaves the reader in a state of suspense that
will “rob” him “of any emotional freedom.”9 A noble young Aztec man, Izocoztli, is
keeping a late night vigil in the Temple to the God of War when,
Suddenly he closes his eyes, he tilts his head back, and he lies down on a mysterious symbolically carved stone, and falls into a sinister dream. Opening his eyes, he tries to remember something important, but is unable to explain to himself what has just occurred. He goes to the Temple’s platform, raises his eyes to the heavens, and in amazement he sees a great red star in the east, a star with an immense tail that seemed to spread over the entire empire.10
Izocoztli proceeds to fall to the ground and lies unconscious until dawn. When he
awakes, he looks up, but the star has disappeared. The literary aspects are in the
foreground, but Payno leaves no doubt that his is a historical account, and does so by the
most academic of practices—he puts in place not one, but two footnotes. In the first he
writes, “The narration of the last days of this unfortunate king in this article is constructed
completely in accordance with the old histories and chronicles.” The second of the
9 This is from Erich Auerbach’s quoting of Schiller in Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 5. 10 Payno, El libro rojo, “Moctezuma II,” p. 19.
78
footnotes informs the reader that the star seen by Izocoztli was a comet documented by
“Arago in his Catalogue of 1514.”11
The young man immediately goes to inform the emperor about what he has seen.
Later that night the emperor himself sees “the fatal red star.” When his soothsayers and
sorcerers are unable to adequately interpret the star’s significance, Moctezuma
immediately has them placed in cages and starves them to death. Payno then recounts
several other examples of sinister portents that appear to the doomed emperor, until he
proceeds to the court of the King of Texcoco. The wise leader of Texcoco informs
Moctezuma of the significance of the signs, telling him, “All throughout our lands and
dominions there will be great calamities and misfortunes; no stone will remain unturned,
there will be innumerable deaths, and our dominions will be lost to us, all by the
permission of the Lord of the heavens, the Lord of the day and the night, and of the Lord
of air and fire…in vain man desires to escape the will of the gods.”12 Then, Payno
informs us, on November 8, 1519 “the powerful and terrible capitán, don Hernando
Cortés” appears in the Aztec capital.
Beyond noting Payno’s use of footnotes to establish this as a historical work, it is
important to not treat the author’s use of “the will of the Gods” as simply a literary
device. Payno will, in fact, have frequent recourse to the theme of a providential
intervention in history that will tend to make all human attempts at altering history’s
course seem in vain. The second point of note is to not misread Payno’s depictions of
Moctezuma committing terrible acts of violence on his own subjects. This is not a
Hispanicist account of the horrors of pre-Christian Mesoamerica, as was depicted by the
11 Payno, El libro rojo, “Moctezuma II,” p. 19. 12 Payno, El libro rojo, “Moctezuma II,” p. 22.
79
conservative Joaquín García Icazbalceta. The terrors and the horrors of the Aztec Empire
are not specific to the Aztecs, who are presented in terms that make them every bit as
human as the Spanish. It is not their indigenous nature that is responsible for the horrible
acts, but rather their human nature. In the two portraits that follow that of Moctezuma II,
the final two Aztec emperors will be depicted in terms that are unsparing of the evil and
violence committed against them by the Spanish. But this is where the tragic vision of
Payno leads us, for these opening chapters are nothing more or less than the founding
myth of the Mexican nation, seen as the child of violence, chaos and murder.
The dark historical vision of Payno at times is drawn towards an Ironic vision.
This attraction to irony nearly overwhelms the tragic element in Payno’s chapter, “La
familia Dongo.” Carlos Montemayor describes this portrait of the murder of an elite
family, the Dongo family, as one of the less political accounts in the book.13 I think this is
to miss the point, and I would argue that the portrait is completely immersed in Payno’s
understanding of the motives behind much of the history of the nation’s politics. The
author begins the piece, as he does so many others, with a bright beginning. In this case,
Payno begins by writing that the year 1789 in New Spain marked the arrival of one of the
colony’s best and most enlightened viceroys, the Conde de Revillagigedo.14 This
enlightened colonial administrator arrived on October 8. On the twenty-fourth of the
month the house belonging to the wealthy Spanish merchant, don Joaquin Dongo, was
found open in the early morning. When the home was investigated, inside were the
bloody remains of eleven people—the entire Dongo family and its servants—who had
been savagely murdered. Alarmed by the news, the new viceroy issued new executive
13 Montemayor, “Prólogo,” p. 16. 14 Payno, El libro rojo, “La familia Dongo, p. 274.
80
orders to aid in the handling of the case. In what follows, Payno claims to be providing a
published historical document that offered a detailed account of the crime and writes,
“and since we could neither add anything, nor remove any detail, without altering the
historical truth, we have copied it in its entirety for you below.”15 What follows is an
almost clinical description of the crime and its aftermath, such as one might find in the
historical accounts of Foucault.16
The report of the crime is a grizzly description of the crime scene, the
investigation, and the trial and punishment of three middle class men [personas decentes]:
Don Felipe Aldama, José Joaquin Blanco and Baltasar Quintero. The reader learns that
Joaquin Dongo was found “lying on the floor, wrapped in his cloak and hat, with various
horrible wounds, in his head, as well as his breast and hands, one of which had two
fingers completely severed; as well as a deep stab wound in his breast that penetrated into
his back, his head half open in the middle, and his belt buckles, epaulettes, and watch
were missing.”17 What follows is a crime scene description of horrifying detail, in which
the read discovers the location and shape of the bodies of the murder victims in the
house. But relaying these details is not the whole point behind Payno’s motives.
Contained in the text, and of equal importance, is the fate of the perpetrators.
Having finally professed their guilt, Aldama, Blanco and Quintero are sentenced
to death by garroting. After death their cadavers “would remain for three days in the
garrote device to serve as a lesson and the amends of an appropriate punishment.” When
15 Payno, El libro rojo, “La familia Dongo,” p. 275. 16 See for example Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 9th Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 17 Payno, El libro rojo, “La familia Dongo,” p. 276.
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the punishment is finally meted out, the corpses of the murderers are kept in public view
for four hours and their right hands are cut off and hung on hooks at the site of their
crime for ten days.18 The gruesomeness of the crime would appear to be, in the selection
provided by Payno, matched by the horrors and public nature of the execution. The
detailed description of the murdered victims, of the witnesses called to testify, and the
concluding public execution, runs the risk of being read satirically. So much so that
Payno will add a narrative coda to bring the story back to its ground as tragic drama
writing, “In conclusion, we should call attention to our readers… In the eighty years that
have transpired since this crime, such an atrocious attempt of victimizing an entire family
has not occurred again in the capital…which shows that civilization, albeit slowly,
advances among us.” 19 The coda establishes the Tragic nature of the piece and, reflecting
White’s characterization of the Tragic outcome, “There has been a gain in consciousness
for the spectators of the contest. And this gain is thought to consist of the epiphany of the
law governing human existence.”20 It is in Payno’s essay on the Independence hero
Ignacio Allende that the liberal writer achieves one of his most successful narratives. As
one of the most aesthetically satisfying accounts of Independence written in the
nineteenth century, Payno’s portrait might come as a shock to those who identify
Mexican liberalism with celebrations of national independence.
The chapter titled “Allende” refers to the narrative of the life and death of Ignacio
Allende, the young military officer who conspired with Hidalgo in a rebellion against
New Spain. Payno begins his portrait with a description of the natural beauty of the city
18 Payno, El libro rojo, “La familia Dongo,” pp. 295-296. 19 Payno, El libro rojo, “Allende,” p. 297. 20 White, Metahistory, p. 9.
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of San Miguel el Grande, home to Hidalgo’s future military leader. In 1810 Allende,
along with the parish priest Miguel Hidalgo, made their decision for Independence and,
“in a word, there [in Dolores] they opened up their tomb, they prepared their coffins, and
upon greeting liberty, they bid farewell to life and said goodbye to the beauty of nature,
and with four or five wretched men from the village at their side, they gave the
tremendous and historic Cry from Dolores on the sixteenth of September, 1810.” Payno
continues, “A half a dozen men began this terrible work.” One could add, following
White, that with the “terrible work” Allende and Hidalgo had opened the door that would,
for Payno, lead to the abyss. The moderate liberal then provides the reader with an
ominous narrative that leads to the assault and massacre at the granary in Guanajuato.
Before arriving at the site of the massacre, Payno stops for a discursive moment to write,
Throughout the course of this book we have referred to very tragic moments of history; but the first truly horrible moment seen in New Spain was the collision between the people, pushed beyond their limits, and the secular authority. It is the same as in nature: the river breaks through the dike, the sea swallows up its beaches, the hurricane snatches up the trees, the volcano floods the cities under its lava. The revolution snatches up authority and destroys it. All the forces of nature are alike. The physical order has a fellowship, an alliance with the moral order. … Those six men, multiplied a thousand times over, were going to break by their brutish troops, their heads bristling with rabies, their blood shed by a thousand wounds, the strong walls of the Castle of Granaditas, placed like a fabulous giant, like a watchdog, at the entrance of that very Guanajuato, encased with so much silver, so much gold, so many precious stones accumulated in peace and pulled from the bowels of the earth for three centuries. … We must not forget that we are at the 28th of September, 1810, in front of Guanajuato, in the company of Hidalgo, of Allende, of Abasolo, Comargo, and the multitude that was following this terrible movement of Independence.21
21 Payno, El libro rojo, “Allende,” pp. 318-319.
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And so we see it, the specter of revolution in its terrible visage: the chaotic,
brutish mass inadvertently unleashed by the civilized and doomed duo of Hidalgo and
Allende. Nature’s chaos has been unleashed on civilization. This is Independence. There
occurs at this moment in the essay an unexpected transition. Allende and Hidalgo become
side characters in a drama whose true hero is the royal intendent, Riaño. Described by
Payno as a man in whom are united the most brilliant physical and moral qualities, Riaño
was a farsighted man who
understood perfectly that peoples being like families, it is inevitable that after the passage of a given number of years of a more or less short length of time, they will emancipate themselves and form a new society. This continual recurrence, this indispensable formation is what has created nations and has divided the world into its constituent proportions. Thus at the bottom of his conscience not only did he believe in the cause of independence, but he calculated that once the flame was lit, it could only be extinguished with the wreckage and the ruin of the colonial government.
Riaño turns out to be Payno’s true, tragic hero of Independence—a man loyal to his duty
who undertakes the leadership of the defense of Guanajuato.
Riaño tries one last attempt at preventing the coming massacre. He meets with an
emissary of Hidalgo. When this fails, he tells Hidalgo’s representative to say to the priest,
“…despite the unfortunate position we find ourselves in and the differences in our
opinions, in my heart I thank you for your friendship, and perhaps later I will accept your
protection and asylum.”22 When the massacre comes, Payno is unsparing:
You can be assured that from the conquest until now, the only truly popular movement that has occurred in Mexico is that of Guanajuato. Just for a moment I want the reader’s attention placed on this key point concerning Guatajuato, and by moving with his imagination to the moment these events occurred, consider those huge masses of people,
22 Payno, El libro rojo, “Allende,” p. 324.
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enraged, agitated, moving like the waves of a stormy sea… In effect, those mountains moved, those buildings had a voice ...”23
Payno ends his historical portrait of Ignacio Allende and Independence with the
Battle of Monte Cruces, where the civilized and disciplined leader proves his bravery,
and then follows this account with the capture and execution of Allende and Hidalgo. In
between these events, he states, “New bloodshed was necessary and new victories so that
the work and sacrifice of the two caudillos might be consummated; so that this work
might be sanctified with their own blood. Nations need their baptism before receiving
their social name.”24
The Battle of Monte Cruces is won by the forces of Independence but at a heavy
cost due to the undisciplined troops who were mainly comprised, according Payno, of
Indians. Masses of Indians hurled themselves at the Spanish troops only to be cut down
by the artillery, yet “they continued to repeat these confused charges, and the death and
the blood had no more effects than to irritate them and make the indigenous race even
more tenacious. It was, more or less, the very same attack that Cortés suffered in the
quarters of Mexico City in 1521.”25 Heading north to regroup and discipline their troops,
Allende and Hidalgo are surprised by Spanish troops and captured. Payno concludes his
terrible tale of Independence, writing, “From this place they were taken as prisoners to
Chihuahua, and there judged and shot. The heads of Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama and
Jiménez were cut off and taken to Guanajuato where they were put in iron cages on the
corners of the bloody castle of Granaditas.”26
23 Payno, El libro rojo, “Allende,” p. 325. 24 Payno, El libro rojo, “Allende,” p. 330. 25 Payno, El libro rojo, “Allende,” p. 329. 26 Payno, El libro rojo, “Allende,” p. 331.
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In Payno’s vision, then, the Mexican nation, at birth, is baptized not with holy
water, but with the blood of Allende and Hidalgo. There is in the writer’s historical vision
a tension between a Providence that governs the world and is independent of the actions
of men, and the efforts—generally in vain—of men to act on the world and change it. The
crucial moment in his vision, I would argue, is his claim that the massacre at Guanajuato
is the only truly popular movement to have occurred in Mexico. In contrast, in the
romantic narrative of Altamirano humans are in control of their own fate and the forces
that oppose them are equally human.
Altamirano’s Historical Romance: Historia y Política de México
Altamirano’s vision of Independence, unlike Payno’s, is a distinctly romantic
story, a narrative structure he shares with Michelet. The differences between the two
Mexican historians and the different places they accord the masses in their historical
works can be seen in their political and rhetorical practices. In contrast to Payno, the
Indian liberal Ignacio Altamirano, during the decade of civil war and French occupation
that followed the liberal Reform and the Constitution of 1857, claimed his authority to
speak for the nation: “Because I am an authentic man of the people, descendent of twenty
unfortunate races who have bequeathed to me, together with their love of liberty, all the
sufferings of their ancient humiliations.”27 The Indians who in Payno’s account appear as
a chaotic mass, an irruption of the forces of nature threatening civilization, are in
Altmirano’s chronicle defined by their love of liberty.
27 Ignacio Altamirano, Discursos 1 in Obras completas T.1 (México D.F., Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1949), p. 49.
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In 1883, Altamirano attempted a work of historical synthesis that would offer an
analytical summation of Mexican history since its Independence from Spain. In Historia
y politica de Mexico Altamirano describes a moment of war in 1860, one in which he
himself had led troops into battle when liberal armies were about to engage with their
conservative contenders for power. He writes of that moment, "For the first time in
México the two sides, enemies since 1821, fought, each side having a government at its
head and the entire Republic for its battlefield. ”28 Altamirano’s historical romance charts
the successful emergence of the people, the formerly oppressed masses, as they overcome
their oppressors and take their rightful place on the historical stage, achieving sovereignty
in a republic they can call their own. The founding moment for the explanatory
intelligibility of this narrative is, according to Altamirano, Independence.
Unlike Michelet, however, this Romance will require a mechanistic account that
will be founded on a binary opposition without hope for integration into any higher unity.
Altamirano described this binary opposition as “the two diverse thoughts that propelled
the two movements of Independence: the first movement of 1810 and the second of 1821:
democracy and oligarchy.”29 The identification of two opposed sides defines the
competing forces whose unresolved conflict will provide the ground of intelligibility for
all the disasters that befall Mexico over the course of a half-century. The crucial moment
in this Romantic drama is the achievement of Independence in 1821 by the ex-royalist
officer, Agustín de Iturbide and his Army of the Three Guarantees. The entire bloody
history of Mexico in the nineteenth century will be emplotted—unlike in Payno’s tragic
28 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 99. 29Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 65.
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drama of a humanity that is half demon, half angel—as a struggle between the opposing
forces of good and evil whose origins can be traced back to this founding moment.
This, to follow White, is a metonymic consciousness involving a dualistic
conception of history: the clash of two opposed forces. The terrible stagnation and
political instability that marked Mexican history for five decades following Independence
has a primary cause in the narrative—the force of oligarchy. In turn, the overcoming of
this stagnation will have its as its cause the emergence of the “people” as the driving
force of liberating social change. Unlike Michelet’s celebration of the people in France,
which falls into a more ironic mode, Altramirano’s history was written in the early years
of the Porfiriato and is marked by an optimistic celebration of the people and its nation as
an historical work nearing completion. Michelet’s metaphoric prefiguration is a process
of articulating the identity of the people in its emergence, whereas Altamirano narrates a
somewhat formed Mexican people locked in combat with their equally fully formed
enemy. Thus Altamirano notes that with Independence, “The new people, having broken
the chains of their servitude, could stand up and walk.”30 This crowning moment was
filled with such promise:
Such a beautiful future smiled on the independent nation! Never had any people, on conquering its autonomy, found itself in possession of so many gifts of nature and of such certain hopes! Why then, was it not present from 1821 the spectacle that today one sees of a peaceful and hardworking people dedicating itself to progress and offering foreign nations, with the wealth of its soil, the guarantees of peace and free institutions?31
This was the militant liberal’s project: To analyze why Mexico had failed to prosper
following independence, and to provide a response to the conservative arguments, begun
30 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 17. 31 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 18-19.
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with Alamán, which idealized the late colonial period and criticized the failures of
independence. It was, indeed, this question that was behind all the liberal national
narratives. To rescue Independence and the Mexican nation from slanders suffered both
from without, and perhaps even more importantly, from within. In contrast to Payno’s
vision, the cause was not the fallen state of man’s nature; the cause was Alamán, his
fellow conservatives, and the social forces they represented.
The movement that began in 1810 with Hidalgo’s Grito de Dolores was not so
much a movement directed against the rule of a distant monarch, according to
Altamirano, as it was the rebellion of the oppressed masses against their own local ruling
elites. When royalist forces fought the rebellion, local elites who saw their own privileges
threatened joined the cause of the monarchy. “That is why,” Altamirano wrote, “in the
movement begun in 1810, the people did not rely on these privileged castes, even though
they were Mexicans, and for that reason, they preferred to form an alliance with the
Spanish oppressors in order to counteract the democratic impulse of the insurgents with
all their power.”32 Thus the early years of Independence were essentially a war of class
alliances in which popular mestizo classes in alliance with Indians fought for their
political liberation. In turn, the royalists aligned with a local aristocracy, the “high
clergy,” large landowners and powerful merchants to crush the rebellion. In 1820 these
reactionary forces recognized that although the rebellion was temporarily beaten, it was
inevitable that it would return in an even more explosive revolution that might threaten
the very existence of the ruling elite.
32 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 22-23.
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Following this line of analysis, Altamirano argues that under the pretext of
supporting Independence, a reactionary leadership launched a plan that would preserve its
political domination and economic interests while fooling the rebelling masses and also
achieving Independence for Mexico. This conspiratorial elite found their man in the
royalist army officer, Agustín de Iturbide, “ due to his Spanish origins, his excellent
relations with Creole leaders, even as he himself belonged to classes allied with the
Spanish, and lastly for his ideas which were completely opposed to popular self
government.”33 When Iturbide changed sides in 1821 and formed an alliance with the
guerrilla leader, Vicente Guerrero, Independence would be a fait accompli in which a
ruling class alliance had hijacked a popular social revolution under the guise of national
Independence. A newly independent Mexico found itself ruled by a reactionary elite
whose political power and economic wealth rested on continuing to keep the country
weak, backward and economically isolated. The entire nineteenth century history of
Mexico—its wars with foreign powers, its civil wars, its backwardness, its poverty, and
its national fragmentation—were all founded upon a continuing conflict between the
forces of a ruling class alliance, whose wealth and power rested on keeping the patria
weak and stagnant, and the people, who were still seeking their longed for freedom. Thus,
Altamirano argues,
The evils that the heroic patriots of 1810 had wanted to cure were those that had remained in the very heart of the new nation…The insurgents of the first stage of independence were not so much disgusted by the king, as by the colonial aristocracy and its oppressive privileges. If the revolution of 1810 would have triumphed, royal sovereignty most certainly would have fallen, because it was incompatible with the popular movement that had begun; but it is even more certain that the privileged classes would have been swept away from the face of the new republic by the
33 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 24-25.
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revolutionary blast, burning with hate against them because of their secular tyranny and their insufferable abuses.34
The whole century, then, was one marked by a battle pitting the popular classes and their
Indian allies against the ruling elite of large landowners, merchants and the high clergy.
This Romantic struggle between essentially opposed historical forces would inform
Altamirano’s critical attitude toward and break with Benito Juárez. Following the victory
of Maximilian, Altamirano would view Juárez’s continuing hold on the presidency and
his political alliances as a capitulation to the forces of reaction, even as he would praise
Juárez for his resistance to foreign occupation.35 Altamirano, unlike Justo Sierra, would
reject the “myth of Juárez.”36 Consequently, both he and his mentor Ignacio Ramírez
would support Díaz’s failed Rebellion of La Noria.
Sierra’s Comic Synthesis: Evolución Política del Pueblo Mexicano
Justo Sierra, like Altamirano, viewed the War of the Reform as a continuation of
struggles for Independence, but the positivist historian rejected Altamirano’s romance of
the people. In Sierra’s positivist historical interpretation, the struggle for Independence
had a very different explanation than that found in Altamirano’s revolutionary Romance.
Sierra, like Ranke (even though Ranke viewed himself as an opponent of positivism),
employed what White has called an “Organicist” mode of explanation combined with a
Comedic mode of emplotment. This is especially true of his work, Evolución Política del
Pueblo Mexicano. The Comedic strategy will, as White explains, recognize antagonism
34 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 25-26. 35 He remained, nevertheless, deeply critical of Juárez throughout his life. I will examine his analysis of Juárez in Historia y política de México. 36 Charles A. Weeks, The Juárez Myth in Mexico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987).
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and conflict, but view it as of a temporary nature to be overcome in an eventual unity.
Even as Sierra’s account of Independence appears as a dispersal of various actors and
factions, the organicist nature of his explanatory strategy ensures an eventual unification
of the diverse elements into an integrative strategy. Sierra prefigures the historical field
through an apprehension of the Mexican nation as an evolving organism. His historical
science, however, will not manifest the apparent detachment (however problematic that
detachment may be) of Ranke’s historicism, but rather will embrace the French
positivism of Auguste Comte and its corresponding moral imperative to aid in the
advance of civilization.
According to Sierra, there is an illness that threatens the young Mexican organism
in gestation. This illness is the peculiar Mexican national character that emerged with the
joining of the Spanish and the Indian races during the colonial period. Sierra cites
approvingly the reflections of the eighteenth-century Spanish viceroy, the Duke of
Linares, who viewed the Creoles and the Indians of New Spain as having character traits
that made them radically hostile to all notions of property and gave to them a “habit of
taking what belongs to others.” This evil “had its origins in disdain for personal
property.” This character trait was accompanied by a second: “A passion for equality, an
absolute refusal to acknowledge that there could be any distinction between the ruled and
the rulers other than force and injustice, was characteristic of the new society’s
personality.” 37 This neo-Mexican character emerges to full blown nationality with the
Independence movement of 1810-1821. But it is an immature organism and the Mexican
37 I am relying here on the English translation of Sierra’s work, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 130. In the Spanish text see pp. 137-138. I have changed the word “ruling” to the less clumsy “rulers.” The original Spanish is a distinction between the mandantes and the mandados.
92
nation will thus have its own soul; it will suffer from immaturity in its infancy and
develop its own viruses. Ultimately it will evolve into a mature organism under the stable
rule of first Benito Juárez, and then Porfirio Díaz.
Sierra’s nationalist narrative of Independence downplays social fragmentation
within the emergent Mexican nation. Unlike Altamirano’s articulation of an essentially
class-based struggle pitting the people against their internal and external oppressors,
Sierra notes the existence of royalist support, but writes,
But the idea [independence] had taken such hold on the country’s mind that the Spanish party was confined to the higher offices, a part of the top clergy, a majority but not all of the Spaniards from Europe…On the other hand a good portion of the upper clergy and of the Audiencia, nearly the whole of the lower clergy, nearly all Mexicans employed in justice or administration, a majority of the Creoles, and the overwhelming majority of mestizos, who had born the brunt of the struggle for independence since 1811, plus the Indian masses, controlled by their priests, belonged to the independence party…
Sierra continues, “The army, with few exceptions, was infiltrated by Freemasonry,
brought to Spain by the French…All the Spanish masons were enemies of absolutism
…the Mexican officers, even those who had fought the insurgents, were nearly all for
independence; many were also Freemasons.38” The social dimension that informs the
narrative of Altamirano is here virtually absent. For Sierra the movement begun in 1810
is continuous with the one that emerges triumphant in 1821, with a broad social alliance
behind it as well as unanimity of vision.
Sierra’s representation of Agustín de Iturbide, compared to Altamirano’s
dismissive account, is instructive. The positivist’s depiction of Iturbide begins with a
description that is not unlike Altamirano’s. The story is a familiar one today. When
38 Sierra, Political Evolution of the Mexican People, pp. 166-167.
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liberal military commanders rebel in Spain against Ferdinand VII, the Spanish liberal
Constitution of Cádiz is restored in Spain. Thus religious anti-constitutionalist forces in
Mexico choose as the leader the royalist officer, Agustín de Iturbide. Sierra’s narrative, I
would argue, lacks some of the formal coherence of Altamirano’s, both with regard to the
project of the anti-constitutionalists in Mexico, and with respect to the motives and
character of Iturbide. In spite of its reputation as the most successful work by a
nineteenth-century Mexican historian, Sierra’s account at this point contains a historic
moment whose synchronic structure remains significantly underdetermined in
comparison with Altamirano’s representation of a field grammatically figured by
opposing social forces. At the same time, Sierra’s account lacks the psychological depth
of Payno’s tragic literary work. It will be Sierra, however, who succeeds where others do
not in creating a synthetic narrative representation of the Mexican nation.
Sierra thus narrates the moment that Iturbide changes sides and joins forces with
the insurgent leader, Vicente Guerrero:
The absolutists offered him [Iturbide] an important military post, the one just left by Armijo, who had failed to crush Guerrero in the south. The viceroy was glad to give the command to Iturbide: he had no idea that a revolution would be the result but felt sure that an army in Iturbide’s hands could be used to put down the constitutionalists, in case the King who was considered a prisoner of the liberals, should so order; the King might even conceivably appear in person in Mexico to give the order.39
Then Sierra recounts the moment in 1821 when “the intrepid and immaculate” Guerrero
gave Iturbide “the famous embrace.” Here we find a reference by Sierra to not so much a
historical moment, but to a visual representation of Independence: the painting by
39 Sierra, Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p.168
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Petronilo Monroy, The Embrace of Acatempan.40 Monroy’s painting was commissioned
by the Mexican government in 1875. The government called for artists and students from
the Academy of San Carlos (the national art academy) to paint images of Independence.
The work is a pictorial representation of the 1821 meeting and “embrace” of Iturbide and
Gurerrero in their alliance for Independence under Iturbide’s Plan de Iguala. In the
narrative, Sierra writes that Guerrero “did not absolve him [Iturbide] of the bloodshed, he
pardoned him in the nation’s name in recognition of the supreme service he was about the
render it. And the nation has pardoned in the Iturbide of 1821 the Iturbide of 1813.”41 In
this narrative representation, Iturbide’s individuality is subsumed under his function in
the historical process—and historical progress—that allows the Mexican national
organism to emerge on the stage. It is worth quoting at length Sierra’s conclusion to this
emergence:
The Spanish evolution whose final product was the Spanish-American nationalities did not have as a conscious objective the creation of national personalities that would be self-sufficient (although this should be the objective of all well-planned colonization, the Spanish domination in America was anything but well-planned). On the contrary, by means of an interior isolation of the Spaniard from the Indian (abandoned to rural servitude and to a religion that soon became pure super station in his atrophied mind) together with the exterior isolation of New Spain from the entire non-Spanish world, this evolution tended to prevent the groupings that took form in conquered America and grew strong, through immutable natural law, from ever achieving self-rule. But the energy of the Hispanic race achieved that result just the same, thanks to a communication between the shut-in peoples and outside ideas that was a kind of osmosis42.
