Mexican Public Intellectuals

D. Castillo, S. Day, D. Castillo, S. Day

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137392282
• eBook ISBN: 9781137392299
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In Mexico, the participation of intellectuals in public life has always been extraordinary, and for many the price can be high. Highlighting prominent figures that have made incursions into issues such as elections, human rights, foreign policy, and the drug war, this volume paints a picture of the ever-changing context of Mexican intellectualism.

Chapter 1

The Democratic Dogma: Héctor Aguilar Camín, Jorge G. Castañeda, and Enrique Krauze in the Neoliberal Crucible

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

One of the salient traits of Mexico’s unfinished transition to democracy is the ubiquity of its intellectuals across mediascapes. All major radio and television networks recruit intellectuals as opinion makers and as hosts of nightly news shows, while local and national newspapers grant them a daily forum in their op-ed sections. The country has many leading magazines and newsweeklies (from Letras Libres and Nexos to Metapolítica and Proceso) where intellectuals play predominant roles and where their voices are heard alongside those of the politicians who seek to position themselves in the media and the journalists who report on the country’s daily life. Intellectuals have even reached high spheres of government and civil society: many founding figures of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) came from intellectual ranks, and writers, critics, commentators, and scholars have served in positions ranging from diplomatic outposts to local and federal cabinet offices. As I write this article, poet Javier Sicilia (the subject of chapter 11) is leading a nationwide caravan for peace in the wake of his son’s murder in the city of Cuernavaca, representing those who have been affected by the government’s war on drugs. The fact that a poet, of all people, is able to attain such a public status in a country where most relatives and loved ones of the thousands of victims of crime and drug violence have been silenced, ignored, or even criminalized, attests to the power and the symbolic aura still enjoyed by the intellectual class.

In this chapter, I will argue that this constant presence in the public sphere, or in civil society, results from a major transformation in the notion of the intellectual and her perceived responsibilities in Mexico since the 1980s. Among the factors that contributed to this transformation, I will underscore three: the decline of the traditional “literary” intellectual (embodied by figures like Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes)¹ in favor of the rise of an intermedial intellectual, who combines the practices of the “lettered city”² with other forms of media and with intellectual disciplines beyond the humanities; the emergence of practices of journalism and communication in post-1988 media, which allows intellectuals to become communicators and opinion leaders in a much wider sense of the term; and the reconfiguration of traditional functions of the literary intellectual (“legislation” and “interpretation,” to use Zygmunt Bauman’s terms³) in the post-NAFTA cultural landscape, in relation to the emergence of the figure of the technocrat. I will analyze this process through the work of three leading intellectual figures—Héctor Aguilar Camín, Jorge Castañeda, and Enrique Krauze—who, in my view, represent the most important aspects of this transformation. To be sure, the topic is vast and it is not my intention to exhaust it in any way. Instead, I will try to point out the ways in which the trajectory of these three figures, particularly in the wake of the 1988 presidential election, provide important issues through which the very concept of public intellectuals in Mexico may be rethought, and their complex institutional articulation of that concept, which goes beyond the limits established by twentieth-century theories of the intellectual.⁴ Rather than trying to confine Castañeda, Aguilar Camín, and Krauze to defined notions of the public intellectual, I will invoke the term as a notion in constant redefinition. The three authors studied here, therefore, construct their own practice as “public intellectuals” on the basis of their self-fashioning vis-à-vis the public and the specific ideologies and theoretical genealogies deployed in their work. In adopting this approach, I hope to demonstrate that the prevalence of the intellectual as a key figure in Mexican public life—in contrast to the proverbial decline of the public intellectual in countries like the United States⁵—rests on the basis of historical specificities that redefined intellectual work in the early 1990s.

Considering the role played by public intellectuals in Mexico, it is not at all surprising that even the most powerful men and women in the country engage with intellectuals in quarrels and controversies. One recent and notable example of such engagements takes place in former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s book Democracia republicana (2010). The book is a manifesto in favor of what Salinas de Gortari terms “social liberalism,” the doctrine he claims to have developed as president and that, in his narrative, was betrayed and dismantled by his successors’ neoliberal policies. We may leave aside, for now, the fact that Salinas de Gortari is a reviled figure in Mexico, credited mostly with introducing the very neoliberal reforms he now claims to reject and with leading the country into disaster in 1994, when Mexico faced the assassination of two major political figures, the Zapatista rebellion, the implementation of NAFTA, and the worst financial crisis in recent history. Democracia republicana is a telling document not only because a figure identified with him, Enrique Peña Nieto, won the 2012 presidential election, but also because it provides a unique reading of Mexico in the wake of neoliberalism.

