A Companion to Mexican History and Culture

William H. Beezley

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405190572
• eBook ISBN: 9781444340587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A Companion to Mexican History and Culture features 40 essays contributed by international scholars that incorporate ethnic, gender, environmental, and cultural studies to reveal a richer portrait of the Mexican experience, from the earliest peoples to the present.

• Features the latest scholarship on Mexican history and culture by an array of international scholars
• Essays are separated into sections on the four major chronological eras
• Discusses recent historical interpretations with critical historiographical sources, and is enriched by cultural analysis, ethnic and gender studies, and visual evidence
• The first volume to incorporate a discussion of popular music in political analysis

This book is the receipient of the 2013 Michael C. Meyer Special Recognition Award from the Rocky Mountain Conference on Latin American Studies.

PART I

The Mexican Experience

CHAPTER ONE

Living the Vida Local: Contours of Everyday Life

WILLIAM E. FRENCH

Caught up, since the final decades of the twentieth century, in the desire to write about those previously considered inarticulate, using various forms of “history from below” or following the twists of the cultural turn; historians of Mexico, as historians elsewhere, have given their attention to popular culture, ordinary values, and common practices. This has led them to take up, among other subjects, Judas burnings on Holy Saturday; the popular or “folk” versions of liberalism, citizenship and Catholicism; manners and morals; civic celebrations and village bands; and the spaces and places of everyday life, all as arenas of contestation and negotiation, and many increasingly inflected by the insights and methodologies informed by histories of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and national imagining. Cultural history—as much a means of professional self-definition as a coherent approach or commonly accepted set of assumptions—while fundamentally concerned with many aspects of what may be described as the quotidian and essential in providing the tools to put into question the seemingly self-evident nature of this category, cannot claim to be the only source of inspiration for the extensive concern, evidenced in both the past as well as in the present, with daily life in Mexico. As much as from cultural history, scholars continue to find in the nineteenth-century novels, travel accounts and historiographical path forged by historians in Mexico, inspiration to help shape the present configurations of the field. Perhaps it is only fitting, therefore, to begin tracing the contours of everyday life in the various forms of foundational fictions that date to the nineteenth century.

Before turning our full attention to these works, it is important to recognize that, in combining attention to everyday life with an ulterior motive, in this case didacticism, novelists were hardly unique. Travelers in the nineteenth century too, in celebrated accounts like that of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, often provide unparalleled descriptions of the everyday while simultaneously managing to make clear their abhorrence of much associated with life that was a little too daily, too associated with the lower classes, as when a lépero happened to intrude upon her writing. Framed variously as examples of the exotic, the picturesque, the other, or simply the bizarre, episodes of Life in Mexico—from the sounds of street vendors, the architecture of haciendas, gambling houses, and humble abodes, to women’s fashion, education, and manners and morals, to views of the urban landscape as well as the scourge of rural bandits—come alive in such texts. Nor can those historians of the first half of the nineteenth century, crafting out of the past histories suitable for their vision of the new nation replete with categories like “the people,” the “masses,” and “citizens” that they hoped to bring into existence with their very narratives, be exempted from the charge of marshaling evidence from everyday life in support of their politics. Indeed, how could it have been otherwise? It might be worth reminding ourselves at this point that all texts, whether novels, travel account or histories written from archival sources, pose problems not only in teasing out the contours of everyday life but also in constructing, often in very different ways, what is even meant by that term.

Writers of novels in nineteenth-century Mexico, beginning, not coincidentally, with the formation of the nation itself, took as some of their main subject matter the description of local customs, seeing in them both the epitome of what was original and particularly Mexican as well as the raw material out of which suitable national beings might be molded. Two novels, together spanning the course of the nineteenth century, bracket the epoch of costumbrismo, that genre of writing concerned with custom and everyday life as a means both of expressing place and forging national character. The first, El Periquillo Sarniento or The Mangy Parrot, written by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, appeared in 1816 during the revolution for independence and was published in installments at the rate of two chapters per week. It gathered conveniently in one location many of the themes that would become dear to the hearts of those intent on teaching through the rhetoric of moral reform. The qualities they desired in citizens of the nineteenth century included a Manichean vision of the world divided between virtue and vice; a commitment to utility or usefulness as measured by a constant preoccupation with being productive, finding a trade, and not ending up a burden to society by becoming yet another letrado (lawyer); and the admonition that people be judged by their acts and deeds, that is to say, by their internal qualities rather than by external signs or trappings such as clothes or manners, their social status or position. El Periquillo is, nevertheless, resolutely focused on the low, the customs of the streets as well as the argot of gamblers, criminals, highwaymen, and the poor, in short, the everyday. Accompanying El Periquillo on his journey through Mexico and its customs and even to the Philippines, as well as from rogue to respectability, readers, in addition to learning about food, drink, habits, manners (ill and otherwise), and conviviality, receive an education in such things as mourning customs, household inventories, gaming practices, the legal system including life in prison, various occupations, the abuses inflicted by the Church on indigenous participants in Holy Week celebrations, and the shortcomings of contemporary institutions of education.