40 Stacie G. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), pp. 61-62, and Illustration #9. 41 Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National, pp. 61-62. 42 Sierra, Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p.170.
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In Sierra’s account we find an Iturbide who is pardoned because of his rendering service
to the nation, his functional role in bringing about the unity hidden in diversity.
The political implications of Sierra’s biological metaphor establish themselves
quickly following this representation of Independence. The immature Mexican organism
is condemned to experience an endless political instability “…so long as the evolution of
the social state did not promote the instinct to preserve peace as the supreme guarantee
for productive work, but, rather, encouraged the hope of obtaining, through sudden
changes, indefinite and undefinable rewards!”43 It is here that we find the narrative form
that structures Sierra’s analysis of the continual state of civil war that will haunt post-
independence México. Immature child of the union of Spanish and Indian, the Mexican
national character will exhaust itself in continual attempts to gain infinite rewards not
through hard work and industry, but rather through attempts at State power and the
rewards it promises to those who achieve it. The different trajectories of the romantic
Altamirano and the positivist Sierra result in their antithetical representations of the
liberal Juárez regime between 1867 and 1872.
Benito Juárez, hero of the Reform and leader of México against the occupation by
French troops during the empire of Maximilian, has come to occupy pride of place in the
Mexican pantheon of national heroes.44 Justo Sierra was one of the major proponents of
this representation. In 1867 and again in 1871 Juárez won presidential elections,
extending his stay in power and provoking bitter hostility from oppositional rivals in the
liberal party. It was this that provoked Díaz’s Rebellion of La Noria in 1871. In Sierra’s
narrative, however, Juárez is a veritable man of granite resolved to make the stubborn
43 Sierra, Political Evolution of the Mexican People, pp. 202. Spanish, p. 225. 44 Charles A. Weeks, The Juárez Myth.
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Mexican character respect proper authority and maintain order so “the people could feel
secure in their work.”45 Unfortunately, the threats of social anarchy continued to haunt
the Republic. The positivist intellectual writes, “Juárez’s decision to have himself
reelected (and he made the right decision, for otherwise anarchy was unavoidable) would
be the prologue to civil war.”46 Juárez’s unyielding strength of will tamed the beast that
was the Mexican national character, establishing the possibility for the advancement of
order and progress.
In Sierra’s conceptual model, the nation as an organism must fall prey to the
Mexican personality in its infancy and its predilection for attempts to utilize state power
for enrichment. This barbarous state of affairs is a holdover from the fusion of the times
of the Spanish monarchy with the pre-Columbian Indian sultanship. But this narrative is
fundamentally devoid of politics, as the continual civil wars are driven not by political
ideologies, but rather by infantile desires to suckle off the breast of state power. The
story’s happy ending occurs when first Juárez, and then Díaz, provide strong centralized
authority, even utilizing terror when necessary, to attain the fear and loyalty of a secular
power that will lay the foundations for order, progress and modern industry. These strong
fathers will mentor the Mexican adolescent nation into civilization and maturity.
Only one of these three narratives will enjoy later success as a history of the
Mexican nation: Sierra’s. Its success, combined with the continuing resonance of Lucas
Alamán’s conservative Hispanicist history from the 1840s, has resulted in a relative
erasure of these other narratives. The results have been a depoliticization of the history of
45 Sierra, Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 347. Spanish, p. 422. 46 Sierra, Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 350. Spanish, p. 427.
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Mexican liberalism, as well as a failure to grasp the difficulties involved and obstacles
overcome by Mexican historians to achieve a discurso integrador of the nation.
CHAPTER IV
“THE DREAM OF ANARCHY”
Friends kill each other. All is confusion; no longer can be heard the drums, the bugles, the horns; no longer are there leaders who command, since none are nor can be obeyed. —José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, El sueño de la anarquía (1823)
The period of Mexican history between Independence and the disastrous
Mexican-American War was one marked by continual social and political crises. As
previously noted, there were 42 different governments between 1824 and 1847 and three
different constitutions. Between 1844 and 1853 the conservative historian Lucas Alamán
presented liberal Mexican historians with their greatest ideological challenge. In 1844
Alamán gave a series of lectures at the Ateneo de México discussing Mexico’s history
from the Conquest to 1808.1 The result of these lectures was the 1845 publication of his
Disertaciones. The work had as its project the search for the historical origins of the
Mexican nation. Alamán argued in the work, “There have been two periods in our history
in which there have occurred major events that have greatly influenced not only the fate
of a nation, but have also had great consequences for politics in general and in the world
1 Will Fowler, Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821-1853 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 75.
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as a whole: such have been the conquest and independence.”2 In the Disertaciones
Alamán considered the indigenous inhabitants of Mexico as obstacles to the advance of
civilization. The conservative statesman wrote, “Everything is the work of Cortés in the
conquest of Mexico: its direction and methods, the plan and execution, the project, and
the labor.”3 In Alamán’s narrative it was Cortés who brought all progress to the New
World and founded the Mexican nation.
After Mexico’s defeat in the war and the large territorial losses to the United
States in the peace treaty that followed, Alamán continued his history of the Conquest
with a five-volume work on Independence and its aftermath, Historia de México.4 In the
work the conservative intellectual argued that September 16, the day in 1810 that the
insurgent priest Miguel Hidalgo delivered his Grito de Dolores (Cry from Dolores) that
sparked the War for Independence, should not serve as the official Independence Day.
Instead Alamán proposed September 27, the day Agustín de Iturbide entered Mexico City
in 1821, as the official holiday. Iturbide had been a royalist military commander and a
monarchist, while Hidalgo had led thousands of lower class peasants and artisans in the
rebellion.
In Alamán’s narrative there had been two revolutions, Hidalgo’s from 1810-1820
and Iturbide’s in 1821. The first was not a war of national independence, but an “uprising
of the proletarian class against property and civilization.”5 Iturbide’s revolution, on the
other hand, was against the anti-clerical and democratic principles of the liberal Spanish
2 Lucas Alamán, Disertaciones sobre la historia de la república megicana I (México: Imprenta de D. José Mariano Lara, 1844), pp. II-III. 3 Alamán, Disertaciones II, p. 18. 4 Fowler, Mexico in the Age of Proposals, p. 78. 5 Quoted in Charles Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, p. 20.
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Constitution of 1812, which had been re-instated in Spain by rebelling liberal military
officers in 1820. The continual state of crisis and anarchy experienced in Mexico since
independence, according to Alamán, had as its origins the overthrow of Iturbide in 1823
by men “who had embraced unthinkingly the system of changing everything,” and
thereby negated “the union which is the strength of the nation.”6 Alamán and his
conservative allies began to press for the adoption of monarchy in Mexico and blamed all
of the country’s ills since Independence on the rejection of Spanish political institutions,
religion and cultural traditions. After 1853 liberal historians found themselves forced to
defend what they had previously taken for granted—republicanism and the cause of
independence.
Manuel Payno: The Anxieties of Democracy
Manuel Payno, while a more conservative liberal than radicals such as Altamirano
and Vigil, could not embrace Alamán’s Hispanicist narrative on the nation’s foundation.
But in his fundamentally tragic conception of history there was no place for the Creole
Patriot narrative of Independence as the re-conquest, by an essentially indigenous nation,
of its lost sovereignty. Whether European or indigenous American, man was the one who
lived, in Tocqueville’s description, “on the verge between two abysses.”7 Payno
published El libro rojo and his history text, Compendio de la historia de México, in 1870
after the restoration of the Republic by liberal forces under the political leadership of
Benito Juárez. The outcome of the political upheavals in the years between the Mexican-
American War and the defeat and execution of Maximilian and his Mexican Empire, left
6 Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, p. 22. 7 Quoted in Hayden White, Metahistory, p. 193.
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Payno in a peculiar position. The conservative liberal had, in effect, backed the two most
significant losing causes of mid-century. First he had participated in an alliance with the
church and the military in the overthrow of the Constitution of 1857. Finding himself the
subject of Altamirano’s fiery speech before the Congress in 1861 after the radicals had
won the War of the Reform, Payno again joined the anti-liberal side and served in the
government administration of Maximilian. Unlike his fellow liberal José Fernando
Ramírez, who had been denied amnesty and forced to live the rest of his days in
European exile, Payno was writing his national narratives as someone “allowed” to
remain in the Republic. He was living and writing national histories in a nation whose
government represented a cause to which he had resolutely denied legitimacy during the
most violent periods of internecine warfare. The legacy of Payno’s political defeats, all
the while writing in a liberal republic ruled by his former adversaries makes of his
narratives a sort of tragic, take on irony.
El libro rojo was not, however, his first historical narrative on Independence.
Before the events of 1857 that would alienate him from former allies, Payno wrote a
historical essay on Miguel Hidalgo’s call to independence, the 1810 Grito de Dolores. In
the essay, “Los primeros tiempos de la libertad mexicana,” Payno discerned a rare
moment of moral purity in a human act; the priest Miguel Hidalgo’s seemingly selfless
act on behalf of human freedom. In the essay Payno recalled traveling through the village
of Dolores, a recollection that ignited in him patriotic emotions, “My imagination carried
me back to those at once bloody and glorious times, and it placed before my eyes an
immense blood soaked canvas, where I nevertheless would discover some of the most
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brilliant and pure pages that the Mexican genius should preserve in its tragic history. It
was the night of September 15, 1810.”8
Given the historical context, this essay was likely not merely an academic
exercise by an intellectual erudite. Payno wrote the work in 1843 in the midst of a
political crisis. In 1841 a rebellion had broken out against the government of Anastasio
Bustamante, with the rebel leadership publishing its Plan de Tacubaya. The rebel victory
resulted in a provisional government. In 1842 the acting president, the former
independence fighter Nicolás Bravo, called for elections to a Constitutional Congress that
would revise the 1836 Constitution of the Siete leyes. When the document came back in a
form too liberal for Bravo’s liking, he dissolved the Congress and named a Council of
Notables (Junta de Notables) that was given the task of creating a new constitution. The
Bases Orgánicas was decreed the official constitution in the summer of 1843 and Santa
Anna was elected president.9
Payno’s account of Hidalgo’s selfless sacrifice to bring freedom to the Mexican
nation struck a powerful contrast to the machinations for political power in the struggles
of 1843. The work recounts the evening of September 15, 1810 when Hidalgo resolved to
go into open rebellion against Spanish rule. There are several moments in the essay that
could have been written by the most radical of Mexican liberals and the work is
undeniably a Romantic one. The question is how to reconcile this essay with the Tragic
narrative of Hidalgo and Allende that Payno wrote in El libro rojo in 1870. In the later
8 Manuel Payno, “Los primeros tiempos de la libertad mexicana,” in Manuel Payno, Obras completas XII, Compendio de la historia de México y Historia nacional (Mexico, D.F.: Conaculta, 2002), pp. 370-383. 9 Manuel Payno, Compendio de la historia de México in Obras completes XII, p. 178; Jan Bazant, “From Independence to the Liberal Republic, 1821-1867,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 17-19.
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work, as noted previously, Payno depicts the Spanish intendant who led the defense
against Hidalgo’s forces at the granary in Guanajuato in heroic terms. It was Riaño who
believed in the cause of Independence and who “understood perfectly that people being
like families, it is inevitable that after a passage of a given number of years…they will
emancipate themselves and form a new society.”10 The violence that Hidalgo and
Ignacio Allende unleashed at Guanatjuato is depicted in El libro rojo in horrifying terms
and the decision by Hidalgo and Allende to declare independence from Spain was one in
which “they opened up their tomb, they prepared their coffins…they bid farewell to life
and said goodbye to the beauty of nature.”11
In the older essay Hidalgo and Allende are represented as the most noble and
selfless of men. The work is a dramatic representation of the night that the revolutionary
priest opted to fight. The essay begins with Hidalgo being interrupted late at night in his
parsonage and informed that the royal government has discovered his involvement in the
Querétaro Conspiracy to overthrow the government in Mexico City, and that he will soon
be arrested. At the precise moment Hidalgo is learning of the conspiracy’s betrayal, two
of his comrades in the plan, Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, arrive at his house to
convey the news and decide how to proceed. The scene is described in unabashed Heroic
terms. When the military commander, Allende, tells Hidalgo they lack any means to
make a revolution, the priest replies, “Your objections, captain, do they not have
something of the stench of fear about them?” When Allende informs Hidalgo that he has
never feared anyone, but God, Hidalgo asks, “Then what would you do, captain?” And
Allende responds, “What would I do? Before giving up your friendship, I would run to
10 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 324. 11 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 318.
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meet danger alone, I would die fighting like a man.”12 For Payno, Hidalgo was a
Mexican Don Quixote. But Payno’s Tragic sense will not allow the narrative to remain a
completely Heroic romance. And so, as Hidalgo and Allende decide to engage in the
cause of liberty that the priest calls “the sweetest dreams of glory,” he asks the younger
man, “Those dreams, captain, they will come to an end and do you know how?” When
Allende asks how, Hidalgo responds, “On the gallows, and we will climb them together.”
Having made their death pact, Hidalgo gathers together 12 men in his house and offers
them drinks while trying to convince them to join the revolution. The men are shocked
that a priest would offer to drink with them and Hidalgo responds,
Don’t be afraid. God has created such things as gifts for man and the only thing to be done with them is to use such things in moderation…to have a drink in the company of friends…because I am not a bitter and nagging priest, but your friend, is that not true? I seek only your happiness: I propose having your own pottery mills so that there would be no need to get earthenware from Spain; the cultivation of mulberry trees and vineyards…What happens is that often we cannot do the things we want because the government prevents us and…but, you are not drinking? Let your fears and shame be gone! I tell you again, I am your friend.
Payno then adds his own comment, “The priest then handed out the glasses of liquor, and
the men (serenos) drank while almost crying.”13
It is at this point in the narrative that Payno supplies one of the principle
motivations for the villagers of Dolores to join the revolution. He proceeds to have
Hidalgo tell the men that the wine from Spain is not so bad, but that if the men could
make their own wine from the grapes of Dolores, it would clearly be superior to Spanish
wine. Payno has Hidalgo conclude his discourse saying, “The Spanish government
prohibits us from producing our own wine so as not to harm Spain, as if those of us who
12 Payno, “Los primeros tiempos,” p. 375. 13 Payno, “Los primeros tiempos,” p. 378.
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live in América were no more than dogs. What do you say to that?” The men agree that it
does not seem fair and suggest they should ask the government to allow vineyards in
Dolores. To which Payno has Hidalgo reply, “It would be in vain. They will not care.
What is needed is to ask them, but to do so by force. That is why I have called you here
tonight. For tonight it is necessary to proclaim ourselves in favor of freedom.” When
some of the men become frightened and want to leave, Hidalgo becomes angry and
accuses them of cowardice. After informing them that he is to be arrested and will be
executed by the government, the men then agree, “Forgive us, holy father. Do what you
want and we will follow you, even if it be to the torture chamber.”14
And so begins Mexican Independence as Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama and the small
band of villagers go off to start the revolution which, as the author writes, “If there would
have been no written history of it, and witnesses to it, one would believe it was only a
fable or a story, invented for the entertainment of children.”15 In the essay’s final
sentence Payno concludes, “Hidalgo entered the city of Celaya and on September 28,
only twelve days after his secluded proclamation in Dolores, then found himself facing
Guanajuato with nearly thirty thousand men.”16 The narrative is a heroic epic and on the
face of it seems difficult to reconcile with the tragic irony of Payno’s later work that was
constructed around the massacre that occurred in Guanajuato. The young liberal
commented near the essay’s conclusion on the significance of the beginnings of
independence, “Hidalgo’s actions, in a country where there might have been civil and
religious liberties, would have been great; but in the context of the time in which he was
14 Payno, “Los primeros tiempos,” p. 379. 15 Payno, “Los primeros tiempos,” p. 381. 16 Payno, “Los primeros tiempos,” p. 383.
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living it was not only great, it was magnificent, sublime, worthy of being bought back to
life by Tacitus so as to dutifully immortalize it.”17 There is, however, a sentence by
Payno that serves as a conducting thread to the moderate liberal’s affinity for the
historical vision of Tocqueville and the unity that this early essay has with the tragic
vision of El libro rojo. In summarizing Independence he writes, “But in all these great
events, as well as in the smallest accidents of nature, it is necessary to recognize the
patent and visible hand of God.”18
Payno, a practicing Catholic, shared with Tocqueville a providential view of
history. Whether he is writing an epic historical biography, or a Tragic depiction of
historical events with a reliance on the figural trope of metaphor, he will always have
what Hayden White calls a “Metonymical” apprehension of the historical field. Whether
stated directly, or merely implied, there is always an otherworldly providence that rules
over the historical fate of men, who are never in ultimate control of their destiny. The
causes of historical developments are never completely discernible by men and the fates
of individuals will have their final sources in causes that men can never fully
comprehend. Payno shared with Tocqueville “a fear of the destruction of those things he
valued most in both the past and the present.”19 Tocqueville’s “Tragic realism” consisted,
according to White, of finding himself in a Europe stuck between the aristocratic order
and the post-revolutionary democratic order. The development of democracy was,
according to Tocqueville, “a providential fact… It is universal, it is lasting, it constantly
17 Payno, “Los primeros tiempos,” p. 382. 18 Payno, “Los primeros tiempos,” p. 381. 19 Hayden White, Metahistory, p. 192.
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eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its
progress.”20
Yet democracy also contained the threat of a mortal danger, especially in its
promotion of the cause of equality. The threat was no less than the destruction of man’s
capacity for critical thought and imagination, and the danger of Leviathan, the expansion
of a massive centralized state that would crush human individuality and creativity. The
ultimate source of this danger for Tocqueville was man’s duality: “Whatever we do we
cannot prevent men from having a body as well as a soul…You know that the animal is
not more subdued in me than in most people, but I adore the angel and would give
anything to make it predominate.”21 What White says of Tocqueville is true for Payno,
“What the Tragic agon reveals, again and again, is that the secret of history is nothing but
man’s eternal contest with, and return to, himself.”22
The balance between the past and the future—between the aristocratic and the
democratic orders—that contained such dangers for Tocqueville, was for Payno the
potential abyss between the colony and the independent republic. The danger was the
same. Just as Europe had felt the shock of the democratic revolution, so had Mexico and
with the same danger. For democracy had emerged in Mexico, as in Tocqueville’s
Europe, “without the concomitant change in the laws, ideas, customs, and morals which
was necessary to render such a revolution beneficial.”23 In the same way that American
democracy was a monstrosity for Tocqueville, so for Payno the political engagement of
the masses without any change in their customs and morals, could only lead to the
20 Quoted in White, Metahistory, p. 207. 21 White, Metahistory, p. 197. 22 White, Metahistory, p. 194. 23 White, Metahistory, p. 207.
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slaughter at Guanajuato. All previous human social orders served to protect civilization
against the threat of man’s fallen nature. The entirety of human historical and social
institutions had their wisdom, and to radically destroy them was to invite disaster: the
abyss, the dream of anarchy. This is the source of both Guanajuato as the threat of the
abyss, and Hidalgo and Allende’s call to arms as a rare moment of moral purity.
Individuals can never foresee the complete consequences of their actions and moral
decisions. They are as much subject to their historical conditions as they are actors that
change them. This is why there is no inconsistency between the representation of
Hidalgo’s angelic moment of a selfless decision to make the revolution, and Payno’s later
depiction of the movement, “We must not forget that we are at the 28th of September,
1810, in front of Guanajuato, in the company of Hidalgo, Allende, Abasolo, Comargo,
and the multitude that was following this terrible movement of Independence.”24 The
most sublime of moral decisions can lead to the most monstrous consequences, which in
turn can be a moment that fosters the growth of liberty.
This space in Payno’s thought between the nobility of a pure decision and its
monstrous consequences can lead in his writing to strategic gaps in which he elides
uncomfortable political moments. This is especially noticeable in his depiction in El libro
rojo of the Independence leader and future president of the Republic, Vicente Guerrero.
Payno begins the historical portrait, “If Mina was the storm and the bolt of lightening that
made the viceroy tremble in his gilded chair, Guerrero was the light of Independence.”25
Payno is here conjoining his portrait of Guerrero with the previous chapter in the work,
one that he wrote on Francisco Javier Mina. Mina was a young Spanish liberal military
24 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 319 25 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 362.
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officer who traveled to Mexico in 1817 to fight on the side of the insurgency. The figure
of Vicente Guerrero, on the other hand, is one of the most difficult for Mexican liberal
historical narratives. This is due to two dramatic events in which Guerrero played the
lead, and to his denouement. The first is the central role he played in completing
Independence. Guerrero was the leading figure of the insurgency in 1820. When liberals
in Spain successfully imposed a constitutional monarchy on the King of Spain, the
military commander of royalist forces in Mexico, Agustín de Iturbide, switched sides and
joined the cause of Independence. When he issued his Plan de Iguala in 1821 his forces
joined the forces of the guerrilla leader, Vicente Guerrero, to form the Army of the Three
Guarantees.26 On September 27 the combined forces entered Mexico City unopposed and
completed the struggle for Independence.
The second key event in Guerrero’s historical career is a much more contested
one: the presidential election of 1828. Guerrero was the candidate backed by the radical
republicans. In the official results he finished second to a far more moderate candidate,
Manuel Gómez Pedraza. Guerrero’s supporters refused to recognize the legitimacy of the
elections and a golpe de estdo overthrew the results. In the Motín de la Acordada (The
Acordada Rebellion) Gómez Pedraza was forced to flee and Guerrero was installed in the
presidency.27 This event is frequently regarded as the beginning of the political instability
26 The guarantees, as Payno tells the reader, were political unity between Spaniards and Mexican creoles; Catholicism as the official and only religion; and independence. 27 There are many works that treat this election and the Acordada Rebellion. See especially Timothy E. Anna, Forging Mexico, 1821-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Michael P. Costeloe, La Primera República Federal de México (1824-1835) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), Torcuato S. Di Tella, National Popular Politics in Early Independent Mexico, 1820-1847 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), and Stanley C. Green, The Mexican Republic: The First Decade, 1823-1832 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).
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and anarchy that reigned over Mexico in the nineteenth century. It was an especially
thorny issue for Mexican liberal narratives, given that Guerrero was the hero of
Independence and a radical republican. Payno’s historical depictions of Guerrero are
examples of the way Mexican liberals would avoid Guerrero’s politics in order to
preserve his featured position as a national hero of Independence.
Before treating Guerrero, Payno offered the reader a brief sketch of the Spanish
officer and republican Javier Mina. The portrait, like most of El libro rojo, is
characterized by the predominance of the figurative trope of Metaphor. Mina had made
his way over to Mexico after leading campaigns against Napoleon’s occupation of Spain.
He arrived in Mexico at a low moment in the insurgency after the executions of Hidalgo,
Allende and Morelos. Payno writes of Mina’s arrival,
Suddenly an unexpected event shook New Spain to its foundations and the fire of Independence that had seemed completely extinguished was re-ignited, never be extinguished, since it is still found alive in the bosom of Mexicans. Mina was the lightening that for a moment illuminated the horizon of the revolution and disappeared in that fathomless eternity that we can never understand.28
Mina is a flash, a blur. From the moment of his arrival in April 1817 he builds a fort and
begins to gather forces to march into the interior of Mexico. His expedition “was
ridiculous, or better said, sublime.”29 With 308 troops, he began his campaign and
achieved victories over royalist forces in San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas and areas around
Costeloe’s narrative is the most consistently supportive of those favoring Gómez Pedraza, while DiTella’s work is the most sympathetic to the radicals and Guerrero. Of the English works, Green is also very consistent in supporting the side of Gómez Pedraza. Anna tries to stake a more or less middle ground. 28 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 352. 29 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 356.
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Guanauato. After this string of victories, he was eventually captured and executed in
November, but not before establishing new life in the then moribund insurgency.
The fire rekindled, Vicente Guerrero would bring the movement to fruition.
According to Payno, Guerrero “had already, without perhaps knowing at the time even
how to write, written his name in the mysterious book of posterity. This is what goes by
the name of genius.”30 Payno here uses a class and racial coding of Guerrero in his
narrative, one he will later employ to effectively spare the Independence leader blame for
the Acordada Rebellion and the golpe de estado that placed him in the presidency.
Guerrero’s ethnic background placed him in the colonial category of a casta, or mixed
race designation. He is generally considered to have had a black and indigenous racial
heritage.31 Born in the small village of Tixtla, the same hometown as Ignacio Altamirano,
“it has been asserted that at the outbreak of the war for independence he was unable to
read, or to write more than his own name.”32
While Guerrero’s military victories and bravery were profound for Payno, what
really catapulted the guerilla leader into greatness was the selflessness he showed in the
pact he made with the royalist army officer, Iturbide. It was in 1820 that “one would
come to know the grandeur of his soul and the elevated character of this dark-skinned
man who saw the light in a poor small hamlet in the mountains.” When Iturbide writes
Guerrero a letter asking him to join forces to bring about independence, they have their
30 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 363. 31 Theodore G. Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero: Mexico’s First Black Indian President (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). 32 William Forrest Sprague, Vicente Guerrero, Mexican Liberator: A Study in Patriotism (Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1939), p. 1.
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famous meeting in the village of Acatempan and make their historic alliance. Payno
writes,
Guerrero had been valiant in his military campaigns. In Acatempan he was greatness itself. There he was inscribed, through the generous inspiration of his soul into Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men. He handed over the command of the insurgent forces to Iturbide, and placed with this rare act of self-confidence, modesty, and abnegation, his stamp on the independence of his patria.33
Having led struggles for independence for eleven years, Guerrero selflessly handed over
leadership of the movement to a royal army officer who had been his bitter enemy.
Payno also writes of the guerilla leader, “Guerrero had the good fortune of
surviving his labor [of independence] and the disgrace of being the head of the Republic
and dying at the hands of his very own compatriots.”34 Forced to reconcile the heroic
grandeur of Guerrero’s struggle for independence with his ignoble end, Payno will make
use of the class and racial coding he employed from the beginning to effectively strip the
guerrilla leader of his political praxis. After the war’s end, Payno employs his tragic
vision and writes,
The [political] parties tried to tarnish with a thousand slanders and malicious stories the greatness of this character who was in his being simple, like a child, true to his friends, humble in his good fortune, generous to his enemies, and noble with his patria. Scarcely had the struggle for Independence ended when the civil war, which still to this day has not ended, began. Guerrero was dragged into their many and shadowy schemes…The [1828] presidential election was one of the most notable of these events in the era, and in which the [political] parties worked and engaged in a terrible and deeply divided struggle between the Scotch Rite and York Rite Masonic lodges.35
33 Payno, El libro rojo, pp. 368-369. 34 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 362. 35 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 369.