For my purposes, I want to point out that Salinas devotes one of his chapters to a critique of what he calls Mexico’s “organic intellectuals” (541). Not surprisingly, three of Salinas de Gortari’s targets are Krauze, Castañeda, and Aguilar Camín. In the former president’s words, “Enrique Krauze is at the top of the list of organic intellectuals sympathetic to the neoliberal governments that have ruled the country in recent presidential terms, certainly with the reservations implied in the certainty that there exists, among today’s Mexican intellectuals, the clear inclination to be carried away by the winds of the government at hand” (549. My translation). Salinas thus attacks Mexican intellectuals like Krauze and Castañeda on the grounds that they were supportive of his reforms in the early 1990s, and that Krauze became an “enthusiastic” supporter of the subsequent “neoliberal” governments. In his telling, Castañeda experienced a similar conversion, from his ardent opposition to NAFTA in the early 1990s to his alleged support of pro-American policies, such as Mexico’s vote for the war in Iraq in the UN Security Council (569–70).⁶

The notable thing about Salinas de Gortari’s argument is that, behind the superficiality of his critique and the many half-truths that sustain his contentions, his assessment of Krauze, Castañeda, and others accurately identifies a major switch in Mexican intellectual work in the wake of the 1994 crisis. However, Salinas de Gortari errs in his interpretation of the underlying causes. It is true that many Mexican intellectuals have intermittently supported state policies from all the post-1988 administrations, and that in some cases one can read their support as instances of political accommodation. Nonetheless, the alleged complicity of intellectuals with power is too simplistic an explanation because, even in the cases in which an intellectual is effectively “organic,” there is usually an underlying doctrine to justify such a choice. Part of the problem is that Salinas de Gortari’s Gramscian framework of analysis, one that remains quite popular in the successive reconstitutions of the theories of the intellectual, either leads to the easy disqualification of any engagement with the State as “complicity,” or idealizes 1960s forms of engaged intellectualism over perceived ideas of the “institutionalized” intellectual prevalent from the 1980s onward.⁷ Furthermore, it is important to remember that the Gramscian model of analysis itself has deep roots in the distinction between an intellectual engaged with society and one who chooses independence and autonomy from the social, as well as in the definition of the “organic intellectual” as the philosopher in the service of the people, not of the ruling order (Fontana, 24–34).

All these limitations heighten the need for an understanding of the intellectual in a transitional setting, such as the one experienced by Mexico in the 1990s, which leaves aside value judgments and assessments of individual intellectuals’ affinity with power. The crucial issue, rather, is that major changes in the ideological paradigm of a country’s intellectual class and the corresponding change in function of intellectuals vis-à-vis the public sphere signal a major transformation in the very logic of political and social knowledge. In these terms, I would contend that the iconic roles played by Castañeda, Krauze, and Aguilar Camín in post-1988 Mexico stem from their ability to register dramatic changes in the episteme that configures the fabric of discourse upon which the Mexican transition was fashioned. In other words, their trajectories represent three distinct ways of successfully reinventing the relationship between intellectuals, power and civil society in a context where the prevailing definitions of all three of these categories experienced dramatic changes. One could indeed locate this change somewhere in between the mid- and late-1980s, when the PRI’s stronghold in Mexican society was undermined by the early instances of social organization unleashed by the 1985 earthquake⁸ and by the crisis of legitimacy caused by the questioned 1988 election. The depth of the epistemic change faced by Mexican intellectuals in this period resulted from the historical coincidence of three seismic shifts in the ideological basis of the nation’s polity: the defeat of the old nationalist revolutionary ideals embodied by the Cárdenas candidacy; the apparent (though not lasting) success of Salinista policies, based on the mixture of neoliberal economic reform and in the cooptation of citizenship organization into state organized structures of decentralized social policy; and the emergence of a new class of knowledge producers—technocrats, economists—who competed with traditional intellectuals in the definition of policy and public discourse.