So popular was El Periquillo that the book was reprinted a number of times through the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, incorporating at first engravings, and then, beginning in 1842 and subsequently, a new form of representing daily life: the lithograph. In fact, as María Esther Pérez Salas shows in Costumbrismo y litografía en México: Un Nuevo modo de ver (2005), costumbrismo was one of the most important genres for integrating text and image, thus reinforcing visually the romanticism, nationalism, and, at times, the didacticism and morality of literary texts. In the case of El Periquillo, lithographers turned their attention to graphically interpreting the action and events that Fernández de Lizardi had crafted with his prose, especially those critical moments in the book having to do with fights between men and the fainting of women, along with the duels, dinners, and dangers, all the while managing, she concludes, to maintain with the illustrations the same high quality as found in the narrative itself.

A form of visual national imagining that came to prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century, lithography built on colonial precedents like casta painting and the sculpting of wax figurines while drawing from contemporary transnational artistic and literary currents associated with romanticism and costumbrismo in France, Spain, and elsewhere. A close relationship between lithography and national themes and imagery developed in the 1840s, reaching its most compelling expression in El Museo Mexicano, a literary magazine published by Ignacio Cumplido and directed by Manuel Payno and Guillermo Prieto, especially in this periodical’s attention to the portrayal of “national types” and customs (to which we return later in this chapter). Attention to “types,” usually tradespeople, servants, street vendors, and other figures that had been elaborated in various artistic forms during the colonial period, or were the subject of travelers’ accounts, or both, became an important subgenre of costumbrismo, leading to the publication, in installments beginning in 1854, of Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, an illustrated and textual portrait of 35 “types,” beginning with “El Aguador,” (“The Watercarrier”) a fixture of life in Mexico City at that time, and also featuring “La China,” a female figure whose manner of dress would evolve, as we will see, into the symbol of Mexico itself. Although idealized, romanticized, even some times exoticized and eroticized, while at other times sanitized or invested with nostalgia, such images, always framed within the dominant discourses of ethnicity, gender, and class of the time, provided visual testimony to the country’s uniqueness within a well-established genre of representation shared by many nations, while at the same time offering glimpses of everyday clothing, food, and drink; the tools of various trades; the setting, whether it be urban or rural; and of the tastes and proclivities of their bearers.

Helping to imbue costumbrismo with its nationalist hues and an early contributor to the development of the subgenre of “national types,” Manuel Payno worked closely with lithographers as early as the 1840s to elaborate such figures as the Aguador (noting the importance of this figure to daily life not only as the deliverer of water but also in controlling the animal population, serving as a source of information on the availability of servants and wet nurses, and helping amorous couples by delivering their love letters). Payno wrote Los bandidos del Río Frío, the novel that, for some, serves as the endpoint of costumbrismo as a genre. A pot-boiler that kept people on the edge of their seats waiting for more; an imaginative yarn based on true crimes and real events in the history of the republic; a foundational fiction whose characters knit Mexicans together both through their common speech, customs, and habits and in their movements across the length and breadth of the country; and a meditation on past and future by means of an insistent focus on inheritance, birthright, destiny and fate, both of the characters that trample across its pages as well as of the country they inhabit, Los bandidos, published in monthly installments in periodicals as it was written between 1889 and 1891, lends itself to many readings. Whichever interpretation one prefers, the novel is, as Anne Staples has argued, second to none as a source of information on customs, the intimate life of families, geographical descriptions, domestic relations, political life, and the character and habits of a broad range of social groups, in short, on nineteenth-century vida cotidiana (Staples, 2001).