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When the members of the York Rite Lodge refused to concede defeat, they
resorted to arms to overthrow the legally elected Gómez Pedraza and “placed their leader,
Guerrero, in the presidency.” When Guerrero is himself overthrown and goes into
rebellion, he is betrayed by a former friend, captured and executed. “The history of
Mexico has many dark pages,” Payno writes, “This is the blackest; and neither the years
nor the dust of forgetfulness will be enough to efface it.”36
What is most notable about the tragic narrative of Guerrero is the guerrilla
leader’s passivity in this political struggle. Payno reduces him in the narrative to a
relatively inert instrument for the use of others. He does this through the use of a racial
and class coding of Guerrero. In his textbook Compendio de la historia de México, Payno
places the rebellion in a broader political context and is harsher on the conspirators of the
York Rite Lodge, the Yorkinos. He identifies the source of Yorkino perfidy in their
opportunistic use of a conspiracy to re-establish Spanish rule. When the conspiracy is
discovered, the Yorkinos attempt to dishonestly link their political rivals in the Scotch
Rite lodge with the conspiracy. After the Yorkinos refuse to recognize the electoral results
the government attempts to arrest the liberal governor of the state of Mexico, Lorenzo de
Zavala, who escapes and joins his supporters when they seize the Acordada, a
government arms deposit, and go into armed rebellion.37 The primary culprit in the
narrative is Zavala, about whom Payno writes, “Zavala came out from hiding and placed
himself at the head of this scandalous rebellion.” A few days later, Guerrero arrives at the
36 Payno, El libro rojo, p. 370. 37 Payno, Compedio de la historia, pp. 162-163; Timothy E. Anna, Forging Mexico, p. 219.
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Acordada and after a three-day firefight between government forces and the rebels,
Pedraza flees the country and the rebellion is successful.
The brief mention of Guerrero is followed by his quick narrative exit from the
rebellion, as he leaves the rebels and heads south. What follows the victory of the rebels
is a complete breakdown of civilization and the rule of law. Riots go on for weeks and
Payno continues, “During those days, robbery, murder, and the greatest of scandals
reigned over the city, with the revolutionaries who had been the cause of this catastrophe,
incapable of enacting so much as a single useful measure to contain so much turmoil.”38
When Guerrero is declared the president the reader is again diverted to his government’s
success in defeating a Spanish invading force and his kindness in giving amnesty to his
main enemies. The Compendio is a textbook for young students and in it Payno utilizes a
prominent nineteenth century rhetorical form, in which he divided up sections as answers
to questions provided by an imaginary student. At this moment in the narrative Payno has
suggested the Guerrero’s victory over the Spanish had left the republic in a state of
happiness and celebration, and the text’s imaginary student asks, “I imagine with this
victory, the government of Guerrero would be secure?” To which Payno responds, “One
would certainly think so; but as is always the case in Mexico, just the opposite
occurred.”39
The revolutionaries who occupied the Acordada will become the inaugurating
motif for “man’s eternal contest with, and return to, himself” in the Mexican Republic’s
tragic historical unfolding. When Guerrero’s government falls from a similar golpe de
estado, the ex-president is captured and “A few government officials, having sold
38 Payno, Compendio, p. 164. 39 Payno, Compendio, p. 166.
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themselves to power and lacking any conscience, made a farce of the proceedings, and
condemned him to death. This good, valiant, honorable man, so worthy of the nation’s
respect and gratitude for the services he rendered, was shot in the village of Cuilapa, on
February 15, 1831.” This shameful event “soon inspired nothing more than terror.”40
Within Payno’s tragic historical imagination, any government must be supported insofar
as it is all that stands between chaos and civilization, unless like the government that
replaced Guerrero’s, it rules by terror. The source of disorder lies within man himself, in
his fallen condition. He remains a liberal, however, since like Tocqueville there is a
providential design governing history whose ultimate guiding principle is a slow and
painful march towards liberty. In so far as the source of man’s tragic condition lies within
the individual, there is a radical indeterminacy to Payno’s politics. This is in stark
contrast to the Romantic imaginations of the progressive Guillermo Prieto and the radical
Ignacio Altamirano.
Guillermo Prieto: Independence, Morelos and the Emergence of the Nation
In 1843 Guillermo Prieto published an essay on the insurgent leader, José María
Morelos, in the very same periodical that Payno published his piece on Hidalgo.41 It is a
didactic piece that lacks some of the literary qualities of Payno’s narrative representation
of the evening Hidalgo met with conspirators at his parsonage and conspired for
independence. The work begins,
40 Payno, Compendio, pp. 168-169. 41 Guillermo Prieto, “Escenas de la vida del general Don José María Morelos y Pavón,” in Obras completes XXIX, Apuntes históricos (Mexico, D.F.: Conaculta, 1999), pp. 143-169. Both essays were published in the second volume of the liberal periodical, El Museo Mexicano in 1843.
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The cry of freedom in Dolores having just roared, the Mexican people had awoken to a life of glory: as swift as the lightening, such patriotic enthusiasm had been dispersed to the most remote ends of the continent, and the bloody scenes of Guanajuato had greatly perturbed our audacious masters.42
After Hidalgo’s Grito de Dolores the priest led an army composed of a “disordered and
turbulent rabble,” that was a force “Worthy of [the Roman historian] Livy.”43 While
Hidalgo is talking to Allende, a young priest comes up and asks to join the movement.
After the encounter, Hidalgo says to Allende, “We are accumulating so many priests,
that’s it’s incredible how easily the devil walks among us.”44 The reader is being
introduced to Morelos, the man who will replace Hidalgo and Allende after their deaths
as the leader of Mexican Independence. For Prieto, the massacre at the granary in
Guanajuato that so troubled the imagination of Payno is merely the first victory in a
glorious cause.
One of the most notable differences between Prieto and Payno is the Romantic’s
efforts to articulate the political visions of Hidalgo and Morelos. While the essay focuses
on Morelos’s heroic military victories, Prieto demonstrates a concern to reveal the
democratic political vision that guides Morelos’s actions. Shortly after achieving a major
victory over royalist forces in Tixtla, the liberal historian says of the insurgent priest,
“Morelos wanted to establish a government, but far from making himself into an arbitrary
interpreter of the nation’s will, he wanted this to be the labor of the people, whose
42 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 143. 43 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 143. 44 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 145. On priests in the independence movement, see Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 201-311.
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sovereignty he recognized.”45 The governing body of the insurgency was the Zitácuaro
Junta under the leadership of Ignacio López Rayón, who had been named the Secretary
of State by Hidalgo before his death. Rayón had created the Junta after Hidalgo’s
execution but, according to Prieto, Morelos had
Refused to recognize the hypocritical title the junta of Zitácuaro assumed as the representative of [the Spanish King] Ferdinand VII…Morelos did not want that governing body to have any other titles than those given to it by the spontaneous will of the people in the full enjoyment of their rights.46
At no point in Payno’s text will we ever see references to the political institutions or the
projects of Hidalgo and Morelos. Prieto has two reasons for his preoccupation with
articulating different political programs. The first is his need to address Alamán, as well
as the early liberal writers Lorenzo de Zavala and José María Luis Mora. For Alamán, as
previously noted, Hidalgo’s movement was nothing more than a horde of proletarian
rabble. Alamán wished to drive a wedge between Hidalgo and later insurgent leaders,
culminating in his promotion of Iturbide as the true hero of Independence and his
argument for monarchy as the political system appropriate to the needs of the Mexican
nation. The liberal writers, Zavala and Mora, were not sympathetic to Hidalgo either,
with both criticizing him for lacking a political program and vision.47 Essential to Prieto’s
nationalist pedagogical project is the attempt to establish the programs of Hidalgo and
Morelos as predecessors to and continuous with the liberal reforms after mid-century.
45 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 152. 46 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 152. 47 Lorenzo de Zavala, Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de Megico, Desde 1808-1830, Tomo Segundo (New York: Imprenta de Elliott y Palmer, 1832); José María Luis Mora, México y sus revoluciones, Tomo 1 (México, D.F.: Editorial Porrua, 1959). Mora’s work was written while in exile in Europe in the 1840s.
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The second reason is intimately tied to, yet distinct from, the first. It lies in his
radical/liberal romanticism. It will be what ties Prieto more closely to the militant
projects of the radical Altamirano, than to his old and dear friend, Manuel Payno. Prieto
utilizes a narrative explanatory strategy of Romance, with a tendency (not always
consistent) for the figurative trope of Metaphor. His formal interpretation is generally
grounded on Formism, which makes of him a Mexican counterpart to Michelet. The
focus on the political institutions serves in the Romantic narrative the strategy of a dualist
conception that seeks to explain the historical field as a clash between opposing forces. It
is precisely in the formist articulation of opposed political conceptions as historical forces
that Prieto will identify the nation in its emergence to self-identity at independence.
Unlike Michelet, however, Prieto’s project is not to show how an apparent multiplicity of
disparate objects obscures their fundamental unity. Rather, the Mexican liberal’s strategy
is to divide the field into an irreconcilable opposition of the political project of the nation,
and its opposite, the program opposing independence. Prieto does not attempt a
“symbolic fusion of the different entities occupying the historical field.” 48As Hayden
White has argued, Romantic narratives are stories narrating the struggle and ultimate
victory of good over evil. Prieto uses a metaphorical comprehension of the historical field
as a means to discern the good from the evil and thereby construct the history of the
Mexican nation in which the victory of Mexican liberalism is the successful search for
the grail. Prieto ends his portrait of Morelos’s political authenticity writing,
These traits show his genuine political instinct, as an agent for the common good, and not as the art of trickery and deception. In our times we have seen many audacious successors to the fortune-tellers of Antiquity, those who would act as interpreters of the divine will of the
48 White, Metahistory, p. 150.
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people, in whom these oracles have no belief, except when the people are incensed or they need to hypnotize them with their doctrines.49
In Prieto’s Romantic conception, even defeat is a victory for the cause of the
good. After the brief description of Morelos’s political authenticity, the essay moves on
to an extended account of the insurgent leader’s defense of the town of Cuautla during its
siege by the royalist military commander Félix María Calleja. Calleja is described as the
head of an army that “had filled [the region of] the Bajío with terror.” The royalist leader
then sets his sights on regaining the town after it had fallen to insurgent forces under
Morelos’ command. Morelos returns to Cuautla, to defend it against the onslaught of
Calleja’s forces, but before arriving he finds himself “squirming in a circle of enemies
like a lion surrounded by skilled hunters.” When a nearby insurgent fighter cries, “My
general, my general, we must save ourselves, we must run,” Morelos responds, “There is
more honor in dying while killing enemies than entering Cuautla fleeing.” At the moment
when all seems lost, the guerilla fighter and collaborator of Morelos, Hermenegildo
Galeana, appeared with his troops and “like a hurricane scatters the sands, drove away the
enemy that surrounded Morelos.” When a royalist commander sees Galeana, he yells,
“Ah, vile one! Come out, for you are the one I have been searching for.” Prieto continues,
“Galeana was at the front. The Spaniard fired his pistol at him, Galeana smiled at him,
took aim at the insulting commander, who then fell to the earth. ‘You were valiant,’ said
Galeana: and he took him in his arms and carried him to the trench so that the auxiliary
priests could administer the last rites to him.”50 The siege of Cuautla continues for 73
days and Morelos’ army, “Fights day after day, moment after moment against forces
49 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 152. 50 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 154. On Galeano see Timothy J. Henderson, The Mexican Wars for Independence (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), pp. 114 and 143.
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seven times greater than their own, they fight with the agony of thirst and hunger, with
the scourge of a devastating epidemic.”51 Finally Morelos is forced to escape the besieged
city, but it was a retreat that was the equal of a victory. The cost is so great in losses to
the Spanish army that “The siege of Cuautla was the tomb of Calleja’s reputation.”52
Prieto’s narrative focuses on this siege, a defeat that is the equivalent of a victory,
and then the liberal historian follows this with an extensive treatment of the institutions of
government that the insurgent leader, Morelos, attempts to create with the convening of a
revolutionary congress, and later a constitution. Prieto recounts Morelos’ attempts to
form institutions to replace the Zitácuaro Junta by convening the Congress of
Chilpancingo. The Congress made it difficult, according to Prieto, for Morelos to conduct
his campaign, it was impractical, and yet it established “the division of powers, as a
formula in accord with liberal principles.” The authenticity of Morelos’ belief in the
sovereignty of the people, is conjoined by Prieto with his heroism at Cuautla, and finally
fused with his commitment to the construction of liberal institutions with the Congress of
Chilpancingo. The project of Prieto to articulate the political ideals of Hidalgo and
Morelos, in order to make them the genealogical origins of the liberal reform, establishes
his Romantic distance from the narrative imaginings of Payno while also constructing a
more complex history of political struggle. The Romantic political narrative is further
elaborated in Prieto’s most famous historical work, Lecciones de historia patria.53
When Hidalgo takes Guanajuato, in his first major victory, the massacre that so
horrified Payno is described in Prieto’s historical textbook as one in which, “The Indians
51 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 156. 52 Prieto, “Escenas,” p. 158. 53 Guillermo Prieto, Obras completes XXVIII, Lecciones de historia patria (México, D.F.: Conaculta, 1999).
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were taking their revenge at [the public granary in Guanajuato] Granaditas for the
Conquest; it seemed as if they were seeing in the flames [the conquistadors] Pedro de
Alvarado and Nuño de Guzmán.”54 Prieto does not glorify the massacre at Guanajuato,
but he places it within a binary opposition of forces in which the violence is apprehended
as a moment of vengeance against an ancient oppression. Prieto’s historical practice is
based on the articulation and identification of a fundamental Mexican nation founded on
liberal principles. The explanation by Romantic emplotment takes the form of a struggle
against and ultimate transcendence of the world that imprisons the nation. If Payno’s
source of historical tragedy is within man’s dual nature, in the Romantic vision of Prieto,
this antagonism is exteriorized into a Manichean struggle of good and evil. The evil is
represented in Prieto’s Lecciones in the figure of Félix María Calleja as the embodiment
of Spain’s reliance on terror to crush the emerging Mexican nation. Early in the narrative
on Independence Prieto offers as an observation, “As for the mandarins who ruled
Mexico, as is the case in all tyrannical and stupid governments, they believe that by the
use of force and imprisonment everything would come to a conclusion.”55
Calleja embodies the terror, first as the head of the Spanish army and later when
he is named the colony’s viceroy in 1813. After Hidalgo, Allende, Aldama and the
insurgent José Mariano Jiménez were executed, their heads were hung on the corners of
the granary in Guanajuato, the site of Hidalgo’s first major victory.56 Prieto offers
numerous descriptions of massacres and torture committed by Calleja and his forces, but
what really provokes alarm in the royal government is the emergence of alternative
54 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 292. 55 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 291. 56 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 301.
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government institutions created by Hidalgo and Morelos that are competing with the
colonial apparatus. It is out of this duality of competing political institutions that Prieto
will frame the evolution of his narrative as a dynamic of competing political visions. The
first to imagine independent republican institutions is Hidalgo. After freeing prisoners
from the jail in Dolores, the priest tells them of the political advances that were made
during the French Revolution. Following the massacre at the granary, Prieto writes,
Hidalgo published an edict to restore order. He published “wise depositions on
government, ordered the minting of money, the manufacture of arms, and in conferences
displayed not only wisdom and common sense, but also other gifts that attracted many
partisans to him.”57 While quartering his troops in Guadalajara Hidalgo publishes a
decree abolishing slavery. But it is his efforts to establish an insurgent government that is
the most threatening project he undertakes.
Before his capture, Hidalgo had established an insurgent Junta and placed the
rebel leader Ignacio López Rayón in command. The political differences between Rayón
and Morelos will ultimately lead to the insurgent Congress of Chilpancingo and the
Constitution of Apatzingán. Prieto describes Rayón as an honorable man, but of
conservative convictions. When the Junta occupies Zacatecas,
[Rayón] dedicated himself to raising the moral standards of his troops and disciplining them. And whether being prudent calculations, or the results of his education, or assessments that we cannot judge, he published tracts in support of [the Spanish King] Ferdinand VII against the French and in favor of the divine rights of Kings.58
The opposition of political forces as a explanatory strategy is conceived by Prieto as
operating within the insurgency itself. According to Prieto, Rayón’s conservatism led to a
57 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 292. 58 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 302.
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growing political split between him and Morelos, one that resulted in a deep split in the
insurgency between two tendencies, “one accommodating with the Spanish; the other
ardently favoring independence and the sovereignty of the people.” This split would
come to characterize a continuing division between “the national party and the moderate
conservatives,” who Prieto decribes as “anti-independence, and subservient.”59 It is this
growing political split that leads to Morelos’ call for the Congress of Chilpancingo.
It was this insurgent Congress that was the first to publish a document formally
declaring independence from Spain. This moment represents no less than the formal
historical self-identification of the Mexican nation and Prieto describes it in the most
patriotic of terms: “On November 6 the Congress decreed the solemn declaration of
Independence, giving the Mexican nationality its flag, its form, and its life.”60 As the
Congress worked to produce a Constitution, Prieto discerns a split between those who
favored Spanish traditions and the model of the Spanish Constitution of 1812, and those
like Morelos who favored “American institutions, thus avoiding the dangers of
anarchy.”61 This is an intentional rebuke to conservatives, in the tradition of Alamán,
who blamed all Mexico’s ills on failures to adopt Spanish political institutions and
traditions. When the Constitution was completed and published in the fall of 1814, Prieto
writes,
The anger of Calleja and the oidores [members of the Spanish high court] knew no limits. He [Calleja] ordered the Constitution be publically burned by an executioner; he threatened those who hid it with the death penalty, and the confiscation of the property of those who defended it, whether in writing or in conversation. The Inquisition could not remain a distant spectator to such acts of barbarism, and issued an edict of
59 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 303. 60 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 310. 61 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 312.
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excommunication against all the members of the Congress of Chilpancigo.62
With the Constitution of Apatzingán, the foundation for the emergence of the
nation is complete. But the future political struggle between competing forces is also
established in Prieto’s narrative of Independence. The differences between Prieto’s
historical romance of independence and Payno’s tragedy begin to emerge more clearly in
the narrative synthesis Prieto makes of the characters and the fates of Iturbide and
Guerrero. The romance has an unsettling conclusion in the culmination of the struggle
with the pact between Iturbide and Guerrero. What was interpreted by Payno as
Guerrero’s greatest moment is portrayed by Prieto in a far more ambivalent way. This
outcome is foreshadowed in the descriptions of Iturbide’s actions as a commander of
royalist forces fighting the insurgents. There are several mentions of Iturbide in Prieto’s
text, but two are particularly pertinent to establishing his character. In 1814 in an early
encounter with and defeat of Rayón’s forces, Prieto describes Iturbide as “that barbarous
man celebrated the victory he achieved on Good Friday with the sacrifice of twenty eight
prisoners who he was sending, he said in an official statement, to the fires of hell to
please God on that great day of his Redemption.” Again when the members of the
insurgent Congress are forced to flee, they were on the brink of being apprehended in [the
town of] Ario by Iturbide, who was marking his path decimating villages, killing women
and children, exceeding even his own barbarism by these atrocities.”63
In Prieto’s analysis of the culmination of Independence he interprets Iturbide’s
project as one he made in alliance with the clergy in order to facilitate his rise to political
62 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 315. 63 Prieto, Lecciones, pp. 309, 315.
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power. When Guerrero and the future Emperor have their historic meeting, celebrated by
Payno, Prieto writes,
Guerrero, gruff, suspicious, with neither a refined education nor courtly manners, but with the clearest of talents and a great heart filled with goodness and patriotism. Iturbide, a brilliant figure, dapper, flattering, with more cunning than talent, full of ideas to dominate and great ambition. No one knows in any detail what was agreed upon at the conference; but Guerrero, with his piercing nature, was persuaded that independence would be gained and once this enormous good was achieved it seemed to him that by the very nature of things the way forward would be smooth.64
Prieto, however, makes clear the ruse. Iturbide, in his analysis, carried an unabashed
hatred for the Independence movement and was placing himself at the interests of the
ruling classes. The opposition, in turn, was organized by the Scotch Rite Masonic Lodge,
composed of an alliance dominated by the Spanish opposition to Independence, but also
an amalgamation of all the regime’s enemies. The predominance in the narrative of the
Spanish opposition in the Scotch Rite Lodge is a prefiguration of the conflicts to come. In
the Romantic narrative of Prieto, as with that of Altamirano, it is the unresolved political
conflicts at Independence that will cause so much anarchy in the Republic. When
Iturbide’s own regime was overthrown by rebelling factions in the army, it was
nevertheless the pro-Spanish party and the Creole enemies of independence who are the
real source of the golpe de estado.
Iturbide’s fall, as opposed to the Acordada Rebellion, constitutes the initiating
motif for the political fractures after Independence. Prieto begins this analysis,
With the disappearance of Iturbide, his party, like all personalist parties once their leader is gone, seek refuge in parties composed around ideas. And there were two; the federalist republican party that brought with it the
64 Prieto, Lecciones, pp. 325-326.
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tradition of Morelos and the Congress of Chilpancingo on the one hand; and the Spanish party of the privileged classes and Aristocratic privileges (fueros), that was backward, educated in the shadow of the throne by the inquisitor, the encomendero (a conquistador with rights to uncompensated Indian labor), and the soldier of the King.65
When the Republic was declared and the Constitution of 1824 decreed, Prieto
sees in it a hopeless conglomeration of these two opposed forces: on the one hand, ideas
inherited from the French Revolution in 1789, and on the other, ideas incorporated from
the Spanish Constitution of Cádiz in 1812. When the infamous Acordada Rebellion
occurs in 1828, Prieto embraces completely the charge of the radical members of the
York Rite Masonic Lodge, writing
The elections for the new president were approaching; the government was falsifying the public’s vote by exercising its influence in favor of Pedraza, the Secretary of War. The radical liberal party was for Guerrero. When the candidacy of Pedreza triumphed, the party for Guerrero, continued manifesting its discontent about the official partisanship.66
65 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 340. 66 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 343. The presidential elections were indirect and in three stages. Electors at the local village level would elect a slate of electors, who would proceed to a second county or parochial level. These would in turn elect a second group of electors, who would proceed to a third, state or provincial level. Those electors would in turn elect state legislators. The state legislators would then vote on the president. The top two vote getters would be the state’s chosen candidates for president and vice-president. Each state would have one vote. Pedreza and Guerrero tied, with nine votes each. Pedraza, however, received two second-place votes to none for Guerrero, and by the terms of the constitution, won the tiebreaker. These indirect elections tended to be very democratic at the village level, but left a lot of room for backroom deals at the parochial and provincial levels, and especially gave state governors at the provincial level immense influence on the outcome. On the indirect elections in the nineteenth century see Luis Medina Peña, Invención del sistema politico Mexicano: Forma de gobierno y gobernabilidad en México en el siglo XIX (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007). Medina Peña provides the 1828 results on pp. 372-376. On the political juridical conflicts between the masonic lodges in the 1828 elections, see Ana Romero Valderrama, “Una controversia en la elección de 1828: los atributos de las legislaturas: ¿seleccionar o designer?,” pp. 165-195, in José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, coord., Las elecciones y el gobierno representativo en México 91810-1910) (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010).
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After Guerrero came to power, following the success of the Acordada Rebellion, he was
soon overthrown by the Iturbide supporter, Anastasio Bustamante, whose government
was controlled by his Cabinet minister, Lucas Alamán. The regime ruled, in Prieto’s
words, with implacable terror.
With the overthrow of Guerrero and the rule of terror under Bustamante, the
Masonic lodges were disbanded but their remnants remained. Prieto’s Romantic
narrative establishes a duality between centralists who are the heirs of the Spanish
tradition and the federalists who look to the legacy of Morelos and popular sovereignty.
The latter will promote the sovereignty of the states over the central government, while
the centralists are aligned with the clergy and the military. Prieto’s narrative implies a
duality of forces in opposition that is suggestive of a metonymic apprehension of the
historical field and a mechanistic formal argument. Prieto remains committed,
nevertheless, to a formist narrative and he relies on metaphorical descriptions to identify
bearers of national sovereignty. This strategy, at times compelling, stumbled and lost
some of its coherence in the explanation of the overthrow of Iturbide. Insofar as the
binary opposition is constructed on the forces of the national against the Spanish party
opposed to Independence, Prieto can only conceive of Iturbide’s overthrow as the work
of the pro-Spanish anti-national force. The radical Jacobin Ignacio Altamirano also
appeals to a duality of political opposition, but is far more explicit in conceiving of these
political oppositions as representative of underlying social forces.
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Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: The Priest from Dolores
When the Mexican Jacobin writes his own historical portrait of Hidalgo in 1884,
he places a much greater emphasis on social analysis than many of his contemporaries. In
the opening pages of his historical portrait of Hidalgo, for example, the reader finds two
analytical aspects of his historical investigations: the identification of the social
foundations of historical events, and his engagement in intellectual arguments with
historians with whom he has opposing views. In effect, the entire piece is constructed as a
defense of Hidalgo against Lucas Alamán’s representation of the priest at mid-century.
Altamirano’s strategy is to use painstaking analysis of the insurgent priest’s actions and
behavior that are contained in transcripts of the Inquisition’s report on Hidalgo after his
capture, as well as on material contained in both Alamán’s history of the Hidalgo
rebellion and the work done by the Mexican historian Manuel Orozco y Berra. The
reasons for his attempts to rescue the legacy of Hidalgo are spelled out in the first
paragraphs of the essay,
It is a duty of patriotism and gratitude for citizens and a political necessity for governments to keep alive in the spirit of the people the memory of the men to whom they owe their freedom. The history of heroic events and of the great men who carried them out keeps the sentiment of nationality strong and strengthens in the popular spirit the resolve to keep intact the treasure of our Independence, achieved at such a great cost, and bequeathed to us by heroes through the sacrifice of their lives.67
The essay quickly raises the class aspects of Hidalgo’s social practice in his ministry. In
his parish in Dolores,
67 Ignacio Altamirano, “Biografía de don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,” pp. 215-234, in Altamirano, Obras completes II: Obras históricas, p. 215.
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Much of his time was devoted to his ministry, but also to earnestly seeking to introduce new industries that would better the fate of his congregation, who he loved dearly, and by whom he was loved and venerated. He greatly expanded the cultivation of grapes, such that even this day, large harvests are made throughout that territory.
Altamirano notes that Hidalgo planted mulberry trees for the cultivation of silkworms,
trees that still exist in Dolores and are called “Hidalgo mulberries.” In addition to this, he
taught pottery and earthenware production and other artisan manufacturing techniques
Hidalgo mastered indigenous languages and taught the Indians in his parish music.68
The introduction is constructed as a means for an intellectual engagement with Lucas
Alamán and his hostile portrayal of Hidalgo.
The militant liberal describes Alamán as “one of the most passionate enemies of
Independence and especially of its illustrious leader (caudillo),” and continues by noting
that the characterization of Hidalgo he has made was taken from Alamán’s narrative and
stating that Alamán suggested that such practices should have resulted in Hidalgo
bringing great benefits to the lower classes. The trap has been set, and the reader is
invited to see in Altamirano and Alamán similar assessments of Hidalgo’s practices.
Altamirano follows this reasoning, however, by claiming that given Hidalgo’s intellectual
gifts and projects, Alamán might have given himself over to the evidence of the insurgent
leader’s greatness. Instead, he argues,
What Alamán did not say, nor could he ever have said, being the blind defender of the colonial regime that he was, is that the colonial regime looked on with suspicion and hatred at the noble undertakings of that illustrious village priest, who appeared to want to establish in his poor patria a few important industries that could possibly be expanded and compete with the metropolis, and take some ground away from the Spanish monopoly.69
68 Ignacio Altamirano, “Biografía de don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,” p. 217. á 69 Altamirano, “Biografía de don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,” p. 218.