This last point is particularly crucial to understand the need of intellectuals to rapidly adapt to new forms of discourse and practice, particularly considering that the three prevailing intellectual figures in 1980s Mexico—Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis, and Octavio Paz—were all members of the lettered city whose claim to knowledge and authority came from granting literature a status of epistemological privilege and from literature’s consecration in the mid-twentieth century as the discourse for the exploration and exposition of the national self. Furthermore, regardless of the many differences and quarrels among them, Paz, Fuentes, and Monsiváis operated within a liberal paradigm that, following models like Isaiah Berlin and Julien Benda, predicated the role of culture and the humanities as platforms of autonomy vis-à-vis the state and as strategies of construction of a civil society—or an “open society,” to use the Karl Popper term favored by Paz—to independently organize the citizenry.⁹ One of the early effects of liberalism was the vertiginous rise of economics as an alternative regime of knowledge and expertise that directly challenged lettered city models of intellectual practice. As Sarah Babb (171–98) and Roderic Ai Camp (Mexico’s Mandarins, 2002) have aptly documented, a new generation of economists with doctoral degrees from US universities joined the political fray as Mexico negotiated its opening to international trade with the World Bank in 1986. This generation would go on to shape the core of subsequent governments. This exclusive and highly educated elite created an alternative regime of knowledge that had nothing to do with the “civil society” advocated by literary intellectuals, one that favored quantitative social-scientific knowledge over ideological and cultural discourses. This type of knowledge was not exclusive to economists and invaded even the very territory where lettered intellectuals thrived throughout the twentieth century: print media. As José Antonio Aguilar Rivera recalls, “the rise of pollsters and efforts to measure public opinion on contemporary issues seems to be undermining one of the historical roles of Mexican public intellectuals: to be the interpreters of civil society” (103). The emergence of quantitative measurement of public opinion in the mid-1990s, and the important role that polling played in creating conditions of credibility in electoral processes, allowed for the incorporation of discourses outside of the intellectual sphere into Mexico’s public conversation (Camp, Polling,1996).

This neural period became crucial in redefining the intellectual work of Aguilar Camín, Krauze, and Castañeda, each of whom published works between 1988 and 1994 that represented major turning points in the very nature of intellectual practice in Mexico. Aguilar Camín was an early interpreter of this phenomenon, as shown in his book Después del milagro (1988). The book is an in-depth analysis of two sets of trends. On the one hand, Aguilar Camín defines four “superstructural” trends, namely “transformations in the system of political domination”: the decline of the state and the rise of civil society; the breakup of the relationship between government, labor, and capitalist organizations; the loss of state control in the countryside and the cities; and the transition from “absolutist presidentialism” to “constitutional presidentialism” (16–17. My translation). On the other, Aguilar Camín highlights four “structural” trends, that is, “civilizational transitions of a wider historical horizon”: the shift from being a rural country to becoming an urban one, and the corresponding decentralization of the state apparatus; the country’s integration into the world economy; a strengthening social inequality; and the emergence of a “new people,” that is, a “new national mental, social and political majority” (17. My translation). If we read this diagnosis carefully, it becomes clear that Aguilar Camín is identifying the opening of a radically new terrain for intellectual action. If the state declines to the benefit of an expanded society, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: A New Kind of Public Intellectual?
• Chapter 1  The Democratic Dogma: Héctor Aguilar Camín, Jorge G. Castañeda, and Enrique Krauze in the Neoliberal Crucible
• Chapter 2  Engaging Intellectuals: Andrés Henestrosa and Elena Poniatowska
• Chapter 3  Monsiváis in a Nutshell
• Chapter 4  Guadalupe Loaeza’s Blonded Ambition: Lip-Synching, Plagiarism, and Power Poses
• Chapter 5  It’s My (National) Stage Too: Sabina Berman and Jesusa Rodríguez as Public Intellectuals
• Chapter 6  From Accounting to Recounting: Esther Chávez Cano and the Articulation of Advocacy, Agency, and Justice on the US-Mexico Border
• Chapter 7  Mayan Cultural Agency through Performance: Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya–Fomma
• Chapter 8  María Novaro: Feminist Filmmaking as Public Voice
• Chapter 9  The Masked Intellectual: Marcos and the Speech of the Rainforest
• Chapter 10  Javier Sicilia: Public Mourning for the Sons of Mexico
• Notes on Contributors
• Index