Payno also continues to develop his earlier interest in “types” that we have seen dating to the lithographs and literary periodicals of the 1840s and 1850s. The novel is, in fact, set in this earlier period, taking up the actual operation of a criminal ring by a certain Colonel Yáñez, a high-ranking official during the time of Santa Ana. That the novel draws on actual figures and real events from the nation’s past has, in part, been responsible for its allure to historians, who have both written about the novel as “virtually true” or as a form of “parahistory” and, in at least one instance, found it a long-term source of fascination in attempting to identify its characters with the “real-life” figures to whom they correspond. Such “real” or, at least potentially real, figures also come, under Payno’s direction, to embody not only unique characteristics that typify the region from which they come but also, simultaneously, through the alchemy of metonymy, to bring into being that very region. The chapter in the novel discussing the yearly trade fair at San Juan de los Lagos is particularly revealing in this regard. After enumerating the products from which various regions are known—prized mules from Tamaulipas, sheep with thick white wool from New Mexico, sweet potato candies from Querétaro, among others—Payno turns his attention to the traits, qualities, and characteristics as well as to regional markers like clothing that distinguish the women who dared to make this trip. Here, a woman of the northern frontier, skin white as alabaster with abundant black hair, dressed in a tight-fitting blue suit that reached to her collar, came face to face with, among others, a stout china poblana, bedecked in double or triple petticoats with rebozo on her shoulders and her arms bare, the first composed and cool and the latter more lively and zestful, two of many regional types on display. So avowedly were they the essence of a particular place, as well as its most compelling representation, they seemed, according to Payno, to be from different and distant countries, as removed from each other as Paris from Berlin, yet fashioning through the bringing together of these unique parts, the single whole of the nation.

It is precisely this description of the fair at San Juan de los Lagos that Guadalupe Monroy draws upon to write her contribution to the Historia Moderna de Mexico, the multi-volume work published in the 1950s that served to reestablish history as a modern discipline in Mexico. In “Compensatory Pastimes” a section in the third volume dealing with the Restored Republic, Monroy has no interest in contributing to a discussion of “types,” but rather in setting out the range of diversions available to various publics, from the glory of the theatre during the empire of Maximilian to the popular big tops (carpas), seamy theatres (teatruchos), circuses, and puppet shows of Mexico City and the local fairs of the countryside during the 1860s and 1870s. In these popular urban locales, she argues, the broader public—comprised of poor and working people—took great pleasure in such things as the rhyming verses (décimas) that clowns would direct at women, mothers-in-law, social vices, to those unhappily married, and even at politicians. In the smaller towns of the countryside, like that of San Juan de los Lagos, the arrival of a fair would, as in the great opera Sonámbula—performed by Angela Peralta the “Mexican songbird,” that captivated more cultivated audiences of that time—lead to an awakening “as if from a deep sleep,” thus providing a small consolation for the daily monotony of work in the mines or fields.

In the themes its contributors took up, as well as in the approaches they adopted, the Historia Moderna de México built on the previous work of the costumbristas and others in the nineteenth century while pointing toward the future by setting out much of the research agenda of those both in Mexico and abroad that subsequently became interested in cultural history and daily life. As discussed by Daniel Cosío Villegas, general editor of the work, in the forewords to the various volumes written in the mid-1950s, the Historia Moderna was envisioned as a six-volume work, three each on the Restored Republic and Porfiriato, with each of the three organized around political life, economic life, and the social life of their respective period. Cosío Villegas pointed not only to the lack of attention that had been paid to the Restored Republic but also to the general decay of interest in history in general, a consequence of the Revolution and the resulting need to focus on urgent national problems in the present and the immediate future. Seeking to rewrite the still-dominant Porfirian narrative that saw nothing but chaos before Díaz arrived to impose order and progress, Cosío Villegas positioned the Restored Republic instead as an era of transition between the formative years and what he referred to as the “ordered” and ultimately “funereal” regime of the Porfiriato. As for that later epoch, its defining characteristic was that of “individualization,” that is, the replacement of the shapeless and static mass of the group or class with the emergence of the individual—isolated, particular, and with his or her own will—no longer simply a part of some larger entity.

Resulting, in part, from the spread of the means of mass communication, the individual was both brought into being through, as well as being the consumer of, new forms of writing, one of the techniques of which was adopted by Emma Cosío Villegas in her contribution to the volume in this collection on the Restored Republic entitled “Daily Life.” Moving through the spaces of the city taking in all encompassed by her gaze, much like cronistas such as Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera in the burgeoning press and their works of fiction, Emma Cosío Villegas describes the traditional plates of delicious home cooking and then follows families from their breakfasts to their strolls in the morning air in the Alameda. Her chapter—divided into sections dealing with life outdoors; house, food, and store; paseos, civic festivals, and restaurants; dances; and Holy Week and religious festivals—chronicles such things as courtship practices, accomplished through the strategic use of rebozos and sombreros, popular decorations and preparations by which means people made official celebrations their own, and the emergence of the particularly national female figure of the china, “brown-skinned, with dreamy eyes, red mouth, fresh and sensual, flexible and well formed in body, lover of independence and wholesome in every sense,” the proud expression of which was her traditional attire.

Although the subsequent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Dimensions of the Mexican Experience
• PART I The Mexican Experience
• PART II The Indigenous World Before the Europeans
• PART III The Silver Heart of the Spanish Empire: Colonial Experiences
• PART IV Two Centuries of Independence: The Republican Century
• PART V Two Centuries of Independence: The Revolutionary Century
• Plates
• Index