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Altamirano argues that what Alamán was unable to admit is that Hidalgo could never
escape the continual persecution and hatred that the Spanish authorities had for his
“civilizing zeal and his love for the oppressed classes of the people.”70 The rest of the
essay consists of a careful examination of the documents and a detailed description of
Hidalgo’s actions in an effort to exonerate the priest from conservative charges that he
was responsible for atrocities committed by the insurgency and that he recanted his
involvement in the movement before his death.
Altamirano argues, quoting extensively from Orozco y Berra, that the atrocities
committed at Guanajuato were committed “largely by local members of the town’s
rabble, who committed the majority of these excesses maliciously attributed to the timid
Indians of the insurgent army.”71 In response to the chaotic violence, Hidalgo decreed
punishments for those guilty of the charges and he put in place political institutions to
keep the peace and stability. Later in the insurgency, when Hidalgo’s troops are quartered
in Guadalajara, the priest organized a government that ordered the abolition of slavery,
with the death penalty for anyone who had not freed their slaves within ten days of the
decree, as well as abolishing the Indian tribute. He ends the piece by using documents
from the Inquisition that were published in Mexico in 1877 in order to rescue Hidalgo’s
reputation from the character assignation of the conservatives. In a particularly articulate
and polemical conclusion Atlamirano contrasts Alamán’s charges of violence against
Hidalgo with the conservative’s historical representation of Cortés,
70 Altamirano, “Biografía de don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,” p. 218. 71 Altamirano, “Biografía de don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,” p. 225.
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Yet Alamán, who earnestly excuses Cortés of the pointless massacres he carried out, hypocritically and with unprecedented inconsistency condemns in the insurrection what he justifies in the conquest. ‘Not even remotely,’ according to Orozco y Berra,” can the crimes and the lawlessness committed in the Conquest be compared with those perpetrated in the insurrection; those [of the Conquest] were horrendously excessive.’72
The essay is a patriotic defense of the cause of independence against the charges of
Alamán. In his Romantic and mechanistic explanatory strategies, Altmirano defines what
is the national authentic as fundamentally liberal, but also as composed of class forces
successfully surmounting the opposition of their oppressors.
By grounding the political disputes at Independence on underlying social forces,
Altamirano’s narrative was far more coherent than Prieto’s in establishing a formal
interpretive framework for establishing a historical intelligibility to Iturbide’s overthrow.
Prieto’s interpretation in fact does little more than repeat the charges made by pro-
Iturbide factions at the time. In Altamirano’s organization of the historical field, on the
other hand, the forces involved in this struggle are always identified as social forces
composed of class alliances. In Altamirano’s romantically emplotted duality, political
projects and the conflicts between them are the expression of social forces that are
themselves the embodiments of oligarchy and democracy. To conceive of the historical
field as representing an opposition of forces in this way is to comprehend and prefigure it
“metonymically.” There is in Altamirano’s narratives a mechanistic explanation of the
events in the text. In the conflict between opposed social forces, Altamirano’s texts
narrate the actions of history’s great men, but the radical historian has what today we
would consider a more modern focus on analyzing human collectivities in pursuit of
72 Altamirano, “Biografía de don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,” p. 234.
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material and political interests. It is for precisely this reason that Moisés Ochoa Campos
writes that when Altamirano published Revista histórica y política, (1821-1882) in 1883,
the same year as the death of Marx,
Marxist ideas were fresh in the air and el Maestro, always alert to the great universal currents of thought, had already abandoned the individualist liberal school in order to face up to the problem of a renovated social liberalism…This important coincidence between the last days of Karl Marx and the publication of Altamirano’s work lies in this, that el Maestro lays out the first history of Mexico that is in class terms As such with this work he [Altamirano] becomes the first modern Mexican historian.73
In configuring the historical field as an opposition between the forces of democracy and
oligarchy, Altamirano established a powerful interpretive framework for conceptualizing
the historical intelligibility of the endless succession of golpes de estado in the Republic,
beginning with the Acordada Rebellion. There is, in his analysis, an understanding of
what could be called a balance of forces between the democracy and oligarchy that
plagues the Republic following independence.
The difficulties in achieving a peaceful and prosperous Republic are
contextualized in Historia y política by Altamirano in the following terms,
But as we have already said the privileged castes did not sincerely accept the democratic system, not even with the restrictions placed on it by the Constitution. And so it began from that moment a series of conspiracies and rebellions that naturally led the popular party into a long and drawn out struggle that exhausted the countries’ strength over a lengthy course of time.74
73 Moisés Ochoa Campos, “Prologo,” in Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Obras completas II: Obras históricas (México,D.F.: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1986), p. 9. El Maestro means, literally, “The Teacher,” and is the term that was used to refer to Altamirano by his contemporaries. It remains a common way of referring to him even today in Mexico. Altamirano’s Revista histórica y política, (1821-1882) was first published in New York by Manuel Caaballero. It did not have a Mexican publication until 1947, under the title Historia y política de México. In this work I have been using the Mexican edition, and its title. 74 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 31.
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The struggle for power takes place between the competing Masonic lodges, the Scotch
Rite and York Rite Lodge. Altamirano describes the political fragmentation in which
“All the representatives of the privileged classes, whose ideal was a central government
in which, as we have said, would be placed their exclusive domination, were with the
Scotch Rite Lodge.” The York Rite Lodge, on the other hand, was where “All the
forward-thinking democrats, partisans of a representative regime and federal system were
found.”75 Within this context, the popular party is itself seduced into a political struggle
for power through armed revolution. After the government unduly influences the
outcome of the 1828 presidential elections, the Yorkinos reject the results, and appeal to
arms to overturn the results. When through a formality of elections Guerrero becomes the
president, the insurgent leader defeats a Spanish attempt to reconquer Mexico and, “All
the world believed in the conformation of independence for the Patria and the
consolidation of peace, the prize lusted for by the people, after a national struggle. But it
was not to be.”76 There follows in the narrative a description of the regime of Anastasio
Bustamante and his head minister, Lucas Alamán, which is unsparing in its critique.
Bustamante, who had overthrown Guerrero, is described by Altamirano as, “Perhaps the
person in whom, more than anyone else, was brought together by his character, his
education, and his instincts, the qualities most desired in a leader by the privileged
classes.” In the Romantic opposition of forces, Bustamante was the “submissive servant”
of power. Due to his “limited capacities,” Altamirano continued, Bustamante was made
to “docilely summit” to the council of Lucas Alamán. Alamán’s intellectual gifts were
75 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 33. 76 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 35-36.
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such that he had “a profound understanding of the men of Mexico, which gave him the
power to discover their vulnerable side in order to attract them to him, or to combat
them,” as the case required.”77 Bustamante’s three year regime was ruled through
violence and terror such that, “Never had there been seen in the Republic such a despotic
government, nor had human rights (fueros) been trampled so obscenely and with such
cruelty.”78 Alamán directed what was for Altamirano a regime of implacable repression
against its enemies, those manifestations of the democratic force.
After Santa Anna overthrows Bustamante, the political competition that had
formerly been represented in the Masonic lodges evolves into a battle between
conservatives, “or monarchists,” and radical liberals, the “puros” There will follow an
unending battle between the forces of oligarchy and democracy that will not be
definitively resolved until the defeat of French troops and the execution of Maximilian in
1867. Altamirano’s foundation of political projects on underlying social forces allows
him to mechanistically explain the seemingly endless successions of golpes de estado that
plagued the Mexican Republic. Each historical actor, once identified, is immediately
consigned to one side of his dualistic conception. The Romantics Altamirano and Prieto
shared a hostility to Iturbide and his consummation of Independence. But theirs was not
the only liberal take on the denouement of Mexico’s first emperor. In the historical
portraits of El libro rojo Vicente Riva Palacio, the grandson of Vicente Guerrero, would
partake of the discourse of Creole Patriotism that would seek a more sympathetic
portrayal of Iturbide.
77 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 37-38. 78 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 38.
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Vicente Riva Palacio: The Martyrs of Independence
Riva Palacio was one of the most gifted writers of the century. He became aligned
with the scientific discourse of Mexican positivism in his later historical works. So it is
all the more surprising to find him openly embracing a Creole Patriot conception of
Independence in his early work. In the history of Mexico’s crimes that is El libro rojo
Riva Palacio contributes the two brief chapters on Morelos and Iturbide. The fates are
conjoined and the narratives provide an intriguing comparison to the Romantic discourses
of Altamirano and Prieto. Payno had supplied the narrative of Guerrero to praise him in
his death as a hero of the patria, eliding his radical republican politics and the dangers of
the Acordada Rebellion. In the portrait of Morelos, Riva Palacio adds nothing new to the
facts that are so well recorded by Prieto, but both the literary quality of the work and the
interpretative framework are considerably different.
Riva Palacio provides the reader with a beautiful introduction that offers a
description of the village of Nucupetaro in Michoacan. José María Morelos was the
village priest there in 1810, the year of Hidalgo’s rebellion. In a premonition of what is to
come, Riva Palacio describes the village, “But there the excessive heat makes the makes
the land arid and sad, a scorching sun dries the plants, and for scarcely a few days, when
the rain falls in torrents, the fields are dressed with vegetables, and the trees covered with
leaves. Later the trees are no more than skeletons and the plains and mountains have the
saddest of looks.”79 When a messenger comes to give him the news of Hidalgo’s
uprising, Riva Palacio makes use of a synecdoche and writes that the messenger
79 Vicente Riva Palacio, “Morelos,” pp. 336-342 in Payno and Riva Palacio, El libro rojo, p. 336.
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Understood the terrible shock that great heart would have suffered upon discovering that now he had a patria for which he could sacrifice himself. Morelos had for the first time felt himself a Mexican; the outcast, the slave, the hacienda worker heard the cry of independence. That pleasure was capable of causing death.80
The Tragic irony that is so present in the essays by Payno is completely absent from Riva
Palacio’s depiction of Morelos. In his description of Morelos’ death, Riva Palacio’s
romanticism reaches a nationalist passion that borders on the sublime:
Morelos was shot en San Cristóbal Ecatepec on the 22 of December, 1815. When the blood of that noble martyr irrigated the land, when his body, riddled with bullets, allowed his great spirit, which had animated it for fifty years, to escape, then a strange thing occurred, that not even science can give a satisfactory explanation for. The waters of the lake, always so pure and serene, began to swirl and to swell, and with no hurricane hovering over them, and with no storm covering the sky with its dark wings, those waters began to rise and overflow the beaches next to San Cristóbal, they advanced, advanced until they reached the site of his martyrdom.They washed the blood of the martyr, and then returned majestically on their ancient course. Never before or again has such a thing been seen. There was the hand of God!81
In this eulogy to the national martyr, Morelos becomes a synecdoche for the genius that is
the Mexican south, itself a essential piece of the national authentic. What follows is Riva
Palacio’s narrative of the national crime that is the death of Iturbide, and in it we begin to
see the appearance of a transition from the Tragic and Romantic strategies of liberal
narratives to what will eventually evolve into a Comedic emplotment of the Mexican
nation.
Following the narrative of Morelos’ martydom, Riva Palacio writes of a second
martyr, Agustín de Iturbide. Employing a metaphoric prefiguring of the historical field he
begins the essay,
80 Riva Palacio, “Morelos,” p. 338. 81 Riva Palacio, “Morelos,” p. 342.
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At last the day of Mexico’s freedom arrived. Eleven years of struggle, a sea of blood, an ocean of tears. This is what the people had to go through in order to arrive, starting from the 16th of September, 1810, to the 27th of September, 1821. Here are two diamond brooches to close that book of history in which the sublime epic of the independence of Mexico was written. But that day arrived, the sky pure and transparent, the sun splendid and radiant, the atmosphere sweet and perfumed.82
In the lines that follow, the narrative suddenly embraces the discourse of Creole
Patriotism,
That was the day of light, after three hundred years of night. That was the redemption of a people that had slept in a tomb for three centuries.1521, 1821. Three hundred years of domination and enslavement.
The Creole Patriot narrative of the sons of the Aztec Empire, Anáhuac and the figurative
trope of metaphor are necessary to identify the immensity of the crime that is
approaching. The consummation of Independence was a day when the joy was so great
that “nature itself seemed to take part in the great fiesta.83 The moment of Iturbide’s
entrance into Mexico City was “a moment of madness, but a sublime, moving madness.”
This was the moment of “the apotheosis of the liberator, Iturbide.”
The transition of the narrative is so sudden, so jarring, that the emotional effect is
overwhelming. Suddenly we are taken from the apotheosis to “the afternoon of July 15,
1824.” Iturbide has returned to Mexico, after being exiled when he was overthrown the
previous year. There is no need for Riva Palacio to provide the details, for it would return
an emotional freedom that the transition has sought to strip from the reader. Suddenly
82 Vicente Riva Palacio, “Iturbide,” pp. 343-351 in Payno and Riva Palacio, El libro rojo, pp. 343, 344. 83 Vicente Riva Palacio, “Iturbide,” p. 343.
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apprehended, the following day Iturbide is walking along side a man, to whom he
suddenly turns and asks, “’Señor general Garza, I suppose I am your prisoner. Can you
not tell me the fate that awaits me?’ Garza lifts up his eyes, looks at him for a moment,
and with an almost mournful tone answers, ‘Death’”84 Providing evidence both through a
letter Iturbide had written to a friend and the account of the ex-Emperor’s behavior by
Garza, Riva Palacio’s narrative sets out to rescue the character of Iturbide and restore him
to the pantheon of national heroes.
The nation’s crime of murdering its liberator fills the last pages of the essay and
rejoins the fallen Emperor with Guerrero, the two allies in the final liberation of the
Mexican republic, as unjustly murdered by an ungrateful nation. Riva Palacio ends his
prosecution writing,
Iturbide liberator of Mexico, Iturbide Emperor, Iturbide idol and the adoration of Mexicans one day, the next expired on the gallows, and amid the most disconsolate abandonment. Political partisans have tried to blame each other for his death. None of them up until now have wanted to take on that responsibility. In any case, and whichever party may have been responsible for the sacrifice of Agustín de Iturbide, I will not hesitate to repeat that the blood shed in Padilla, has been and is perhaps one of the most shameful stains in the history of Mexico. Guerrero and Iturbide consummated independence, and both, on the pretext of attacking a legitimate government, expired at the hands of their own citizens. I will not be the one to speak on the death of Guerrero; but as for Iturbide’s, I will exclaim always that it was the most infamous act of ingratitude that the Mexican nation could have given at the time. A people that places their hands on the head of their liberator is as guilty as the son who attacks his father.
84 Vicente Riva Palacio, “Iturbide,” p. 346.
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There is, above and beyond all the political interests of nations, a virtue that is superior to all others, gratitude. God let the generations still to come forgive our ancestors for the death of Iturbide, since history cannot erase from the annals this bloody and black page.85
When Lucas Alamán published his five volume work, Historia de Méjico at mid-
century, he did so to attack the earliest representation of Independence in the work by
Carlos María de Bustamante, Cuadro histórico de la revolución de la América
mexicana.86 Bustamante had been a participant in the insurgency and its most famous
chronicler. Alamán broke the previous continuity and unity that Bustamante had narrated
in the struggle in order to promote Iturbide as the true hero of Independence. The
Romantics, such as Altamirano and Prieto, responded by accepting the fracturing of the
movement, but only in order to re-establish Hidalgo and Morelos as the true heroes of the
insurgency. Riva Palacio’s historical portraits embrace the Creole Patriot narrative in an
effort to renew the historical continuity of the movement. Riva Palacio embodied, in his
person, the changes in Mexico’s historical imagination in the nineteenth century. He
would move from a Creole Patriot Romantic to a moderate contextualist, and finally
would embrace scientific positivism. His essays in El libro rojo partake of Tragic and
Romantic strategies of emplotment.
Whether Tragic or Romantic, these writers sought a way to offer liberal
explanations for the anarchy that they saw plaguing Mexico after Independence. In the
Tragic view, the explanation lay in man’s duality, his location between two abysses. The
task of history was to both preserve the traditions of the past that preserved civilization
85 Vicente Riva Palacio, “Iturbide,” pp. 351-352. 86 On Busatamante’s and Alamán’s work, see Fowler, Mexico in the Age of Proposals, pp. 75-84, 101-129.
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against the always impending chaos, while discerning the small changes that were
necessary for the advance in the cause of liberty. In the Romantic vision, the duality was
an external one and the historian’s task was to bear witness to the people’s struggle to
break the chains of their oppressors. The succession of pronunciamietos and golpes de
estado that began almost immediately after Iturbide was proclaimed Emperor in 1822
would serve as the inaugurating motifs to defend liberal institutions and offer an
interpretation of the Republic against the powerful critique of Lucas Alamán.87 Each
would have to engage in their historical interpretations with the political divisions and
fractures that emerged within the liberal party itself after mid-century.
87 For a general view of Mexico’s golpes de estado see Will Fowler, ed., Forceful Negotiations: The Origins of the Pronunciamiento in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Will Fowler, “Entre la legalidad y la legitimidad: elecciones, pronunciamientos y la voluntad general de la nación, 1821-1857, pp. 95-124, in Antonio Aguilar Rivera, Las elecciones y el gobierno representativo en México.
CHAPTER V
AYUTLA AND THE WRITING OF THE HOMELAND
The Cataclysm
The Mexican liberal, José María Ramírez, was in Mexico City in December 1845
at the start of the Mexican-American War. The moderate liberal wrote in his diary that a
military commander, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, had come to visit him, telling him,
At the last minute we have armed the populace, and this has excited and angered the troops. My greatest worry now is how to control the situation so that there will not be a clash. Since no judgment was used in arming the people I have very grave fears that they will indulge in all kinds of excesses, thus repeating the scenes of 1828. In that event I will be occupied in controlling the mob and I shall even send troops against them if need be.
Ramírez then goes on to add his own thoughts on the subject: “The people share the same
fears, which are cooling all enthusiasm for resistance and facilitating the triumph of
Parades.”1 The reference is to Mariano Parades y Arrillaga, a conservative military
commander who had attempted a golpe de estado against the regime of Santa Anna in
1844.2 According to Ramírez, “The war in Texas was the excuse for the revolutions and
corrupt governments of the past. Today this serves as a weapon that each of the
quarreling factions wants to get hold of in order to wound its opponents to the death.”3
The factions were the radical liberals, the puros, who Ramírez viewed as the heirs of the
1 José Fernando Ramírez, Mexico During the War with the United States (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1950), p. 122. 2 Will Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 236-240. 3 Ramírez, Mexico During the War with the United States, p. 122.
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radicals who had led the Acordada Rebellion in 1828, and conservatives such as Parades
who were openly supporting the establishment of monarchy in Mexico.4
Ramírez was an astute observer. In the weeks that followed his journal entry the
moderate liberal president, Joaquín de Herrera, attempted to reach an agreement with
Texas that would preserve its independence while ensuring it would not be annexed by
the United States. His enemies accused Herrera of weakness and Parades succeeded this
time in overthrowing the regime.5 In April of 1847, with defeat imminent, the moderate
liberal was severe in his judgment of his fellow citizens:
That is the way I can look at them at the present moment and I tell you with a heavy heart that everyone, everyone without exception, behave in such a manner that we richly deserve the scorn and derision of all cultured peoples. We are nothing, absolutely nothing. An additional aggravating detail is that our stupid vanity makes us believe that we are really all-important. Our people have a super abundance of vanity.6
In speculating on the internal factions at the war’s end he noted with distain, “Now in the
terrible division within Congress, the puro party has taken the war as its rallying cry with
the sole purpose of discrediting and ruining its opponents if they seek to speak peace.”7
Guillermo Prieto was one of the liberals who rejected the idea of capitulation and
seeking peace. He was far less strident than Ramírez implied, however, and wrote
warmly of liberals, such as Manuel Payno, who sought to reach a peace agreement.8 As
4 Palti, La política del disenso; Lillian Briseña, Laura Solares Robles, Laura Suárez de la Torre, Valentín Gómez Farías y su lucha por el federalismo 1822-1858 (México, D.F.: Instituto Mora, 1991), p. 203. 5 Moisés González Navarro, Anatomía del poder en México (1848-1853) (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1977), p. 8. 6 Ramírez, Mexico During the War with the United States, p. 103. 7 Ramírez, Mexico During the War with the United States, p. 116. 8 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 368.
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US troops were entering Mexico City in 1847, Guillermo Prieto had retreated to
Querétaro with the fleeing Mexican government. In his memoirs he wrote,
Coarse chairs made of cattails, as if embedded in the wall, a wide wooden beam, functioning as a table with maps, papers, and books, glasses of water, plain candle sticks with extinguished candles. Here are the furnishings of Fidel and the local gathering spot for fervent political leaders in the making, military experts in threadbare and filthy uniforms, generous and distinguished, who were kindly attending that gathering of shining intelligence and were giving off the most tender feelings of patriotism.9
The meetings and discussions at Prieto’s home resulted in the essays collected together
and published as Apuntes para la historia de la Guerra entre México y los Estados
Unidos.10 The work is a collection of essays by 15 liberal writers that analyze the events
of Mexico’s war with the United States. The threat of political reprisals, especially from
Santa Anna, led the writers to take collective responsibility for the content. None of the
essays were signed, and instead the group referred to themselves collectively as “La
familia de Renepont.” Prieto, in his memoirs, listed the authors of the individual essays
when he knew who they were.11
In the opening of Apuntes Prieto wrote,
At the end of last year in Querétaro we met, various friends, with no other object than of organizing a select gathering. Our conversations fell frequently on the misfortunes of the country; we lamented our common misfortune, we discussed according to our peculiarities and opinions its
9 Guillermo Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, 1840-1853 (Mexico: Libreria de La Vda. De C. Bouret, 1906), pp. 261, 263-264. This is volume 2 of Prieto’s memoirs. Fidel was Prieto’s political pen name. 10 Apuntes para la historia de la Guerra entre México y los Estados Unidos (México: Tipografía de Manuel Payno, Hijo, 1848). 11 Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, p. 265. The 15 authors are listed alphabetically in the opening of the work. Prieto lists the authors of the introduction (which Prieto wrote) and 21 of the works 34 essays in his memoir. Prieto writes that he was unaware of the authors to the rest of the essays because Manuel Payno took over the project from him at the mid-point.
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origin, and finally, we differed on the relations among the battles that some of us had witnessed.12
The most famous essay in the work, Polkos y Puros, was co-authored by Prieto and
Payno.13 The authors begin the essay writing, “Our efforts compel us to put pen to paper
to describe not only the disasters of the national war, but also the scandals of our civil
discord, being as truthful as possible, and as exacting as a scandal that must never be
repeated compels us to be.”14
The scandal was the rebellion against the government’s attempt to expropriate
church properties to help pay for the war effort at the beginning of 1846.15 While Santa
Anna was ostensibly the president, it was the vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías, who
was running the country. Farías was a radical federalist who had attempted to attack the
church’s wealth and power when he had previously run the government in 1833. The
church and the military were bitterly opposed to him and, according to Prieto and Payno,
“D. Valentín Gómex Farías was the chief executive. He had managed to gain the support
of some sections of the lower classes, while at the same time other parts of that very same
class detested him. The friars feared him, the old women regarded him as a greater
heretic than Luther, and the upper class of society could never reconcile themselves to his
government.”16 The measure to expropriate church-owned property passed in the
Congress after the radical puros in Congress supported Farías. In response to Farías and
the puros,
12 Apuntes para la historia, p. III. 13 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 462, note to Páginas 358-359. 14 Prieto and Payno, “Polkos y Puros,” in Apuntes para la historia, p. 122. 15 Briseña, Solares Robles, Suárez de la Torre, Valentín Gómez Farías y su lucha por el federalism, pp. 230-252. 16 Prieto and Payno, “Polkos y Puros,” pp. 125-126.
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The wealthy people, moved perhaps by the instinct of self-preservation, had taken arms to place themselves in opposition to the rabble, to whom D. Valentín Gómez Farías had entrusted weapons; a rabble, properly so called, for they were neither troops of the line, disciplined according to the rigorous Spanish Ordinanza, nor the National Guard, composed of intelligent, industrious, and honorable citizens. Now let’s see how those citizens, who had served so well in the capital, failed in their duty, and lost, for the moment at least, any right they had acquired to the nation’s gratitude.17
The Polkos rebellion began when a contingent of National Guard troops composed of
members from the upper class refused Farías’ orders to go to Veracruz to aid in its
defense against American forces. The church and many moderate members of Congress
supported the rebellion and called for the overthrow of Farías. There followed several
days of street fighting between government troops and elite members of the National
Guard. The rebellion was eventually put down, but not before Santa Anna returned to
capital and removed Farías from office.
The Polkos rebellion would be used by liberals to represent themselves as the true
defenders of the nation against imperialist aggression. Conservatives could be depicted as
loyal to the church and their own class, without concern for the Mexican nation. While he
was a moderate, the Polkos rebellion was too much even for Ramírez, who wrote in his
letters,
The press has probably informed you that the written statements, maneuvers, and behavior of the moderado party have completely nullified the [church confiscation] laws of 11th January and the 4th of February, and in this way they have made it absolutely impossible for the government to get the necessary funds to help our troops. At the same time they were actively fomenting the disgraceful Polkos revolution. Members of the clergy, who had been spying about, dealing in hatreds and fears, seized the opportune moment I have referred to to open their money chests and start a civil war at the very time the enemy was casting anchor
17 Prieto and Payno, “Polkos y Puros,” p. 122.
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in Veracruz harbor. The Treasury, which they had declared exhausted when it was a matter of defending the nation and the faith that these clergymen represent, was found to be full to overflowing when it came to killing Mexicans. The revolution broke out and there were plenty of funds to finance uprisings while the Government and the few troops that were supposed to have made the bloody catastrophe at Veracruz an impossibility were eating their meager little loaves.18
The failure of national unity in the face of foreign aggression presented a further pressing
need for historical narratives, the need to educate the masses of their membership in a
national family.
Manuel Payno: Civilization vs. Chaos
In Compendio de la historia de México, Manuel Payno informs the reader,
It was necessary to bring together beforehand in some form all the domestic events and changes of government that occurred in such a short period, so as to provide all at once the main events of the war with the United States, and not divide one’s attention, or confuse one’s memory with so many pronunciamientos and frequent changes in administration…
While in the capital and in some states the social order was constantly troubled by pronunciamientos, as we have seen in our short account of the previous lesson, the Americans were sending forces and squadrons to the most important points in the Republic19
Payno’s understanding of the chaos that ruled over Mexico following Independence was
that of an expression of man’s duality and of his fallen nature. This understanding made
him incapable of offering a synthetic narrative that might give some unity to the dizzying
political struggles of the preceding decades. Writing in the liberal order brought about by
the radicals, whose victory he had consistently opposed, it can seem as if Payno is
struggling to understand the meaning of his own previous political engagements. In spite
18 Ramírez, Mexico During the War with the United States, pp. 104, 105. 19 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 182.
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of the lucid description he and Prieto offered of the battle between the Polkos and the
puros, he could only conceive of these two sides, with both pursuing their own partial
interests at the expense of the interest of the nation. Yet he now found himself living a
world constructed largely by the political practices of the puros while his side had
become completely marginalized. A commitment to a formist argument and a struggle
between civilization and chaos could only narrate the events as an endless series of
calamities without intelligibility. On the continuous succession of golpes de estado and
pronunciamientos following the Acordada Rebellion of 1828, all Payno could say of it
was, “Truly one’s imagination gets lost and the memory confused by so many plans and
pronunciamientos.”20
The war with the United States then loses any forward or backward internal
relations to the domestic events. After a summary of significant military operations, the
Mexicans lose a key battle at Padierna. Payno then has his imaginary student ask, “No
doubt the Mexican resistance ended with this battle?” To which Payno replies, “Not at
all. The national guard battalions, composed in the majority of affluent people (gente
acomodada) and from very good social backgrounds, handled themselves with an
authentic heroism, and backed up the withdrawal of the frontline troops who, once
defeated, were withdrawing from the battle and entering back into the city by the San
Angel and Tlalpan roads.” It seems that Payno, who had favored surrendering and
reaching a negotiated peace treaty with the Americans in the face of puro calls to
continue fighting, had to continue defending the bravery and patriotism of those from
good backgrounds. But in a nod to Creole Patriotism, the war comes to an end when, in
20 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 172.
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September of 1847, “The Americans occupied the ancient capital of Moctezuma’s
empire.”21
Payno’s 1848 analysis of the polkos rebellion and his comments on the arming of
the rabble by Farías and his puro supporters seemed to condemn the actions of Farias
even as he criticized the rebels. By 1870 in the Compendio he offered a historical portrait
of the former radical federalist. After writing that Gómez Farías sacrificed his fortune to
aid Hidalgo’s independence movement, Payno noted “Thus he began his public career, as
irreproachable as he was useful to his patria.” He followed this judgment by describing
the militant liberal’s leadership of the short-lived radical government of 1833 as follows:
In those trying times when cholera and civil war were devastating his patria, Gómez Farías displayed a feverish activity, dispatching business, enacting health measures, and repressing uprisings, ruining with great risk to his own life, the intrigues of his enemies, who at times by threats, at other times with shameless offers, wanted to make him abandon the cause of democracy.22
Farías’ radical anti-clerical government was overthrown in 1834 and precipitated the
centralist annulling of the Constitution of 1824 and its replacement by a centralist
document. When Farías returned to govern in 1846 he succeeded in having the 1824
Constitution reinstalled. Again Payno paints a hagiographic and patriotic portrait of
Farías,
For the second time he had to struggle against the difficulties and dangers from the reactionary enemies that surrounded him due to their hatred for his unshakable principles. These enemies made the so-called revolution of the Polkos, thus facilitating the victory of the North Americans then at war with Mexico.23
21 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 186. 22 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 171. 23 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 171.
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Almost ten years earlier in a previous work Payno had condemned the “reformist
fanaticism” of radical projects like those of Gómez Farías.24 Following the Polkos
rebellion, Payno served as a mediator on the side of the moderates to convince Santa
Anna to bring an end to the radical policies of Farías.
He continued to describe Farías in the portrait as an “unwavering champion of
freedom.” When close to death, Farías “signed the Constitution of 1857 as president of
the Chamber of Deputies, a post conferred on him to attend the session by a special
dispensation owed to him as the patriarch of Mexican democracy.25 Payno’s Compendio
is, as noted earlier, a work lacking much of the tragic aesthetic of his essays in El libro
rojo, a work written in the same year. The textbook read as a chronicle with an
emplotment that, to the degree there is one at all, is a Comedy. In it Payno narrates,
The reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds… reconciliations of men with men, of men with their world and their society: the condition of society is represented as being purer, saner, and healthier as a result of the conflicts among seemingly inalterably opposed elements of the world; these elements are revealed to be, in the long run, harmonizable with one another, unified at one with themselves and others.26
Payno wrote the Compendio in 1870. The society he lived in was a product of the Liberal
Reform, when liberals came to power in 1855 in the Revolution of Ayutla. The crowning
achievement of the Reform was the liberal Constitution of 1857. The Compendio has the
form of a Comedy in which the Mexico of 1870, as a product of the Reform, is the social
reconciliation of Mexicans in a liberal and free society.
24 Manuel Payno, “Memoria sobre la revolución de diciembre de 1857 y enero de 1858,” Pp. 33-97 in Obras Completas, Vol. VIII (México D.F.: Conaculta, 2000), p. 58. 25 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 172. 26 White, Metahistory, p. 9.
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This reconciliation of men begins with a rebellion announced with the
pronouncement of the Plan de Ayutla. The Ayutla Plan was pronounced on March 1,
1854 with the declared aim of toppling the dictatorship of the once-again commander and
chief, Santa Anna.27 The architect of the plan, according Payno, was the moderate liberal,
Ignacio Comonfort. In 1847 at the height of the Polkos rebellion, Comonfort had signed a
petition requesting that Santa Anna return to Mexico City to assume control of the
government and remove Farías from power.28 When Santa Anna, who had gone into exile
after the Peace Treaty with the United States, returned to Mexico in 1853, he had seized
power and installed a repressive conservative dictatorship. The Ayutla Plan, in its original
form, was proclaimed by Florencio Villarreal.29 Following that initial document, Payno
writes, “On March 11 the Plan was reformulated in Acapulco, with generals Álvarez,
Moreno, and don Ignacio Comonfort taking part in its reformulation.” After this
pronouncement liberal leaders began rebelling all over the country in support of the
Ayutla Plan. Once the rebels succeeded in overthrowing the dictatorship, Juan Álvarez
was named interim president in the fall of 1855.
The forces of Comonfort had reached Mexico City first, but when Álvarez’s
troops arrived suddenly “symptoms of division appeared in the liberal party itself. This
kind of plotting came to an end with the generous measure taken by Álvarez of naming
Ignacio Comonfort his replacement as president."30 Payno then writes that Comonfort
entered the office as functioning president on December 12 and named his cabinet, one of
27 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 191. 28 Fowler, Santa Anna of Mexico, p. 264. 29 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 191; Silvestre Villegas Revueltas, El liberalismo moderado en México, 1852-1864 (México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997), p. 52. 30 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p.193.
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whose members was Manuel Payno.31 One of the most important measures decreed by
the government in its first year was the disentailment of ecclesiastical property through
the passage of the Lerdo Law in the summer of 1856. After describing Comonfort as a
“tolerant and humane” man who accomplished many good things during his presidency,
Payno changes direction and writes, “he increased free trade, and the president always
had the idea of reconciling the two parties, something he was not able to achieve and that
led to his ruin.”32 His ruin would come about from his rejection of the liberal Constitution
of 1857 and the golpe de estado that he led against his own government. This self-
imposed overthrow of the state led to the most violent of all of Mexico’s civil wars, the
three year War of the Reform.
Once the liberal Constitution was put into effect, Comonfort was elected
president. Upon entering office on December 1, 1857 he changed course, “believing that
it was impossible to govern with the Constitution, and judging that this was the sentiment
of the liberal party, he initiated a golpe de estado, disbanded the Congress on December
11, and on the seventeenth, Zuloaga issued his pronunciamiento in Tacubaya.”33 Payno
writes that the decision was taken advantage of by the opposing party and that a
pronouncement by the military commander, Felix Zuloaga, turned to the side of
31 According to the radical liberal, Francisco Zarco, in the weeks between Álvarez being named interim president and his handing power over to Comonfort, there was a great deal of political intrigue and internal power struggles. In the weeks he was president, Álvarez issued a decree forbidding priests or members of the clergy to vote or run for office. According to Silvestre Villegas Revueltas, the moderate liberal Manuel Siliceo threatened to go into rebellion against Álvarez and in support of “ecclesiastical and military privileges (fueros).” See Francisco Zarco, Historia del congreso extraordinario constituyente, 1856-1857 (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1956), pp. 14, 18; Villegas Revueltas, El liberalismo moderado en México, p. 97. 32 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 194. 33 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 194.
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conservative reaction. Comonfort realized his mistake, recognized the Constitution, and
freed the president of the Supreme Court, Benito Juárez, who had had previously
arrested. It was too late, however, and Comonfort was forced to flee to the United States
and the three-year War of the Reform broke out. Juárez, “supposing the renunciation and
absence of Comonfort,” took over as the president and moved his government to
Guadalajara.”34 The absence of political determinations in Payno’s narrative and his
formist succession of events is striking in comparison to the romantic narratives of Prieto
and Altamirano, both of whom joined the side of Juárez, even fighting in battles.
The violence intensified in the summer of 1859 after Zuloaga’s government in
Mexico City abolished all of the Reform laws. Juárez, whose government was in
Veracruz at this moment, proceeded to radicalize the liberal movement with a number of
decrees, the most notable of which was his decision to nationalize church properties. The
narrative is effectively ended here, as Payno provides some details of the deaths of
various important figures before moving on to the war against French intervention.35 This
formist analysis, however, is almost devoid of political intelligibility, so much so it is
difficult to discern any criteria by which Payno chooses the events he considers
significant in the historical field. The Comedic strategy seems half-hearted. Payno was
writing these lines in 1870 as the narrative of the slow march of liberty in Mexico. Yet
this march of liberty was one Payno himself conspired to undermine.
34 Payno, Compendio de la historia, p. 197. 35 In an odd mistake, one of the deaths Payno narrates is Comonfort’s at the hands of bandits after he had returned to fight for the liberals. Comonfort was indeed ambushed and killed by bandits after he had returned to Mexico to fight, but it was to fight French troops and he died during the War of the Intervention in 1863.
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In November, weeks before Comonfort’s overthrow of the Constitution, the
conspirators were meeting to plan the golpe de estado. There were many meetings
attended by Zuloaga, Comonfort and others at the house of Manuel Payno, one of the key
conspirators and authors of the Plan de Tacubaya.36 We know this because Payno himself
wrote about it ten years before he wrote his textbook. The extended essay, “Memoria
sobre la revolución de diciembre de 1857 y enero de 1858,” is a detailed account of his
actions, as well as a defense. In the essay he argued that for him religion and freedom, not
as they appeared in history books, but as they were in reality, were like “twin sisters
nurtured by the One Reformer.”37 He defended his actions by comparing the Mexican
government to the government of Robespierre or the Inquisition under Philip.38 In the end
of the essay he justified his actions by asking,
What is preferable? A gradual reform, that goes about slowly correcting [social] abuses, diminishing political influence and establishing a prudent social equilibrium, or a complete absolutist reform that would annihilate the good along with the bad, that would destroy the ripe corn along with the weeds, in order to plant later in an entirely empty field. Is it better to repair the old building or to demolish it, at the risk of possibly not being able to build a better one?39
The combative Payno is clearly a more compelling writer than is evident in his comedic
emplotment of the Compendio, and his kinship with Tocqueville is certainly more
apparent. The Tragic irony of his historical vision in El libro rojo is, I believe, intimately
tied to his providential view of history. There is a moment in which they collide in El
libro rojo and that is in his historical portrait of Ignacio Comonfort.
36 Villegas Revueltas, El liberalismo moderado en México, pp. 183-184. 37 Quoted in Villegas Revueltas, El liberalismo moderado en México, p. 183. 38 Payno, “Memoria sobre la revolución de diciembre de 1857 y enero de 1858,” pp. 73-74. 39 Payno, “Memoria sobre la revolución de diciembre de 1857 y enero de 1858,” p. 92.
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Payno begins the work with a defense of the state Puebla, “Puebla passes for one
of the states where civilization has had the most difficulty penetrating. I don’t share this
belief, and it seems to me that its religious adherence to its old customs and beliefs is the
motive for such an unjust and impassioned criticism.”40 Puebla had a history as a center
of religious orthodoxy and conservatism. Comonfort was from a village in Puebla and his
mentor in school was a Jesuit priest. Payno informs the reader that Comonfort was a
member of a distinguished group of liberals who met at gatherings in the house of
Mariano Otero, the editor and chief of the liberal paper, el Siglo XIX. Otero had emerged
as the leading voice of the moderate liberals in the Constituent Congress of 1842. He had
postulated the existence of an objective materialist necessity working in history, one
founded on “the organization of property.” Economic progress operated in history as its
rational foundation, and guaranteed the eventual political dominance of the middle
class.41 Comonfort’s membership in the meetings at Otero’s placed him at the center of
the moderate liberal faction. The center of this faction, indeed “the soul” of these
meetings, was Manuel Gómez Pedraza, the old nemesis of Vicente Guerrero.
In 1854 Santa Anna dismissed Comonfort from his post as chief administrator of
the Customs Office of Acapulco. Payno describes Santa Anna’s mistake writing, “Here is
the small beginning of a great social revolution called the Reform, that was later linked to
such important events as the Intervention, and this very day to the coming destruction of
Bonaparte’s dynasty.”42 Comonfort is described thus by the moderate historian: “He was
40 Payno, “Comonfort,” Pp. 410-424 in El libro rojo, p. 410. 41 Elias José Palti, La Invención De Una Legitimidad: Razon y retórica en el pensamiento mexicano del siglo xix (Un estudio sobre las formas del discurso politico), (México: Fondo De Culura Económico, 2005), pp.177-182. 42 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 412.
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really the sudden appearance on the scene of our great revolutionary drama, that recalled
those figures that suddenly rose up everywhere during the last years of Spanish
domination.”43 This is an attempt on the part of Payno to link Comonfort to the legacies
of Hidalgo and Morelos, and in so doing to establish him as the origin of the Reform,
itself the heir to Independence. Payno writes:
The revolution of Ayutla was the spark, but the wildfire was now spreading from one end of the country to the other. There had been many personal governments in the republic; since personal rule was now tiring to the fickle Mexican character, a plan that would promise a constitutional order ought to have resonated throughout the republic, as the Ayutla Plan indeed did.44
Comonfort, now the equivalent of a modern day Hidalgo, prepared to engage Santa Anna
on the battlefield and “the light of Santa Anna’s glory was extinguished for ever in that
week and Comonfort began to be the man of the revolution, the distinguished personage
of the era.”45 With a lower class mob raging in the streets, Santa Anna was forced to flee
Mexico City.
Payno then turns to the other leader of the movement: “General Álavarez, the
ancient (centenario) patriarch of the unconquerable south, was also the leader of a
revolution.” After the flight of Santa Anna, Payno explains that Álvarez who had fought
with Guerrero for Independence, was elected by a junta of notable men as interim
president and Comonfort was named by the old guerrilla fighter as his minister of war.
Payno then leaves the narrative for a moment to offer a discourse on the politics of the
moment writing, “The revolution was in a sense liberal, but not progressive. The
moderate party, in principle opposed to dangerous innovations, was in that sense an
43 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 412. 44 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 413. 45 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 413.
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antagonist of the red party. Comonfort, representative of that revolution and of the
moderate party, was elected the replacement president on December 12, 1855, not
without the radical (exaltado) liberal party attempting to block it.”46 The “progressives”
remained strong in the government, and in June 1856, “Miguel Lerdo de Tejada occupied
the Office of the Treasury and the law of June 25, 1856 continued the civil reform that
had already been started without success several years earlier by Valentín Gómez Farías,
Doctor Mora, and the lawyer, don José Espinosa de los Monteros.”47 Comonfort, while
valiant by nature,
… vacillated in the face of observations made by notable men of the conservative party, who he had always treated with the greatest of consideration. What the progressive party instilled in his spirit during the day, the conservative party would destroy at night…He wanted the reform, but gradual, philosophical, without violence and bloodshed.48
This was no longer possible, according to Payno, and so Comonfort was now “Like the
ship on the waves between two reefs.”49 The Constitution was the foundation for making
46 The terms of the Ayutla Plan placed power in the Council of Advisors to the President to name a replacement president. The puros controlled this council. Comonfort, by most accounts, was not elected as the substitute president, but named to the position by Álvarez on December 7, thus breaking the terms of the Ayutla Plan. The council refused to go along and rejected Comonfort. Álvarez then simply ignored the council and named Comonfort the replacement interim president and he accepted the position and became the acting interim president on December 12. Virtually all the contemporary accounts write this, so Payno would appear to be engaging in a little revisionism here. Álvarez had, after the fact, convened a Council of Notables, mostly moderates, and asked if they wanted him to resign and if they wanted a different cabinet. This council was not part of the Ayutla Plan. They rejected his offer to resign, but were in favor of a new cabinet. Perhaps, in Payno’s memory, this council of notables was an electoral body that voted Comonfort into the office. For an extensive, and largely pro-Comonfort analysis, see Villegas Revueltas, El liberalismo moderado en México, pp. 88-97. 47 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 416. 48 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 417. 49 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 417.
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society permanently stable, while the Reform had to go further in changing society, and
for Comonfort—as well as for Payno— this was an irresolvable contradiction.
It is at this moment that the tensions in Payno’s essay will begin to burst at the
seams. The moderate, a life-long Catholic and proponent of gradual change, continued,
Little by little justice takes place in history filled with the weaknesses and passions of humanity. Today is an obvious example, living and undeniable. But if we were to place ourselves in December of 1857, we would have the Republican Constitution, but we would not have the Reform. Today, while contradictory in themselves, these two things exist in a unity, and the golpe de estado led to the survival of the Constitution and realized the Reform. Had the government of Veracruz done everything it did by the slow measures indicated by the legal code itself, we would still be at the first letters of the alphabet, something the nations of Europe have themselves not learned, except at the cost of the most terrible disasters… Compare, and all of you will be content at how little it has cost us amongst ourselves that which at this moment [1870] the French Republic still has to begin.50
This is the moment when the moderate attempt to construct a national history implodes.
Ten years earlier, towards the end of the War of the Reform, a defiant Payno raised the
specter of the French Terror, argued the need for slow and gradual change, and
articulated the bonds of solidarity between freedom and religion. These needs demanded
the overthrow of the Constitution of 1857 and the removal of the threat of the Reform.
In 1870, Payno finds himself in a world that is the product of the very measures
and programs he worked tirelessly to undermine, even to the point of overthrowing the
government. His essay is, I would argue, an attempt to save both Comonfort and himself.
He will do so through recourse to his Catholic providential view of history:
50 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 418.
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The Republic restored, Comonfort tried to return to his country, to find his way again with new services to his patria, and through brave actions erase the personal error that he had made as president, without perhaps noticing that he had been nothing more than a means, an necessary instrument for the development of a social revolution. It is not the engineer who begins a railroad, he who travels the whole finished line. It is the same in politics, he who began the progressive movement, reaped the dangers, the sorrows, and the disappointments, and it was others who harvested the fame, the honors, and the power.51
Providence has a final cruel fate in store for Comonfort: “that by one of those designs of
Providence, that escapes the understanding of human intelligence, he died obscurely at
the hands of some bandits, instead of a glorious end facing the foreign enemy, clutching
the flag of independence and freedom.”52 Payno concludes, writing perhaps for both
Comonfort and himself,
Whatever might have been the errors that Comonfort committed as head of the government, his memory ought to be welcomed by Mexicans, for he was valiant honorable, straightforward, affectionate, frank, generous, and well intentioned. And overall he represented the good, kind, and noble part of the Mexican race (raza).
Payno’s Tragic and providential view of history, a fundamentally conservative one, will
crash in his efforts to write national history. He will trip over precisely how to understand
his own practice within it. Payno’s gifts as a writer are confined to the biographical
portrait of a moment in time, the profundity the subjective moment. He was
fundamentally a narrator of the synchronic, static moments of the past.
51 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 418. 52 Payno, “Comonfort,” p. 420.
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Guillermo Prieto: Romancing la Patria
Guillermo Prieto’s textbook, with the opposition of political freedom against the
anti-Independence forces of the past, creates a more dynamic text in conveying a sense of
historical movement. Prieto writes in the postscript to the work,
Precious inheritance for the spirit, registry of mankind’s advances, teacher of the soul, beacon of morality, sublime revelation of the divine Providence, soul of experience, exalted star that guides us through the darkness of the future, such is history, even though some call her the storehouse of lies and warehouse of tall tales.53
Prieto’s narrative is that of a romantic celebration to the patria. In his work humans are
not simple instruments of a mysterious Providence beyond man’s ability to understand.
Rather, history is the chronicle of man’s victory. It is the victory of “the federalist
republican party that brought with it the tradition of Morelos and the Congress of
Chilpancingo,” over “the Spanish party of the privileged classes and Aristocratic
privileges (fueros), that was backward, educated in the shadow of the throne by the
inquisitor, the encomendero (a conquistador with rights to uncompensated Indian labor),
and the soldier of the King.54 The romantic victory is the victory of the forces of the
Constitution of 1857 over the political projects remaining from the colony that Iturbide’s
triumph had kept alive in the heart of the nation.
The beginnings of the victory are planted by Gómez Farías in 1833, following
Santa Anna’s toppling of the repressive and terroristic regime of Anastasio Bustamante
and Lucas Alamán. The progressive historian writes, “Notwithstanding the fluctuations
that uneven and troubled administration was exposed to, this is the era when the
53 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 448. 54 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 340.
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transcendental ideas of the reform begin to be discerned.”55 Among Farías’ advanced
ideas, Prieto lists secular public education, a reform of the subjects taught in advanced
education, the ending of the civil government’s forcing of the population to pay forced
tithes to the church, progressive economic measures, the end of government enforced
monastic vows so that women in convents were free to leave if they desired, and Farías’
raising of the ideas of disentailment of church property and ending of religious and
military corporate privileges. This list does indeed read like a wish list for the Reform in
1857. Almost immediately after decreeing these changes, the administration of Farías
was faced with a pronunciamiento bearing the title religion y fueros (religion and
corporate privileges).
When the radical federalist Farias is toppled by the anti-Independence party of the
upper classes and corporate privilege, a new centralist constitution replaces the federalist
document of 1824. There is at this point an interlude where the historian leaves the
narrative to turn to a discursive moment when he writes, “On bringing to an end the study
of the colonial period, we saw clearly the bad distribution of land, the disproportion
between the amount of land and the number of inhabitants of the soil, the persecution of
the workforce, taxes falling on the consumers…in other words all the economic
conditions that would have annulled any political system.”56 This is a rare moment in the
work that refers to a systematic relationship between the social forces and the opposed
political visions. Prieto will raise this issue, but he has difficulty unifying his social
concerns with the opposing political ideas in contention. These ideas, which are more
systematically narrated by Altamirano, remain continuously implied within Prieto’s text.
55 Prieto, Lecciones, pp. 346-347. 56 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 348.
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Prieto notes that the inability of either party to establish its dominance was
inscribed in the Constitution of 1824, with passages that recognized freedom of thought,
while prescribing religious intolerance, that proclaimed legal equality yet kept in place
the clerical and military privileges, and that granted state sovereignty while maintaining a
monopoly of military power in the central army. The battle between the two lodges had
now evolved into one between the defenders of the sovereignty of the states—the
federalists—against the allies of the clergy and the military, who were centralists. When
the centralist system was established, Texas rebelled and became independent (a move
instigated by Lorenzo de Zavala, who stained his honor and betrayed his patria, according
to Prieto) and Anastasio Bustamante returned to the Mexican presidency. Bustamante’s
return and the centralist Constitution of 1836 is the culmination of the overthrow of
Farías and inaugurates a prolonged struggle between centralists and federalists. The
conservative betrayal of the patria in favor of narrow and partial interests is made
manifest in the opening days of the Mexican-American War. When Farías returns to
power and re-establishes the federalist Constitution of 1824 at the war’s beginning, it
sparks the rebellion of the Polkos. This is the moment when the conservative movement
reveals its loyalty only to its narrow partisan self-interest, to the detriment of the nation in
Prieto’s view.
Prieto describes the moment of the betrayal,
The Congress, composed of a majority of liberal patriots, in view of the circumstances, and the scarcity of resources, issued a decree on January 11, 1847 on the disentailment of church properties, and then conservatives and clericals thought of nothing more than the fall of the puros, even if it was at the cost of independence. The national guard corps that had been raised up for the defense of the patria, were separated by class, and there were corps tied to the conservatives and others to the government…
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In the end, to the eternal shame and scandal of Mexico, the pronouncement of the Polkos (an allusion to the polka dance) broke out, namely the rebellion of the cultural elite (gente decente), the conservatives, under the leadership Salas and Peña Barragán, and secretly sustained by the moderate party; while various national guard corps still remained loyal to the government whose leader was general Rangel.57
There occurs at this point in the text an endnote. In it Prieto informs the reader, “He who
is writing this acted as an obscure soldier on the side of Mr. Peña y Barragán, and he is
unable to recall those days without shame and remorse.”58
The reader discovers that Prieto had been a supporter of the Polkos rebellion.
Following Mexico’s humiliating defeat, Prieto later regretted his involvement. In his
memoirs he wrote of the polkos,
Now it is left to understand the unsuccessful denouement of the polkos movement and the disgrace and humiliation that should cover those of us who spewed out that shame on our history during the days of greatest anguish for our patria…I tell you that was a great offence…that reappears each time more horribly to my eyes whenever I look upon it.59
Prieto admitted in his memoirs to being much taken by the ideas of Mariano Otero and he
remained a life long friend of Payno, who never joined Otero and his fellow moderates in
support of the Polkos rebellion. After the war Prieto appears to have sided with the
radicals on virtually every major political conflict. It is safe to say, I think, that the war
was a turning point in Prieto’s personal political evolution. The Polkos rebellion became
symbolic of an opposition whose origins dated from the colony. When a liberal
government attempted to reform the army—a reform that Prieto argues was necessary in
order to for the functioning of the government treasury—the president resigns due to the
57 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 358-359. 58 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 462. 59 Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, 1840-1853, p. 204.
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obstacles put in is way by the army and the clergy. When a moderate liberal successor
takes office, he dissolves the Congress. With the government in turmoil, Santa Anna
returns from exile and installs his last dictatorship in 1853, with Lucas Alamán as the
head of his cabinet. This is the critical moment in the romantic historical imagination: the
glorious Ayutla Revolution will lead to the final encounter between the forces of good
against evil.
On his return, Santa Anna established the most ruthless of dictatorships. “As was
to be expected,” Prieto writes, “freedom of the press was annihilated and espionage,
denunciations [of citizens], and base intrigues became part of the political system.”60
Santa Anna’s police state led to the Ayutla Plan, which “was received with universal
elation.” Prieto’s description of the origins of the Ayutla Plan are considerably different
than those by Payno, who credited the tragic hero, Ignacio Comonfort, with the plan’s
creation. In Prieto’s account, the Ayutla Plan “was the child of the radical [“exaltado,”
literally “exalted”] liberal party and was proclaimed in Ayutla on March 1, 1854, by
coronel Villarreal, the representative of Juan Álvarez and Tomás Moreno. Ignacio
Comonfort modified the Plan later in Acapulco so that the moderate party would join.”61
In an endnote, Prieto writes,
The Plan of Ayutla can be considered the real revolution of principles that the country has had, and an interesting pamphlet that Mr. [Melchor] Ocampo published during that time, titled Mis quince días de ministerio (“My fifteen days in the ministry), explains [the Plan’s] realization and the state of the spirits en those times, as well as how the distortions that Comonfort imbued it with.62
60 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 373. 61 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 373. 62 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 465. Ocampo was one of the leading radicals. He was assassinated by conservatives in 1861, at the end of the War of the Reform. He had been a member of
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In this account, the Plan is identified principally with Álvarez, who had been an insurgent
leader at Independence. In fact, Álvarez had been a very close friend of Vicente Guerrero
and bore an abiding hatred toward Lucas Alamán, who he blamed for Guerrero’s murder.
In the Revolution of Ayutla there appeared two tendencies, according to Prieto,
described in his Romantic binary as,
One in transaction with the past and its abuses, represented by Comonfort; the other uncompromising and determined, closer to Juan Álvarez. In the first inner circle the influence of Lafragua, Haro y Tamariz, Payno and Siliceo is notable. In the second, that of Juárez, Ocampo, Ignacio Ramírez, Prieto, Zarco, and various others.63
Prieto identifies his own practice here with the political views of Ocampo and Ignacio
Ramírez, clearly indicating his membership among the radicals by 1854. When the
revolution triumphs, puros send a commission to appeal to Álvarez to carry out a
program of radical reform. But “the moderates, the clergy, and the members of the elite
(the gente decente) avail themselves of Comonfort, so that he might take command,
freeing society from the invasion of the barbarians.”64 When Álvarez is chosen as interim
president, his cabinet composed of radicals (including Prieto) proposed the abolition of
clerical and military privileges (fueros), the reduction of diplomatic posts, the
suppression of useless government bureaucratic offices, a tariff reduction, and lowering
of postal rates. These proposals caused anxiety in the Capital, according to Prieto, and
Comonfort had positioned himself in this situation to appear as a compromise.
Comonfort, who Prieto describes as “opposed to any reform,” succeeded in gaining the
Álvarez’s first ministry, the one that moderates wanted him to dissolve and to pick a new one, more moderate one. 63 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 374. 64 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 374.
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interim presidency bequeathed to him by Álvarez after the latter stepped down. In June
1856, the Lerdo law disentailing corporate property was signed into law, which provoked
the rebellion of the clergy.
The Lerdo law has been identified with the radicals, but Prieto writes the puros
were opposed to it and that their spokesman, Ignacio Ramírez, spoke out against it in the
legislature. The radicals argued that the law served to paralyze liberal advances and aided
the clergy in gaining political support. Essentially, Prieto argued, the Lerdo law placed
the government in an untenable situation of either working on behalf of those who would
buy the property, thereby protecting those who lacked any capital but were rebelling
against the church, or renouncing the Reform entirely. Prieto charges Comonfort with
being in this case of being both the person responsible for creating the situation and
making himself the receptacle for and protector of the discontented, thus leading to a
false and dangerous situation65. As multiple pronouncements in favor of religion and
corporate privilege were erupting, Comonfort became persuaded of the need to obstruct
the Constitution that was being openly debated in Congress. But the constituent assembly
“heroically” succeeded in getting the Constitution passed in early February 1857. At this
point in Prieto’s narrative, the opposition of forces begins to descend into a formist litany
of events lacking an interpretative unity. Thus the microscopic details of Prieto’s account
threaten to undermine the Romantic narrative he wishes to convey.
Prieto offers the reader a summation of the advances of the Constitution and the
hatred that the clergy and the elite held for it. He puts the accomplishments in cursive
writing, so as to highlight the accomplishments of ending protection of industrial
65 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 377.
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monopolies, putting an end to debt peonage, outlawing corporate entities such as the
church to own real estate, and guaranteeing the right to a trial by jury. Comonfort’s
behavior, in Prieto’s account, fans the animus of the clergy and the military. Prieto’s
narrative at this point specifically accuses his friend, moderate liberal Manuel Payno, of
conspiring with Félix Zuloaga to withdraw recognition of the Constitution and of
convening a new Constitutional Congress.66 His inability to sustain a Romantic
emplotment dissolves into a narrative in which poetic tropes are rare and adjectives are in
short supply, but still the Romantic impulse remains in the way that Prieto selects those
events he deems significant from the mass of historical data. There is a moment in his
work, and one not found in Altamirano’s account, where the progressive liberal’s
Romantic tale swerves into a moment of tragedy. This moment is the summation of
Comonfort’s downfall and an assessment of his character. As Prieto writes:
Señor Comonfort knew very little of the abyss he had rushed into; he wanted to defend himself but he could not. He felt the coldness of the void he had created around himself, and all was hesitation, contradiction and stupefaction. His good and generous heart was showing him the horrors of the war, and although valiant, among the most dedicated of men, he did not want to uselessly resist. The alienation of the affections that his finesse and kindness had earned him was noticeable and demoralized him completely, making him abandon the capital at the end of January 1858.67
Benito Juárez’s nationalization of church properties in 1859, along with his decrees on
civil marriage, his proclamation of religious tolerance, and his secularization of
cemeteries, according to Prieto, “were the Laws of the Reform, the basis of the great
economic and social revolution for the radical progress of our society.”68 After the war
66 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 379. 67 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 380. 68 Prieto, Lecciones, p. 384.
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ended and the liberal government was in power, according to Prieto, the Juárez
administration “removed any further obstacles to the disentailment.”69
Prieto’s implication of history as a contest between two opposed forces, those
from the anti-Independence factions who became centralists and the opponents of the
followers of Morelos who evolved into the federalist liberal party, presupposes White’s
Metonymic consciousness and a mechanistic conception of the historical field. As the
final contest approaches after the Revolution of Ayutla, the progressive liberal’s story
falls into a dispersive formist mode of argument with an increasing lack of figurative
language. The reader is aware, because Prieto continues to assert it at various moments in
the text, that what is occurring is collision of the forces of good and evil, with the
author’s assurance that good prevails. But the loss of figurative language strips the
narrative of its aesthetic drama. Instead the implied romance is reduced to implicit criteria
by which the writer will discern those events that are significant, from those that are not.
What trips up Prieto, ironically, is that the great romantic national poet seems unable to
adequately articulate and name his historical subject, the nation. In the discursive
interludes of the text, he will assert the nation as the conquering hero, but in the narrative
itself he relies increasingly on successive dispersals of the actions of great individuals. He
can never quite narrate a conducting thread that ties these individuals into an abstract
national being. He can never quite make the transition from the singular to the universal,
and back again.
69 In the nationalization of church property, lands formerly belonging to the church were sold at public auction, with the money going into the government treasury. See Brian Hamnett, Juárez (London: Longman, 1994), p. 107.
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What Prieto does best, then, is what he shares with Payno: the biographical sketch
and the metaphorical depiction of a synchronic moment. Both writers can move the
reader with either a tragic or a romantic portrait of a static moment in time. What eludes
both, however, is the ability to articulate the temporal movement, the diachronic change,
of an adequately articulated subject that is the nation.
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: The Victory of the People
The Romantic voice that will successfully articulate the national authentic in its
victory over the forces of injustice is found in Altamirano’s Historia y política de
México. As previously noted, Altamirano defined the War of the Reform as one where
“For the first time in México the two sides, enemies since 1821, fought, each side having
a government at its head and the entire Republic for its battlefield.”70 And so it was that
the two sides, the people and their oppressor, were the very same that emerged out of the
resolution of Independence and the contradictions of Iturbide, Guerrero and their
combined forces in the Army of the Three Guarantees.
Following the creation of the centralist political order with the new Constitution
of 1836 (the Siete Leyes),
What was being established in Mexico, where the majority of population was composed of uneducated Indians, or mestizo proprietors, was in reality an oppressive exclusivist oligarchy; or better said, a veiled monarchy, under the control of the army, the clergy, and the rich. One even more exposed than a democratic regime to palatial conspiracies and military uprisings, especially in a country that was being devoured by the virus of revolutions.71
70 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 99. 71 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 46.
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The fault for the nation’s ills was not, as Alamán had asserted, the inappropriate liberal
institutions and political culture. It was an oppressive conservative elite that ruled over a
nation of mestizo small property owners and poor Indians. In Altamirano’s narrative the
national authentic and the social forces involved are, from the beginning, named. The
struggle between opposed political options is, in reality and at a deeper level, a class war.
This identification of the romantic agon, as White calls it, will allow Altamirano to move
relatively seamlessly from the general to the particular, from the universal to the singular.
The metonymic apprehension of the spirit of the people in Altamirano’s narrative is
under continuous assault from the murderous forces of oligarchy. What was achieved by
the centralist overthrow of Farías was that
At last the privileged classes of México had managed to construct something that fulfilled their aspirations and, although not realizing their ideal, was at least enough to continue killing in the spirit of the people the principles of freedom that had germinated in the previous period.72
In effect, the continuous instability of Mexico was conceived by the radical as a
succession of attempts by the people to free itself from bondage. The never-ending series
of pronunciamientos was the continued reconfiguration of the forces of reaction to
prevent the nation’s liberation.
When Farías returned to power in 1846 in the face of the US invasion, Altamirano
writes ironically of the moment,
But it was written that neither the foreign invader that was gravely threatening the country, nor the dangers that our weakness exposed us to at those moments should have been an impediment for the shameful military uprisings that seemed to have no end.73
When the author goes on to narrate the Polkos rebellion, he adds to the narrative:
72 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 45. 73 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 53.
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The narrator of these events, who is a Mexican, is ashamed to relate them, and would gladly omit them if they were not such rigorously historical events, if they did not have such notoriety in the world, such that it would be in vain to try to diminish them, and a crime that would even be antipatriotic to try to attenuate them.74
Altamirano like Prieto, and even like the moderate Payno, uses the Mexican-American
War as definitive proof of the conservative virus that for so long had held back the
country.
When Santa Anna comes to power for the last time, Altamirano offers a savage
assessment of “Serene Highness’” political history:
Royalist officer and friend to the Spanish domination in the last years of the colony, hastily pro-independence and pro-Iturbide in 1821, enthusiastic imperialist in 1822, republican, the first to proclaim the Republic in 1822, federalist in 1823, friend of the yorkinos and Guerrero in 1828, pro-Pedraza in 1832, liberal and constitutionalist in 1833, enemy of the Constitution in 1835, centralist in 1843, dictatorial in 1844, once again constitutionalist in 1846, and once again a dictator and absolutist in 1853. After that an imperialist, but rechecked by both the French and the Empire, he became pro-Juárez and then pro-Ortega, but neither Juárez nor Ortega would have him. … For him political convictions meant nothing. Power was everything; such was his project for his entire life.75
When the revolution of Ayutla was proclaimed by Álvarez, the author describes the old
insurgent leader as someone whom had always been a partisan of democracy and
liberalism. In his description of Comonfort and the Lerdo Law of disentailment,
Altamirano offers a description that seems to concur with Prieto, but is both more concise
and more clearly representative of his puro sympathies. He describes the Lerdo Law as
one that unleashed the most violent civil war in the history of the country. But he goes on
to add,
74 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 54. 75 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 63.
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Some characterized this measure as one of weakness even to this day, believing that it would have been better to have decreed all at once the Nationalization Law, since there would not have been any worse consequences than those that came about from the original law. But Comonfort, loyal to the program of the moderate party, hated definitive blows and believed that by means of the law he could secure the peace and the disarming of those irreconcilable enemies.76
The original law called for the church to sell its properties, as opposed to the government
nationalizing them. Altamirano’s account is the most clearly stated argument that the
original Lerdo Law was a compromise measure promoted by Comonfort and the
moderates.77 When the Constitutional Congress debated the liberal project, the debates
broke out again into a battle between oligarchy and democracy, with the moderates siding
with the conservative forces of reaction.
When Comonfort annulled the constitution and dissolved the Congress,
imprisoning leading liberals in his government, it was the privileged classes composed of
the clergy, the army, and the rich who attempted once again to monopolize all power and
impose their principles on the country—principles, Altamirano notes, that the country
had repeatedly rejected since the regime of Bustamante and Alamán. In contrast to Payno
and Prieto, Comonfort barely figures in Altamirano’s narrative. The emphasis remains on
the social forces involved. Comonfort’s actions are quickly enumerated and then just as
quickly Altamirano’s narrative turns again to the social forces at war. In a particularly
strong analytical moment of the narrative, the radical historian discerns a split within the
forces of reaction, between the more secular conservatives and those allied to the church,
76 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 85-86. 77 On the debate and content of the Lerdo Law see Richard Sinkin, The Mexican Reform, 1855-1876: A Study in Liberal Nation-Building (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), pp. 124-127.
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a split that weakened the cause of the reaction.78 The victory of Juárez and the liberals in
the War of the Reform is complete.
In 1861 French, Spanish and British forces occupied the port of Veracruz to force
Mexico to meet its foreign debt obligations. When the British and Spanish troops
withdrew, the French remained and Napoleon III attempted to install the Austrian
Archduke Maximilian as the monarch of a Mexican Empire.79 The war began with the
disastrous French defeat on May 5, 1862 at the battle of Puebla.80 Mexican conservative
monarchists had appealed to Napoleon to install a foreign monarch in Mexico after their
defeat in the War of the Reform. Both Altamirano and Prieto narrate this war against
intervention as the final victory for the people/nation.81 What is interesting about the
narration of the war, from the perspective of the Mexican romantic historical imagination,
is the fractures that emerge within the liberal party. Both Altamirano and Prieto became
opponents of President Benito Juárez at a key moment in the war. Altamirano’s narrative
was written at a time when Juárez was being promoted in the regime as a national hero
for his role as the national leader in the Liberal Reform and the War of the Intervention.
After the narration of the war, the work drops entirely its romantic historical emplotment
and Altamirano instead turns to a lengthy memorial on the life and career of Juárez.
In contrast to Sierra’s claim that Juárez’s re-election in 1870 was necessary to
prevent anarchy, Altamirano argued,
78 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 101. 79 For a concise overview of the French intervention and the liberal war against it see Hamnett, Juárez, pp. 167-198. 80 A victory now commemorated by Mexican-Americans in the US as the Cinco de Mayo celebration, although not nearly as big of a celebration in Mexico. 81 Altamirano again referred to the opposition of forces at the beginning of 1867 as “irreconcilable enemies since 1821.” See Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 134.
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Juárez could have retired from politics then, renouncing his candidacy and showing himself to be selfless and magnanimous, which would have enhanced his prestige and glory. The whole country would have followed him to his private life with respect and admiration and would hold him always as the oracle of the Republic. He would have truly been the Washington of México.82
For Altamirano, it was precisely Juárez’s decision to remain in power that led the
Republic to the brink of anarchy. The split between Juárez and radical liberals began in
1865, during the War of the Intervention. Juárez’s term in office was due to end and the
Constitution mandated that if for any reason it was not possible to hold elections, then the
president was to hand over power to the head of the Supreme Court. The war had made
elections impossible and Juárez utilized extraordinary emergency powers to extend his
stay in office until election could be held. Liberals such as Prieto and Altamirano
opposed this and supported the claims to office of Jesús González Ortega. 83 Altamirano
granted that the situation was unprecedented and that there was no real legal basis to
decide. Even when he opposed Juárez’s reelection in 1867 after the war, he recognized
that Juárez had emerged from the war the most popular politician in the country.84
However, after the victory over Maximilian and Juárez’s reelection in 1867, “The
mania for pronunciamientos had returned.”85 But these were frequently liberal
pronouncements against the liberal regime. The radical understanding of the multiple
rebellions that broke out after 1867 within the liberal party, and the anarchy that it
threatened, was to place the blame on Juárez’s continuation in office. The largest of these
rebellions was by radicals supporting the war hero, Porfirio Díaz, in the Rebellion of La
82 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 164. 83 McLean, Vida y obra de Guillermo Prieto, p. 37. 84 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 152, 154. 85 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 162.
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Noria following Juárez’s reelection in 1871. Altamirano describes the electoral outcome
as a rigged vote,
As this reelection of Juárez, even though allowed by the Constitution, had been completely unpopular, not only because of the candidate, who had already lost a great amount of his prestige, but because of the principle of reelection itself, the declaration [of Juárez’s victory] by Congress was received with tremendous exasperation by the defeated parties, who saw clearly enough that it was the power of the government and not the public will that had decided the outcome of the elections, through official pressure and by a thousand mechanisms that he who commanded the government had available to influence the vote.86
Among the mechanisms that Altamirano singled out was Juárez’s “system of a coalition
with state governors, that insured the election of official candidates.87 It was, according to
Altamriano, the death of Juárez that brought an end to the anarchy. When Juárez died
from a heart attack in 1872, Altamirano observed,
The arms fell from the hands of the combatants. There was mourning throughout the nation. Rarely has the death of a man so rapidly appeased the rancor raised against him. Everyone remembered what Juárez had done for Patria, and there were only eulogies of respect and admiration for him.88
The contradiction in this appraisal is transparent. Juárez’s death brought an end to the
bitterness held against him, but also an immediate cessation to the outbreak of rebellions
86 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 167. 87 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 180. The presidential elections were indirect. Voters would elect “electors” who would go to the provincial or state level, and in turn they would vote on the president. This gave a great deal of power to the governors who could exercise a great deal of influence in back room political trading to influence the vote. Juárez had acquired an alliance with loyal state governors during the War of the Intervention. Altamirano is here suggesting that the public voted for electors they believed would vote for another candidate than Juárez, but that through the influence of governors at the state conventions, Juárez’s allies were able to subvert the vote. This explains why one of the key points in the Plan de la Noria was a demand for no reelection for state governors. On the voting system see Medina Peña, Invención del sistema político mexicano, pp. 237-239. On the Rebellion of La Noria see Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz: Profiles in Power (London: Longman, 2001), pp. 55-58. 88 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 184.
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within the liberal party. Díaz pledged loyalty to the new regime and retired into private
life. Atlamirano wrote these lines at a moment in which Juárez was being raised to the
status of the privileged hero of the nation for his services rendered in carrying out the
Reform and patriotically resisting the Intervention. Yet Altamirano’s hostility to Juárez is
visceral and his narrative undermines both of the legacies commonly attributed to Juárez.
It was not the president’s granite-like determination that saved the Republic in the
War of the Intervention, in Altamirano’s view, but the republican loyalty of the military
commanders. Given this loyalty, the Republic would have triumphed all the same if
someone other than Juárez had been president; what is more, lacking the patriotism of the
military commanders, Juárez would surely have failed.89 Altamirano goes so far as to
even deny the liberal president’s importance to the Reform and his decrees of 1859
imposing nationalization of church properties. He writes,
What is well known in Mexico is that none of the laws he enacted and that made his administration famous bear the stamp of his thought, although they certainly carry the seal of his invincible firmness. Lacking completely in initiative, he was often late in deciding on his own proposals and in accepting the advice of his ministers or his friends; but once accepted he never turned back. Sometimes he resisted to the point of stubbornness, and in Veracruz it was necessary for the governor Gutiérrez Zamora to threaten to withdraw his support, for Ocampo y Lerdo to threaten to resign, and for other caudillos to threaten to renounce his authority, so that he might decide to enact the Laws of the Reform.90
Altamirano is especially bitter about what he regards as Juárez’s repression of liberal
opponents. He accuses the liberal icon of having promoted former conservatives and
89 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 156. 90 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 176.
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traitors while “tenaciously pursuing and ordering shot immaculate liberals for not being
personal supporters of him, or for offending him in some way.”91 During the outbreaks of
multiple rebellions centered on the Plan de la Noria following Juárez’s final reelection,
Juárez was resolved to resist at all cost and his minister of War, [Ignacio] Mejía, who was at that time the soul of the government…was deploying in his activity the greatest repression, organizing forces and ordering frequent executions with the aim of sowing terror among the revolutionaries.92
The return of the pronunciamiento and the emergence of parties allied to Porfirio Diaz
and Sebastián Lerdo, in opposition to Juárez, were entirely the fault of Juárez, in
Altamirano’s estimation. With his death, the rebellions came to an end. But they did not
cease for long.
Altamirano wrote his historical synthesis in 1882. As could be expected of a good
romance, he closes with the victory of the people. In the conclusion of the work he
writes,
The old attempts at revolution are now forgotten, and the poor Republic, so shattered and fatigued by international wars and civil rebellions, today rests tranquilly, and values the benefits of peace from which it has learned so much in he six years it has enjoyed it, learning all the more how to take advantage of its natural riches.93
Altamirano was not able to sustain his romance in his treatment of Juárez and the liberal
pronunciamientos that flourished during his regime. His metonymic consciousness of the
historical field, and the mechanistic means for its interpretation, failed him in his analysis
of Juárez. He ends up abandoning his analysis of a conflict of opposed social forces—
enemies since 1821—which had provided the basis of historical intelligibility. Perhaps
Altamirano’s liberalism made him incapable of conceiving of the political fracturing
91 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 178. 92 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 169. 93 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, pp. 210-211.
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within the liberal party itself as an expression of this historical and class opposition.
Whatever the reason, he retreated into a strategy of narrating the calamities brought about
by a vain and power hungry individual. This inability to extend the class analysis to
oppositions within the liberal party itself leaves him with a denouement that lacks the
kind of intelligibility his Romance cries out for.
In reality, the peaceful republic was itself the product of a golpe de estado or
pronunicamiento, the Plan de Tuxtepec. In 1875, when successor to Juárez, Sebastián
Lerdo de Tejada, won reelection, José María Iglesias and Porfirio Díaz refused to
recognize the legitimacy of the elections. A three-way struggle for power ensued among
three liberal factions and the supporters of Díaz’s Tuxtepec Rebellion were the victors.
Díaz was officially installed by Congress in the presidency in May 1877, inaugurating a
thirty-three year period later deemed the Porfiriato or the Pax Porfiriana, the Porfirian
Peace. Liberal historian Vicente Riva Palacio was a supporter of the rebellion and a
military commander within it. In 1875 he wrote an essay on Lerdo’s rule, “Historia de la
administración de don Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada.” In the essay, Riva Palacio identifies a
small group of leaders who had emerged around Juárez in 1865 during the War of the
Intervention. This was a group, according to Riva Palacio, that sought to capture power
and monopolize it among themselves and their allies. In the group he included Juárez,
Lerdo de Tejada and Iglesias.94
Altamirano, however, did not follow Riva Palacio in identifying a small power
faction within the liberal party that sought to monopolize political power. Nor did he
94 Vicente Riva Palacio, “Historia de la administración de don Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada,” pp. 73-93, in Ensayos historicos (México, D.F: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1997), pp. 80-81.
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attempt to link this faction to underlying social forces.95 Instead Altamirano’s romantic
history of the people devolves to recounting a succession of revolutionary events of the
Tuxtepec victory that is supportive, yet remains tepidly neutral in its interpretive analysis.
The reader comes away knowing that Lerdo is bad, and Díaz is sort of good, but can
glean no more from this from Altamirano’s account. Thus, his narrative does not really
seem to merit its ultimate line: “We conclude this historical and political review of
Mexico when peace and material progress fill the spirits of the peoples with their hopes
and benefits, on the conclusion of the year 1882.”96
95 The victory of the Tuxtepec Rebellion was definitely considered a triumph for the radical wing of the liberal party at the time. On this rebellion as a radical victory see Garner, Porfirio Díaz: Profiles in Power, pp. 61-68. For the most comprehensive account of Tuxtepec, see Ballard Perry, Juárez and Díaz, Machine Politics in Mexico. 96 Altamirano, Historia y política de México, p. 213.
CHAPTER VI
HISTORY AS A NARRATIVE SCIENCE: THE DISCURSO INTEGRADOR
Introduction
Altamirano’s romantic historical imagination appropriated an ideological
component he inherited from the insurgents for independence, Creole Patriotism. The
ideology was radically anti-Hispanicist. The embrace of this insurgent vision was the
response by radical liberals to the challenges of Alamán’s historical argument in support
of Spanish traditions and culture as the basis for national salvation. In 1889 Vicente Riva
Palacio criticized past Mexican historical narratives writing,
New Spain was not the ancient conquered nation that recovers its freedom after three hundred years of foreign domination; to consider it as such has been a source of historical errors and extravagant philosophical claims, when it is a matter of a people, the Mexican, whose embryogenesis and morphology ought to be studied in the course of three hundred years of Spanish government during which time by the mysterious work of chrysalis, and with the heterogeneous Spanish, Indian, and mestizo components, a social and political identity was formed that, feeling itself robust, proclaimed its emancipation in 1810.1
The target of Riva Palacio’s criticism was Creole Patriotism. The liberal historian had
just completed an ambitious intellectual enterprise, leading the publication of the multi-
volume state-sponsored work of Mexican national history, México a través de los siglos.2
1 Vicente Riva Palacio, “Introducción de México a través de los siglos,” pp. 114-138 in Ensayos Históricos, p. 127. 2 México a través de los siglos : historia general y completa del desenvolvimiento social, político, religioso, militar, artístico, científico y literario de México desde la antigüedad
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This work was not only an attempt to produce a national narrative that would serve as an
example of a rigorous scientific-historical discipline, but also an effort to reach a political
consensus on Mexico’s historical representation. As Riva Palacio’s words make clear, the
arrival at a historical consensus constituted a rejection of the Creole Patriot vision.
The ideology of Creole Patriotism was the basis for the narratives of Carlos María
de Bustamante, especially in his historical chronicle of Mexican Independence, Cuadro
histórico de la revolución de la América mexicana. Bustamante originally published his
work in five volumes between 1821 and 1827.3 The Mexican erudite was not only a
chronicler of Independence, but also an active participant in the movement led by José
María Morelos following the execution of Hidalgo. He is credited with writing a speech
Morelos gave at the 1813 Congress of Chilpancingo, a speech that can still resonate to
this day. Morelos is said to have called out to his audience,
Spirits of Moctehuzoma, Cacamatzin, Cuauhtimotzin, Xicotencalt and of Catzonzi, as once you celebrated the feast in which you were slaughtered by the treacherous sword of Alvarado, now celebrate this happy moment in which your sons have united to avenge the crimes and outrages committed against you, and to free themselves from the claws of tyranny and fanaticism that were going to grasp them forever. To the 12th of August of 1521 there succeeds the 14th of September 1813. On that day the chains of our serfdom were fastened in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, on this day in the happy village of Chilpancingo they are broken forever.4
más remota hasta la época actual: obra, única en su género, publicada bajo la dirección del general d. Vicente Riva Palacio (México D.F.: G. S. López, 1940), 5 Vols. 3 Carlos María de Bustamante, Cuadro histórico de la revolución mexicana, 5 vols. (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones de la Comisión Nacional para la Celebración del Sesquicentenario de la Proclamación de la Independencia Nacional y del Cincuentenario de la Revolución Mexicana, 1961). 4 Quoted in D.A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 580-581.
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This narrative construction that presents the Independence movement as the liberation of
an ancient nation after suffering 300 years of enslavement under Spanish colonialism is a
classic example of the discursive/ideological tradition of Creole Patriotism. In the
decades following its original publication the work was rejected by both leading liberals,
such as Lorenzo de Zavala and José María Luis Mora, as well as the conservative
intellectual and statesman, Lucas Alamán. Alamán published his five-volume work,
Historia de Méjico, between the years 1849 and 1852 largely as a refutation of
Bustamante.5 Between the years 1843 and 1846, however, Bustamante published a
second edition of his Cuadro histórico and the work’s Creole Patriot theme was
embraced by the new generation of radical liberals, including a young Ignacio
Altamirano.
The puro’s account of Spain, “…with its appetite for war subjugated the people of
Anáhuac…,” posited an irreconcilable contradiction between Mexico’s indigenous past
and the colonial period.6 In the Romantic historical imagination, three hundred years of
the Spanish colony were excluded from the national tradition. Even as Mexican liberals
were fragmenting into increasingly hostile factions, however, there existed an intellectual
movement towards a historical/cultural détente. In the early decades following
Independence, the study of the pre-Hispanic past and the colonial period tended to be
dominated by conservatives, while liberal historical narratives were more focused on
5 Lucas Alamán, Historia de México: desde los primeros movimientos que preparon su independencia en el año de 1808 hasta la época presente, 5 Vols. (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985). Zavala wrote what appears to be the first criticisms of Bustamante in his 1831 work, Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de México desde 1808 hasta 1830, 2 Vols. (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985). 6 Altamirano, Discursos 1 in Obras completes, p. 13.
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contemporary history.7 Following the war with the US, however, Mexican liberals began
to take a more active interest in studying the indigenous past, as well as the colonial
period. Liberals such as José Fernando Ramírez had formed intellectual relationships
with a younger generation of conservative historians led by Manuel Orozco y Berra and
Joaquín García Icazbalceta. Ramírez would eventually employ a Contextualist narrative
strategy to his understanding of the Colonial past that would serve as a means by which
liberals such as Riva Palacio would reject the themes of Creole Patriotism. A striking
example of the differences can be seen in a comparison of the historical narratives of José
María Vigil, Ramírez, Riva Palacio and the later liberal historian of the Indigenous and
colonial periods, Alfredo Chavero.
Vigil’s Poet King
José María Vigil appears to have written his historical romance, Nezahualcóyotl,
El rey poeta, after 1887. The work was virtually unknown until after Vigil’s death in
1909. Vigil relied, however, on the English translation of the Cantares mexicanos by
Daniel Brinton, published in 1887.8 While a relatively late work, Vigil belongs to an
early generation of Mexican puros and his account of the “Poet King” is a classic
example of the historical understanding of a radical Creole Patriot. In the work’s
introduction Vigil writes,
7 Zermeño Padilla, “Apropiación del pasado,” pp. 89, 96. 8 Jongsoo Lee, The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetics (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), pp. 11, 132. Lee mistakenly identifies Vigil as a modern writer. The edition of Vigil’s work that he uses was published in 1957 and Lee seems unaware that Vigil was a 19th century Mexican writer.
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One of the most notable characters in the history of ancient Mexico is most assuredly he whose biography we are concerned with in the present work. The extraordinary events that surrounded the life of Nezahualcóyotl, his great insight as a politician, his indomitable bravery as a warrior, his high mindedness as a legislator, his transcendent views as a philosopher, and his truly sublime inspiration as a poet present him in such a prominent way that he has justifiably aroused the admiration of all writers, be they national or foreign, who have dealt with him.9
The reader is confronted from the beginning with a nationalist and didactic narrative.
Vigil divides his work on Nezahualcóyotl into four sections: “Plunder and Persecution,”
“Warrior,” “Statesman,” and finally, “Poet and Philosopher.”
The narrative recounts the journey of Nezahualcóyotl from plundered and
displaced monarch to restored and wise leader. Vigil narrates the defeat of
Nezahualcóyotl’s father Ixtilxóchitl, “sixth King of the Chichimecs” by the hand of the
tyrant Tezozomoc, “chief of the Tepanec monarchy, whose capital was Azcapulzalco
[Azcapotzalco].”10 Deprived of his birthright, Nezahualcóyotl’s movements are
constrained by Tezozomoc and he is forbidden to travel outside the boundaries of the city
of Mexico, a ban later extended to his city-state of Texcoco. In a presentiment of things
to come, Tezozomoc has nightmares that oracles interpret as the future ruin of his empire
by Nezahualcóyotl. The only means to prevent this future, his counsels advise, is to have
the displaced prince put to death. Drawing on Hayden White’s account of nineteenth
century historical narratives, we can see that the reader of Vigil is confronted with a work
whose narrative explanatory strategy is that of Romance. The reader is invited to follow
“a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of
9 José María Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, El rey poeta (México: Biblioteca Minima Mexicana, 1957), p. 19. 10 Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, p. 20.
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experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it.”11 The rest of the first
section is the story of how Nezahualcóyotl uses his political cunning, bravery and loyalty
to friends and loved ones to surmount overwhelming odds and defeat the nefarious plans
of Tezozomoc.
On his deathbed, Tezozomoc breaks with protocol by overlooking his eldest son
Maxtla and naming his second son, Tayauh, as his successor. Before he dies, Tezozomoc
orders his sons to have Nezahualcóyotl put to death. Following the tyrant’s death
Nezahualcóyotl decides—against the advice of his friends and family—to attend the
funeral services, despite the dangers of appearing in the court of the now dead
Tezozomoc. Vigil writes,
The danger was imminent, and his family and friends tried to dissuade him from making the journey…Nezahualcóyotl, nonetheless, with the boldness that often accompanies superior beings, scorned the danger, not heeding the predictions of those doomsayers attempting to make him give up his task.12
At the funeral services the prince uses his cunning to take advantage of Maxtla’s anger
about being passed over by his father in the naming of a successor. Maxtla decides that
keeping Nezahualcóyotl alive for the moment can aid him in gaining the crown; he
proceeds to thwart efforts to kill the prince and ends by overthrowing his younger brother
and making himself emperor. Once ensconced on the throne, Maxtla of course returne to
the project of killing Nezahualcóyotl. The emperor invites the prince to his court for the
ostensible purpose of engaging in matters of state business, but with the real aim of
assassinating him. Nezahualcóyotl again accepts an invitation against the advice of his
11 White, Metahistory, p. 8. 12 Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, p. 36.
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family and oracles who warn him of the danger. He does so in the hopes of persuading
Maxtla to spare the life of his uncle, Chimalpopoca, the ruler of Mexico.
Two aspects to this part of the narrative are worth exploring. The first, of course
is the reason for yet another journey to the emperor’s court: his family loyalty. The
second concerns Vigil’s narrative and, more importantly, the author’s discourse on the
narrative. Vigil writes, “One could then see all the valor, all the greatness, contained in
the soul of the young prince, as well as the elevation of his spirit over the superstitions of
his country and of his time.”13 Vigil here is commenting on his account of
Nezahualcóyotl’s response to the oracles, whose soothsayers are, as any nineteenth
century liberal would know, intentionally vague about the dangers he faces and caution
him that to avoid these imminent dangers he should not go looking for them. To which
the prince responds,
To the contrary, I think; because if your science does not deceive you, and if the stars really do threaten me with such risks, searching for them will make them no less greater and trying to flee them will not prevent me from having to confront them. And so I have decided to search for them and to leave these worries behind as soon as possible. If I should perish, life’s end is also the end of its labors; and if I vanquish them, all the sooner will I triumph over my enemies.”
Vigil then comments, “An answer that recalls Caesar’s celebrated response to the ides of
March.”14 The radical liberal’s Romantic emplotment leaves no doubt as to the resolution
of the story. It is his discourse about the story he narrates that is revealing of the radical
historical imagination and the indigenous past.
13 Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, p. 45. 14 Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, p. 44. Vigil is referencing Shakespeare and not Plutarch. In Plutarch’s chronicle of Julius Caesar, Caesar’s response to the famous “ides of March” is neither especially wise or brave, while Shakespeare’s drama represents the doomed emperor’s response in all of its tragic glory.
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Vigil’s comments concerning Nezahualcóyotl’s transcendence of the superstitions
of his country and time engages in a narrative strategy that is as old as the very first
accounts of the “Poet King.”15 Early Christian chronicles also attempted to westernize
Nezahualcoyotl by presenting him as opposed to the religious practices of his day,
especially to human sacrifice, as well as suggesting that he carried some vague
understanding of the one true God. This was done either directly or by positing him as a
link between Quetzalcoatl/St. Thomas and the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the sixteenth
century, such a narrative could assure the crown that the Indians were not synonymous
with the practice of human sacrifice and that they were ready and able to accept Christian
teachings. In Vigil’s narrative we find the King of Texcoco inscribed with all the
requisites of an enlightened Mexican lover of liberty. A rationalist, Nezahualcóyotl
transcends the superstitions of his time. More than an enlightened rationalist, however,
the “Poet King” is a brave lover of his patria—one who overcomes insurmountable odds
in defeating foreign tyrants attempting to plunder his homeland.
In the section of Vigil’s narrative that recounts Nezahualcóyotl’s qualities as a
statesman, the liberal tells of a moment after the Poet King has defeated the forces of
Maxtla in battle and assumed his rightful place as the leader of his people. Instead of
appropriating all political power to himself, Nezahualcóyotl restores the sovereignty of
the monarchs of other city-states after the defeat of Maxtla’s imperial project. Vigil
comments, “The restoration of political power to the leaders of their ancient States was a
15 For an analysis on the different narratives of Nezahualcoyotl from colonial times, see Lee’s The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl, previously cited. On the identification of the indigenous god, Quetzalcoatl with St. Thomas, as well as Creole Patriotism and the Virgin of Guadalupe, see Brading, The First America, pp. 273-274, 365-366, 385-388, 593-596, 632 and 343-361.
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measure that caused the greatest impressions among the peoples who previously had
feared that too great a concentration of political power tended to lead to tyranny.”16
Vigil’s narrative, written in 1887, can seem anachronistic today, in that it
resembles an older form of emplotment, the Epic. But it is no exaggeration to say that
when Vigil writes of Nezahualcoyotl, he is writing about a contemporary. The Poet
King’s subjectivity is never historicized, nor can it be. Nezahualcoyotl shares, along with
Vigil, an abstract and atemporal human nature and this timeless man of nature is placed
in different places at different moments and always responds to events consistent with the
qualities of his fully formed character. In such a narrative, everything appears in the open
and lacks depth. The speeches and actions of the characters fully reveal their motives and
fully convey the feelings of the agents involved.17 Yet Vigil’s narrative is not an epic, and
it is precisely the author’s discourse on the narrative that pushes the work into the mode
of a Romance. At root, Vigil’s work is didactic; it seeks to teach lessons and to offer
comparisons to other places, times, and events.
Vigil employs two modes of discourse that he inserts into the narrative. The first
consists of commentaries on the many admirable character traits of his hero: the wisdom
he shows in ruling over his people, his loyalty to family and friends, his bravery as a
warrior all work to establish both the Romantic nature of the narrative and the liberal
pedagogic function of the text. All of these comments exist to signal the Romantic nature
of the plot. The second mode of discourse consists of comments on and references to the
writings about Nezahualcoyotl by previous authors. These are few and far between and
16 Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, p. 119. 17 On Epic narratives see the famous first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
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usually refer to the early seventeenth century work, Monarquía indiana by Juan de
Torquemada, or the eighteenth century work, Historia antigua de México, by Mariano
Fernández de Echeverría Veytia.18
In every instance that Vigil cites other works, he does so for rhetorical purposes:
to establish the fealty of his narrative to the events and to heighten the sense of realism in
the work. Vigil makes use of Veytia several times to establish an accurate chronology of
the events he narrates in order to heighten the realist effect of his text. He comments that
Veytia estimated that a military maneuver by Nezahualcoyotl, in response to one by the
armies of Maxtla, occurred on February 12, 1428. Later he lists 80 laws of a legal code
compiled by Veytia that Nezahualcoyotl enacted once his right to rule was restored.19
References to Torquemada, and others, are utilized by Vigil to cite different accounts of
events in such a way as to heighten the reality of the narrative. Early in the text, for
example, Vigil writes of the death of Nezahualcoyotl’s father,
Some historians [Torquemada and Clavijero] refer to this event in detail, conjecturing that Ixtlilxóchitl perished in a trap prepared by Tezozomoc…be that as it may, the truth is that this tragic event was the beginning of extraordinary adventures that would put to the test the valor, the astuteness, and the perseverance of our hero.20
Such references are rare, however, as too many of them would interfere with the flow of
the narrative and adversely affect the narrative strategy of a Romantic plot structure. All
the references are utilized for rhetorical purposes, specifically to heighten the realism of
the narrative, and bear little resemblance to the contemporary disciplinary practice of
footnoting.
18 On these works see Brading, The First America, pp. 277-284, 385-387. 19 Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, pp. 88, 131. 20 Vigil, Nezahualcóyotl, p. 23
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The distance between a novel and a historical portrait is effaced in Vigil’s
narrative. The references to the writings of colonial chroniclers, however, makes clear
that for Vigil the distinction is not an especially pertinent one when narrating the
indigenous past. What stands out in the radical liberal imagination is that Vigil is writing
of a contemporary. Mexican romanticism’s abstract man, with his atemporal fixed human
nature, is what ties the Republic’s citizens to the indigenous past for they are all
contemporaries. It is also what expels the Spanish colonialists from the nation’s
traditions. The colonial enterprise could only conceived of as political oppression, a
Spanish version of Maxtla’s oppression. Romantic nationalists rejected the colonial
period as much as conservatives rejected the indigenous past in any narrative elaboration
of the Mexican nation. In contrast, the narrative Contextualist strategy of José Fernando
Ramírez offered the beginnings of a historical imagination that might be capable of
synthesizing the indigenous and colonial periods into a unitary national narrative.
Ramírez: Setting the Record Straight
In contrast to Vigil, José Fernando Ramírez wrote few narrative histories on the
pre-Hispanic and colonial past. When he did so, his works could be contrasted to Vigil’s
in the minimal use he made of adjectives, adverbial phrases and qualifying grammatical
elements. Ramírez had little need for narrative color and, in opposition to Vigil’s
universal and atemporal human nature, Ramírez constantly sought the historical context
for an explanation of the actions of his historical subjects. As for the pre-Hispanic past,
the moderate liberal confined himself to the more erudite project of collecting and
commenting on the sources needed to fill the vacuums of the historical field.
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Ramírez sought out the unknown or unpublished chronicles of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Among his best known accomplishments was the publication,
accompanied with his notes, of the first volume of fray Diego Duran’s sixteenth century
work, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y Islas de Tierra Firme. Among his best
known accomplishments was the publication, accompanied with his notes, of the first
volume of fray Diego Duran’s sixteenth century work, Historia de las Indias de Nueva
España y Islas de Tierra Firme. It was his discovery of what came to be called the Codex
Ramírez, however, that Alfredo Chavero would cite as “the purest and most important
source of Mexican history.”21 In 1856, Ramírez discovered the work of an anonymous
author in a convent in Mexico City. It was originally written, he argued, in an indigenous
Mexican language and its author was most probably a secular Indian, given the text’s
hostility to the Spanish and to the clergy, as well as its horrifying descriptions of
Alvarado’s massacre of the Aztec nobility. The bases for the narrative were various
hieroglyphs translated into Spanish by the Jesuit, Juan de Tovar, who Ramírez describes
as an Indian from Texcoco.22
Ramírez’s work on indigenous history was essentially limited to the publication
of chronicles and codices, the attempt at establishing an accurate chronology of
indigenous history, and the study of indigenous hieroglyphs and their meanings. He did,
however, produce one significant example of a historical narrative of the colonial past
that demonstrates his commitment to historical contextualism and the rejection of Creole
21 Ernesto de la Torre Villar, “Vida y obra de José Fernando Ramírez,” pp. 12-94 in José Fernando Ramírez, Obras históricas I (Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2001), pp. 83-84. 22 José Fernando Ramírez, “Códice Ramírez, Advertencia” in Obras históricas I, pp. 394-398.
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Patriot narratives: his Noticias historicas de Nuño de Guzmán. Nuño de Guzman, the
head of the first Spanish Audiencia in Mexico was generally represented as the corrupt
and bitter rival of Hernan Cortés. He was also demonized as the mass killer of Indians for
his role in the conquest of Western Mexico.23 In the opening of his text, Ramírez
establishes his distance from the kind of history written by Vigil,
Few are those who know of him and none who know him completely, because the misfortunes that pursue men still beyond the grave have been especially cruel with Guzmán. History, which has carefully collected all his crimes, all his mistakes, and all of his weaknesses, has not handed down to us even a single one of his good acts, much less has it thought to temper the harsh colors with which it painted his character. It refers to his deeds the way an impartial judge considers the sentence of a bandit with no defense and dispatches him to the gallows. My intention is to compensate in the smallest way I can and that the nature of this writing will allow, for that deficiency of history, since it is not merely a matter of making known a famous individual, still to this day mistaken for an ordinary villain; it is rather a matter of shedding some light on the most interesting period of our history, one which ought to be seen as the point of departure for our political organization.24
The reader encounters here Ramírez’s contextualist approach. Guzmán is not his
contemporary, but a man of his own times. This contextualist approach comes with a
further imperative: the rejection of “parcialidad” or partiality. On the charges of
Guzmán’s violence as a conquistador, Ramírez writes,
In order to unfold the thinking that has inspired me to write this piece and to bring to an end the analysis of the charges and the defense newly submitted to the impartial judgment of history, I will summarize in a few words the facts and considerations that might excuse or diminish what are extremely serious charges against Guzmán, since no one is condemned
23 Nuño de Guzmán was the head of the first Audiencia, or royal court, established in Mexico in 1527. He was given the job of evaluating the conduct of Hernán Cortés. When he became the target of a court inquiry, he left Mexico City in 1529 and led the expansion of the conquest to the west coast of Mexico. See Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 121-122. 24 Ramírez, “Noticias históricas de Nuño de Guzmán,” pp. 145-215 in Obras históricas II, p. 149.
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because of the criminally made historical knot in which they find themselves. The reader and the judge should take into account the direct effect that mistakes of legislation or of politics had on him.25
Ramírez examines all the historical and political determinations that caused
Guzmán to behave as he did and finds in him not an especially evil man, but rather a man
of his times. When Guzmán had six Indian caciques hung for refusing to clean the streets,
the crime was not as serious as it would appear today. Ramírez argues that “one should
take into consideration that the offense Guzmán punished as he did was at that time very
serious, however despotic and oppressive the demands for personal service would appear
today,” since the cleaning of the roads was at that time a long standing custom among the
indigenous and continued by them under the Spanish “as a symbol of peace and
friendship.”26
Ramírez examines three charges against Guzmán in the work: his greed, his
harshness, and his cruelty. The liberal lawyer finds him largely acquitted on all charges.
Guzmán, for Ramírez, was also a victim of his times. In attempting to discern the
historical causes for events and Guzmán’s behavior, Ramírez identifies these causes with
well-intentioned yet poorly conceived projects of the Spanish crown. Guzmán’s role, as
head of the Audiencia, inadvertently combined private interests with public service. The
crown, in its attempt to weaken the power of the conquistadors and establish a civil
government, in themselves enlightened ideas, granted too much power to the Audiencia
and resulted in the formation of two extreme opposed factions—the followers of Cortés
and those of the Audiencia. Ramírez considered the same dynamic to have occurred in
the developing conflict between the government and the Church. Having sent the clergy
25 Ramírez, “Noticias históricas de Nuño de Guzmán,” p. 196. 26 Ramírez, “Noticias históricas de Nuño de Guzmán,” pp. 196-197.
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over to balance the power of the Conquistadors, the crown established two “absolutely
incompatible charges.” Conquistadors were given the assignment to conquer the
Indigenous, while the clergy was assigned to protect them and bring them peacefully
under the control of the crown. In the end, the liberal lawyer finds that Guzmán’s offense
was being a man of his own historical moment placed in an irresolvable situation in the
middle of completely opposed interests.
Ramírez wrote his portrait of Guzmán in 1847, before the romantic narratives of
Prieto and Altamirano. There is in his work a demand for imparciality and a rejection of
Creole Patriotism. His impartiality, hoever, must be distinguished from that of
conservatives like Icazbalzeta. Conservative impartiality was a rhetorical device by
means of which to promote a pro-Spanish narrative of the Conquest and the colonial
period. Ramírez, on the other hand, offered a contextualist account that sought to relate
the actions of men to the historical and institutional determinants of their actions. In spite
of his claims that Spain’s rule is the source of Mexico’s political institutions and
organization, he does not offer a judgment, negative or otherwise, on the indigenous
societies and practices. As a liberal, he is a key transitional figure in the liberal historical
imagination and its later rejection of Creole Patriotism.
Riva Palacio’s Eulogy to Alvarado
In 1870, Vicente Riva Palacio will extend the Contextualist narrative to the life
and death of Pedro de Alvarado. In so doing, he will appear to do the impossible—give a
sympathetic portrayal of the most vilified figure of the Spanish conquest. Alvarado was
the commander who Cortés had entrusted to guard over the captured Aztec capital,
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Tencochtitlán, in 1520. With Cortés away, Alvarado led a massacre of unarmed Aztec
nobles and priests that precipitated a major escalation of war and violence. After the
conquest of the Aztecs, he led the conquest of the Quiche, followed by that of the
Cakchiquel in Guatemala, where he was blamed for sowing terror and engaging in large-
scale massacres.27 Riva Palacio’s portrait of the fallen conquistador is found in El libro
rojo, and so takes its place as one more tragic death in the history of the nation. It is a
romantic tragedy that will give to Alvarado the characteristics of a national legend. Even
more, the portrait will represent the indigenous together with the conquistador in a
historical drama.
When the Spanish viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, sought help to explore lands on
the Pacific coast, he met the captain general of Guatemala. Riva Palacio describes the
captain general:
The captain general, who appeared so powerful, who commanded an army as effortlessly as a king, was none other than the poor adventurer from the island of Cuba, the commander of the small squadron for Juan de Grijalva, he was Tonatiuh, he was don Pedro de Alvarado, knight of the habit of Santiago, and governor and captain general of Guatemala.28
Riva Palacio’s Alvarado is a tragic knight errant. In 1510 he was one of many young
Spanish adventurers. Because he wore an old tunic that his uncle had given him that bears
the traces of the cross of Santiago, his young cohorts jokingly called him “the
commander knight.” Daring and brave, Alvarado rose to the rank of captain and served
under Hernán Cortés in the conquest of New Spain. It was during this campaign that he
received from the Indians the unlikely name, Tonatiuh. Riva Palacio narrates the arrival
27 Alan Knight, Mexico, From the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) pp. 234-236; Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 62. 28 Riva Palacio, “Pedro de Alvarado,” pp. 130-138 in El libro rojo, pp. 134-135.
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of the Spanish army to the “Republic of Tlaxcala” in 1519, where they are greeted by “a
thousand shows of affection” from the people.29 When the Spanish meet the Prince and
acting ruler of Tlaxcala, Xicoténcatl, they look upon his beautiful daughter, Doña Luisa.
The young princess has
Hair as black as a raven’s wing, it was woven with strings of gold and coral, and on her perfectly formed feet she wore richly adorned light skin furs, secured by gold embroidered ribbons that were interlaced up almost to her knee. … Such an amazing beauty must have been destined for the most valiant of Cortés’ captains, because that young woman was the pearl and the flower among the beauties of Tlaxcala.30
Doña Luisa returns from her baptism and walks before the warriors of Cortés, deciding
who she will choose for her lover. She stops before her choice, “‘Tonatiuh! (the sun),’
proclaim the Tlaxcalans, ‘Pedro de Alvarado!’ cry out the Spanish.”31
The daring Alvarado “was more a projectile, than a man,” according to Riva
Palacio. It was this same impetuousness that could lead the valiant conquistador to acts of
tyranny. His commander, Cortés, was
Among those men with an iron will, like the sun in the middle of its planets, he restrained the violent impulses of the daring captain. The natives from the beginning called Pedro de Alavarado, Tonatiuh (the sun), and the name of Tonatiuh was celebrated, and he was for a long time the terror of those regions.32
When Cortés and the Spanish suffer the terrible defeat of “La noche triste (literally “the
sad night,” but perhaps better translated as the sorrowful night), “Alvarado guarded the
29 Riva Palacio, “Pedro de Alvarado,” p. 132. 30 Riva Palacio, “Pedro de Alvarado,” p. 132. 31 Riva Palacio, “Pedro de Alvarado,” p. 133. 32 Riva Palacio, “Pedro de Alvarado,” p. 134.
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rear of the Spanish forces, and exposed himself to such danger, that his name was given
to one of the main streets of that city.”33
By the time Mendoza asks for help from Alvarado to seek out new possessions for
Spain on the Pacific coast, Alvarado has become lame. The great conquistador suffered a
wound from an arrow in one of his campaigns. He agrees to the expedition, but before he
can begin the exploration, news arrives of an Indian uprising in the province of New
Galicia and the colonists in Guadalajara are in danger. Alvarado immediately puts off the
expedition and goes off to help put down the uprising. Impetuous as ever, he hastens into
combat with insufficient forces and his troops find themselves suffering a terrible defeat.
As he orders his forces to withdraw, a young accountant who had joined the expedition
panics and whips an exhausted horse, forcing it to climb rough terrain. Walking behind
him on foot, Alvarado tells the frightened man to ease up, that the Indians have left them
behind. But the man becomes more frightened, and whips the horse until it stumbles and
falls on Alvarado. As the conquistador lies prostrate, writes Riva Palacio,
The soldiers flew to the aid of their captain. Alvarado comes to, and before all else, thinks of his troops. Wanting to avoid a complete defeat, he had enough self-control to shed his armor, and make one of his soldiers put it on, believing the man was still ok and could continue in the fight. One of his captains asks him what hurts. “The soul,” answered Alvarado. “Take me where it can be cured with the balm of repentance.” This event occurred on June 24, 1541… On July 4, 1541 Pedro de Alvarado ceased to exist.34
33 “La noche triste” refers to the greatest defeat suffered by the Spanish in their conquest of Mexico. They were forced to flee the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (today’s Mexico City), and suffered major losses in their escape. Alvarado is frequently blamed for “La noche triste” in the literature on the history of the Conquest. It was his massacre of Aztec nobility at a religious festival that is credited with leading to the Indian uprising. 34 Riva Palacio, “Pedro de Alvarado,” p. 137.
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When news of his death reached his widow, “doña Beatriz de la Cueva cried inconsolably
over such a great misfortune.”35 When she took with her several women to help her
mourn,
The top of one of the mountains blew off, falling towards the opposite side of town, but suddenly on the spot came a huge torrent of lava, dragging huge boulders, rushing over the buildings, burying six hundred people. Doña Beatriz de la Cueva and twelve women who accompanied her perished that night among the ruins of a chapel where they had sought refuge.36
Riva Palacio’s romantic tragedy of the life and death of Pedro de Alvarado sought
to rescue the conquistador, claiming him as a member of the Mexican nation. The
linguistic protocol is metaphor, which he uses to convey the character of his doomed
figure, as well as his surroundings. His recounting of his indigenous lover, and his wife,
seeks to appropriate the indigenous and colonial past into the construction of a national
tradition, or better still, a national family. Ramírez and Riva Palacio both sought to retain
the Spanish colony of New Spain as an integral aspect in the diachronic depth of the
Mexican nation. Writing his portrait of Alvarado in 1870, Riva Palacio still retained the
legendary histories of the Spanish chroniclers. Alfred Chavero would take a different tack
in his attempt to produce a synthesis of the old chronicles with emerging empirical
studies and findings of the indigenous past.
Chavero’s Scientific Romance
The liberal historian Alfredo Chavero was given José Fernando Ramírez’s
collection of Codices and books from his personal library after the disgraced liberal’s
35 Alvarado’s Indian lover, Doña Luisa, with whom he had three children, died in 1835. 36 Riva Palacio, “Pedro de Alvarado,” p. 138.
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death. Chavero became the most recognized historian of the indigenous period in Mexico
during the rule of Porfirio Díaz. He was the author of the first volume of México a través
de los siglos, which treated pre-Hispanic Mexican history. At some point between 1873
and 1880 he wrote a critical essay about the Aztec Calendar Stone, Calendario Azteca.37
In the essay, Chavero critically examines the stone that had been found in Mexico City in
1790, along with the stone sculpture of the goddess Coatlicue.38 The discovery of the
stones had led, at the end of the eighteenth century, to a protracted intellectual debate on
their significance. The most famous interpretation at the time was made by Antonio de
León y Gama, who used the Aztec artifacts to write an extensive interpretation of
indigenous calendars. The significance of the stones, he argued, consisted in their
demonstrating an advanced system of indigenous calendars, which attested to the
advanced nature of indigenous civilizations prior to the arrival of Europeans. Leon y
Gama’s project was to correlate the indigenous calendars with the European Julian and
Gregorian calendars. He concluded that the Sun Stone was a calendar built around an
indigenous two hundred and sixty day ritual cycle. It was in effect a sundial. For Leon y
Gama, this hypothesis was warranted by the existence of sockets on the edges of the
stone that he posite held the gnomons, the parts of the dial that cast a shadow.39
After conducting an extensive hermeneutical study of the stone, examining its
images, the hieroglyphs engraved on it, and looking at comparative studies on the stone,
37 N. Leon, “Noticia biográfica del autor” Pp. V-XXV in Alfredo Chavero, Obras de Alfredo Chavero, Tomo I (México: Tipografía de Victoriano Agüeros, 1904), p. XX. 38 Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Moctezuma’s Mexico: Visions of the Aztec World (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), p. 92. 39 Jorge Caüzares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 271-280.
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Chavero drew a different conclusion; the stone was not a calendar, but rather the Sun
Stone constructed by Axayacatl in 1479 to be used for human sacrifices.40 What is
interesting about Chavero’s narrative is the extensive use he makes of sources, in contrast
to the approach taken by Vigil and previous liberal narratives. Chavero’s essay is a
synchronic one, but one that I would argue has an implicit historical subject. The essay is
ostensibly about the Sun Stone, but it is also as much about the individuals who have
studied it and the institutions related to it. Chavero constructs his work as if it were a
scholarly conversation between himself, the stone and Antonio de León y Gama, along
with the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, historian William Prescott, the
colonial writings of the sixteenth century Dominican priest Diego Durán, and the Codex
Ramírez.41 It is a meeting of the minds among the former indigenous monarchs of
Mexican city-states and their myths and legends. But what unites the stone, Humboldt’s
investigations of it, and the writings of sixteenth century clerics? The diachronic depth is
composed by this unity, which is none other than the Mexican nation, the implicit
historical agent in Chavero’s work.
In the same years that Chavero investigated the Sun Stone, he wrote a brief
biographical essay on Hernán Cortés, Las Naves de Cortés (The Ships of Cortés). The
work serves a similar purpose as the Calendar Stone essay; both are acts of
demythologizing. Just as the Calendar Stone piece served to correct the idealist
interpretations of Leon y Gama, Chavero’s essay on Cortés seeks to correct what he sees
as the mythical claim that when Cortés arrived on the coast of Mexico in 1519, he burned
40 Alfredo Chavero, “Calendario Azteca,” pp. 231-285 in Obra, Tomo I, p. 243. 41 On von Humboldt’s visit to Latin America and his research see Brading, The First America, pp. 514-534. On Durán, Brading, pp. 283-284.
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his ships so there could be no retreat from the enterprise of conquering new lands. He
wrote the essay in response to the award of a literary prize to the poet, José Peón
Contreras, for his Ode to Hernán Cortés. Among the members of the committee that
awarded the prize was Ignacio Altamirano. In the poem, Contreras had referenced the
story of the Conquistador burning his ships so that his troops had no choice but to march
on to the Aztec capital and win glory for Spain. With a sense of both academic outrage
and bemusement Chavero comments, “What a great shame that so much great beauty
might not be true!”42 In the interest of truth, Chavero sets out to unmask a romantic
legend.
Using historical sources, most especially the chronicle of Bernal Díaz, Chavero
argues that Cortés did not burn the ships, but rather dismantled them and left the
materials behind so they could easily be reconstructed. Cortés was operating against the
orders of the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez. Cortés dismantled his ships, according
to Chavero, to prevent members of his party who were loyal to Velázquez from returning
to Cuba and threatening Cortés’ plans.43 The moment he arrived, Cortés revealed his
plans to circumvent Velázquez’s orders, by setting up an Ayuntamiento, a Spanish
municipal council, who would have authority in the New World as a representative of the
King. This strategy effectively cut out Velázquez from the project and constituted,
according to Chavero, “what today, in our political language, would be called a golpe de
estado.”44
42 Alfredo Chavero, “Las Naves de Cortés,” pp. 313-323 in Obras, Tomo I, p. 314. 43 Chavero, “Las Naves de Cortés,” p. 318. 44 Chavero, “Las Naves de Cortés,” p. 315.
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In the process of refuting the myth, Chavero argues an even more important point,
which is that it was not in fact a handful of Spaniards who had conquered Tenochtitlan,
but thousands of Indians with the aid of Spanish canons. This actually appears to be the
liberal’s real purpose in writing the essay. Cortés, Chavero writes,
Recognized powerful peoples existed in the land: enemies amongst themselves, and therefore easy to conquer, by making alliances with some against others. The leader of Cempualla later became an ally, and complained of the slavery and tribute that the King of Mexico, Moteczuma, forced on him. The quick thinking genius of Cortés understood at that moment that with the alliance of the Cempualtecas he would have an Indian army under his command, and would be able to attract other peoples to form numerous hordes in order to seize the Mexican empire; and so he decided on the conquest.45
Chavero argues that it was the centrality of large Indian armies that led to the conquest of
the Aztec Empire, with the Spanish playing an important, but secondary role in the final
battle. The strategy is twofold. On the one hand, it restores the Indians to a more equal
footing with Europeans, and on the other, it argues for the political astuteness of Cortés
as a leader. Chavero concludes the piece:
Thus we have restored the historical truth: in so doing, Cortés has not stopped being a great man; we have uprooted the glory of his military performance, to place it at the feet Cuauhtemotzin, when in his sublime martyrdom, upon feeling his feet burn, laughed saying “it was no bed of roses.”46
The essay is a presentiment of what Chavero would later argue in volume one of México
a través de los siglos: the conquest of Tenochtitlan was the founding of the Mexican
nation, an event not accomplished by the Spanish against the Indians, but rather a joint
enterprise, that brought into being a new nation. 47
45 Chavero, “Las Naves de Cortés,” pp. 316-317. 46 Chavero, “Las Naves de Cortés,” p. 323. 47 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, pp. 234-235.
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Alfredo Chavero is a transitional figure in the appropriation of the indigenous
past. He attempted to unify the new historical and geological sciences with the legendary
histories of the old chroniclers. Ultimately he wrote romantic comedies in which “hope is
held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional
reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds.”48
Sierra’s Evolución del Pueblo Mexicano
“‘Indian’ and ‘Nation’ are two concepts of a diverse nature and had mutually
exclusive meanings in the nineteenth century,” according to historian Daniela Marino.49
“Indian” was a colonial juridical category that was in complete contradiction to the
liberal concept of the abstract individual who was equal before the law. The category
designated three aspects that identified the Indian as a distinct group with distinct rights
and obligations: the first was as a peasant cultivator; the second, as living in a state of
extreme poverty; and lastly, as possessing the attributes of innocence and naivety in
relation to the Spanish. A fourth attribute was eventually added to the list, that of a
conquered people. The general category presented problems for Mexican liberals who
sought the equality of all Mexicans, and so the term began to give way to the word
“indigenous,” a designation that implied a people with a distinct culture. In the same
vein, the term “peoples” was being replaced by the singular, “people.”50 Liberal
historical narratives had to both valorize the indigenous political and social institutions of
48 White, Metahistory, p. 9. 49 Daniela Marino, “Indios, pueblos y la construcción de la Nación: La Modernización del espacio rural en el centro de México, 1812-1900,” pp. 163-204 in Erika Pani, coord., Nación, constitución y reforma 1821-1908 (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), p. 163. 50 Marino, “Indios, pueblos y la construcción de la Nación,” pp. 163-165.
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the past, while simultaneously constructing an indigenous present in which their cultural
characteristics would be appropriated to a Mexican national identity retained, even as the
Indian was absorbed into the liberal juridical abstract citizen of the nation. The solution
to this challenge for liberals lay in the construction of history as a rigorous positive
science.
When Justo Sierra wrote his national narrative, Evolución del pueblo mexicano,
he relied on the multi-volume work México a través de los siglos. His text was,
nevertheless, an attempt to transcend what he considered the conceptual shortcomings of
the larger work. While México a través de los siglos is often portrayed as the triumph of
positivism in the Mexican historical imagination, the fact is that only one of the five
volumes could be considered a positivist history: the volume on the colonial period by
Riva Palacio. Vigil’s fifth volume is resolutely radical, and Sierra considered Chavero to
be overly speculative and prone to romanticism. In spite of Chavero’s attempts at an
objective and scientific discourse, he still manifested a moralizing repugnance for the
Indian practice of human sacrifice.51 Sierra would transcend this liberal morality tale
through a radically historicizing narrative strategy that could adjudicate virtually any
historical event by assigning it a function in the progress of the forward march of human
civilization.
Sierra appropriated Auguste Comte’s philosophy of positivism, which allowed
him to construct a historical Comedy with an organicist interpretive strategy, in his
narration of the emergence and evolution of the Mexican nation. Following this positivist
thesis, Sierra writes the history of Mexico as the evolution of a social organism as it
51 Ortiz Monasterio, México eternamente, p. 228.
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develops over time. He does so by appropriating a Mexican liberal take on Comte’s
theory of the three stages of human progress. Comte’s theory of human social
development was founded on eighteenth century thinker Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot’s
theory of the three stages by which “every branch of knowledge passes in succession
through three different theoretical states: the theological or fictitious state, the
metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state.”52 According to Alex
Callinicos, “In the theological stage phenomena are explained by imagining fictitious
beings—gods and the like; the metaphysical stage replaces these with more abstract but
still imaginary entities such as essences or causes.” In his Cours, Comte wrote,
Finally, in the positive state, the human mind, recognizing the impossibility of obtaining the absolute truth, gives up the search after the origin and hidden causes of the universe and a knowledge of the final causes of phenomena. It endeavours now only to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena—that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness.53
Relying on Comte’s three stages theory of human history, combined with a comedic
emplotment, gave Sierra not only an implicit criterion for determining what would and
would not count as a historically significant event, but also allowed him to reconfigure
elements within the historical field so that they could be interpreted as advancements in
human social evolution. A particularly striking example is his historical understanding of
the indigenous practice of human sacrifice.
In the opening of his work, bearing the scientific title, “Civilizaciones aborígenes”
(“Aboriginal Civilizations”), Sierra writes,
52 Quoted in Alex Callinicos, Social Theory: A Historical Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 65. 53 Callinicos, Social Theory, p. 65.
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The rites of human sacrifice were exactly the same among all the advanced peoples of Mexico—the Nahua, the Tarascans, and the Maya-Quiché—which clearly indicates a single origin, and that origin is Toltec. These peoples had passed from the cannibalism of starving tribes to religious anthropophagy, in which the slave or prisoner, when sacrificed and shared in communion (that is the proper word, united man and god). This was progress with respect to cannibalism pure and simple: those who adopted the bloody rite to part in the revolting only in certain festivals, and at no other time.54
While the practice may be repugnant to our modern sensibilities, there is no moral value
judgment associated with Sierra’s analysis. The indigenous religious practice is historical
progress over the primitive animal need for food, and is also an advance into the
theological stage of human society as it emerges out of nature.
Synthesizing his analysis of the migrations and social organizations in the pre-
Colombian period, the positivist social scientist writes,
To sum up: two great spontaneous civilizations sprang up in our country, that of the Nahua and that of the Maya-Quiché, and there were others that likewise revealed a conscious evolution, a sustained effort, and finally, a stupendous accumulation of faculties, which gradually atrophied over a period beginning before the Conquest and continuing afterward.55
This theme of decay is tacked on, somewhat clumsily, in an effort to frame the Conquest
and its functional role in advancing the course of human society. The Conquest will itself
produce its two greatest figures, the opposed forces of Hernán Cortés and Cuauhtémoc,
the last Aztec emperor. These two men, two forms of energy, will be the contradictory
unity of the origins of the Mexican nation. They will constitute an egg still to be hatched
54 Justo Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), p. 42. In Spanish, Evolución política del pueblo mexicano, (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1940), p. 34. Unless otherwise indicated, I will be relying on the English translation. 55 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 44.
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and within the Comedic emplotment of Sierra, one destined to be reconciled into a higher
unity.
These two forces are not of equal value. Cortés will be defined as a conquering
hero, a brilliant strategist, and wise politician. To Cuauhtémoc will be assigned a noble
and indomitable spirit. The Spanish character had a “fund of energy” inherited from its
seven hundred year struggle against the Moors that give to it a fundamentally warrior
character. It is the hero, Cortés, whose wise decisions will transcend the limits of feudal
warriors, “Those predatory and boundlessly greedy but heroic men.” The Conquest, and
indeed the entire colonial enterprise, is the singular achievement of Cortés. Sierra
describes the process as one in which, “Once that captain of adventure, without mandate
or legal authority, had carried his daring enterprise to a triumphant conclusion, all that
came after was merely the result of his achievement.”56 Following on Chavero’s
assessment of Cortés’ political skills, Sierra describes the accumulation of Indian allies,
for the final assault on the Aztec capital. In the final chapter Sierra writes of the two
historical forces,
This man, whose military exploits and political activities had expanded to such a degree that he now assumed, before the hordes of vanquished Indians, the attitude of a sovereign and supreme judge, who looked on the Mexica as rebel subjects, since Moctezuma had pledged his kingdom in fealty to Charles V—this stupendous adventurer found an opponent worthy of him in the new emperor of the Aztecs, the high priest Cuauhtémoc, noblest epic figure in American history.57
The Mexican national character will be nothing more, or less, than the progeny of the
essences of these two historic forces. Sierra will end his first book of the text by writing,
“We Mexicans are the sons of two countries and two races. We were born of the
56 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 53. 57 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 60.
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Conquest; our roots are in the land where the aborigines lived and in the soil of Spain.
This fact rules our whole history; to it we owe our soul.”58
A Comedy needs reconciliation of its opposed forces and the mediators that will
aid the reconciliation of Cortés and Cuauhtémoc are the Spanish religions missionaries,
the “Peacemakers.” Sierra did not follow Ramírez in redeeming Nuño de Guzmán.
Instead, the head of the first audiencia stood in as the essence of the corrupt and violent
lust for gold. In the opening of Sierra’s chapter on the missionaries he begins,
The appalling doctrine, secretly or openly professed in the Antilles, that the Indian was not a rational being, or just barely one—a diabolical pretext, as certain friars declared, to palliate the insatiable rapacity of the slave dealers, which had wiped out the entire population of the West Indies—never entered the minds of these friars, not even as a vagrant wicked thought. In all fairness, neither did Cortés profess it. The Indian was a rational being, a younger brother waiting for redemption and worthy of it.59
Sierra skirts the issue of spiritual conquest, but resolves it with a turn towards
contextualism, noting that while the missionaries destroyed Indian temples and historical
paintings and writings, “Men so ardent in such circumstances, could not have done
otherwise.”60 Sierra buttresses this argument with the observation that in order to protect
the Indians, the missionaries had to show that they could become Christians. In a nod to
the Virgin of Guadalupe and to the Aztec goddess, Tonantzin, Sierra writes
The Indian’s feeling toward God was tremendous fear; his love was all for Mary. The whole theology of the Indian race is summed up in the Indian woman who kneels before the alter of Mary of Guadalupe, her mother an Indian like herself, and confides her troubles and hopes in a dialogue that,
58 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 62. 59 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 85. 60 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 86.
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whether in Nahuatl or Otomi, has for its eternal response the sweet compassion in the Virgin’s eyes.61
It is the church that is responsible for bringing order and stability to colonial society and
for allowing the social institutions to form and evolve. Sierra then spends the remaining
pages on the colonial period analyzing and articulating the social and political
organization of New Spain.
The social struggle that pits the King against the colonial settlers over the control
of Indian labor, once won by the crown, bears the fruit of the future Mexican nation,
One of the first viceroys ordered that the illegitimate sons of Spanish-Indian parentage be gathered up and given proper education. This was the first attempt to bring together the mestizos, the new family born of the two races, the real Mexicans.62
This theme of mestizaje will inform the evolution of the Mexican people, who will burst
from its larval stage at Independence. In the narrative, however, Sierra suddenly breaks
off to offer a discourse that defines the very essence of his historical imagination,
We have expatiated to the point of upsetting somewhat the planned proportions of this work in an effort to characterize the elements, one as important as another, which will go to make up the new organism; but we doubt if our analysis can be complete unless we show the part that each element played in history… The center is the group of conquistadors, formed by men of insuperable strength of character, who put their lasting seal on their vast empire, to rule over a large family of peoples, to replace a culture inferior on many counts with a better one; thus they forced the long slow road of Indian evolution to take a new way, they produced a revolution. But the result of this revolution was an overlordship, not a colony, The conquistadors disdained to exploit personally the wealth of the conquered country—it was not in their nature; they had not fought to that end; they were fighters,
61 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 88. On the identification of the Virgin of Guadalupe with the Aztec goddess, Tonantzin, see Knight, Mexico, The Colonial Era, p. 47. 62 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 101.
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not exploiters. The exploitation had to be done through members of the conquered race itself. With ostensibly different objectives, the conquistadors and the peacemakers, the redeemers, disputed the exploitation of the conquered. Compromise between these two elements resulted in the more or less legal and slowly ameliorated servitude of the Indian, his submission to tutelage of the Church, supervised by the civil authority, and his conformity with his status as a minor, which alleviated his burdens but kept him bound forever to the status quo. The Indian family was the first property in America to be brought by the Church under mortmain.63
Sierra will present the Independence movement as a unified project, bringing
together Hidalgo, Morelos, Iturbide and Guerrero into a singular enterprise, thus rejecting
the oppositions of both an Alamán and an Altamirano. His description of the violence of
the masses recalls the tragic narrative of Payno. Hidalgo tries to restrain the masses, “But
as always happens when the masses of humanity, repressed for generations, are suddenly
released, they burst forth in wild frenzies. Liberty for those people was not a right, it was
an intoxication.”64 It was, however, Morelos who will take pride of place in Sierra’s
avowedly patriotic depiction of the movement that would give birth to the Mexican
people as a newly formed historical agent. The Congress of Chilancingo is described as
“invested with supreme powers by the nearly unanimous sentiment of the Mexican
people.”65 And here we see a resurrection of the Bustamante thesis of a universal
rejection of the Spanish yoke. Sierra’s thesis is notably different from the Romantic
oppositions found in Prieto and Altamirano. Conceiving of Independence as a universal
rejection of Spanish rule elides the social struggle between opposed political forces or
social classes. This theme has its corollary in the de-politicized analysis of the anarchy
63 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 105. 64 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 153. 65 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 158.
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that pervades the young Republic and its entrance into the metaphysical stage of
humanity.
Sierra offers the reader the most elegant—and the most simplistic—understanding
of the anarchy that reigned over the republic in its continuous experience of the golpe de
estado and the pronunciamiento. The Mexican national character—the nascent offspring
of the mixture of the Spanish and the Indian, of Cortés and Cuauhtémoc—has failed to
reach majority. Instead of seeking progress through industry, the Republic suffers the
effects of a character that seeks its own self-promotion through a dependency on
acquiring wealth by working in and controlling the state. It is plagued by a prolongation
in Comte’s metaphysical stage. The stage had served its functional historical purpose.
The first generation of Mexican liberals had inherited the ideals of the French Revolution.
There political practices were, therefore, structured around the theme of government as a
social contract between free individuals, embodied in a constitution. But, as Sierra
argued, “the metaphysical spirit, as seen for example in the abstract doctrines of equality,
the rights of man, and freedom of conscience, are now radically hostile to all true social
organization.”66 In Sierra’s view, French rationalism was part of the metaphysical stage
of man’s evolution. It was a moment in the transition from the theological to the positive
stage. Its sole function was negative: to bring about the fall of the theological stage.
Sierra considers Mexico’s political history and argues,
Mexico has had only two revolutions, that is, two violent accelerations of its evolution. They were the results of that forward drive, propelled by the interaction of environment, race, and history which continually moves a human society to realize an ideal, to improve its condition…The first was Independence, emancipation from the motherland, which grew out of the Creoles’ conviction that Spain was not able to govern them and that they
66 Quoted in Hale, The Transformation of Mexican Liberalism, p. 30.
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were well able to govern themselves…The second revolution was the Reform…which would be based on the transformation of the social order, on the suppression of privileged classes, on the equitable distribution of public wealth…on the creation of a national conscience by means of popular education.67
After the defeat in the Mexican-American War, the moderate liberal president, José
Joaquín Herrera finishes his term, and Sierra describes the moment:
When that hero out of Plutarch, modest, honorable, selfless, serene, José Joaquín Herrera, turned the Presidency over to his Minister of War…he could well say, “He who does what he can, does what he should.” But not much could be done with the chaos resulting from the American war and from the unbridled federalism, from the anarchism among the radical groups and the resistance to all change among the conservative ones.68
Such an analysis could have come from the pen of Payno. The hero in this history will be
Benito Juárez, who will stem the advance of both the conservatives and the radicals,
thereby bringing order to the Mexican nation for the first time since its Independence.
When the Revolution of Ayutla is proclaimed, Sierra argues unconvincingly that
there “was not a word about federalism or reform, but, on the contrary, a tendency
towards centralism.”69 The tragic figure in the unfolding drama is Comonfort,
A man of great heart and unswerving purpose. He foresaw a sea of blood, and he wanted to save his country from this crushing calamity. His whole intent was to avert civil war, without betraying the revolution. With this in mind he accepted the Presidency of the Republic from General Álvarez in December 1855.70
67 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 249. 68 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 253. 69 There is not a word in Sierra’s description about the two versions of the Plan de Ayutla, or of Álvarez’s known federalist past. This is in keeping with the Comedic strategy leading to the future reconciliation under Juárez, who will thus remain faithful to the original movement. 70 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 266.
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“Although Comonfort’s program,” according to Sierra, “was most conciliatory, and he
did his best to make the country swallow the Reform little by little, the reactionaries were
able to frustrate his efforts. To do them justice, the secular clergy (but not the regular)
tried to stay neutral and the bishops tried not to feed the flames of war.”71 As Congress, at
that point dominated by radicals, demanded greater reforms, Sierra argues that
Comonfort felt the need to disassociate himself from the body’s “demagogic” majority.
As the two sides both become more intransigent, the outcome is pre-ordained. Sierra
writes, “The Congress that proceeded from the Revolution of Ayutla was legally the
voice of the land. Actually it was no such thing.”72 The originating sin of the Ayutla
movement was it “made the Executive a mere agent of the Legislative Power.”73 As the
war of the Reform approached, Sierra concluded,
In this fearful crisis, not a great heart, but a strong character, was needed: not a Comonfort, but a Juárez. It was the nation’s good fortune that Comonfort’s enormous error had eliminated him, for he would have ended by thwarting from sheer good intention the whole work of the Reform. Certainly the Republic has pardoned, in the patriot, the weaknesses of the statesman.74
It is through the political intervention of Juárez that the reconciliation of man with
man occurs. After Juárez’s iron will leads the Republic in the War of the Reform and the
Intervention, Sierra concludes,
With the end of the Empire and the Second War of Independence, as it was officially called, the grand period of the Mexican Revolution, which really started in 1810 but was definitely renewed in 1857, came to a close. In this last phase, Mexico lost on battlefields and in consequence of the war certainly more than 300,000 souls, but meanwhile acquired a soul of
71 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 268. 72 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, pp. 273-274. 73 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 277. 74 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p.280.
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her own, a national unity. Destroying a throne, appealing constantly against force in behalf of law, mortally wounding the military power of France and the Empire of Napoleon III, incarnating in Juárez an adamant resistance against any foreign meddling in our sovereign affairs—neither European intervention nor American alliance—Mexico redeemed her independence, acquired thorough self-knowledge, and won for herself a secure place in history.75
In Sierra’s narrative, the valiant Juárez did all he could within the constraints of the
Constitution to strengthen the central government, but the Constitution
Had been buried in the ruins of legality. The forms advocated by the revolution were altogether Jacobin: neither Senate nor reelection, which meant omnipotence of the popular Chamber…There remained the Supreme Court, but how can a tribunal act as a positive break on political despotism, when that tribunal is likewise subject to popular election, which has always been manipulated by the prestidigitators in office?76
Writing from the vantage point of Porfirio Diaz’s long reign, the original
radicalism of the Tuxtepec Rebellion having been annulled, Sierra could note
approvingly that reelection was instituted and there was hope for the continued
reconciliation of the Mexican nation. Thus, Sierra ended up where we knew he would all
along. The Comedic narrative has promised a human reconciliation and the organicist
interpretive argument has adjudicated all the elements in the historical field, giving each
its functional role. The work is a brilliant achievement, a single volume interpretive
synthesis of five hundred years (more, even) of national history. Sierra could do so
because in his historical vision, the truth was the whole and the whole was a non-
contradictory one.
75 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 340. 76 Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, p. 358.
CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION
The challenge to construct a history of the nation in nineteenth century Mexico
was resolved in Sierra’s brilliant historical synthesis. Sierra managed, in a way that had
eluded other historians, to construct a discurso integrador in which he presented in a
single narrative a history that joined Mexico’s indigenous past, to the Spanish colony,
and both to the independent republic. His social organism in its evolution to a mature
adult, however, effectively erased any political intelligibility to the liberal factions that
emerged at mid-century.
The romantic narrative of Altamirano had posited a contradiction, an opposition
of forces that was internal to the Mexican nation. He did so by appropriating the Creole
Patriot narratives of an older generation that articulated an irreconcilable contradiction
between the indigenous civilizations and the Spanish Empire. His history, however, left
no room in the national narrative for the three hundred years of Spanish rule. With
independence, his opposition of forces took the form of a struggle between Oligarchy and
Democracy. By further defining this struggle in terms of class oppositions incapable of
any political resolution, he maintained a continuing threat that was interiorized in the
very heart of the Mexican Republic.
Sierra’s depoliticizing strategy consisted of effectively removing this interior
contradiction from the heart of society and displacing it to an essentially temporal, and
thereby external site, between different stages of human development. In place of the
215
avowedly partisan narratives of the romantics, he had restored the notion of la
imparcialidad. Yet his impartiality was a decidedly liberal one. Unlike the Hispanicist
conservative narratives of an older impartiality, Sierra’s narrative demanded of his
readers an allegiance to some form of representation, secularism, and juridical equality.
There was no room in his narrative for any intermediary allegiances between the
individual and the state. The success he achieved, ironically, concealed the originality
and magnitude of his accomplishment. But it also succeeded in erasing the multiplicity of
competing liberal discourses in nineteenth century Mexico.
Sierra composed his national comedy under the stability of a state and his history
became one more state institution among many in the Porfiriato. His achievement was the
outcome of a struggle whose existence he effectively erased. Jacques Ranciere has argued
that European history as a rigorous discipline was born in the age of democracy and the
masses.1 But as an institutional practice, it was also born during the reaction and the
emergence of the nation-state. Scientific history’s privileged protagonist would become
the nation, a subject who would achieve its state. In Sierra’s national history we
encounter a complete identity between the exigencies the state makes on its citizens, and
the demands that Sierra’s text makes on its readers. In Sierra’s text, it is the Mexican state
that speaks through its historian.
1 Ranciere, The Names of History, pp. 8-9.
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